Portrait of Lulu Wilde Woodman by Andrew Jones By nineteen, your face is slim, angular, and defined. Your translucent eyes blaze through the sepia tone with a forthrightness that hints at their crystal blue color. The brim of your hat is as wide as the life you will lead, and even now you overshadow your sisters and gaze in the opposite direction. Soon to marry the last of the neighbor’s three sons, you fall for imagination over hypothesis and workmanship. For the eldest daughter, your father hosts the finest farm wedding that Rock County has yet witnessed, on a Christmas Eve blanketed with a soft snow. The New Year will bless you with a healthy son—the only child you will bear. Then it is as though your middle name takes hold of your life-path. Stealing away with a dancer to another state, leaving your infant son to be raised by aunts and uncles in the wake of your husband’s heartbreak. You do attempt to reconnect once, when the boy is five and just after you’ve shot a man in Kansas City. But it fails, just like your second marriage, when you break a table lamp over the gambling man’s head, and flee to Illinois, where you lie about your age and enroll in nursing school. Oh the gossip you must have garnered by proving a capable nurse and marrying the last of the bachelor doctors. At last, when frostbite claims his surgeon’s hands you journey on again. You finally settle in San Jose by the end of the first world war, ready to stay and waiting to make up time with your soldier son. Like most adventurers, you die a long way from your birth ground. But you have stories, you make history and create legends. And your eyes never lose their glare, never fade. Those same eyes you’ve passed on to my daughter.
|
