“It’s too hot to argue with you today, Vanessa.”
But I could not think of a time when we had argued. Our conversations usually consisted of two or three sentences, a statement by one of us and response by the other, all of which was repeated a few times over. The rest of the argument must have gone on in my grandmother’s head. She always seemed more angry with me than her words had indicated.
Because I needed my grandmother most in spring, I rarely spoke to her at all then, out of fear that I might upset or alienate her. In that watery, unstable season when the whole world seemed to be changing, she did not. She was always the same: a silhouette, a dark triangle, carrying eggs and milk and wood back and forth between the barn and the house. She was a place for the wandering eye to rest. As the dogwood exploded around my head and, under my feet, seedlings sighed and gasped for air, I followed her along her hypnotic path and attempted to focus my attention, instead of letting it run on endlessly here, there, until inevitable exhaustion and then depression set in. What I was looking for was an order, and somehow I knew even then that order was the product of a self-conscious effort, it was a man-made thing imposed on the universe and involving constant exclusions. But as hard as I tried, as much as I concentrated on the print in my grandmother’s dress or the gray strands in her hair, I could not forget the complex texture of the evening or the sound of the ground breaking apart. And though the transparency of spring frightened me — the chloroplasts I could see in the leaves, the worms moving underneath the dirt, and the human body looking like the plastic models in science class — I kept it alclass="underline" the exposed heart, the miles and miles of purple and blue veins everywhere; I think I had no choice.
I remember how the animals howled, not just at night but all day long, too — high pitched, at the edge of control. Sex turned their bodies liquid. They seemed to swim inside each other, with their curving backs and gleaming eyes. Could you see it in me, Grandma? The sex of animals? The fur on my arms? The hair standing straight up on the back of my neck? The swollen glands? The friction under my skin? I frightened myself. But you kept walking; the chores kept you busy — the hens, the hogs. You were tireless, your head bent, your arms overflowing, insisting in your every action that life made sense, life made good sense. I thought it was wonderful that someone who had lived as long as she could still believe that. But when she was seventy, I was only twelve and just learning how the bed could float around under my hands. I noticed the sweating men in the market, their thick arms, their large muddy hands. They began to stare at me. How beautiful a young girl’s neck can be, one whispered, how smooth her skin. I fingered my lower lip and pretended I did not hear. At night I could feel the weight of those words like hands all over me. Is that why she disliked me? Could she tell that one day my eyes would be able to make anyone melt? That freely, and without guilt, I’d open myself to them?
Plants pushed through the cracked earth. Fish twirled in the air, their scales reflected light in every direction. Thousands of ants moved together like black shadows across the yard.
But none of this seemed to bother her. “Dinner,” she’d call from the kitchen window. “Dinner,” she’d say, ringing a large bell, wiping her hands on her apron. I loved you best in spring, Grandma, if I ever loved you.
In the dreams of my grandmother the barn looks enormous — a red cutout against the stark sky. The sky itself is almost white but not quite; there’s a hint of gray, a touch of blue there. Somewhere in the cloudless, birdless sky, my grandfather lies — somewhere I can’t see, he’s lost in gray-blue.
“How much longer?” I ask the sky. I feel myself to be an ancient instrument upon which someone’s fingers play slow, sad music, hesitantly, careful not to touch the wrong note. It’s something eerie and difficult, something I’ve never heard before, and yet I feel a part of it. The music continues as I look out the back window and see the hay he stacked in huge piles before he died, still there, about to ignite. There’s a message among those brittle bales. I study them from every angle. The notes fade. Or perhaps he forgot to leave one as he moved closer and closer to the place where messages no longer count. Does a twelve-year-old girl make any difference at all to him now? Maybe in the overall pattern there’s a larger truth, a design I can’t yet see. He tells me something — the best way to reach him or how to live a better life. Some days I think I hear his voice coming from the center of the stacks, the voice I’ve kept vivid and perfect in my mind. It’s softer than in life, muffled, but distinctly his. “Why do you make your grandmother walk so far?” it asks.
“Why don’t we just sit for a minute, Grandma? Why don’t we just rest?” I place my hands on the tops of her shoulders, wanting to push her down. Already I am as tall as she. She sits for a minute to tie her shoe. Her bones are brittle. She could break so easily under my hands.
“I can’t, Vanessa. My feet won’t do it.” She rises. Quickly, I lift my hands up.
“Thank God I’m able,” she says, as we begin the walk to the cemetery on the other side of town. I suppose she believed that soon enough her shoes would fill with dirt for billions and billions of years, too heavy to lift.
Grandma would have buried him on the farm. Wheat would have sprung between his bones. The lacy leaves of tomatoes would have formed a crown for his head. Fruit would have grown in his mouth. His fingers would have fed the flowers.
It was my father who objected when my grandmother suggested a plot of land left of the silo in the north pasture behind the barn.
“I will not,” his pale hands looked like two smooth fish, “I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He stared at his mother, the stare of the orphan, the stare of the terrified child left totally alone in the world — the stare that much later would become the permanent face of my father. But now the look changed: the grown man came back; his eyes grew darker; his pupils opened; his mouth seemed to curl in sarcasm or anger. Did he think then, looking at my grandmother in her yellow apron, why was it she — pacing in the kitchen, now lighting the oven and complaining about the price of oil — who continued while his gentle father in the next room could not even get up? As he sat there at the table, his eyes bloodshot and wide, did he wish to trade their deaths? Her hair that had not yet completely grayed seemed an insult, her feet that would not drag. I thought of my own tenuous position in my father’s heart. He looked to me. I thought he wanted to touch me; it seemed his body moved slightly forward in my direction but then pulled back. I think he wanted to be forgiven, for he was sorry he would never be a father like his father, and he didn’t know how to make it up to us. He stood up. His face went blank.
“I will not eat my own father’s flesh.” He turned toward the window. The wheat quivered in the wind. “Bury him somewhere else. The dead grow enormous without our help — so huge you cannot swallow them, you cannot choke them down.”
Already when my father looked out onto the land that his father loved so much he could see him there, his hands folded across his chest in the slopes of the hills. When he walked on the land he thought he heard my grandfather sigh. In the cow’s brown eyes he thought my grandfather watched him. In the wind my grandfather whispered requests my father could not keep.