The only man
who’d seen her naked
was Guy, until her breast
blackened to a fist
and she unbuttoned her dress
to show the doctor.
Dead by forty,
Willie didn’t live
to know her oldest boys
would die
in separate icy crashes
off Red River Bridge.
And Guy, helpless
to raise six kids,
would marry Grace
the Tattooed Lady
from the traveling circus.

Any tune you could hum,
Guy played by ear
on the rented piano.
But when his black mood
settled in,
he drank, beat his wife,
chased the kids under the house
where they stayed
until the black mood lifted.

Later, two wives gone
and all his children
grown or dead,
Guy ended his black moods
with a bullet to his head.
                        

Velma married money
when she married Red.
Still, she stayed a worker,
tended the livestock,
laid out meals for hired hands.
Stayed cheerful too,
through the car wreck
that snapped her legs like beans,
the tractor accident 
that crushed her husband’s chest,
the fire that burned
her big white farmhouse
to the ground.
When she had black moods,
she took to her bed
with a bottle of Jim Beam.
But mostly she slept with Red
the rich boy she’d married 
sixty years before.
Said, sex is waking up at night
to hear that old boy breathe.