Watermelon Summer

by Anna Hess

  Which is when Arvil dropped the bombshell. "Your father's in the hospital. He's okay, but he had a heart attack."

  And then I fainted.

  Once I came to, I was quick to assure Arvil that I'd only passed out due to low blood sugar from the previous night's indisposition, but he refused to leave me alone after that. My neighbor patted down his pockets and came up with a mint, which was enough to fuel my walk up the hill, but he wouldn't take no for an answer when he invited me to his house for a hot meal.

  It turns out Arvil's home was one of the structures I'd peered across the road at from Greensun's mailbox. (I guess I hadn't been as alone as I'd thought.) We walked the whole distance in fifteen minutes, and even though I was a bit light-headed, I didn't lag behind because Arvil turned out to be a talented storyteller. "I love an audience," he explained, which turned out to be code for the fact that Arvil was an actor who had played small speaking parts in big Hollywood movies (and leads in smaller independent films)—he did, indeed, live for an audience.

  His stories were light and humorous until he got me safely ensconced at his dining room table, sipping chamomile tea while he heated up a jar of last summer's vegetable soup on his stove. "Now, tell me what brings you to Greensun," he asked, and finally fell silent.

  I'm not the kind of person who pours her heart out to strangers (or even to well-known people, for that matter), but I was speaking to Arvil's back as he stirred with a wooden spoon, the chamomile tea reminded me of my mother, and my defenses were particularly low in my weakened state. Somehow, my experiences over the last few days came gushing out in a sort of diarrhea of the mouth—just as embarrassing as the previous night's episode, once I caught my breath and heard what I'd been saying. "I don't even know why I'm here!" I emoted finally, and shut my mouth with a snap.

  "You're looking for Greensun, of course," Arvil answered, turning to face me with a bowl of soup in his hand. "Here, eat up."

  "I'm looking for Greensun?" I parroted. "What does that even mean?"

  "It means you're just like the rest of us," Arvil answered. He'd added some bread and cheese to the table and joined me for the feast. I slurped up a spoonful from my bowl to give myself a minute to think and was momentarily side-tracked by the extravagant flavor of the seemingly simple tomato-based soup.

  "This is amazing!" I exclaimed, without meaning to. "It tastes like...summer!"

  Arvil was clearly pleased by my pleasure but wasn't willing to be side-tracked. His slow smile went all the way to his eyes, but his words stuck to the point. "Are you ready for one more story?" he asked. "Maybe it will help you understand Greensun...and what you're looking for."

  At my nod, Arvil slipped right back into storytelling mode, but I could tell this tale struck closer to home than the amusing anecdotes he'd used to pass the time while we climbed Greensun's hill. "Your father has been my closest friend for longer than you've been alive," Arvil started, "which is why I had to leave Greensun.

  "What you've got to understand, is that folks around here are clannish. Most of our ancestors hailed from Scotland and Ireland, where family was everything, and we took that culture with us to the New World. Outsiders today tell us our accents are strange, but the Lord's own truth is that Appalachian English is closer to the pure English of the 1700s—we just didn't see any reason to change with the times. Most of us still don't."

  As Arvil spoke, I noticed his vowels lengthening and his consonants shifting until he sounded more like the people I'd met in the airport. Later, I would realize that Arvil's stories were unconscious chameleons, blending into their linguistic surroundings. His previous tales were told in standard American English because Arvil was speaking entirely to me, but now he was talking as much to himself as to anyone else.

  "When I was a young'un," Arvil continued, "I had more cousins than I could shake a stick at. Every year, our family held a reunion for the sake of the relatives who'd moved down the road a piece, but the rest of the time, most of us lived in each other's pockets. It was comfortable and comforting when I was a child, like snuggling down into a mess of puppies.

  "But try as I might, turned out I wasn't a puppy. I didn't quite know what I was—maybe a skunk or a 'coon—but I soon saw that the puppy pile wasn't for me. First thing I noticed was—I didn't want to be a coal miner like my daddy. Sure, he made right good money, but Daddy came home worn down and used up. I didn't know then that the mines were poisoning our streams and tearing apart our families, but I did know that Uncle Tom was on a breathing machine from too much coal dust, and Uncle Eddie died in a cave-in before he hit thirty. Even the lucky ones were all bent over like old men long before their time."

