I started to cry, remembering it, thinking about him in the water, he had been so sure and strong, but then—true to my changed nature—I began to laugh at the memory, for his wide blue eye had had a puzzled cast to it, as if it had never before seen such a crazy thing as the ordinary root in his forceless hand. It was an expression he never wore in life.
“It was only a weed, Daddy,” I said, wiping the tears from my face.
The amazed puzzlement stayed in his eye until I brushed down the lid.
Of course he had been dead beyond all talk and puzzlement. Dead when I found him, dead for hours, bloated dead. And this is how I've come to be—blame the spray or don't: the chores don't get done on time, the unplanted fields wait, Mama wanders in her mind, and yet I'll sit in the shade of my truck sipping on Lewis and Clark bourbon, inventing the thoughts of a stone-dead man.
————
Time bent away from me like a tail-dancing rainbow. It was about to slip the hook. I wasn't trying to hold it. Try to hold it and it gets all the more slippery. Try to let it go and it sticks like a cocklebur to cotton. I was drifting somewhere between the two kinds of not trying: not trying to hold anything, not trying to let anything go.
Then he sat down next to me. The old man.
“You got something for me?” he said.
He was easily the homeliest man I had ever seen. His bald head was bullet-shaped and his lumpy nose was warty as a crookneck squash. His little, close-set eyes sat on either side of that nose like hard black beans. He had shaggy eyebrows that climbed upward in a white and wiry tangle. There was a blue lump in the middle of his forehead the size of a pullet's egg, and his hairy ear lobes touched his grimy collar. He was mumbling something, but it could have been the noise of the ditch water as it sluiced through the culvert under the road.
He stank of whiskey and dung, and looked like he'd been sleeping behind barns for weeks. His clothes were rags, and he was caked with dirt from fingernail to jaw. His shoes were held together with strips of burlap. He untied some of these strips and took off the shoes. Then he slid his gnarled, dirt-crusted feet into the water. His eyes fluttered shut and he let out a hissing moan of pleasure. His toes were long and twisted, the arthritic knuckles painfully bright. They reminded me of the surface roots of a stunted oak that had been trying to grow in hardpan. Though he was only about five feet tall, his feet were huge. Easy size twelves, wide as paddles.
He quit mumbling, cleared his throat, spit. “You got something for me?” he said.
I handed him my pint. He took it, then held it up to the sunlight and looked through the rusty booze as if testing for its quality.
“If it won't do,” I said, “I could run into town to get something a little smoother for you. Maybe you'd like some Canadian Club or some twelve-year-old Scotch. I could run into town and be back in less than an hour. Maybe you'd like me to bring back a couple of fried chickens and a sack of buttered rolls.” This was my old self talking, the hothead. But I didn't feel mad at him, and was just being mouthy out of habit.
“No need to do that,” he said, as if my offer had been made in seriousness. He took a long pull off my pint. “This snake piss is just fine by me, son.” He raised the bottle to the sunlight again, squinted through it.
I wandered down the ditch again to the place where Daddy died. There was nothing there to suggest a recent dead man had blocked the current. Everything was as it always was. The water surged, the quick water bugs skated up and down, inspecting brown clumps of algae along the banks; underwater weeds waved like slim snakes whose tails had been staked to the mud. I looked for the thistle he'd grabbed on to. I guess he thought that he was going to save himself from drowning by hanging on to its root, not realizing that the killing flood was inside his head. But there were many roots along the bank and none of them seemed more special than any other.
Something silver glinted at me. It was a coin. I picked it out of the slime and polished it against my pants. It was a silver dollar, a real one. It could have been his. He carried a few of the old cartwheels around with him for luck. The heft and gleam of the old solid silver coin choked me up.
I walked back to the old man. He had stuffed his bindle under his head for a pillow and had dozed off. I uncapped the pint and finished it, then flipped it into the weeds. It hit a rock and popped. The old man grunted and his eyes snapped open. He let out a barking snort, and his black eyes darted around him fiercely, like the eyes of a burrow animal caught in a daylight trap. Then, remembering where he was, he calmed down.
