Welcome to Labrys, your student-run art and literature collective of Smith College.

The farmers thresh dried wheat in the field, which comes up to their waist, and they are like Knights wading deeper into golden waters. Their cutting and drudging move in rhythm with one another, until, in the still afternoon heat, it is just the sound of their labored breath and fluent blows that can be heard. The tremble of blade holds the tall stalks against metal for a moment more—before the arm pulls back and strikes again, at the base, to pull from quieted earth the fine necked grain. There is a mountain behind the men, meeting the edge of the land with tapered flanks of forest, which grow out from beneath the peaks like toes, or even, reaching tendons. Across earth and just touching the far end of the field. It has been five hours already, and the time which keeps them from resting and eating only seems to grow. Some of the older workers rest, just enough, between each swing, to let their weight fall back over their heels and the vertigo dry out of their heads. The workers behind them wait, not lifting their breath louder than the weak breeze, until the line begins to move again. The field has made brothers of them. Each man knowing the other’s struggle, because he too has an impatient wife who waits at home with dwindling winter monies. And the fraternity somehow keeps them sane among the wheat fields which seem to fall away only beneath distant skies and not their own.

The man knows that he too will be aged one day, still working in the delirious heat, with an arm that manages, barely, to cut the grain. He will never work in a butchery, or even a library, like his wife wants, because the physical labor learned as a young boy is all he understands. It is the only way he knows how to spend the day. And when he comes home at night she will forgive his calloused hands and greedy stomach. She knew even before they married that worn and aching is the only way she could ever have him. The man had miscellaneous jobs over the winter, which somehow kept, and even then, as a grave digger and brick layer his arms stayed tanned, even beneath long sweatered sleeves, even in December. The other workers, like him, are dark skinned. They are all true people of the land, sultry and definitive in appearance, with thick hair that frames their face like dark, flowered crowns. It is an olive complexion sharpest in the people of the coast, who live all along the cliffs and Mediterranean beaches. An intensity of appearance but also lifestyle, survived only by the neighboring southern countries. When he was a boy the man pretended that, at one point in time all of Europe’s color mixed, into a deep, uniform brown, which then dripped down to the sea’s edge, where it lay heavy and saturated all future generations. His father would tell him that up North, where snow and ice exist, the people are silver. Ever since then, even at his old age, the man has wanted to travel up North, to meet the Swedes and Dutch and Nords, who have so much pale and blonde he imagines they must disappear into themselves. He imagines, in such fragile colors, their movements must be like smoke pulled by a breeze. This makes him appreciate the intense and electrifying way of southern people, the only kind he has ever known.

The sun is so strong that surrounding color lifts away, like a weak stain—leaves are faded and wan, the sky is a large, bleached alabaster stone. Each day is hot. Each day pinches off into another, like clay beads, rolled, swollen and resting on twine, until the week is heavy with them. But soon it will be August and the rain will come. There will be water again, bringing back a kind of life the man has forgotten. A vitality he cannot place but is reminded of with each step, as the dry soil atrophies beneath his boot. In August the storms will once again close over summer, and tuck blue skies into stratospheric fabrics of grey and even purple. The man knows that when the clouds come they will root themselves into the land, tethered by long tresses of water. He knows that each tufted piece of sky will be pulled further down, until it touches just the bristling wheat. And, like so many times before, he will watch the fields come apart, beaten to the ground by wind and water, separating still into smaller and smaller islands of stained yellow. But the sun will return, quietly, as if it were never gone, and the familiar warmth will lift the fallen plants from the ground, to let the wind shake the bends and arcs from their fragile backs, which have somehow survived, and hold them upright to the sky. It is now close to noon, and the man lets himself remember the time with Rona, in the fields, when they had first married and forgotten about the August rains. It had been sunny, and all at once, not. He had held his coat over her head and they had run, looking for the woods, laughing and holding each other, as if ghosts, visiting from a time of only happiness. The clouds are thinning, like they do in the afternoon heat. And if the day was a fruit it would already be softening. Its meat just beginning to sweeten in the slackened skin.

During lunch one of the workers tells about his job at an orchard down the road, which grows peaches and almonds, where he walks after his shift in the field is over. But why? The rest ask, including the man. Because… at night thieves come to steal the peaches. They come when the air is just warming, sometime before dawn, down stepping along the furthest hill until they reach the wired boundary of fence. He knows because that is where he waits—for them to send the youngest, to scout. The man listens along with the others. The man imagines his fellow fieldmen, standing just at the orchard’s hem, with a sky breaking into early morning above, prepared to deliver a swing, right handed and precise, just below the jaw of a young boy, which only sometimes breaks. That is enough… it can keep them away for up to a week. The worker says. But the man understands the thieves, because peaches are expensive and delicious. Though he does not say this aloud, because the worker continues speaking. It’s true though. The worker says. They need me. The orchards who cannot afford a watchman, they will lose half of their crop by the end of the season. The poor can get hungry, and sometimes that is enough. Some of them even have families. The worker does not say anything else until lunch is over, no one does. The man knows the orchard mentioned. He goes to it in the spring, when the almond trees are in bloom. When their flowers open in the air like elegies, for branches which held them deep and tight in a wooded marrow during the cold months. And in June he goes again, to wait for the stems to break and let their blossoms sift down through the branches like pink ash. Where the man gathers them at the base of the large, opened tree to bring them home to his wife, who puts them in ceramic bowls filled with jasmine water.

The last hours of work are the hardest. The man, bending over the blade for a seventh hour, feels that his spine and all the ribs which grow from it will split the skin of his back. Yet even then he will keep working, with his bones warming in the sun. Because he needs the money, and because the pain shucks away everything that exists beyond the fields—a surviving which requires a much different and more complicated endurance. The labor is a monotonous and cathartic medicine. For him it is the answer.

The man focuses only on his arms and their aching, until the rusted truck comes into view, amidst the road’s dust and flying stones, with a driver that whistles out towards the field, calling in his workers, who stand straight and still for an instant, like antelope hearing a lion in the brush. It is time.

Evening has subtracted the noise and sharp light. This leaves the workers to traverse across the fields in peace, with only branches and stones popping beneath their boots. The man steps over the furrowed earth and a cicada flies past, headed deeper into the fields, where its family clutches to the swinging uppermost of the grass and the young nymphs suck from the bark’s xylem. Wind combs back the field, revealing a lightened underbelly of grass, and he watches the green fall away beneath his outstretched hands. He parts the field as if opening a jaded lake. For a moment the man stops. Everyone else is far ahead and talking. In the pause he can almost hear the delicate pull of earth worm bodies beneath him, moving through brown in their own small, blind dramas of the soil kingdom. He sees the evening star just becoming visible behind him, barely there and barely not, as if waking from a cosmic amnesia. The man goes on. Another summer day has passed, held together by the fragile hours of heat and Tuscan hills, which stretch beneath the sky like cleaned bones. By the time the truck arrives back in town it is dark, and he must use the kerosene lamp to find his way back home, along the knotted dirt road which follows the hills for another mile. The vineyards are behind him and their striations, of grape plants twisted on posts, never break across the landscape. The constellation Canis Major is already far above him, its shape pinned and followed by delicate yellow stars. Dinner will be on the table and the fields of bearded wheat are somewhere far away and behind him, brushing against each other in the night like drunken lovers.