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DUSTBOWL FUNERAL by Robert Lavett Smith Near dawn, the farm hands dressed by candlelight, their hair tonic thick, and rank with kerosene. They fixed stiff collars to their starched white shirts, and rinsed their mouths with urine to sweeten their breath. They dressed in black, in suits they knew they'd wear when, one day, they were laid in their own graves. Such finery as they possessed was grayed by the dust that covered everything like despair. Dust storms had scoured the whitewash from the walls of the clapboard church across the barren fields. They walked together in silence, knowing the way; in silence, after the service, they carried the coffin. Six mourners bore that body through a landscape as still and colorless as a photograph; the only sound besides their own footsteps, dust devils howling through abandoned farms. The dry husks of dead locusts were impaled on barbed wire fences: many thousands of them, so that the wires sagged beneath the weight like branches burdened with some hideous fruit. © Robert Lavett Smith « Home | Contributor Notes » |
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