  I shivered but sat in silence, not wanting to interrupt, even to spur Arvil on. Although his childhood was completely different from mine, I could relate to his feeling of not fitting into the world he was born to. I'd always felt like an ugly duckling, too, not able to feign enough enthusiasm in makeup and TV shows to float along in the stream of modern American youth culture. But my trials and tribulations paled in comparison to Arvil's.

  "Mammy tried to keep the peace," Arvil was saying, "But 'fore long, I couldn't keep her happy either. All my poor sainted mother ever asked of me was that I dress up in my Sunday going-to-meeting clothes once a week and come along to church, but soon religion started feeling like part of the problem. We were raised to submit to the will of God, but I wasn't feeling particularly submissive. It seemed to me that the the preacher taught us to listen to the man in charge, and that's why no one talked back to the coal-mine boss-man."

  I could hear the Appalachian mannerisms drop away as Arvil went on to tell me that he'd worked hard in school, gotten a scholarship, and left the mountains to go to college. Even though he came back, there was no real home to return to. "My boy cousins were already working in the mines," Arvil said, "Or at McDonald's if they were less lucky, and each of my girl cousins seemed to have at least two babies on her hip. I was trying to decide whether to cut my losses and leave the mountains, this time for good, when I met your father...and Greensun.

  "Greensun seemed to be the answer to my prayers. Here was a group of people who believed what I believed, and who were making their own puppy pile. I was the only one from around here, but the Greensun folks only laughed at my accent in the way you tease cousins to make them know they belong. I hadn't realized that if you left your family, you weren't leaving the puppy pile forever, and I was ecstatic."

  I was pretty happy myself. This is what I'd been dreaming about; it was why I'd thrown away my European adventure to spend the summer at Greensun. I couldn't resist nodding along as Arvil told me about the community in its prime.

  "I spent a couple of years so in love with the idea of Greensun that I was 100% happy to never go beyond that mailbox," Arvil told me. "We dug potatoes together in the fall, ate them all winter, and planted more in the spring. You've never met him, so you don't know how magnetic your father's personality is, how he can pull a dozen people into his dream so we're all drifting right along with him. But he can, and we were.

  "Eventually, I fell into a part as an extra in a movie that was being filmed locally. That seemed like just as much fun as digging potatoes, so I got an agent and started going to auditions in Atlanta. Then I landed a couple of bigger roles where I spent a week or two on set, and after a while, it seemed like I was spending half my time away from Appalachia."

  You know how the music starts to change in a movie, and you're sure something bad is going to happen? Arvil was such a good storyteller that I could almost hear the ominous tune overlaying his words. (No matter what had happened in the past, it was clear the movie business had worked out for him.)

  "Sometimes, when there's a sudden drought after a lot of rain," Arvil continued, "your potatoes will look perfect on the outside, but when you cut into them, they're starting to rot out inside. That's how Greensun was, although I only caught little hints of the problems in between my movie trips. By then, I'd built this house at
the far corner of Greensun to give myself a little space from the puppy pile...."

  "Wait a minute," I interrupted, despite myself. "You're saying we're on Greensun land now?"

  "Not quite, but it once was," Arvil answered. "Here, have a cookie to follow that soup." Which seemed to be his polite way of saying "Shut up and listen." So I did.

  "By that time, Glen's first wife had left him, and the rest of Greensun's inhabitants had drifted away. Glen and I were the only ones here, which made a sort of sense since we were also the only ones who'd put any real money into Greensun's infrastructure. Your father wanted to start over, to pull in a new set of idealists to keep him company, but I thought maybe we should go back to basics and remember what it was that had made Greensun tick in the early years. I was starting to wonder if a Greensun-style puppy pile was even possible, or if we'd all just been swept up in Glen's enthusiasm, like the way you suspend your disbelief when watching a particularly good movie.

