John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore-1

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    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 came to pray in Gods house that, like their own, was built of split logs. Annie-Belle kept her eyes down; she was a good girl. They were good children. The widower drank, sometimes, but not much. They grew up in silence, in the enormous silence of the empty land, the silehat swallowed up the Saturday-night fiddlers tune, mocked the rare laughter at weddings and christenings, echoed, a vast margin, around the sermons of藏书网 the preacher.

    Silend spad an unimaginable freedom which they dare not imagine.

    Since his wife died, the rancher spoke rarely. They lived far out of town. He had no time for barn-raisings and church suppers. If she had lived, everything would have been different, but he occupied his spare moments in chiselling her gravestohey did not celebrate Thanksgiving for he had nothing for which to give thanks. It was a hard life.

    The Ministers wife made sure Annie-Belle knew a thing or two when she judged it about the time the girls bleeding started. The Ministers wife, in a vague, pastoral way, thought about a husband for Annie-Belle, a wife for Johnny. "Out there, in that little house on the prairie, so lonesome. . . Nobody for those young folks to talk to cept cows, cows, cows."

    What did the girl think? In summer, of the heat, and how to keep flies out of the butter; in winter, of the cold. I do not know what else she thought. Perhaps, as young girls do, she thought that a stranger would e to town and take her away to the city and so on, but, since her imagination began and ended with her experiehe farm, work, the seasons, I think she did not think so far, as if she knew already she was the object of the object of her own desire for, in the bright light of the New World, nothing is obscure. But when they were children, all they knew was they loved each other just as, surely, a brother or a sister should.

    She washed her hair in a tub. She washed her long, yellow hair. She was fifteen. It ring. She washed her hair. It was the first time that year. She sat on the porch to dry her hair, she sat in the rog-chair which her mother selected from the Sears Roebuck catalogue, where her father would never sit, now. She propped a bit of mirror on the porch railing. It caught the sun and flashed. She bed out her wet hair in the mirror. There seemed to be an awful lot of it, tangling up the b. She wore only her petticoat, the men were off with the cattle, nobody to see her pale shoulders except that Johnny came back. The horse threw him, he knocked his head against the stone. Giddy, he came back to the house, leading his pony, and she was busy untangling her hair and did not see him, nor have a ce to cover herself.

    "Why, Johnny, I declare --"

    Imagine an orchestra behind them: the frame house, the porch, the rog-chair endlessly rog, like a cradle, the white petticoat with eyelet lace, her water-darkened hair hanging on her shoulders and little trickles running dowween her shallow breasts, the young man leading the limping po<tt>藏书网</tt>ny, and, inexhaustible as light, around them the tender land.

    The &quot;Love Theme&quot; swells and rises. She jumps up to tend him. The jogged mirror falls.

    &quot;Seven years bad luck --&quot;

    In the fragments of the mirror, they ko see their round, blond, i faces that, superimposed upon one another, would fit at every feature, their faces, all at ohe same face, the face that never existed until now, the pure faerica.

    EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

    (Long shot) Farmhouse.

    (Close up) Petticoat falling on to porch of farmhouse.

    Wissin, Ohio, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Mia, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana . . . Oh, those enormous territories! That green vastness, in whiything is possible.

    EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

    (Close up) Johnny and Annie-Belle kiss.

    &quot;Love Theme&quot; up.

    Dissolve.

    No. <mark></mark>It wasnt like that! Not in the least like that.

    He put out his hand and touched her wet hair. He was giddy.

    Annabella: Methinks you are not well.

    Giovanni: Heres  you and I. I think you love me, sister.

    Annabella: Yes, you know I do.

    And they thought, then, that they should kill themselves, together now, before they did it; they remembered tumbling together in infancy, how their mother laughed to see their kisses, their embraces, when they were too young to know they should not do it, yet even in their loneliness on the enormous plain they khey must not do it. . .do what? How did they know what to do? From watg the cows with the bull, the bitch with the dog, the hen with the cock. They were try children. Turning from the mirror, each saw the others face as if it were their own.

    [Music plays.]

    Giovanni: Let not this music be a dream, ye gods.

    For pitys sake, I beg you!

    [She kneels.]

    Annabella: On my knees,

    Brother, even by our mothers dust, I charge you

    Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

    Love me, or kill me, brother.

    [He kneels.]

    Giovanni: On my knees,

    Sister, even by our mothers dust, I charge you

    Do not betray me to your mirth or hate.

    Love me, or kill me, sister.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

    Upset water-tub, spilling over discarded petticoat.

    Empty rog-chair, rog, rog.

    It is the boy -- or young man, rather -- who is the most mysterious to me. The eagerness with which he embraces his fate. I imagine him mute or well-nigh mute; he is the silent type, his voice creaks with disuse. He turns the soil, he breaks the wills of the beautiful horses, he milks the cows, he works the land, he toils and sweats. His work sists of the vague, undistinguished &quot;work&quot; of such folks in the movies. No cowboy, he, roaming the plains. Where the father took root, so has the son, in the soil that was never before broken until now.

