Foot Washing

Todd Davis

She flinches when he caresses her foot, rubs thumb

over ridged callus grown like a furrow through a summer

of no shoes. Weeds hoed, corn and beans picked.

Each year her mother buys one pair of shoes to last

the frozen ground from November to April. The last two

she outgrew before the first violet. With a butcher knife,

her father cut away the toe-box so she wouldn’t blister.

The minister tells her to think on the savior pouring water

from a pitcher, dust clouding the basin with a muddy plume.

We must shed the world, he says. The girl wonders why

you’d want to be rid of the only home you have.

In the pink of May, with feet bared, she loves the earliest

strawberries, grown of bull frogs, the pulsing, high-pitched

call of spring peepers when the ice goes out of the pond,

which sounds like a hundred young chickens frightened by a fox.

This man her parents trust recites the story of the woman

who washed Christ’s feet with tears, anointed them with nard

and dried them with her long black hair. This morning

on the way to church at the river’s edge she rubbed sand

over soles, trying to erase the stains of fieldwork, afraid

of the strong smell of sweat, the manure she shuttles

from the stalls in the barn. And now she shakes as he wipes

the top of her foot, his fingers brushing her ankle bone.

Nobody but her mother has ever touched her feet.

Image © Europeana