OUT OF THE DUST Outlined by Dust My father stares at me while I sit across from him at the table, while I wash dishes in the basin, my back to him, the picked and festered bits of my hands in agony. He stares at me as I empty the wash water at the roots of Ma's apple trees. He spend long days digging for the electric-train folks when they can use him, or working here, nursing along the wheat, what there is of it, or digging the pond. He sings sometimes under his breath, even now, even after so much sorrow. He sings a man's song, deep with what has happened to us. It doesn't swing lightly the way Ma's voice did, the way Miss Freeland's voice does, the way Mad Dog sings. My father's voice starts and stops, like a car short of gas, like an engine choked with dust, but then he clears his throat and the song starts up again. He rubs his eyes the way I do, with his palms out. Ma never did that. And he wipes the mild from his upper lip same as me, with his thumb and forefinger. Ma never did that, either. We don't talk much. My father never was a talker. Ma's dying hasn't changed that. I guess he gets the sound out of him with the songs he sings. I can't help thinking how it is for him, without Ma. Waking up alone, only his shape left in the bed, outlined by dust. He always smelled a little like her first thing in the morning, when he left her in bed and went out to do the milking. She'd scuff into the kitchen a few minutes later, bleary eyed, to start breakfast. I don't think she was ever really meant for farm life, I think once she had bigger dreams, but she made herself over to fit my father. Now he smells of dust and coffee, tobacco and cows. None of the musky woman smell left that was Ma. He stares at me, maybe he is looking for Ma. He won't find her. I look like him, I stand like him, I walk across the kitchen floor with that long-legged walk of his. I can't make myself over the way Ma did. And yet, if I could look in the mirror and see her in my face. If I could somehow know that Ma and baby Franklin lived on in me... But it can't be. I'm my father's daughter. January 1935