Night Shift at the Root Cellar

It was at night when the real pain would come. Marzine sprawled out underneath the stars, the straw patches itching at her back. She'd see her father in the patterns of stars, and the tales would well up in her again. She'd see Hershel rounding cirrus minor, tipping his hat and disappearing behind the little dipper in an explosion of struts and electric sawdust. Dewey eyed, she'd lean out of bed, and seek solace in her guitar. The crickets acted as the string section as she stomped her foot onto the rotted-out floorboards of the barn.

She'd made an arrangement with the owner, letting her sleep in the barn in exchange for three mornings a week, as a pourer of coffee to the borders in the the white boderhouse, and three nights a week as a canner in the root cellar, often until the stars would fade, and Hershel would retire again into the great elastic highway of the Milky Way Galaxy.

She wrote half of her songs in this way, the legacy of her father beaming down reams of ebullience upon his expectant daughter. Her own life lived through his past, a life too big for one lifetime. It would be one of these visions that would eventually lead Marzine to the massive dark shadow of breakdown, madness and chemical dependence. The stars were a playground for Hershel, a spiralling netherworld where his legacy would torment his daughter until the day she died, broke, drunk and staggeringly alone.