The Corn Husk Experiment

by Andrea Cale

  “It’s one of my favorites,” Kenny said. “I found it in one of the old albums the other day. You look so much like her, Caroline. She must be looking down on you today with so much pride.”

  Caroline’s eyes filled with tears. She knew she had made strides that would’ve made her mother proud, especially after emerging so strongly from a long tunnel of pain. Most recently, Caroline had been accepted into University of Boston’s School of Medicine, where she planned to continue her studies in the fall toward becoming a psychiatrist. She hoped to stay in the city of Boston, moving only a few miles down Commonwealth Avenue.

  “I love this picture so much,” Caroline said. “This is the perfect gift for me on this day. Thanks, Dad. I’m going to hang it up prominently in my new place.”

  “Should we get going?” he asked awkwardly as he glanced at his watch and tried to keep back his own tears. “I’d hate for you to be late to your own graduation. It took me half an hour just to find a parking spot.”

  “Let’s take the T and walk, Dad. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  Caroline slipped her arm through her father’s on their way to the ceremony, just as they used to do on their Sunday morning strolls to St. Matthew’s when Caroline was a little girl.

  “Do you remember that morning walking to church when you told me your promotion at Harper meant I could take my first dance class?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, that changed everything, Dad. Without dance, I wouldn’t have received the scholarship here. I wouldn’t be pursuing my dream to be a psychiatrist next.”

  Kenny straightened his back and walked a little taller.

  “Just promise you won’t change a bit when you have Dr. attached to your name,” he said.

  Caroline squeezed his arm with reassurance.

  University of Boston’s stadium felt more familiar to her than most of her fellow graduates as she walked behind a banner reading “Class of 2017” onto the field. Excited chatter rang through the facility instead of the usual cheers and chants. As Caroline took her seat on the field she thought of Devin and how he must’ve run over the exact spot where she was sitting at least a hundred times. She knew he made it to the NFL, but she hadn’t watched any of his games, unlike so many of the University of Boston fans. She wondered for a moment how he was doing.

  Caroline studied the banner that had predicted her year of graduation at her freshman convocation. Back then, the sign had given her so much doubt in a life so burdened that she was left questioning what the next day would bring, never mind the next four years.

  As one impressive speaker after the next gave the graduating class their words of inspiration, her mind drifted and reflected on her transformation at the school.

  Caroline watched a senior priest take the stage to proudly say the words of the Jesuit founder, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, just as he had at the class’s freshman convocation four years ago.

  “Set the world aflame!” he declared.

  Caroline immediately recognized the priest—or, rather, his voice. It was the same voice she had heard in the confessional booth during her freshman year when she first learned about the corn husk experiment. He was the one who had helped her move away from her troubled past more than anyone else.

  “Set the world aflame!” he repeated.

  Caroline fixed her fiery hair under her graduation cap and confidently assured herself she would one day soon do just that.

  As Caroline celebrated her new degree in her beautiful black dress and robes, the shy boy named Henry shifted uncomfortably in his first black suit just twenty-eight miles south at McCarthy’s Funeral Home in Brockton, Massachusetts.

  A lot had changed in the three and a half years since the Orange Bowl, a game that had marked a positive turning point in Henry’s childhood. He was a teenager now, and over the course of the last few years he had experienced great happiness, pain, and, on this day, tremendous sorrow.

  Henry sat shoulder-to-shoulder with his mother in the front row of seats in the family’s designated room. Misty held Henry’s hand and stared at the taupe-and-cream-colored wallpaper in an attempt to keep herself together as the casket holding her quirky mother, Henry’s grandmother, lay before them.

  His grandmother’s random coughing fit that had prevented the bullied boy from spilling his classmates’ positive reaction to a poem about her on the afternoon she had picked him up from school had become more persistent. When Henry and Misty returned home from the Orange Bowl with a plastic orange-shaped cup souvenir in hand for the elder woman, they were greeted at their apartment door by another violent coughing fit.

  “Mom, did you come down with something while we were away?” Misty had asked.

  “Oh, ya know, it’s the time of year,” the elder woman had replied. “Everything is goin’ around. I’m constantly touchin’ people’s filthy money at the gas station. It happens to me every wintah.”

  In the weeks that had followed, the cough got even worse, and so did the older woman’s stubbornness.

  “Misty, no, I’m not goin’ to the doctah!” she had said one morning over their regular cups of tea. “If I go theyah, I’ll come home with somethin’ else. You know how I feel about goin’ to the doctah’s office.”

  After an especially bad coughing spell later that night after returning home from her restaurant shift, Misty had enough. The family of three had piled into the family car and headed for the emergency room, where a handful of tests led to a doctor’s office visit that revealed the elder woman’s diagnosis of advanced lung cancer.

