We Make Mud

Look there at our father. Our father, see over there, he is digging, with his shovel, down into mud. He is, with this mud-crusted shovel, lifting the mud from over there where he is standing, hunched over, and he, our father, he is dumping the mud out, into a hump-mudded pile, here in this other not so muddy place, up here on this hill that is uphill from where the river is, up here where there is this grass up here that is trying to cover up the dirt that us brothers and now our father too — we like to take dirt and make dirt turn to mud. When us brothers ask our father, What is he doing, what our father says to this is, he says, he is working. Working? we say. We say this with our eyes. Work, no, work: work was back when our father used to have a work to go to, back when the black-metaled mill that now sits shipwrecked on the river’s shore, so dark and silent, back when it wasn’t so dark and silent, back when blast-furnace fire and smoking smokestack smoke used to make us brothers raise our eyes up to look up at the sky. But now that place where our father used to work, it is a shipwrecked ship with no treasures left inside it. Sons, our father says this to us. I’m making mud, he says. I’m taking mud, he tells us, and I’m making, with this mud, I am making, out of mud, a house for us to call our own. A mud house, our father calls it. A mud house where mud, it’ll be okay for us to walk inside this house with mud caked on the bottoms of our boots. That sounds like a good place to us, us brothers, we say this to our father. And so, us brothers, being the good boys that we are, we drop down onto our hands and knees, down in the mud, and we get to work. We start at the bottom and make our way up. But a house, a house made out of mud, a mud house: this we do not make. Us brothers, what we make, from the mud, we make Girl. We make Girl’s knees especially muddy. Girl’s knees, they make us want to stay forever kneeling. It’s when Girl stands up from the mud that’s sticking to the skins of our muddy boy hands, it’s then that we can see that Girl, she is naked. Brother is the brother of us brothers who is making Girl’s nakedness seem like not such a good thing for Girl to be. So what if she’s naked? That’s what I’ve got to say to this. We’re all naked underneath our clothes. But maybe, Brother says, maybe she’s cold. Maybe she wants some clothes. Are you cold? I go and ask Girl. Would you like some clothes to put on top of your girl body? Girl doesn’t say yes or no to this. She just stands there being naked. Brother turns though and runs away and when he comes back he has in his arms an armful of girl clothes. Where did you get those? I say this to Brother. Our mother’s closet is what Brother says to this. I give Brother this look. There is this look that us brothers, we have this look between us brothers. It’s the kind of a look that actually hurts the eyes of the brother who is doing the looking. Imagine that look. Where else was I supposed to look? Brother says. I don’t know where or what to say to this, and so I don’t say anything. I take back looking that look. Then I take hold of Brother’s hand. I take out of Brother’s hands this dress — it’s a dress with yellow flowers on it: it is a dress that I cannot picture our mother ever wearing it, this dress — and then we slip, we tug, we pull, we fight, we struggle, we twist, we rip, this dress down over the top of Girl’s head. Oh, even so, Girl is still beautiful. Girl’s beauty — it shines — the beauty of mud, it is shining, from beneath our mother’s flowery clothes.