Field Notes from a Body

In this gripping essay for The Kenyon Review, N.C. Happe recalls the moments of routine and sometimes horrific violence she saw while spending time on the family farm during summers in Bemidji, Minnesota. She confronts what it means to be guilty, sometimes by association as a witness, sometimes as an unwitting participant. This is a thoughtful look at what we absorb before we have the language to respond to what we’ve experienced in the past.

A wave of nausea passed through me. I steadied my gaze, looked forward without really looking. Instead, in the periphery, I studied our dark figures etched on the ground. Our shadows a single black clot, one body blended into the next. Discernable: a group of teenage boys, tall, and feathered with facial hair, and the stumpy young girl they had initiated into their ranks. To them, in that moment, I must have looked rapt, laser focused on the snake in Connor’s hands. In a reality privy only to me, I was entirely elsewhere, communing with the shape of myself in the dirt.