Wrest

Abstract

Wrest R. T. Smith (bio) Nearing ninety, my father the optimistkneels in a furrow and reaches to wrest weeds from his last patch of garden. Freshly re-wedand ready for his new life, he tells the collards, "Those liberal professors ruined my son,"an axe he's ground for thirty years. A nuthatch ceases hammering nearby to listen,and the window's open louvers allow me to eavesdrop as he rantsat the vetch and crabgrass, his happy anger half what keeps him going. Stemsand tendrils, the greedy weeds and briars his lifelong enemies, and men like me in thrallto books and words. Furious, he wrestles along a furrow, wrenches the offending stalks,and I remember the blind tuner Joe Merrick who led my hands inside the upright Baldwin.His tool for turning the strings to sharper tones was called a wrest, a word I laterlearned the Saxons fashioned. "It's all," [End Page 43] he whispered, "in the fingers and wrists,like a farmer picking a sunset peach," and these days, when I open my ledgerto write, I always think wrest and know it was not college whereI learned to work words, twist the nouns and verbs from their socketsand sow them to my own design. Outside—turning toward autumn harvest—my father's still preaching the merits of manual labor to anyone willing to heedhis harangue. Then at the steel sink to rinse his rusty knuckles and wrists,he says only the body's work earns a man rest, though from his furious and robusttone, he seems more happy with wrath, a pleasure not beyond my grasp,also Saxon and surely as the russet sunset, a far cry from the worst. [End Page 44] R. T. Smith R. T. Smith is writer-in-residence at Washington and Lee University. His new books are Sherburne: Stories and The Red Wolf: A Dream of Flannery O'Connor. Copyright © 2013 University of Nebraska Press