W.D. Ehrhart

Each day I go into the fields to see what is growing and what remains to be done. It is always the same thing: nothing is growing, everything needs to be done. Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray till my bones ache and hands rub blood-raw with honest labor— all that grows is the slow intransigent intensity of need. I have sown my seed on soil guaranteed by poverty to fail. But I don’t complain—except to passersby who ask me why I work such barren earth. They would not understand me if I stooped to lift a rock and hold it like a child, or laughed, or told them it is their poverty I labor to relieve. For them, I complain. A farmer of dreams knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams knows what it means to be patient. Each day I go into the fields.

What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace? Or what if the boy—but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food, Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee, Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski didn’t die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang. In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of angels. What if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud. What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man, and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee? What if none of it happened the way I said? Would it all be a lie? Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? Would the dead rise up and walk?