by Jacob White
There was a security he missed and felt he might be finding again in the stewardship of this crop. He whiffs among the fledgling stalks the sweet, drowsy comfort of those first summers here: afternoons stretched out endlessly by the waver of boats echoing in off the lake, by the sound of a distant tee off, a car hushing by at thirty. The boy’s skateboard ticking and tacking up the drive, then coasting smoothly away down the street—off to his friends.
The caterpillar crawls over his knuckles.
There were customs then. When Wynn was much younger, he and Fran pranced across the hot asphalt parking lot by the club pool and drove home through the plantation barefoot and shirtless, not wearing seatbelts, eyes hazed from chlorine, the two adrift in the sea of summer. The boy began to recognize certain songs on the radio, sweet, bubblegum ballads, and would demand the volume turned up, not yet afraid to share with the father, not yet understanding that the tunings of the hearts might not be the same.
After high school, Wynn’s few remaining neighborhood friends went to Charleston, and it was another year before Wynn could get in to college there. Of course there was no recovering that missed freshman year; his friends had long branched off into complex social circles, nearly forgetting the Plantation. The boy is still out there, trying to make his rounds—trying, for all the father knows, to recover those old friends. Perhaps he is happy to sleep on their couches. Perhaps he, too, has found some safety. The father doesn’t know if his messages, left every month or so—“Wynn, it’s your father”—are ever heard.
At harvest, he will snap off the ears with the quick downward push of his father—a twist and a yank, boy. He will harvest the field alone, by hand. He has arranged for a local cropper to come by and haul the corn off. He will have to do the same for the stalks once he’s cleared them. He will not eat the corn. Corn is not his favorite thing to eat.
• • •
Someone has been coming into his field at night and tearing down a few stalks. He finds them one morning, folded to the ground in a little clearing, flattened into a pile as if stomped on. The damage is modest—some bitter impulse of an old neighbor, he supposes—but it disheartens him nevertheless. He begins to understand his father’s hate for the trespasser. He drives to the feed & seed with rigid stillness, mouth pressed, exhaling so hard at stoplights he feels it against his button-down.
In the dark, one deep night, he grapples for the phone. He is still mostly asleep. “Yes.” The security guard says his son is up at the front gate. The Plantation sticker on the boy’s car is expired, he says. “Hello?” the guard says after a moment. “Yes. Yes, let him through.”
He turns on the front porch light. He sits on his couch and looks out into the night. The amber porch light touches the now head-high wall of stalks in his yard. They shuffle slightly; appear, almost, to be reflecting fire.
For an hour he sits staring out at them. He dozes.
In his dream, he is cutting smut from stalks in the middle of the night. The black boils multiply before him, he cannot move fast enough. He is on his knees. Then he notices the boils are moving: holding up his blade, he sees a caterpillar moving across the moon gleam. He can see its colors, and in his dream this caterpillar is a memory, the deep green and gold, slow-pulsing inch of some passage. There are more of these coursing up the stalks all around him. They climb out of the dark at his feet, inch toward the moon-wet leaves.
The living room’s morning light eases him awake. He squints out at the empty driveway. On his way back to his bedroom, he taps open Wynn’s door, but does not slow his pace to remark upon the un-slept-in bed. He has much to do this morning.
That afternoon his neighbor hips through the holly bushes and hands him a pea-green Tupperware container heavy with a hunk of casserole. Then she holds out a white envelope. “Another doozie from the P. O. A. I said I’d save the postage.” He stuffs the envelope in his shirt pocket, nods—the old half-smile. She stands there for a moment, hands on her hips, taking in the sight of his tall cornstalks. She laughs, says, “You have lost it, bucko,” then turns and walks off.
Inside, he opens the envelope. It’s a third notice from the P. O. A. If he does not demolish his cornfield, it states, people will arrive to do it for him. The half-unfolded letter floats into the trash. He feels entitled, having helped shape the earth on which these people live. Entitled—a word he would’ve never used before; the farmer’s shield of pride.
He stands before his field and feels how this place was once a plantation. With a certainty he’s never felt capable of, he knows corn was once grown in this very spot.
