He’s dirty and he has a sour smell.
His eyes are ringed by the soil that comes from riding
trains.
But there’s a deeper shadow to those eyes,
like ashes,
like death.
He needs a hair comb and a shave,
and a mending needle applied to his pants.
He speaks to me,
“Where you from, miss?” he wants to know.
He shows me a picture of his family.
A wife. Three boys.
The photograph is all he carries.
That and the shredding, stinking clothes on his back.
I feed him two of the stale biscuits I’ve been hoarding
and save the rest.
I’ll be hungry tonight,
what with giving my day’s biscuits away.
But I can see the gaunt of hunger in his cheeks.
He asks if I have water and I shake my head,
my tongue thick with thirst.
He eats the biscuits.
He doesn’t care they’re caked with dust.
He finishes eating and crumbs stick to his mustache.
He’s staring hard at me and his eyes water.
“I’ve done it again,” he says.
“Taken food from a child.”
I show him my cloth bag with more biscuits.
“At home,” he said, “I couldn’t feed them,
couldn’t stand the baby always crying.
And my wife,
always that dark look following me.
Couldn’t take no more.
Lost our land, they tractored us out so’s we had to
leave,
rented awhile, then moved in with Lucille’s kin.
Couldn’t make nothing grow.”
I nodded. “I know.”
We talked as the train rocked,
as the cars creaked,
as the miles showed nothing but empty space,
we talked through the pink of the setting sun,
and into the dark.
I told him about Ma dying.
I told him about my father,
and how the thing that scared us both the most
was being left alone.
And now I’d gone and left him.
I told him about the piano,
and Arley Wanderdale,
and how I wasn’t certain of the date,
but I thought it might be my birthday,
but he was sleeping by then, I think.
He was like tumbleweed.
Ma had been tumbleweed too,
holding on for as long as she could,
then blowing away on the wind.
My father was more like the sod.
Steady, silent, and deep.
Holding on to life, with reserves underneath
to sustain him, and me,
and anyone else who came near.
My father
stayed rooted, even with my tests and my temper,
even with the double sorrow of
his grief and my own,
he had kept a home
until I broke it.
When I woke,
the man was gone, and so were my biscuits,
but under my hat I found the photograph of his
family,
Maybe the photograph was
left in trade for the biscuits,
maybe it was a birthday gift,
the one thing he had left to give.
The children in the picture were clean and serious,
looking out with a certain longing.
The baby had his eyes.
On the back of the photograph,
in pencil,
was the address of his family in
Moline, Kansas.
First chance, I’d send the picture back,
let his wife know he was still alive.
I got off the train in Flagstaff, Arizona.
A lady from a government agency saw me.
She gave me water and food.
I called Mr. Hardly from her office and asked him to
let my father know …
I was coming home.
August 1935