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The Ghost of Doc Bentley by Roy Bentley

The Ghost of Doc Bentley

Maybe I do like being in the world again, even if it is

only in a poem by my great-nephew who was too good

to be a doctor—that’s one of those sentences you speak

and then wish you could change it. It’s what makes for all the wrong

in the world: our overstating something like that.

The boy writing this would’ve been a doctor had he passed

high school chemistry. Anyway, I’m recalling the afternoon

we commenced stonework on the First Bank of Neon. It was

nineteen thirty-two. Seems I recall because Sister’s boy Roy

was born that October. My nephew. I had the stone quarried

the summer before he was born—drew up the plans myself.

Roy was the father of this one with the reason to believe that

the life of a mountain doctor is Shakespearean enough to rate

an appearance as a ghost in a poem that takes place in Neon.

I don’t remember why I waited so late in the season to start

building the bank, but I remember it worked out in the end.

In those days I liked to stand at the foot of a prodigious oak

and look up and down Main Street like I owned every inch.

Maybe I smoked as I watched the A & P open, the sheriff

begin rounds, the sheriff’s boots noisy on wood but less so

in mud—I don’t miss mud: the afterlife lacks mud altogether.

That day, I was standing in the light, watching the town I was

helping become something in the way I had become a doctor—

one hard thing accomplished at a time. I was thinking about that.

And, sure, Ivy Wright started up the street and waved solicitously

and maybe I was thinking I wasn’t dead yet and so waved back,

quite-alive, and morning tumbled into place like limestone blocks

I saw promise more than solitude. I strained at my suspenders.

The living quarry that pride like it was a wide coal seam or

an outcropping on the hillside announcing where to dig.