Veins

Photo by henry perks on Unsplash

(This short story was written in the fall of 2022 for a college class I was taking. When I read it now, I realize that this time in my life was like a bridge between those strange, unexplainable years after my husband’s cancer and finding our way into a new life.)

Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society. . . may unexpectedly come forth . . . to enjoy its perfect summer life at last! (Walden 262).

 Jacob and my dad stand at the edge of the untidy line of hesitant and uneven grass that marks the edge of the cultivated part of the yard. Behind this mark of delineation is an open field of dirt, nearly larger than our grassed area—wild morning glory and newly sprouted blue mustard plants pushing out of the hard clay.

It’s been many things—this patch of dirt. When I’ve known it alone: peach orchard, horse corral, garden, and field left to grow green wildflowers that dry up by mid-summer and crumble into woody stalks and burrs that stick in our clothes and shoes.

“Corn field.” My husband says.

But I’m still seeing a purple-hazed memory of blue mustard and my children’s brown and red heads bobbing in the midst of it as they play with my cousin’s children. In my mind, I stand in the house three years ago as it’s torn up and remade, and I know when I see the children through the back window as they race though the flowers like wild fairy creatures, that this is where we have to—where we need to—live.  It made little sense to move back into my recently vacated childhood home when it was so far from my husband’s work and so far from all we’d hoped to find in our next step: buying instead of renting, more kids, a better job.

The field of this memory—the spring field that eventually died by mid-summer—is what stays in my mind when my now landlord dad hires another cousin to till up the dirt and spread it all flat a few weeks later.

“Corn. Rows and rows of it. As far at the eye can see,” Jacob says. He sees a past of his own in the corn of his imagination. A farmer’s field in upstate New York where he played as a kid.

“What will we do with it all?” I ask.

We talk about it, but, really, we aren’t even sure how to grow it yet.

 We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep (72).

It’s Covid 19 that gets us outside. The world stops around us, hunkers down, grows silent with a strained, tense breath. I’m worried. We’re all worried. But when I see Jacob, thickened muscles straining to lead the new orange tiller over the massive corn field yet again, I’m something else too. It’s too selfish to think, though. So I don’t. Much.

Each morning I wake with him by my side. He moves through the yard with long strides. He rakes up and hauls rocks that are seemingly birthed from the clay overnight, some as big as an actual baby’s head, and he doesn’t fail. When the sweat pours down his face and flattens his fine, dark hair against his scalp under his floppy hat, he sits under the apricot tree—the last vestige of the orchard my grandpa planted over thirty years ago—and watches his dirt patch with our twelve-year-old son.

There’s a spot behind them, on the other side of the apricot tree, where once, three years ago, I felt the presence of my grandfather. I’d been sitting on a blanket in the shade, knotted inside by burdens I couldn’t unravel, and then, like a light had been lit behind me, I felt him there. He was younger in my mind’s eye, like the man of strength and youth from old photos. That man was swallowed by age by the time my eleven-year-old-self lived in the same house with him, this house, three months before he died. I turned. I didn’t see anyone. There was only the feeling—him standing guard over me like a sentinel.

That was a month before we learned about cancer.

Now, all these years later, I watch my husband under the tree, and I know why I feel guilty. The world is shuttering, falling to its knees around me, but we’ve been asleep for so long, it finally feels like we’re awakening. People used to ask me if I was okay, how things were going for him. When the cancer was purged by the poison dripped through his body, when the surgeon cut the rest of the tumors from his middle, when he stopped looking like a wraith-thin ghost, they still asked, but I didn’t know how to explain it. And maybe I felt they wouldn’t understand it anyway.

I’d been in a long, long, winter. There was urgency and purpose in knowing what each day asked of me during the cancer. When the role of caretaker was shed and he took back his own living, he didn’t want me hovering around trying to help him. Sometimes, I could tell he resented the wrestle I had with God before I knew he would live, as if I’d single handedly kept him from moving on to the next life by pleading with God to let him stay. Somehow, life had become something stollen that he wasn’t always sure what to do with. He wasn’t better yet, even two years later. But I wasn’t either.

I knew this because of the stories I couldn’t write. It had been over two years of near silence in my novels. Words had dried up inside me and when I forced them out, they fell like the rhythmic pulse of a machine as I let myself be swallowed up in the busy, the next thing, the life I was only half living.

“And not till we are completely lost, or turned round . . . do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. . . Not till we are lost—in other words, not till we have lost the world—do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are, and the infinite extent of our relations.” (136)

The first corn doesn’t grow well. Jacob’s so disappointed, I hurt for him. We re-till the ground and try again. And again. And again. He reads about corn, converses about corn, and makes spiritual connections to corn during our at-home church we hold on Sundays. We make jokes about corn, and when he finally brings himself to pull a few baby corns to thin out the rows, we mourn for corn. We have twelve rows of corn by the end of July, a mini field in our backyard rippled over the top like a stormy sea with its uneven rows.

We collect our days in quarantine like the furrowing away of winter stores. Three years ago, we spent weeks apart, month after month of him returning to hospitals. The week after Thanksgiving, I thought he would die. I stood over him, his bald head hid under his beanie hat, as he wavered in the chair, in too much pain to think through the next step with me.

“I’m taking you to the hospital.”

When he didn’t argue, I knew it was bad.

After he came home the week of Christmas, I walked the short distance between my childhood home and the new house my parents built next door. It was foggy and late, white snow falling on muffled white streets, the pine trees across the road leaning toward me under the warm distilling glow of the street and house lights. Sound was muffled and I slowed. Above me, so close I could make out the black and white markings on his expansive white wings, an owl coasted, the resonant deepness of his wing’s motions stirring the close night air.

“What is man but a mass of thawing clay? Who knows what the human body would expand and flow out to under a more genial heaven? Is not the hand a spreading palm leaf with its lobes and veins?” (242)

I am enthralled with my husband’s strength. In September, I return to school and read Walden for class. When Thoreau describes the sand along the railroad tracks melting through the snow like veins, I see my husband’s pic-line, me sitting at the kitchen table with four syringes of fluids to flush the lines. I know how to hook on the threaded tips to the clear tubes extending from his upper arm, the blue veins of his pale and thin underarm like the snow cradled veins of sand Thoreau describes.

Covid 19 is another sort of thawing. We are slowly emerging from the snow of hard things and demands, drifting away from the tracks of society into our own rhythms and paths. The veins of my husband’s arms are incased in muscle as he works at the land, tilling, digging, and carrying.

I walk with him under the apricot tree.

His eyes are on the full ears of living, growing, ripening corn. “I didn’t know I would love it like this—that it was in my blood. I never understood until now.”

“I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.” (241)

As the corn grows, I write.

She’s a strange character, the girl who fills my pages with her story. She pries at my sleep and wakes my body. I think of her while cleaning, while cooking, while working with my husband and children in the garden. I haven’t had a character standing like this before me since before cancer. She pulls words from my fingers and time from my days, sucking me dry, but I don’t stop. There is nothing mechanical about the flowing way she spills free of me. She wants my words giving her paper veins life.