"Eve's Hands"
They were like my grandmother's
probably, my mama's mama, Dora, whose third
husband had fought
in the War Between the States, a man we boys knew
only from his uniformed likeness
in a misty daguerreotype
hanging over the old pump organ
in the living room that
one of grandma's stepsons had added on by enclosing
the front porch. Nobody ever saw
grandma play the organ
but she made lots of pies with her crooked
fingers wrapped around
the ends of the rolling pin while she flattened out
the dough and there was hardly
a day she didn't have four or five soggy
pies in the warmer over
the stove, terrible pies, really, pies that got made
to use up the peaches and apples,
that she baked out of habit
whether anybody came to visit or not,
a farm woman who never took up
knitting or quilting or any of those other woman's tricks,
with hands
that had milked cows and wrung the heads off
chickens and gathered persimmons up
in her apron and held on to
the bucking plowhandles behind her mules,
hands, that if she came across
a copperhead
in the garden would grab hold
of her hoe and chop
its head off, not out of meanness or hate
but because if one was to bite you
the only place
to get help was forty miles away, clear on over
in Salisbury, either that,
or you could die like grandpa did
not from
the artillery at Chickamauga but from a copperhead
at threshing time, in sight of his own house,
hands clenching and unclenching while he tried
to say some final word,
hands, that when grandma laid hers on top
of them in the coffin, mama said, you would have thought
they were twins
© 2005 Native Dancer (Jim Lineberger)
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