The Moon Hangs Lowest Over Our Open Fields 

When the neighbors uncovered Granddaddy keeled over in the shocks, the farm in Easton became my Daddy’s lot. My mother and I loaded up our old house on our backs and hoisted it down the gravel road until we passed fields filled with daughters on their knees. Then we turned down a drive lined with straight-backed neighbors and neighbors’ sons and, at the end, my father banging a lone nail into the barn wall. 

  My mother and I freed the farmhouse floors from dust and dung and dirt. We kneaded bugs out of the sheets and beetles out of the floorboards. My father plowed three full-fields with only a filly. My mother could quilt a river to its bed but she couldn’t hold a trowel. I sold corn on the roadsides, learned how to work a stove and hitch a plow, and in the winters when we bundled down and lived on game and cornbread. I grew a chest that filled my mother’s largest dresses, and then the filly died and my father pounded down a row of corn and eyed me over the laundry. 

“Those hips can hold a harvest,” he announced one night. 

  The next day he led me out into our corn. On my back he can reach the highest cobs: on my knees, I can cart them back to the barn. The neighbor’s sons stay on their feet except for the son across the creek-bed. Hitched to his father, he is stoop-shouldered, whip-scarred, lock-jawed, but this neighbor’s son is the only one who plucks me a smile big as a sunflower before carting off his own cobs.

  When it was clear I was in the fields to stay, the neighbors’ sons lined up along their lawns. They picked daisies, daffodils, and Osage oranges but I held out for the son across the creek bed to come clambering over the stones one summer morning when the water ran low. He waited under the nail every morning after, ready to help with reaping and harvesting and canning and, a year later, burying my father in a barren patch between the corn. He lingered on the porch as the moon turned all the harvest into silver and my mother offered tea and shawls. His own mother had been under the corn some twenty-three years. She’d left him no sisters, no brothers, just a father with a whip and a son. The next morning I was there under the nail and we walked off into the fields without either of us being hitched. 

*

The neighbor’s son crossed the field until my mother let our floors and walls and breads crawl with lice and gnats and flies and her breath went out in one last trail of steam. I carried her to the porch and when the neighbor’s son arrived he said a prayer and we planted her so close to my father the shovel uncovered a fleshless elbow. The neighbor’s son worked the fields alone while I set about freeing the house, as my mother and I had done when we’d first carted our old home up the road. 

Together, my neighbor’s son and I finished planting a full week before any other farms. I thanked him in a way that meant “goodbye,” but the neighbor’s son still came every morning until the sun bellied up hot and hardy and the corn commanded every spare inch of the county.    

  The ears that sprung up over the graves of my parents bloomed bigger than sunflowers, enough to turn into breads and mash and meal, store and sell in town. All that happy autumn, we husked the hair out of the corn until night husked the sun out of the sky and when the moon rose it rose up slow as a stalk poking through Spring. 

  When the neighbor’s son and I had filled the fields with corn shocks he held my hand. He’d shucked all but one last giant ear, and he cracked back the husk and tied a strand of the corn’s hair around my finger. I guided his hands to my waist and his mouth to my lips and dawn found us bundled under the same quilt.  

The wives made me a dress with embroidered white flowers and my husband appeared in a stiff, dark suit he never sat down in. We fed all the neighbors, the neighbors’-wives, and the priest who married me and the neighbor’s son on the fat cobs from the once-barren center of the corn.  

My father-in-law appeared only to hand his son a daisy-yellow hatbox. Inside was a fat black snake with a rat’s tail. My husband dropped the box and the snake wasn’t a snake all but a horse-whip that uncoiled itself right over my good shoes. We backed away and I took my husband’s hand as his father pounded down through the rows and over the creek to his own field. 

 That night I wound the whip up tight inside the old hatbox and buried it at the bottom of my Hope Chest. My husband tried to use it only once, three months later, after a quarrel on our way home from Church. While I readied supper he unlocked my chest, removed his shirt, took the whip in his hand, and struck his own back until it bled. I found him curled under our bed and tended him with whisky until his color returned. 

