Made This for Their Father

Read it the way it was cut, out loud, to a road: To the memory of Valerius Amandinus. Valerius Superventor and Marcellus made this for their father. It was never a label. It was two brothers talking, and the person they were talking to was whoever came by next.

Somebody came by, six or seven hundred years on, with a cross and a chisel, lifted a Roman's lid and set a wooden box inside the stone, a monk in it, a man near fifty with two old breaks in his ribs that had knitted the way ribs do, crooked and sufficient. They cut the cross across the top. They left the brothers' sentence on the side. I don't think that was carelessness. You don't carve a lid that carefully and never read the side. I think they heard it and let it stand: a father, a memory, sons who made something. It was true enough to lie beside.

Then the wood went, the way wood goes, a little every year, until all that was left was a white line in the lime where it had been, which says one thing and cannot be talked out of it: here. I trust that line. I also notice it has nothing to say to me.

The brothers had more to lose. They could be wrong about where he would stay, and they were, and the sentence still does what it was for. Somebody up in the Abbey's gallery this week bends to the stone and sounds out a name that hasn't had its body under it for a thousand years, Amandinus, Amandinus, the way you'd say a name into a stairwell to see who answers, and a monk answers, without a name, he never left one, and two brothers answer, by name, from the side of the box, and nobody under the lid is the man they meant, and the name gets said anyway, out loud, in a quiet room, to a road.