The Shape of the Sun
When they talked last night it seemed somehow
not clear; in the shack's gray blackness
stumbled only his voice
And hers, dry, strong, like a dust wind
husked of its fury.
He'd mutter; make some noise, maybe keys
jumbled with matches in his pocket,
or his fist on the table.
She kepf jerking at him, urging, until
I covered my ears and lay sweating,
The hard blanket over, the planks below,
pressed like a bug between
two stones.
In the bat hours I wakened twice hearing him
roll in unrest.
Then this morning bird-early I found them
outdoors, and I wondered, waiting on
Their faces: his broad-templed but thin where
the cheek furrows cut square to the chin;
. hers bleak,
Harsh as brambles, peaked with a dry
thorny strength.
He stood turned to the coming sun. From a
gaunt tree, wings flashed like
two hands with spread fingers,
Closed, spread again ....
"It's Redbeam,"
she said into the flapped color
While the call still echoed. "He allus
crows like a house afire; sure thinks
he can hog-call the sun to breakfast."
We watched the cock stiffen on the cracked
branch, swell,
Rake at the air, and shrill, his black
sliver tongue forking the light.
" ...
aimed to chop it down," she was saying,
"but Redbeam likes it to roost on. We don't
need it for wood. We got plenty
When the barn blew down; no use building again
with the stock
Petered out like this. Listen," she said,
moving off, "I'm going in. You and
him come along
In a shake. He'll feel more like eating
after a bit; and he's got
To eat. Stewing don't take the place of it."
I bent to watch a couple of
beetles labor
In their brittle skins, struggling for food
to keep life crisp in them.
Spit passed me in a sprav of sudden stars,
then darkened the earth-
False rain drawing the dust in puckers--
and he squatted the way Indians crouch, tireless,
26
And looked strangely over the familiar ground:
the land, lizard-flat, raising small
Rough-headed humps to remind him of what
his eyes veered to avoid. I
moved to a weathered mound
Of straw, bedding for field mice, solid,
but uneven to sit on.
Dry balls of earth scuttled from heel
when I shifted, making me think:
of the stony excrement
Of West Coast kitchen middens built
like this flattop
Only bigger, higher, and the fishermen, flint-
faced, chipped to shadows when famine
Fingered their edges.
"Christ I" he said,
jumping up. "She don't understand how I love
this hole,
This rotten spot where even a grasshopper
can't spit tobacco juice
And rock on his legs in comfort I" His mouth
strained to say more but she came, calling,
so we went in,
He again, silent, turning words inward
like spikes in a harrow
Stirring the thoughts in his mind.
After he'd
hammered through scrapple and hotcakes,
sucked at his dogtooth,
And pushed off somewhere, I said: "What's
eating him?" She, grim,
Pitched down the spider:
"It's Sam Calkin's
place. Th'eviction's today
And he," back-tossing her thumb towards the
door gaping open, "won't go stand
with the rest against the
Sheriff and his pack of stinkhounds I"-neither
of us noticing then,
And we didn't care later, how the grease
gathered on the slant and ran over,
cooling gray
On the pan's brown edge like snow on a rut
of gumbo, while her voice
Kept grinding. "Sam's a good man. Take h:m
or near any farmer, take us for exampI...
We've dried up
Along with the land and now they want to
shovel us off.
I s'pose
we
made the drought,
we
set the
black rust to firing the fields,
we're
The rabbit-heads that thought up the stunt
to plow under, to slaughter our stock!"
She caged the space between stove
And table with her hard walk, flinging force
into her words
So they seemed beaked, pointed with power.
After a moment she cracked a dry
grin, as suddenly
FEBRUARY,
1936
