Minerva Jones
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am Minerva, the village poetess,Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the streetFor my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,And all the more when “Butch” WeldyCaptured me after a brutal hunt.He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.Will some one go to the village newspaper,And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—I thirsted so for loveI hungered so for life! “Indignation” Jones You would not believe, would youThat I came from good Welsh stock?That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?And of more direct lineage than theNew Englanders And Virginians of Spoon River?You would not believe that I had been to schoolAnd read some books.You saw me only as a run-down manWith matted hair and beardAnd ragged clothes.Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancerFrom being bruised and continually bruised,And swells into a purplish massLike growths on stalks of corn.Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of lifeInto which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,Whom you tormented and drove to death.So I crept, crept, like a snail through the daysOf my life.No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,Resounding on the hollow sidewalkGoing to the grocery store for a little corn mealAnd a nickel’s worth of bacon. “Butch” Weldy After I got religion and steadied downThey gave me a job in the canning works,And every morning I had to fillThe tank in the yard with gasoline,That fed the blow-fires in the shedsTo heat the soldering irons.And I mounted a rickety ladder to do it,Carrying buckets full of the stuff.One morning, as I stood there pouring,The air grew still and seemed to heave,And I shot up as the tank exploded,And down I came with both legs broken,And my eyes burned crisp as a couple of eggs.For someone left a blow—fire going,And something sucked the flame in the tank.The Circuit Judge said whoever did itWas a fellow-servant of mine, and soOld Rhodes’ son didn’t have to pay me.And I sat on the witness stand as blindAs Jack the Fiddler, saying over and over,“I didn’t know him at all.”
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