Preserves
by Steve Knepper
Preserves
1994
I heard those girls of Amy’s laugh at me for putting up these jars of beans and beets, for sweating at the stove when cans are sold four-for-a-dollar at the IGA. They’ve had a dozen years of easy living and smirk at me for saying it won’t last. Their mother ought to set them straight on that but she won’t discipline those girls at all— might have to turn the TV off for that. One generation gives up thrifty ways. The next one mocks. Then the hard times come back. Your head is screwed on straight so I tell you rather than wasting time and breath on them. When I was young it was good times that seemed a fairy tale—depression, then a war, an eighteen-year-old girl who barely said ‘I do’ before her man shipped off for France. Those years brought out the best and worst in us. Look to your right, a saintly charity. Look to your left, the stinking stain of Cain. One spring when I was still a little squirt I got myself a lesson in both sides. Daddy had given most of our potatoes to uncles out of work in Robertsdale then taken in a boy that wandered down the lane and offered help for room and board. He was a handsome boy. A good one too. He saw we needed fewer mouths to feed, so he walked down that lane again one night, left us a note of thanks beside the stove. We culled the poorest layers from the flock and willed those peas and cabbages to grow. Then Daddy spent a week away from home working for wages at the Thousand Steps. On the third night, we heard the dog bark twice. My brother stuck his head outside the door then sent us back to bed. He was fourteen, acting the man but with a boy’s fool sense. We found our collie by the garden gate stretched stiff with gashes in his fur, poor boy. He probably ran to them with wagging tail. They used a greasy sack to muffle him. Then on they went about their thievery— the roosting hens, the smokehouse ham and bacon, the lettuce, turnips, peas, and cabbages. They trampled what they didn’t steal away. My brother got the gun but Momma stopped him. He bawled while we replanted ruined rows. Things got so bad that year we ate the cleanings when heifers dropped their calves. Just boiled them. That kind of hunger changes how you look at empty cupboard shelves—at people too. Besides, those store-bought cans don’t have no taste.
Steve Knepper grew up on a small dairy farm in Pennsylvania and currently teaches at Virginia Military Institute. Knepper is a widely published poet and the founding editor of New Verse Review. He has written or edited several books at the intersection of literature, religion, and philosophy.
Note from the Poet
Like many of my poems, “Preserves” is set in a somewhat mythologized version of south-central Pennsylvania, where I grew up on a small dairy farm. Some real places and their history receive a nod: the coal mines of Robertsdale, the ‘thousand steps’ on Jacks Mountain that laborers climbed each day to dig ganister. While the narrative is (mostly) fictional, the voice of the speaker is drawn from memories of my paternal grandmother. I’d like to think that the blank verse allows me to elevate the cadence of that formidable voice. Dramatic monologues almost always raise a set of interesting questions related to narration. What, exactly, are the speaker’s motivations? Who, exactly, is the speaker addressing? How is that addressee receiving all of this? How reliable is the speaker? You can ask the same questions of a first person prose narrative, but the compression of verse tends to sharpen these questions, to make them more vexing. All of these questions can be asked of “Preserves.”
Note from Mary
Our inaugural poem, a dramatic monologue from Steve Knepper, founding editor of New Verse Review, first appeared in the (sadly) now defunct American Journal of Poetry. We are delighted to republish (preserve) “Preserves” here. It seems only fitting that one of Steve’s poems appears in our first issue as it was his encouragement which inspired us to launch Talk to Me in Long Lines: A Journal of (Long) Narrative Verse and Dramatic Monologue. Some of the most compelling lines in this poem are:
"They’ve had a dozen years of easy living and smirk at me for saying it won’t last."
And then, later in the poem, the hard reality of hard times:
"Things got so bad that spring we ate the cleanings when heifers dropped their calves. Just boiled them."
And the line that grabbed me on my first read: “Look to your left, the stinking stain of Cain.”
We hear the truth in this line, and in all the lines of this poem, even though the story is mostly fictional because Steve has conjured a whole person, her history, her experiences—in this case, based on his grandmother’s life and voice. Steve has the storyteller’s gift of making the made-up seem as factual as truth. When my niece Philomena was little, she told us a story. When we questioned the veracity of her story, she responded, “But in the story, it was real.” And so it was, and is, in any piece of good art.
B. H. Fairchild and Paul Martin are two of my favorite poets and Steve has a voice like theirs: rooted in place, plainspoken, attentive to the embodied world. Mark Jarman wrote that Fairchild’s “unique power is in leading his dead from the field of personal memory and into the living history of the poem.” Martin does this, and so, too, does Steve.
Thanks for reading.