Page 39
By Jack Joseph Smith
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
A rural pig anecdote leads into 'LOME LAND ANARCHIST,' a portrait of grain hauling, field burning, hunting, machinery, whiskey, and prairie violence.
The page pairs comic brutality with a catalog of rural competence and damage. The first section performs a spoken farm story in dialect, while the titled section turns the land worker into a mythic figure made from gears, fire, truck ownership, hunting, and smoke.
The pig story and anarchist catalog appear in another variant, followed by Granny Lawrence watching bank robbers escape at noon during a potato factory lunch break, and then Roy Nash from Alberta with his broken neck.
Roy Nash - fifty-one years old, six foot six, French Basque eyes, broken neck from falling a Douglas fir, right arm dead - arrives as one of the collection's most affecting portraits. The narrator feeling his handshake and watching him go sober up the logging road through the moon while returning to iron pipes and furnace makes the farewell genuinely elegiac, the body's damage held against the moon's indifference.