'Your father is a feeble man,' Eliza told her daughter, your grandmother, who loved her father very deeply, but who, only in her tenth year and so perturbed by the obscenity of seeing her father unclothed among the beasts--his pale white skin wrinkled like theirs, gangly patches of hair dangling from the nooks between their legs--refused to speak.

Instead she took to drawing. She drew sheep, herds of sheep floating across the sky like puffy white clouds beneath a sun that, invariably in her drawings, never rose beyond the dawn. Sometimes she'd maneuver her pencil in tight curlicues until the wool grew as dark as a storm, her hand clenched so tightly and pressing down so hard that the lead tip would mash into little fragments, sometimes punching a tiny hole in the paper, which would then wrinkle like the skin of the shorn sheep on the day she saw her father counting naked in the field. Then she'd start to cry, hysterically. Nothing could make her stop beyond sheer exhaustion. Not the many spankings with a spoon, which soon enough proved to only amplify the problem. Taking away the pencils and paper didn't work either.

Photo © Mollie Bryan




Your grandmother would just smuggle them home from school and hide them at the end of the driveway to retrieve them later, after she'd been patted down.

It took Eliza weeks to figure out a solution. Down past the grazing field there was a riverbed that had dried up enough so that the water never grew higher than the ankles. 'Before God created Man,' Gideon told his daughter, 'this river and this field and the land on which we built this house used to be a seabed.' Now the riverbed was full of rocks. Smooth, dark stones. Before she lost her speech, your grandmother had grown fond of the stones. She'd stand there in the water with her back to the farm, holding the larger ones in both hands, studying them like skulls, silently and without expression, as if to ascertain their weight, their fathomless histories. Henceforth, every time her daughter began to cry, Eliza sent her down to the riverbed to fetch some stones to bring up to the farm, ten to twenty every time she had a fit. To rectify her daughter's disturbances, Eliza devised to have her construct a wall around the grazing field.

Follow the words ...

The Grazing Field

Ryan O'Connor

Once, as we sat smoking cigarettes on the front steps of his mother's house the day before her funeral, my father relayed a story she had told him about her father, Gideon Leath. On the heels of old age Gideon's wife Eliza, his younger by nearly twenty years, found him roaming aimlessly around with the sheep in the field behind their small farm. He was naked and chewed the fingernails of his left hand down to the pink, his right hand limply pointing among the herd, tallying up the recently shorn. It was as clear a morning as any. Your grandmother had a hell of a time getting him back inside, my father said. He swatted at her with the hand that wasn't being nibbled, groaning low like a dog about to bite.

49