Skinny Farmer, Fat Wife

Leaning next to the farm wagon, the bent old man steadies the fleshy arm of his fat wife. He guides her tree-trunk of a leg onto the step with dignity of motion, as if changing a delicate lampshade; I remember Barnum’s Elephants balancing on painted cups.

The old farmer scowls.

What does he feel in the shadow of her mass?—Anger, disgust, impatience? Does his heart rage smothered? I picture her passing dreary days, waiting for him to come in from the fields, rocking, grinding timeworn planks that groan under her weight. Once she was a brown-skinned girl, pink feet flying, carefree of the relentless gravity that now binds her, the mass of age, of sorrow.

The train I peer out from shudders to a stop on Main Street, a place no different from a hundred others in the vast, brown West; the couple does not seem to notice the noisy engine; the tracks are not a way out to them as they are to me.

A car, sleek and haughty pushes through the cluttered road, lending the couple’s wagon a wide berth. Children stare from the back, pressing open mouths to the window. They point at the farmer, struggling to lift his wife. One boy pinches his nose, twists his face.

The fat wife is painfully hoisted, burdening the wagon, her chalk-white head bowed under his shoulder. His brick-red hand rises. It flails against her shoulder. She doesn’t cower, doesn’t speak, only leans into the blows like sleet endured. The horse twitches its flanks, as if the next blow would be there.

The fat wife’s refuge must be to eat whatever he dishes out, never refusing, never purging, never digesting. How many blows has she taken, hiding her girl’s heart in ancient dreams? Those visions all girls have, of princesses and ballerinas, where did they go? She has shrunk inside herself, smaller and smaller as she grew larger and larger.

The reins snap; the black horse coils the power in its hooves and lurches forward. The farmer leans, his back still bent. The sorrowful, short visit to town is over. I think of what I would do if I were in the skinny farmer’s place. Then I shudder to imagine being in the fat wife’s place.