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Field Portrait Jesse Graves
The man and woman stand deep in tall grass, each balancing a small girl like a school prize. The man is tall and leans toward the camera while the child in his arms looks down, squinting at the tiny flares of her sunlit shoes. A wooden fence stretches out behind them, row of short sticks like tobacco spears snapped in half, holding a small orchard inside the fence, apple trees and pear trees. The woman’s dress is the same color as the pears and it must be Sunday, for the fabric is neither muslin nor floursack, but looks to be fine as linen, a flowered embroidery stitched along the hemline. She does not lean in to close the circle and she does not smile, though the children beam like lit candles, their dresses white as cinder fallen from the sun. A drunkard’s like a chimney full of ashes, more likely to burn the house down than keep it warm. That’s what her mother said when she confessed they were getting married. She had thought it over and over, a man can change— she had seen him in the field, he could outwork his mule when it came to plowing cornrows, could sow six acres of rye grass in a day. The pencil trace says, Edith and Ken, Summer 1943. It is not hard to imagine how the man’s body would turn on itself in the years to follow, become a natural enemy of his ways and wants. Spinal declension, eruptions of the stomach, sotted liver, stroke. He never got the farm he worked those years, got none of the money his father made when he sold it, none of the tools or cattle. In the picture, one happy daughter reaches up to the apples hanging like Christmas bulbs while the other, my mother, looks down. Their young father, teller of heroic Indian tales, drinker of cough syrup and rubbing alcohol, stands with them, his life more than half over. Their mother never relenting, who will later stab his lip with a fork, beat him sober with a boot-heel, call him the saintliest no-account man God ever set upon the earth. Forthcoming in Connecticut Review |
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