“You got something for me?” he asked. He pushed himself up to a sitting position. It was a struggle for him.
“Not any more,” I said. I sat down next to him. Then, from behind us, a deep groan cut loose. It sounded like siding being pried off an old barn with a crowbar. We both turned to look at whatever had complained so mightily.
It was Miss Milky, up in the trailer, venting her misery. I'd forgotten about her. Horseflies were biting her. Her red eyes peered sadly out at us through the bars. The corners of her eyes were swollen, giving her a Chinese look.
With no warning at all, a snapping hail fell on us. Only it wasn't hail. It was a moving cloud of thirteen-year locusts. They darkened the air and they covered us. The noise was like static on the radio, miles of static across the bug-peppered sky, static that could drown out all important talk and idle music, no matter how powerful the station.
The old man's face was covered with the bugs and he was saying something to me, but I couldn't make out what it was. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. When it opened, he'd have to brush away the locusts from his lips. They were like ordinary grasshoppers, only smaller, and they had big red eyes that seemed to glow with their own hellish light. Then, as fast as they had come, they were gone, scattered back into the fields. A few hopped here and there, but the main cloud had broken up.
I just sat there, brushing at the lingering feel of them on my skin and trying to readjust myself to uncluttered air, but my ears were still crackling with their racket.
The old man pulled at my sleeve, breaking me out of my daydream or trance. “You got something for me?” he asked.
I felt blue. Worse than blue. Sick. I felt incurable—ridden with the pointlessness of just about everything you could name. The farm struck me as a pointless wonder, and I found the idea depressing and fearsome. Pointless bugs lay waiting in the fields for the pointless crops as the pointless days and seasons ran on and on into the pointless forever.
“Shit,” I said.
“I'll take that worthless cow off your hands, then,” said the old man. “She's done for. All you have to do is look at her.”
“No shit,” I said.
He didn't seem so old or so wrecked to me now. He was younger and bigger, somehow, as if all his clocks had started spinning backwards, triggered by the locust cloud. He stood up. He looked thick across the shoulders like he'd done hard work all his life and could still do it. He showed me his right hand and it was yellow with hard calluses. His beady black eyes were quick and lively in their shallow sockets. The blue lump on his forehead glinted in the sun. It seemed deliberately polished, as if it were an ornament. He took a little silver bell out of his pocket and rang it for no reason at all.
“Let me have her,” he said.
“You want Miss Milky?” I asked. I felt weak and childish. Maybe I was drunk. My scalp itched and I scratched it hard. He rang his little silver bell again. I wanted to have it, but he put it back into his pocket. Then he knelt down and opened his bindle. He took out a paper sack.
I looked inside. It was packed with seeds of some kind. I ran my fingers through them and did not feel foolish. I heard a helicopter putt-putting in the distance. In defense of what I did, let me say this much: I knew Miss Milky was done for. Doc Nevers would have told me to kill her. I don't think she was even good for hamburger. Old cow meat can sometimes make good hamburger, but Miss Milky looked wormy and lean. And I wouldn't have trusted her
bones for soup. The poison that had wasted her flesh and ruined her udder had probably settled in her marrow.
And so I unloaded my dying cow. He took out his silver bell again and tied it to a piece of string. He tied the string around Miss Milky's neck. Then he led her away. She was docile and easy, as though this was exactly the way things were supposed to turn out.
My throat was dry. I felt too tired to move. I watched their slow progress down the path that ran along the ditch. They got smaller and smaller in the field until, against a dark hedge of box elders, they disappeared. I strained to see after them, but it was as if the earth had given them refuge, swallowing them into its deep, loamy, composting interior. The only sign that they still existed in the world was the tinkling of the silver bell he had tied around Miss Milky's neck. It was a pure sound, naked on the air.
