At his party, Engels is forgetting the question. His friends all take him by the elbow when they speak to him. He laughs until he can’t stand. He sings a carol in the German. His eyes well up and then dry. But in the bathroom upstairs, quiet. A minor Socialist at the bowl. Behind him, a bathtub skinned with pudding. And in the pudding, proof. 

Walker Evans takes a picture…

Walker Evans, the famous Northern photographer, loves the light in the South. It sets clear, like glue, he says. It immobilizes his subjects. The houses in the South are a crop, coaxed temporarily from the dirt. They stand stock still in the sun at the edges of fields. The fields thrum with insects. The insects are everywhere and invisible.

He has come down again to photograph farmers; he is photographing one now. The farmer stands between two rows of tilled dirt, waiting while Evans fusses with his tripod. “What do you grow down here in these fields?” Evans asks. The farmer glances into the eye of the camera. “Corn; sorghum. Cotton.” He arranges his words like the objects in his wooden home, which Evans will also photograph. Necessary objects, deliberately spaced. A broom, a cauldron; boots. They triangulate an unspeakable stillness that presses on Evans’ eyeball through the lens. He feels a god asleep in every room. He is happy to be outside again, making conversation.

The scratch of the weevils on the stalks is the noise — that and the breeze — that is patching the holes in their talk.