  "To cut a long story short, Glen's and my visions didn't match up. I ended up buying this one corner of Greensun from your father, and Glen tried again with a new set of people, and a new wife. This time, the rotten core of Greensun erupted much sooner, and I was glad I'd left when I did. Because even though it had hurt his feeling when I bowed out, the little bit of distance between here and the main house was enough to keep my friendship with Glen alive. After a while, I even realized that a friend like your father, who spans decades of my life, was really what I was looking for when I fell in love with Greensun in the first place."

  We sat in silence for a minute until I was sure the story was over. Then I ventured, "So, when you said I'm looking for Greensun, you meant I'm looking for friendship?"

  "Not really," Arvil answered. "I meant you're looking for something that doesn't exist."

  Both of us needed a little space after that admission (which might have been more than Arvil originally meant to say), so he disappeared into his garden and I settled into the guest room. My neighbor had warned that Greensun's creek usually takes a day or so to go down from flood levels, and due to my fainting episode, he really preferred I not walk back across the log anytime soon. Arvil had been given the Mom seal of approval, and he was genuinely excited to have a house guest, so I told him I'd stay the night and walk back home in the morning.

  I thought I'd take a nap to finish resting up from my bout of illness, but I couldn't seem to get to sleep, so I ended up wandering through Arvil's house. (He'd told me to make myself at home and seemed to mean it.) The structure was clearly hand-built with love, framed with whole trees (the bark removed), and full of polished wooden shelves lined with contraptions that I suspected had some sort of ingenious use. I was riveted by an eight-foot-in-diameter lemon bush in one sunny window, a few ripe fruits gleaming amid the dark leaves and hundreds of fragrant flowers heralding fruit to come. In the kitchen, honey dripped into a five-gallon bucket from a stainless-steel vat full of wax in wooden frames. I snuck a fingertip full of honey into my mouth and had to close my eyes for a minute to relish the flavor.

  With my tour complete, I wandered outside to see if I could help Arvil in the garden. Blueberry bushes arching over my head were dripping with fruits in all stages of ripeness, and my host soon set me to work plucking. A considerable number of berries ended up in my stomach, but it still didn't take long to fill my bucket with a gallon of the ripest fruits, at which point we moved on to weeding a nearly immaculate vegetable patch.

  "We didn't really talk about your father," Arvil said after a while, when the sun and earth had begun to fill my mind with the pure silence I usually only achieve after a long hike. But I wasn't sorry to be interrupted from my reverie, though I was relishing the peace. Thinking about my bio-dad was one of the reasons I hadn't been able to fall asleep this afternoon, so it was good to get my worries out into the open.

  "You said he'd be okay?" I asked tentatively, not really sure what answer I wanted. "Is there a way for me to go see him in the hospital?"

  "I'd be glad to take you there anytime you want—I'm going to visit him soon anyway," Arvil answered, "But I don't recommend that you come. Glen can be a bit vain, and I suspect he'd rather meet you under better circumstances. He wants to make a good impression."

  I thought of all the crazy notes scattered around Greensun and almost laughed, but I just hummed noncommittally instead. "Okay, I'll wait then, if you think that's the best thing to do. If you're going to go see him, though, maybe I could send a card along with you?"

  "Sure," Arvil answered, and we moved from one topic to another at the same time we moved from the squashes to the tomato patch. "Are you thinking of planting a garden while you're here?" Arvil asked me, about the way Mom asks me if I plan to do my homework—the correct answer is always yes.

  I admitted that I'd never grown anything to eat but thought I might try it. I didn't add that I was enthralled by the complex beauty of Arvil's garden and was blown away by the flavor of everything I'd tasted here so far. Staying for supper and breakfast was starting to feel like one of my wisest moves to date. But, "Do you think I've got enough time to grow anything before the summer ends?" I queried.

