He Said She'd Have to Walk Six Miles to Draw Them Water Rodney Jones (bio) Willodean wore long-sleeved black shirtsand long dresses with her hair swept back from her face and falling down her backclean to the waist in a straight braid, she and the sisters always in blackaccording to the strict proscriptions of their father, the old man in suspendersand beard, who had peculiar ways, people said, living like that, up in a hollerbetween Nebo and Mount Zion. A cult, some had it, of one family, the old man Willand his daughters: Willodean, the painter; Wilma, the philosopher; and Willa, the singer.Some told of a wife who died in childbirth, two sons disowned and driven off like lion cubs.Though few saw the family in their daily life, holding to the old ways, in holy abstinence.They hoed, they sewed, they milked the cows. Some Saturdays they would ride to townand sell produce from the back of a wagon: preserves, honey, lettuce, watermelons;and handiworks: footstools and whatnots, [End Page 141] woolen socks, and Willodean's paintings:a goat in a churn, a crawfish with sextant, smoke boiling up from a fleeing animal.Daubed onto bed sheets—few bought them. But then, briefly, her name was everywhere,the paintings in museums, everyone had to have one. This happened as horses disappeared,as the Beatles harmonized on Ed Sullivan, before the depot became the bistro.When a man on public television discussed Willodean's technique with chiaroscuro,he said it was if a genius from a remote tribe in Borneo had discovered, by scratching in dirt,the rudiments of Euclidian geometry. But it is all gone now: the decoys and the whatnots,and the strange paintings for two dollars. No record of Willa's singing or Wilma's logic.Like nuns or crows, a girl said, and it was true. To see them, who'd know one from the other?Once an expert came to Saturday market to ask Willodean questions. She never spoke.The old man Will spoke for her. These paintings, he said, were part of prophecy. She saw, but didnot seek these visions, and he said the blasting had started on the bluffs, Judgment Daywas coming. The interstate would be a sign. [End Page 142] Rodney Jones Rodney Jones is the author of eleven books, including Transparent Gestures (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Salvation Blues (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which he received the Kingsley Tufts Award. The poem in this issue is from his forthcoming book, Difficult Subjects. He lives in New Orleans and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Warren Wilson College. Copyright © 2020 Middlebury College Publications