Daddy's on the Porch

Daddy’s on the porch

Singing to himself

Waiting for the fever to go down

And Beth’s in bed

Hallucinating

Trying to tell the time

How long’s she been in bed?

Six days?  Seven?

She sweats so much we gotta change the sheets

Every few hours

She died on a Thursday

That’s what I remember

Eleven brothers and sisters

And all of us sitting around on the porch

Listening to Mommy wail on the doctor

Wail on Daddy

Wail on anybody who would come near her

Beth died of something

You can cure these days

The last thing I remember was each of my brothers and sisters

Getting up from wherever they were on the porch

And walking off into different directions away from the house

Away from the sound of Mama howling

And Daddy saying Beth’s name

And the clock going tick tock, tick tock

Like it didn’t care what’d happened

Like it was gonna push time forward

Whether we wanted it to or not

I was the last one on the porch

When Daddy came out

And sat down next to me

He lit a cigarette

And scratched at his beard

Like it was something he glued on

Then he said ‘Yup’

And he walked off too

Just like everybody else had

Mama was laying in bed with Beth

Waiting for the doctor come

With the coroner

To take her away

To take ‘em both away

We might as well have buried Mama with Beth

Because we never got her back after that

Just a tower of tears that looked like her

I never wanted kids because of Beth

Because of what happened

How it split the family

How we all walked off

And some of us never returned

But I had a kid

And her Daddy told me not to worry

Because medicine had made it so that

What happened to Beth

Would never happen again

And I felt good about that

Then my kid goes off and has a kid of her own

And one day the phone rings

And I answer, and it’s her, my kid, my Nicole,

And she says her girl’s sick

And she’s real worried about it

I say, ‘Honey, what’s she sick with?’

And Nicole says it

The thing

The thing Beth was sick with

And I almost drop the phone

But I can’t

Because my girl needs me

And I say ‘But I don’t understand’

And I don’t understand

There’s a cure

But of course there ain’t no cure

There’s just something you can take

A shot

That’ll stop you from getting it

And my daughter didn’t want to get the shot for her kid

The way I did for her

Because she read something in a magazine

Saying she shouldn’t

And so she didn’t

And so my granddaughter’s in the hospital

And my daughter’s talking to me from a stall in the women’s room

And I’m in my kitchen

And I walk into my living room

And there it is

A picture of Beth

And I hear the clock

I hear the clock

Tell me what time it is