He often tells himself that he has not returned to growing corn. That he is not typical, that he has broken into something new and essential. Yet some evenings, while he is so deep in his field he has lost his bearings, a lingering, errant gust will huff unexpectedly across the tasseled ears, making a wheeze akin to his father’s rare laugh.
• • •
He does not mean to step back when he sees the boy. He feels the stalks against his back; leaves tickle his ear. Wynn walks up from the driveway.
The boy’s bottom lip is pierced, his hair greasy on top, the rest of him a ragged mess. The slick yellow remnants of what seems a mohawk hang over the pale, stubbled sides of his head—he looks diseased.
“Christ, look at you.” The father breathes heavily from a day’s work.
“Look at yourself,” Wynn says, looking not at his bearded father but at the corn.
He walks in front, parting leaves and stooping his head. Wynn follows. A queer half-light closes in around them. “I’m at a friend’s,” Wynn says. “I can’t stay.”
“You see this?” Fran says. They step into the small clearing of flattened stalks. “The old-timers around here, heh”—he crosses his arms—“I think they turned on me, son.” He chuckles, glances over. “Son,” he says, “I tried calling.”
Wynn exhales sharply, something like a laugh. “Old-timers,” he says, toeing a soiled wisp of pink cotton. He, too, has his arms crossed. “Old-timers, huh,” he says, and eyes him for a cold moment. The father sees his own cheekbones trying to wrack the face; the lank boy’s shoulders are broadening. The sooty eyes. It’s been a year.
“A year,” the father says, reaching with his thick fingers to part the blond licks from his son’s forehead. Wynn flinches back some, but only some. His forehead is hot, the hair dank. He seems, for a moment, to lean into the heavy palm. The father forgets his kernel-piercing thumbnail, accidentally pricks the boy’s temple.
Wynn swats him away—“The hell.”
The father tries to laugh, reaches to wipe the bead of blood with his sleeve. His son shoves him, the thin arms like a colt’s kick to his chest. The father ignores this petulance and again steps forward—“Oh, come on now”—raising his sleeve toward the forehead.
Wynn swings at him.
Chapped knuckles graze his lip, whiffle the air before his face—a kind of awkward, mistimed kiss. It’s a halfhearted blow. Startled, Fran stumbles back. His heel catches something; his eyes try to hold to the boy as he falls. There is the sound of his own body crashing backward through the stalks. They crack and shiver, bend gradually beneath him, letting him down slowly enough that by the time he is set upon the ground his anger, too, has lost its heart.
It comes down to this: to gardening in old age, sipping whiskey in doorways, coveting a few acres; to being pinned between a father and a son. It comes down to these tired clichés—the only real custom. Alone, he is the father, a vestige, a parched scroll of no particular interest handed down among generations of men. Alas, the metaphor is not lost on him: he is the chaff, not the thing itself. The estranged son, the gardening, his beard even—all the mark of a wide failure among fathers. Maybe a necessary failure.
Wynn stands in the middle of the clearing. Fran can’t look at him, gazes skyward instead. He feels foolish lying there, licking his lip, pant
ing—foolish for not realizing that it was exactly this his son came here to do. Surely he’d meant to hit him harder.
Then he hears Wynn walking off, slamming his shoulders through the stalks, mumbling warbled curses. Fran knows there are no more friends, no one to stay with here. He’d heard no car drive up. He doesn’t know how far his son has had to walk.
“Old-timers,” his son repeats. He stops for a moment, calls back through the stalks, “Man, kids come to your corn to fuck. No one cares about your—your crop.” Fran hears his boy swat his way out of the corn, sneakers squeaking up the drive. “It’s just some place to lie down.”
Lying upon the stalks, he imagines generations of boys and girls sneaking into his yard by night to make love. He imagines a young boy bowing down the stems, quietly, until there is a soft crackle. The boy’s deliberateness as he sets about making a pallet. Shirts drop softly as shadows. How he lowers her out of the moonlight.