    And I imagine him with an intelligenourished only by the black book of the father, and hence cruelly circumscribed, yet deh allusion, seeing himself as a kind of Adam and she his unavoidable and irreplaceable Eve, the unique panion of the wilderness, although by their toil he knows they do not live in Eden and of the precise nature of the forbidden thing he remains in doubt.

    For surely it ot be this? This bliss? Who could forbid such bliss!

    Was it bliss for her, too? Or was there more of love than pleasure in it? &quot;Look after your sister.&quot; But it was she who looked after him as soon as she knew holeasured him in the same spirit as she fed him.

    Giovanni: I am lost forever.

    Lost in the green wastes, where the pioneers were lost. Death with his high cheek-bones and his braided hair helped Annie-Belle take off her clothes. She closed her eyes so that she could not see her own nakedness. Death showed her how to touch him and him her. There is more to it than farmyard ways.

    INTERIOR. MINISTERS HOUSE. DAY

    Diable. Ministers wife dishing portions from a pot for her husband and her son.

    MINISTERS WIFE: Taint right, just aint right, those two out there, growing up like savages, never seeing nobody.

    MINISTERS SON: Shes terribly pretty, Mama.

    The Ministers wife and the Miurn to look at the young man. He blushes slowly but prehensively.

    The rancher knew nothing. He worked. He kept the iron core of grief within him rustless. He looked forward to his solitary, once-monthly drink, alone on the porch, and on those nights they took a d slept together in the log  uhe patchwork quilt made in the &quot;log &quot; pattern by their mother. Each time they lay dowogether, as if she obeyed a voice that came out of the quilt tellio put the light out, she would extinguish the dle flame between her fiips. All around them, the tactility of the dark.

    She pohe irreversibility of defloration. Acc to what the Ministers wife said, she had lost everything and was a lost girl. Ahis ge did not seem to have ged her. She turo the only one she loved, and the desolating space around them dimio that of the soft grave their bodies dented in the long grass by the creek. When winter came, they made quick, dangerous love among the lowis in the barn. The snow melted and all was green enough to blind you and there was a vinegarish smell from the rising of the sharp juices of spring.<s></s> The birds came back.

    A dusk bird went k-k-k like a single blow oone xylophone of the ese classical orchestra.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

    Annie-Belle, in apron, es out on homestead porch; strikes metal triangle.

    ANNIE-BELLE: Dinners ready!

    INTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. NIGHT

    Supper-table. Annie-Belle serves beans. None for herself.

    JOHNNY: Annie-Belle, youre ing anything tonight.

    ANNIE-BELLE: t rightly fanything tonight.

    The dusk bird went k-k-k with the sound of a chisel on a gravestone.

    He wao run away with her, west, further west, to Utah, to California where they could live as man and wife, but she said: &quot;What about Father? Hes lost enough already.&quot; When she said that, she put on, not his face, but that of their mother, and he knew in his bohe child inside her would part them.

    The Ministers son, in his Sunday coat, came c Annie-Belle. He is the sed lead, you know in advance, from his tentative manner and mild eyes; he ot long survive in this prairie sario. He came c Annie-Belle although his mother wanted him to go to college. &quot;What will you do at college with a young wife?&quot; said his mother. But he put away his books; he took the buggy to go out and visit her. She was hanging washing out on the line.

    Sound of the wind buffeting the sheets, the very sound of loneliness.

    Soranzo: Have you not the will to love?

    Annabella: Not you.

    Soranzo: Who, then?

    Annabella: Thats as the fates infer.

    She lowered her head and drew her foot bad forth in the dust. Her breasts hurt, she felt queasy.

    EXTERIOR. PRAIRIE. DAY

    Johnny and Annie-Belle walking on the prairie.

    ANNIE-BELLE: I think he likes me, Johnny.

    Pan blue sky, with clouds. Johnny and Annie-Belle, dwarfed by the landscape, hand in hand, heads bowed. Their hands slowly part.

    Now they walk with gradually increasing distaween them.

    The light, the unexhausted light of North America that, filtered through celluloid, will bee the light by which we see America looking at itself.

    Corre: will bee the light by which we see North America looking at itself.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

    Row of bottles on a fence.

    Bang, bang, bang. Johnny shoots the bottles one by one.

    Annie-Belle on porch, washing dishes in a tub. Tears run down her face.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE PORCH. DAY

    Father on porch, feet up on railing, glass and bottle to hand.

    Sun going down over prairies.

    Bang, bang, bang.

    (Fathers point of view) Johnny shooting bottles off the fence.

    k of fathers bottle against glass.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

    Ministers son rides along tra long shot.

    Bang, bang, bang.

    Annie-Belle,  dress, tidy hair, red eyes, es out of house on to porch. k of fathers bottle against glass.

    EXTERIOR. FARMHOUSE. DAY

    Ministers sohers horse. He has brushed his Sunday coat.

    In his hand, a posy of flowers -- cottage roses, sweetbrier, daisies.

    Annie-Belle smiles, takes posy.

    ANNIE-BELLE: Oh!

    Holds up pricked forefinger; blood drops on to a daisy.

    MINISTERS SO me . . .

    Takes her hand. Kisses the little wound.

    . . . make it better.

    Bang. Bang. Bang.

    k of bottle on glass.

    (Close up) Annie-Belle, smiling, breathing in the st from her posy.

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