This Was the Explanation - Kent Wright

Vestas Snodgras looked like other farmers. He wore overalls with the front pushed out by an ample gut like most of the others. He was taller but not by an obscene number of inches. He had big jowls and small eyes. On Saturday nights he came to town like the other farmers and their families, and during the week sometimes if he needed something at the hardware store. If there was machinery he couldn’t fix, he brought it to the welding shop where plows and tractor and combine parts had to be stepped around to get to the man with the dark metal hood with its one blue-black eye. He looked like the others but nobody thought Vestas Snodgras was like them. Especially when you saw him walk. Agitation shivered in him most times he was up town. Big as he was he moved with quick small steps that weren’t quite delicate. No one ever said that, but he did seem to balance oddly on his feet, and when the agitation overfilled it’s host he would suddenly stop his odd-gaited pace and spin around once or twice before going on. Everyone who had been to town on Saturday night had seen Vestas Snodgras stop and spin. He didn’t talk to people much, but he talked to himself all the time, and that sent chills up the rural spines around there. No one ever screwed up courage enough to ask him to repeat what he was mumbling. There was always the suspicion that he could be dangerous. He was strong. Other farmers liked to hire him to help harvest or when rocks and stumps needed clearing. He was like a draught horse. People who lived in town knew he was strong from experience not just because of what they heard from the farmers. When that agitation of his got the best of him some Saturdays, the stop signs there at the centered of town suffered. Kids went silent and shrunk back against their Mother’s thighs when they saw Vestas grab one of those stop signs and twist it completely around on is its iron pole.

Vestas Snodgras didn’t have a diagnosis. In those simpler days one wasn’t necessary for folks. “He just ain’t right,” they’d say and shake their heads at each other like they knew and were brave. That was the explanation – he just ain’t right.