Every couple of months or so, he and his wife got dressed up. At the club, he cracked wise and his wife rolled her eyes and laughed, mock-bemoaning him. She wore glossy crimson lipstick that awoke her eyes with appetite. Back home, he kept up the randy act, palming her hip and dancing her up the stairs from behind, dancing some jig: how could he have known, back in Iowa, such a life awaited? How hidden they’d felt in the liquid curves and hills and coves of this place.
She would laugh delicately, emptily, wriggle him off. By this he was to understand that the act was over.
Mornings, he often woke to the eclipsing of light from their bathroom, the door coming to with the snick, it seemed, of his parting eyelids. Then he’d hear the heavy pipes of water let loose, her gold band clinking to the tiles. The exultant quavering of the shower door as it was opened. Then another snick—and his eyelids again shut.
He often felt he was missing the point.
He opens his eyes, now to a clean night sky—a sky viewed through the man-sized hole his fall made in the corn. The sky is crisp with the coming autumn, glitters with a careless scatter of stars. All these stars, they will all fail other planets one day. He tries to remember his and Juna’s first night here, the smell of grass as they slept on this lawn in a tent, airing out their newly painted walls. He tries to imagine where his son might be. He will go looking for him tonight, he decides. He will walk to the houses of friends he remembers. He doesn’t care who he wakes.
But first he lies there a while longer, listening for the shiver of stalk, the whisper of leaves, for the tentative step of new lovers.
17. You Will Miss Me
You take me and Reg. Once we hit the lake, weren’t nothing like us. We were three hundred pounds each and drag-raced boats down Lake Wylie, which was illegal yet totally unstoppable.
We were always racing. Our mothers will tell you we came hard into this world, that our feet hit the dirt like little hill-backed boars. Juggernoggins our daddies called us for our big heads. We built go-carts. We tore Clover up in those things. Burned across fields like dirt-dobbers, just our heads visible over the highgrass (our heads even then too juggish for helmets). Later it was four-wheelers. Reg suped his up fast enough to hydroplane across his daddy’s catfish pond. You have to try and see this: Reg, a good two-seventy by tenth grade, skeetering over that pond. We were both of us what Coach Simpkin called a hoss—part horse, part boss. We blocked but could out-sprint anyone on the team, our thighs massive and hard. We shook the field. We tried out for track but put divots in the asphalt. Nights, whenever we came back to Reg’s farm, hollering-drunk after a game, we’d go tearing at that catfish pond, ripping off our clothes as we ran—fast enough, we were sure, to just run right over it.
We weren’t brothers but should’ve been. Only real difference was Reg’s fire-red hair, which everyone but me spotted right off as the tendrils of tragedy. His boat said Reg in flaming orange letters. Mine said Hicks in yellow, the H made of lightening bolts. Our rooster tails stretched two hundred yards.
Some talk of us still—those few whose cabins haven’t been buried under cul-de-sacs and fairways. Mostly they recall the night Reg ushered in a new era by blowing up Buster Boyd Bridge in his race boat. They argue about what unholy speed he attained on that midnight glass, whether he was borne more upon air than water. Sometimes my name bobs up, too, with stories of Reg and Hicks and the old days. But the stories putter out, and folks just stare off, mostly. They’re thinking of the dark red glow of the channel that night Reg burned—the glow you see when you close your eyes. They must know I’m not dead yet.
Living on the lake was our dream since high school. When we didn’t have summer football practice, we slalom skied and tubed behind Penny Cocker’s boat for whole days. Penny was a few years older and had her own lake house. We’d fly down the lake full throttle as the sun set, her crow-black hair whipping at our faces, and back at Penny’s cabin all topple into a golden heap of drunkenness which was part muscle burn, part motion sick, part sun poison, and part Miller Genuine. It was a powerful lake. One night Penny bowed me over the inboard engine hatch of her Ski Nautique. Stars fell across my body in tingly dust, and I whimpered a pledge of love.
