His father was a tall man with a yellow beard. He smelled of musk and spent most of his days out in the field with the other men.
"A woman is like this," his father told him as he penetrated a shallow layer of earth with his hoe. "Just like this."
He missed those days. At nights now, in a strange bed faraway, he wakes up crying, remembering the sunset over the fields. The shadows cast by the tobacco plant. His father's voice and musk.
Like everyone else on the compound, they lived in a one room cabin. So when the time came, it was not a matter of what but of how. He knew the man was above, silent, powerful, steady, unyielding. And the woman, underneath, somewhere, invisible beneath all the motion and disturbed blankets. Her presence a series of grunts wavering between surprise and despair. As his father came, these sounds reached crescendo in an unbearably sweet moan of loss--something very precious had been finally released. Like a child.
In the morning, his father was ruddy and sweat-sodden. He whistled as he splashed the ice water over his hairy face. His mother, also red-faced, but quiet, She had been opened again.
It was around this time, the time that the large trundle bed he shared with his three brothers became too small, that he began to notice Fish Face. That was not her real name, of course, and thankfully not a nickname, either. It was how he thought of her in his head about that amorphous female, all eyes and mouth. Carrot curls peeking out from beneath a rose-bud bonnet. A soft, lumpy body encased in those confused, voluminous garments designated for the not-quite girl, not-yet woman.
"What do you think of..." he had asked the boys one evening in the fields. It was autumn. The sun set behind the tobacco fields and left a coolness in its wake. They needed to finish the harvest before the frost set in.
"Eh," said one, shrugging his shoulders. "Eh," said another, and the subject was soon changed by the other. She was, you see, not a pretty or bad girl. Sometimes, with a shudder, he realized that you couldn't tell if she was a girl from a distance. "Yeah, just a sack of potatoes," he said out loud without thinking. The others halted their conversation and stared at him. "I'd rather be on my knees digging for taters than look at another damn tobaccer plant." The others rejoined in a collective guffaw. He turned back to his work.
That night he threw the stones at her window in the dark.
