Wash Day

Abstract

Wash Day Stephen Behrendt (bio) Annie Does Some Dresses She likes to wash her dresses in the old tin tub, working the strong, coarse Fels Naptha with her stubby fingers without minding the steady, slight stinging where the strong water laves the angled rivulets of her reddened hands, her split fingertips. She washes with cold water, wondering at its chill when she had set pot and kettles on the old black stove that she never lights or clears of crumpled paper, kindling. The dresses are the cornflower ginghams she loves for their soothing softness against her skin, their shades of morning light where they have faded, gentle gradations of color tracing the course of hours and years in sun and toil, She wrings them over the tub, suds falling in soft bubbles floating and swaying in the slanting sunlight, drops their wound-up shapes into her wicker basket, a slow stream beginning to flow along the floorboard from beneath, and reaches for the next, her breath catching at the water’s cold. Their heavy weight will lighten in the sun and wind where they sag on lines between two T-shaped posts that angle every year nearer the ground where the grass is greener from the falling drops and the wooden clothespins make spiky lines atop the shadows of the swelling dresses. [End Page 381] Frost in Midwinter The moon troubles her. She loves it, she thinks, at times, welcomes its bluish light on the empty pasture, on the crisp glaze of ice that creeps across the cistern, the rimy silence of the frost in midwinter, the globes of summer dew on the garden plants— the leggy tomatoes and the burned-out pea-vines; but it troubles her, still, its rude stark face peering in, unexpected, at the kitchen window, her washroom, the parted cornflower curtains in her bedroom where no one goes but she and the moon, unbidden. One night, at harvest time, the air thick and humid with threshing dust and late September’s weight, it rose enormous, broad, and dusky orange, flattened in a crouch behind Stevens Ridge to the east, and took her by surprise, her breath catching, a tremor along her heart, a flush at her neckline that she felt seep down between her breasts in a hot trickle of shame, of nakedness observed, as when they had to bathe together in the orphanage, the nuns watching down their aquiline noses through glasses that magnified their hard gray eyes like the great orange moon menacing over the horizon. It keeps her company, though, her and the horses racing soundlessly up and down the field all night, and the barn owls, their ghostly moonish faces looming in flight down the barn’s musty avenues in the half-apologetic moonlight that sifts like snow through the holes where the wind-stripped shingles used to be. [End Page 382] Cabbage Patch A fox comes, from time to time, tall and lanky, who crosses in from the weedy pasture to the garden corner where she leaves the bits of half-cooked egg, scraps of spare meat, chicken bones still slick with fat beside the cabbages running wild and bursting because she cannot bear to cut their stalks, their sunburnt August heads seeming to have eyes that watch her when she comes with her knife and fill her with a dread so deep and chilling that she flees and spares their broad green pates, their jowls nestling in ruffs of tough yellow leaves. The fox knows none of this, nor cares, but comes at dusk for his share of spoils before the moonrise possum visits, moving with straight and purposeful paces, or the snuffling coons that spar and snarl over the odd bits, raw or burned, that turn up in the little fox’s pan-shaped feeding place. She watches for the sudden blur of reddish fur along the sagging fence line where the burned-out pea-vines rattle in whispered tones when a south breeze passes. She wonders at his courage, eating with little smacking sounds beside those fierce and staring cabbage eyes as if he felt no watching, no fire-points on his flanks, no accusations of hungry...