Ten Nights in a Barroom

A clapboard town exhales sawdust and regret; the mill, once a cathedral of industry, now groans under a lien that its owner, once upright, signed away for the amber oblivion of a barroom. Night after night he drowns ledger sheets in rye, while his daughter’s laughter—once bright as fresh-cut pine—falters, then gutters out, crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway carriage whose driver had also been celebrating. The mortgage burns, the child is laid in the iron-hard ground, and the man, still clutching an empty glass, awakens to a dawn the color of a wound.