Then a breeze opened a gap in the box elders and a long blade of sunlight pierced through them, illuminating and magnifying the old man and his cow, as if the air between us had formed itself into a giant lens. The breeze let up and the box elders shut off the sun again, and I couldn't see anything but a dense quiltwork of black and green shadows out of which a raven big as an eagle flapped. It cawed in raucous good humor as it veered over my head.
————
I went on into town anyway, cow or no cow, and hit some bars. I met a girl from the East in the Hobble who thought I was a cowboy and I didn't try to correct her mistaken impression, for it proved to be a free pass to good times.
When I got home, Mama had company. She was dressed up in her beet juice gown, and her face was powdered white. Her dark lips looked like a wine stain in snow. But her clear blue eyes were direct and calm. There was no distraction in them.
“Hi boy,” said the visitor. It was Big Pete Parley. He was wearing a blue suit, new boots, a gray felt Stetson. He had a toothy grin on his fat red face.
I looked at Mama. “What's he want?” I asked.
“Mr. Parley is going to help us, Jackie,” she said.
“What's going on, Mama?” I asked. Something was wrong. I could feel it but I couldn't see it. It was Mama, the way she was carrying herself maybe, or the look in her eyes and her whitened skin. Maybe she had gone all the way insane. She went over to Parley and sat next to him on the davenport. She had slit her gown and it fell away from her thigh, revealing the veiny flesh.
“We're going to be married,” she said. “Pete's tired of being a widower. He wants a warm bed.”
As if to confirm it was no fantasy dreamed up by her senile mind, Big Pete slipped his meaty hand into the slit dress and squeezed her thigh. He clicked his teeth and winked at me.
“Pete knows how to operate a farm,” said Mama. “And you do not, Jackie.” She didn't intend for it to sound mean or critical. It was just a statement of the way things were. I couldn't argue with her.
I went into the kitchen. Mama followed me in. I opened a beer. “I don't mean to hurt your feelings, Jackie,” she said.
“He's scheming to get our land,” I said. “He owns half the county, but it isn't enough.”
“No,” she said. “I'm the one who's scheming. I'm scheming for my boy who does not grasp the rudiments of the world.”
I had the sack of seeds with me. I realized that I'd been rattling them nervously.
“What do you have there?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Seeds,” I said.
“Seeds? What seeds? Who gave you seeds? Where'd you get them?”
I thought it best not to mention where I'd gotten them. “Big Pete Parley doesn't want to marry you,” I said. It was a mean thing to say, and I wanted to say it.
Mama sighed. “It doesn't matter what he wants, Jack. I'm dead anyway.” She took the bag of seeds from me, picked some up, squinted at them.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I said, sarcastically.
She went to the window above the sink and stared out into the dark. Under the folds of her evening gown, I could see the ruined shape of her old body. “Dead, Jack,” she said. “I've been dead for a while now. Maybe you didn't notice.”
“No,” I said. “I didn't.”
“Well, you should have. I went to sleep shortly after your Daddy died and I had a dream. The dream got stronger and stronger as it went on until it was as vivid as real life itself. More vivid. When I woke up I knew that I had died. I also knew that nothing in the world would ever be as real to me as that dream.”
I almost asked her what the dream was about, but I didn't, out of meanness. In the living room Big Pete Parley was whistling impatiently. The davenport was squeaking under his nervous weight.
“So, you see, Jackie,” said Mama. “It doesn't matter if I marry Pete Parley or what his motives are in this matter. You are all that counts now. He will ensure your success in the world.”
“I don't want to be a success, Mama,” I said.
“Well, you have no choice. You cannot gainsay the dead.”
She opened the window and dumped out the sack of seeds. Then Big Pete Parley came into the kitchen. “Let's go for a walk,” he said. “It's too blame hot in this house.”
They left by the kitchen door. I watched them walk across the yard and into the dark, unplanted field. Big Pete had his arm around Mama's shoulder. I wondered if he knew, or cared, that he was marrying a dead woman. Light from the half-moon painted their silhouettes for a while. Then the dark field absorbed them.