At graduation we ran across the stage like gorillas, then took jobs at the Duke Power plant. But one day at work Reg bent over to laugh at this joke I told, and one of his three-hundred-plus pounds shifted in such a way as to split the seat of his safety jumper, which caused us to stop laughing. Talk of possible exposure won him an early retirement. Duke Power was fixing to develop the whole goddamn lake, they didn’t need vapors of nuclear sloppiness. After what deal he got, Reg said I ought as well retire too. He could easily have bought one of those houses in River Heights, this gated place up by the bridge. But Reg said how there you couldn’t spit out your window without hitting another house or else get fined for it. He decided instead to get a cabin farther up the lake, way back in Little Allison Creek, where it seemed we were pretty much on our own. One whole side of that cove was Tree Geese Landing, and it was all ours.
When we first moved out to the lake, we spent every day running hard, laughing and hollering. We chased deer through our forest, or waded out into the slime-bellied cove and corralled hog-sized catfish onto clay spits and wrestled them. We ran two-inch mooring line across the cove and played tug-of-war. Bored of that, we hung rope swings that sent us through the air like Tarzan. Every Saturday Penny canoed over from across the lake and we’d grill out. Reg bought this old houseboat, and after we ate we three puttered down the lake on top of it till we got to the River Rat.
Even then, campaigns of progress were afoot. As we neared the bridge, we spotted great swaths of red clay in the pineland, some already littered with prefab house framing. We shook our heads, drained beer cans, and Reg or me would stand and stare down this progress as we pissed off the top of the houseboat, something of our regalness eroded.
The Rat was uphill from a gas dock, its orange light snug harbor to a great woodwork of fishermen and lake-prowling lowlifes, some of which knew us from our football days. You saw how everyone got excited when we ran through the door growling, me picking up one of the skinny old fellas and running around the bar with him over my shoulder. We talked loud and knew what to say to make everyone in there tumble to the floor with laughing. They’d drunkenly sack our legs, and Reg and me’d slog around the barroom, dragging all of them. Night fell and we slumped at a table, and it was never long after Penny disappeared unalone down to the houseboat that Reg’s eyes flickered dim and he mustered grunts about the end of the lake, how one day there’d be no love left, no woods neither. Back then no one knew what he meant. The others would start in teasing us about who was faster, and Reg lifted his head and we two argued heartily for their benefit before thundering down the pier, ripping off our clothes—Reg banging down the side of the houseboat as he ran past and crashed into the water. We raced the whole three miles home.
Summers got us buck wild but the lake could calm us: just the
sight of it some mornings set us to gentler kinds of sabbath. On these days we felt ourselves growing old together and were embarrassed. When fish weren’t biting we devoted ourselves to rotgut. We’d sit on our dock and just roast, cicadas sizzling round the cove. We looked off separate directions down the lake and let our talk take wider circles. “No love left in these hills,” said Reg, looking up the cove to where, by the mouth, a new strip of houses was going up. “None, seems,” said myself, looking the other way, down to where the cove piddled to a muddy end and halfheartedly eroded at a shelf of pine forest. Empties clattered to the dock. We wanted too big, we agreed after a while. Then we squared off on that dock like sumo wrestlers. Whoever got wet had to make dinner.
Summers passed, and we never got tired. Our bodies just started glowing by the end of each day, our eyes fuzzy and sweet-stinging. We found ourselves ravenous, and after steaks or pulled pork, we lay in front of the big-screen till sleep played over us like kittens. Not that crushing sleep of the weary: no, our sleep came as a kind of lightness—the very lightness we’d run or swum all day to achieve. This, what I mean by we never got tired.
Winters couldn’t stop us either. Mornings our naked bodies shattered through the icy water, and we raced up the cove and across the channel and back, sidling up midway to box each other in the ear where it hurt most, firing each other up. Some days we took the Bronco out to visit nearby farms. We helped some of the older men fix tractors and reframe barns, and took home cleanly wrapped flanks of beef and venison, which we needed because our bellies were house-fires of hunger.
Then the racing boats. Reg just drove up one day with them on the trailer—I’d heard him honking half a mile out. I cracked a beer and walked out to the porch, where I waited to see his Bronco come dusting down our long gravel drive. Our driveway was two miles long! And there he came: fishtailing down the last stretch, trailering two drag boats, ramped one upon the other, their forked bows raised like missiles.