NOTE:
John Ford (1586-c.1639). English dramatist of the Jacobean period. His tragedy, Tis Pity Shes a Wliore, ublished in 1633. "Deep in a dump John Ford alone was got/With folded arms and melancholy hat." (Choice Drollery, 1656.)
John Ford (1895-1973). Ameri film-maker. Filmography includes: Stagecoach (1938); My Darling Clementine (1946); She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). "My name is John Ford. I make Westerns." (John Ford, Andrew Sinclair, New York 1979.)
There was a rancher had two children, a son and then a daughter. A while after that, his wife died and was buried uwo stiailed together to make a cross because there was no time, yet, to carve a stone.
Did she die of the loneliness of the prairies? Or was it anguish that killed her, anguish, and nostalgia for the close, warm, neighbourly life she had left behind her when she came to this emptiness? her. She died of the pressure of that vast sky, that weighed down upon her and crushed her lungs until she could not breathe any more, as if the prairies were the bedrock of an o in which she drowned.
She told her boy: "Look after your sister." He, blond, solemn, little; he ah sat with her in the room of logs her husband split to build. Death, with high cheek-bones, wore his hair in braids. His invisible presen the mocked the existence of the . The round-eyed boy clutched his mothers dry hand. The girl was younger.
Theher lay with the prairies and all that careless sky upon her breast, and the children lived in their fathers house. So they grew up. In his spare time the rancher chiselled at a rock: "Beloved wife of. . . mother of. . ." beh the space at the top he had left for his own name.
America begins and ends in the cold and solitude. Up here, she pillows her head upon the Arctiow. Down there, she dips her feet in the chilly waters of the South Atlantie of the perpetually restless albatross. America, with her torso of a woman at the time of this story, a woman with an hlass waist, a waist laced so tightly it snapped in two, a a belt of water there. America, with your child-bearing hips and your crotch of jungle, your swelling bosom of a nursing mother and your cold head, your cold head.
Its tral paradox resides in this: that the top half doesnt know what the bottom half is doing. When I say the two children of the prairie, suckled on those grees, were the pure children of the ti, you know at ohat they were norteamerios, or I would not speak of them in the English language, which was their language, the language that silehe babble of this tis multitude of tongues.
Blond children with broad, freckled faces, the boy in dungarees and the little girl in gingham and sunbo. In the old play, one John Ford called them Giovanni and Annabella; the other John Ford, in the movie, might call them Johnny and Annie-Belle.
Annie-Belle will bake bread, tramp the linen and cook the beans and ba; this lily of the West had not spare time enough to pause and sider the lilies of the field, who never do a hands turn. No, sir. A womans work is never done and she became a woman early.
The gaunt paterfamilias would drive them into town to chur Sundays with the black Bible on his knee wherein their names and dates of birth were inscribed. In the buggy, his shy, big-boow-headed son i, dark, Sunday clothes, and Annie-Belle, at thirteen, fourteen, increasingly asto and rendered shy by her own lonely fl. Fifteen. How pretty she was growing! They