————
I went to bed and slept for what might have been days. In my long sleep I had a dream. I was canoeing down a whitewater river that ran sharply uphill. The farther up I got, the rougher the water became. Finally, I had to beach the canoe. I proceeded on foot until I came to a large gray house that had been built in a wilderness forest. The house was empty and quiet. I went in. It was clean and beautifully furnished. Nobody was home. I called out a few times before I understood that silence was a rule. I went from room to room, going deeper and deeper toward some dark interior place. I understood that I was involved in a search. The longer I searched, the more vivid the dream became.
When I woke up I was stiff and weak. Mama wasn't in the house. I made a pot of coffee and took a cup outside. Under the kitchen window there was a patch of green shoots that had not been there before. “You got something for me?” I said.
A week later that patch of green shoots had grown and spread. They were weeds. The worst kind of weeds I had ever seen. Thick, spiny weeds, with broad green leaves tough as leather. They rolled away from the house, out across the fields, in a viny carpet. Mean, deep-rooted weeds, too mean to uproot by hand. When I tried, I came away with a palm full of cuts.
In another week they were tall as corn. They were fast growers and I could not see where they ended. They covered everything in sight. A smothering blanket of deep green sucked the life out of every other growing thing. They crossed fences, irrigation ditches, and when they reached the trees of a windbreak, they became ropy crawlers that wrapped themselves around trunks and limbs.
When they reached the Parley farm, over which my dead mother now presided, they were attacked by squadrons of helicopters which drenched them in poisons, the best poisons chemical science knew how to brew. But the poisons only seemed to make the weeds grow faster, and after a spraying the new growths were tougher, thornier, and more determined than ever to dominate the land.
Some of the weeds sent up long woody stalks. On top of these stalks were heavy seedpods, fat as melons. The strong stalks pushed the pods high into the air.
The day the pods cracked, a heavy wind came up. The wind raised black clouds of seed in grainy spirals that reached the top of the sky, then scattered them, far and wide, across the entire nation.
1987
AT ST. THERESA'S COLLEGE FOR WOMEN
Ellen Hunnicutt
“I don't know who tunes the fiddles,” says Sister Theophane.
“Fourteen?” I am only half listening.
“‘They play the Bach Double Concerto but I
don't think they can tune their own violins.’” She reads this information from a letter, refolds the page, looks into her coffee cup and finds it empty. One more betrayal.
“Perhaps they never go out of tune,” I offer. “The Japanese can do anything these days.” I am thinking about gardenias, my very first corsage, how my fingers ached to touch the soft ivory petals. Any place you touch will turn brown. This is my mother's voice. The fretful, rising tone is perfectly preserved in my memory, like the fingering pattern for an extended arpeggio that, once learned, lives on forever in the brain cells. “What ever happened to gardenias?” I ask Sister Theophane.
“Opal, please be serious. Success depends on seeing to details. I've spent half my budget on these children, half the budget for the entire series.”
“I'll help you tune,” I say, contrite. “What's fourteen fiddles? Even if you are putting me out of business.”
Sister Theophane rises, takes both our cups for more coffee, hers in the left hand (sugar), mine in the right (black). “You have tenure, Opal.” A gentle reprimand.
In the cafeteria at St. Theresa's College for Women, at four in the afternoon, it is 1949. I am eighteen and nothing has happened yet. It is a trick of the light, pale Chicago sun slanting through the high iron fence, bathing our simple buildings in a certain yellow glow that is inexpressibly sad. In many ways, St. Theresa's exists outside of time; many things have not changed since I was a student here. That is because nuns never wear anything out; and at St. Theresa's nobody vandalizes. Unscarred maple floor, golden oak dining tables, cool pink marble windowsills and, beyond the windows, the small sandstone chapel.
But I am not eighteen, and Sister Theophane in a neat blue dress, professor of music and my boss, thick-waisted and graying above the coffee cups is actually two years younger than I.
“I've decided to offer them ice cream,” Theophane says, heartened by fresh coffee. “Lemonade might make them need the bathroom.”
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