  Arvil did, indeed, think I had enough time. Especially if I started with some tomato stems that had drooped to the ground and rooted—"They should be blooming in a week or two," he promised—and seeds from the crookneck squash he'd selected as being the most resistant to the wily squash vine-borer. Swiss chard would soon give me leafy greens, and how about some of these ultra-fast hybrid cucumbers?

  Before I knew it, we were back inside, filling homemade seed packets with this and that, my head once again over-full, but this time with instructions on planting and days to maturity. Arvil also filled a basket with ripe produce for me to take home the next day, just to tide me over.

  "I shouldn't accept all this!" I exclaimed, wanting the delicious, brilliantly colored food, but not knowing what I could give Arvil in exchange. The seeds, especially, seemed like a fascinating project but also a major gamble. After all, "I really might be leaving in early August," I warned him as the bounty began to overfill my pockets. "I don't want to waste your seeds."

  "Don't worry, I have plenty," Arvil answered. That did, indeed, seem to be the case. It also seemed like my neighbor had loaded up his seed box primarily from his own garden, and he soon explained that he'd be harvesting more seeds shortly to refill his coffers. "If you want to pay me back, you can come weed another day and listen to my stories. You know I love an audience."

  I smiled—being an audience, at least, was something I did well, even though I had seemed barely more than a hindrance in the weeding department. Arvil was able to zip down four rows in about the same amount of time it took me to pluck the weeds from one. "If you're really sure you can spare all this..." I wavered.

  "I'm sure," Arvil answered. "And, about you leaving in August—sometimes you have to plant things even if you don't think you'll get to see the harvest."

  I'm not sure if Arvil meant his statement figuratively, or whether he was just speaking as a good gardener, but his words inspired me to turn the last couple of gifted mailbox fruit into banana bread and to put the treat back in my box the next day along with a note to Jacob. Sure, Jacob and I would be living in different worlds in just a few short weeks, but sometimes you have to plant things even if you don't think you'll get to see the harvest, right?

  After the drama of my first few days in Appalachia, I was glad to spend the next week getting to know Greensun. I found a good-looking spade and a sad-looking rake in the shed and dug up a little patch of garden by hand. The soil was loose and dark, and I suspected I'd discovered a spot that had grown vegetables not too long before. I planted all of Glen's seeds and put out the tomato cuttings, settling them in with with the help of a bucket of water from the creek. Within a couple of days, the tomatoes seemed to have their feet under them and to be visibly growing, while the first seedlings were popping out of the soil nearby.

  In the after
noons, Lucy and I would take a book and a snack and wander Greensun's hillsides. Not far upstream from the house, I found a grove of towering white pines, the ground beneath which was mulched nearly bare with pine needles. I'd been sleeping in the house ever since I arrived, but I wanted to set aside a bit of privacy for when the hoards began to pour in (and also because Greensun seemed to attract unannounced visitors). So I pitched my tent under the pines and began to retreat to my new abode every night.

  You'd think time alone at Greensun would be boring, but I had plenty to keep me busy. The chickens wanted to scratch up my little garden, so I had to cobble together protection out of branches and bits of chicken wire I found lying around. I spent another day "helping" Arvil with his plot, and later I canned apples from the tree down the holler. The Greensun shelves were full of a diverse array of books that kept me occupied for hours, and I couldn't resist cleaning up the kitchen, if only to see what other gems—like an ancient bar of baking chocolate—I'd find pushed behind the flour and cornmeal.

  The highlight of my day, though, was walking up the hill to check the mailbox. Nearly every time I made the trek, my previous note was gone and a new letter from Jacob had shown up in its place. A week after I dropped off the banana bread, Jacob's missive was particularly intriguing since it came with a hand-drawn map and an invitation to supper at his house. It turns out that Jacob lived just on the other side of Cell Phone Hill, and even though I could walk the long way around on the roads, if I took this shortcut, my journey would only be about a mile long. "Or I could come pick you up if you'd rather," the note finished. "Just let me know in your reply if you'd like to visit. A meal is the least I can do to repay you for that delicious banana bread."

  I owed Mom a call anyway and was ready for another adventure, so Cell Phone Hill it was.