The Piece of String

T WAS MARKET DAY, and on all the country roads around Goderville the peasants and their wives were making their way toward the town. The men walked slowly, throwing their whole bodies forward at every step of their long crooked legs. They were deformed from pushing the plow, which makes their left shoulders higher and bends their figures sideways; from reaping the grain, when they have to spread their legs so as to keep on their feet; from all the slow and painful work of country living. Their starched blue smocks, glossy as though varnished, ornamented at collar and cuffs with a little embroidered design and blown out around their bony bodies, looked very much like balloons about to soar, from which protruded a head, two arms, and two feet. Some of these fellows dragged along a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. And just behind the animal followed their wives, beating it over the back with a leaf-covered branch to hasten its pace, and carrying large baskets out of which protruded the heads of chickens or ducks. These women walked more quickly and energetically than the men, with their erect, dried-up figures, adorned with scanty little shawls pinned over their flat bosoms, and their heads wrapped round with a white cloth, enclosing the hair and topped by a bonnet. Now a char a banc passed by, pulled along by ajerky gaited nag and shaking up strangely the two men on the seat, and the woman at the bottom of the cart who held fast to its sides to lessen the hard jolting. On the square of Goderville was a great crowd, a swarm of men and beasts mingled. The horns of cattle, the high, long-napped hats of wealthy peasants, and the headdresses of the women came to the surface of the assembly. And the sharp, shrill, barking voices made a continuous, wild din, while above it occasionally rose a huge burst of laughter from the sturdy lungs of a merry peasant or a prolonged bellow from a cow tied fast to the wall of a house

Archaeology · Art · Biology · Clothing · Collar · Geography · White (mutation) · Canadian Identity and History · Engineering · Mechanical Engineering

• Ostracism and the Guilty Conscience

  Sara Deutch Schotland•ANQ A Quarterly Journal of Short…•2013

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