  She had been a fighter until the end and never lost her outspoken attitude through it all. Insurance claims, chemotherapy treatments, and nurses’ wide range of personalities had kept her busy creating more than one observation about life per day. She had battled bravely for more than three years—1,195 days, to be exact.

  On the spring day of her burial, Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” played in the elder woman’s honor in the funeral home. Even the guests who were unfamiliar with the 1996 alternative rock hit understood the reason for the selection once they listened to the lyrics.

  The song that Henry’s grandmother would’ve adored had been selected by the man sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with Misty on her other side. The man who was now Misty’s boyfriend put his hand on her kneecap as the song played on. He wished he could protect her from the hurt.

  Teach had waited until the last day of Henry’s sixth grade to pull the boy aside and ask him an important question.

  “Henry, can you hang back for a second?” he had asked as all the other kids ran from the classroom to their summer plans. “I guess I shouldn’t take it personally, huh?”

  “They’re just excited school’s out, Teach.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Hey, I want to ask you a question that I hope isn’t out of line. I’m sure the principal will be thrilled with my latest shenanigans, but anyway, it’s like way more important that I ask this. I want to get your permission to ask your mom out on a date. If you have any questions for me, I’m prepared, little man.”

  Henry’s face had looked puzzled as he finally pieced together the reason why his mother and Teach always acted so funny whenever they crossed paths. Henry adored Teach. He loved his mother. He quickly made his decision.

  “Uh, go for it,” the boy had said with growing embarrassment. “Um, I’m going to head out now. My grandmother is waiting in the car.”

  Teach had felt a weight lift off his shoulders, similar to how a man would feel after asking his future father-in-law for his daughter’s hand in marriage. After all, for the first time in his life, a ceremony like that was where Teach felt a relationship of his could be headed. He had reached inside his desk for his earphones and cranked up his music in private celebration.

  A few years later, Teach leaned forward in his funeral home chair to see how Henry was faring. He recalled how nervous the boy had been to read his poem in front of the class. Even though he knew Henry was about to do just t
hat for a bigger audience of family members, gas station regulars, and colleagues from Misty’s restaurant, Teach thought the boy looked as calm as he could be. Henry had matured so much under Teach’s mentorship.

  Henry felt a hand touch his shoulder gently. He turned to see the boy who was still his best friend and gave Oscar, Oscar’s mother, and Oscar’s mother’s boyfriend each an appreciative nod for coming.

  Life had turned around for Oscar too, especially following Teach’s blind date setup for Oscar’s mother and Teach’s closest buddy at school, the comical nurse who had helped judge the students’ poems. With the weight of the abusive, addict boyfriends out of his mother’s life, Oscar slimmed down and led a healthier, happier way of life that was finally free of stress.

  As Alanis’s song about life’s irony drew to a close, Henry pulled a piece of paper from his suit pocket and stepped up to the podium. Neither the distraction of the wallpaper nor Teach’s protective hand on Misty’s knee could help keep the woman’s tears at bay now.

  Henry took a deep breath and coughed through the thick, overwhelming smell of the room’s daylilies. It didn’t rattle him.

  “I wrote this little poem in sixth grade, when my teacher asked us to write in couplets about something, anything, that mattered to us. For me, this was an easy topic. I wrote about my grandma.”

  Henry turned his back to the audience to look at the woman resting behind him and find the confidence to continue. He thought she looked cold and overly made up. She did, however, look pain-free and at peace.

  “And please remember I was in sixth grade,” Henry said as he turned back to the rows of seats. The comment helped ease the sadness in a room filled with people who were beginning to realize that Henry wasn’t necessarily a shy boy after all.

  “She greets me each morning with a smile on her face;

  Despite her mind already stewing about the human race.

  She touches my hand later and asks how was my day;

  She knows not to push, for I’ll retreat to my room and lay.

  She covers me each night with an old blanket made with love;

  I’ll adore her into forever, when we’ll be reunited again above.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are many people I want to acknowledge in the creation of The Corn Husk Experiment.

  Dorothy, Melodie, Kelly, Barbara, and Charlotte were such giving mentors.

  The management and staff of Fielding Manufacturing in Cranston, Rhode Island, opened their fine company doors to me so I could listen to the sounds and see the sights of their industry.

  Thank you to my parents, as well as the

  Cales

  Binnicks

  Asseos

  Cunninghams

  Mahoneys

  Sosnowskis

  Dellavias

  Krebs

  Craves

  Stearns

  Ashley, Emily, Jenni, MaryEllen, Nicky, Sarah, Sonja, and Sue-Ellen.

  And finally, thank you most of all Marc, Harrison, and Graham. You are the inspiration for most everything I do.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Andrea Cale is a writer and a New York State Associated Press Award recipient for spot news reporting. Before writing her first novel, Cale also served in the press office of a top ten U.S. commercial bank holding company. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and Boston University’s College of Communication. Cale lives in central Massachusetts with her husband and sons.