Nights when the moon lay low I’d wake to find him by the windowsill, wary of the open fields. I’d stroke his back and we’d watch for any movement other than the eager bubbling of the creek. His father never left his own porch, but my husband still stopped at least once a day to stand like a dog on guard whenever a stray husk cracked. 

“Some of us should be killed,” he always said. “We never had a chance.”   

*

My first child was a boy with a sun-wide smile circling big-buck teeth with no tongue. He was born smack in the middle of an Indian summer: the neighbors stayed out late, the hay-colored evening warming the red rivers of scars across the wives’ backs. The boy and I watched from the porch for until my husband strode through the corn rows smelling of fresh tilled soil and, later, half a field of rotted crop he couldn’t save. 

The boy laughed every time a dead husk or winter-brown leaf popped in his father’s hand. My husband waned pale and thin on our dwindling suppers while the boy grew round and white and fat on my milk. Nights when my son would open his tongueless mouth wide to wail I’d creep down to the kitchen with the boy at my breast, look out over the back porch and ask the dead corn to send us another wedding feast. The clouds pressed thick over the moon and nothing in the fields shone back any promise—weak as my husband was, he still walked into the forests every frost-crusted morning, hauling whatever kill he’d found all the long miles every starless night. 

That winter, my husband took the ropes and rags and buckets down off my father’s nail and tried to hang himself by his shirt. 

*

The daughters lined up in my belly. On the ninth time the moon swelled one pushed out the next until there were seven—dark eyed, straight haired, sharp-tongued and big-toothed. Hands on their hips when told to watch their brother. Hands on their hips when asking for dresses shinier than my wedding ring. Hands on their hips when they marched into the corn and lived off the fields, three nights at a time. My husband struck seven new nails down the barn wall: in a row they stood, blocking his path when he tried to hang a daughter by her skirts. 

  “You take too much,” my eldest said. She is almost as tall as my husband, as thick-armed and ham-handed as her grandfather.

“It’s our lot.” I rocked the boy in my arms. At more than five-feet, he still slept at my breast. 

“No.” The eldest daughter rose. Her sisters stood accordingly. “This, Mama.” She pointed over the fields. “This is our lot.” 

The boy smiled in his sleep. “You’ll wake him,” I scolded. The daughters sighed. They lined up and slammed the door on their way in. The boy laughed and struck my chest. My husband’s boots echo down the corn row, hammer-heavy on the dried-up creek bed’s stone. 

*

The daughters grow. The eldest fills out my largest dresses and the youngest loads her small back with cobs of her own. It won’t be long before seven neighbors’ sons venture to our lawn and seven new farms sprout up down the road. Then there will be me, my husband, the smiling boy and rotted cobs in the compost, dirt and dust in the blankets and bugs in our clothes and corn. 

“He won’t have a chance,” my husband says one night. He sleeps very little now. His shoulders are curling in and his hair is chilly gray. The boy still clings to my breasts, which sag and wrinkle like the once-fattened belly of a she-cat. He laughs when the daughters circle my husband too quickly for him to strike. He laughs at the husks full of worms and the barn roof rotting. He laughs as my husband kicks in the door and carries him, over his shoulder, to the nail, where he hangs for two days, laughing and laughing until he coughs up the lost tongue and dies with his eyes open. 

At the funeral the daughters move their hands from their hips to their eyes. They plant their brother in the barren center of the field, tilling up their Grandparents’ bones and some long-dead cobs big as sunflowers. They march to the house and circle the table, their voices humming through the floor long after the sun beds down. 

Dawn finds them around our mattress, two and two and two and the youngest with her hand on my cheek.

“Go downstairs,” she tells me.

When dawn blooms over the shocks there is no husband in bed or at the sill. When I question the fields they carry the pounding of my daughters’ hammers up over the roof right as the sun breaks the first frost crusting the crops. There is my husband, my father’s nail through his throat. There are the girls, felling their Grandfather’s barn. There is the grave of my son, covered with fresh lumber. My daughters are rebuilding.