Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Planting Peas

the soil turns easy
still wet from winter rain
hands on wood
sifting red
over black
over red
she sits on a pile of leaf compost
at the end of the row
and reads

lukewarm breeze
picks up raven hair
her words carry over me
the stroke of a lover
the rhythm of the soil

I stop to look up
feel the air thick
as it carries
her voice
away

heels buried in clay
I go back to work
excavate bones
long turned to nitrogen
seep into my pores
this unusually warm February afternoon

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Rat Snake

The total measure when you added it all together was a little over a half ton of man that made up Beth's father and uncle propped against the tailgate of the pickup truck in the front yard, most of it going toward the uncle. He was a colonel of a man with a round pot belly, suspenders and a constant smell of bourbon.  The sort of man other men deferred to on matters involving who to vote for or allow to come your dove shoot on a baited field. Her father was the exact opposite, rail thin in work boots and dark blue pants good for camouflaging the stains of a hard day’s work. Her father held himself against the truck as he did in all things; hands clasped around a can of Miller beer, his torso a permanent forward lean that made his spine look like the stave of a bow built only to shoot toy arrows. The collective courage of the both of them in the face of a woman amounted to little more than the spot of oil left behind in the driveway by the truck they leaned against. Beth glimpsed the scene through the poured glass windowpane of the farmhouse living room, it was the only one not cracked. She sought out their faces as respite from the tenant’s voice that had been following her from room to room spilling out the endless list of repairs needed to the house. They were not looking her way.

Half an hour earlier the three of them had stood on the porch together. The plan agreed upon by Beth and her uncle, the house’s current owner, would be to explain that the house would be sold to Beth and not the tenant who had been there for ten years. But when the dark haired woman came to the door her uncle had simply introduced the two women, referring to Beth as “the fly in the ointment” and the two men retreated to their current perch while Beth entered the foyer alone. “You are ruining my life I hope you know” were the first words the tenant spoke. She was tall and thin, made thinner by her stringy black hair that flowed over her shoulders and the cigarette in her hand. The house reeked of pot and stale tobacco, the living room with the stone fireplace had been converted to another bedroom which contained a man passed out on a stripped mattress. It was 11 AM and Beth surveyed the scene with a fair amount of sympathy. The woman was not much older than she and Beth recognized this portrait of a life as not a far walk from her own. She imagined the guy on the mattress sold pills to augment the tenant’s pay as a waitress and still she knew it was a struggle for them to make the $250 a month rent. It had only been a few years ago Beth and her own pothead boyfriend shared a trailer in the middle of some woods not far from here. When Beth realized she would not be able to begin her first job out of school until a bench warrant was cleared up on a speeding ticket, it had been the pothead boyfriend who suggested they hunt mushrooms in the adjacent cow pasture and sell them to pay the fine. Beth went for the idea and as a result was able to go to work as a teacher for the Department of Corrections the following month out west, where the pay was better. She could have gone to any of the landed gentry in her family to fix the problem but she knew it would only feed their view of her as a fuck up. So now she stood face to face with what could easily be a reflection of herself had she not reached outside the family land to find a fissure of independence.  Beth’s hair was washed and blown and her clothes a reflection of a woman with her own checking account.  The modest nest egg she had built up during her years out west had her in a position to buy her first house. Western money was good but southern property was better and Beth had decided to move home six months ago after the harshness of the west had her craving the green canopy of home. She decided to move back after her brother came to visit in his new Dodge flatbed pick up. It was a couple of months after her Grandmother had died and he let it slip that all the grandkids got money but her. She after all had thought she could do better away from the land so there she had stood with $40 in her bank account in a job that wouldn’t allow glass picture frames in her office, watching her brother pull away on a Grand Canyon vacation. As it turned out the money was nothing big, only enough for a down payment. Apparently, they all used their inheritance as down payments on something and now, five years later her uncle was in trouble and the farmhouse would have to be sold. She heard about that from her brother too and remembered the whitewashed carved wood that curved around the corners of the wide front porch. Embellishment such as that would easilly add another hundred thousand to a house like that out west, not to mention the 3 acres that came with it. The house was in a donut hole that was surrounded by her dad’s property, a right of way would have to be granted and she may one day get road frontage if she worked her way back into the inheritance pool. She wasn’t sure what that would cost but she knew for now hr nest egg wasn't enough to land something this nice on the inflated housing market. Besides, she needed to lay down roots somewhere and for the past few years these fields and woods surrounding the house were the places that always came to her in late night dreams.  The dreams always began with a realization that her grandfather had never died but was alive again.  He would emerge through some homemade barb wire opening in the fence or out of the logging road that went to the creek.  The recurring story was that he would appear and inform everyone present that he had never died but just retreated to those woods in his old age and lived there, letting the woods heal him from the series of strokes that had deemed him blind and speechless.  He would tell her things in her dreams, that he had watched her grow up running around those woods barefooted, that he was proud of her.  She would wake up in whatever foreign place she was in and nestle back on her pillow for a few moments still trying to feel the sagebrush around her head.  It never lasted longer than a few seconds and she would be forced to open her eyes to some place faraway from that scene, some place she would be trying to settle into as home but it never did stick.  A few times she tried to explain the dream to whatever man lay beside her at the time but for the most part she kept the dreams to herself.

She fought back the urge to commiserate or apologize to the tenant for her presence in a space that was clearly not her own but instead quietly walked from room to room, there to claim her version of a birthright she had been on the other end of for so long.  The entire house needed to be rewired and the hot water heater needed to be replaced, the chimney had never been swept and the well regularly needed to be primed in order to take a shower. These were the problems the tenant listed while Beth could spot a whole host of other problems from her vantage point. The kitchen would have to be gutted as well as the bathroom and the whole place repainted. But it was all encased in a beautiful endoskeleton of three inch thick heart pine floors and ceilings. The original stained glass light fixture still hung in the foyer and in the bedroom holes were drilled in the massive ceiling where a quilt frame once hung.  Dogs ran across the scraped floors around Beth’s feet but it was clear the wood was as sound as it had been when those dogs' great great grandparents were puppies being birthed out likely on that same floor. The tenant wasn’t giving Beth a second to admire the details and continued to rattle off problems as if she were begging for her life on the hangman’s platform. She spotted the attic door and remembered there were built in stairs, "stairs to nowhere" her uncle had described. She moved to turn the wooden latch to find escape in the darkness above her. “The stairs need to be replaced and are steep enough you’ll break your neck if you’re not careful” the tenant barked.  No movement of Beth’s was wasted as opportunity to point out another liability. Beth found the top step through a few cobwebs and a climb up a narrow entry built of plywood. Old newspaper from the seventies lined the tunnel meant to hide those details inferior to the rest of the house.  The cobwebs clearly had not been crossed since the Carter administration.  She found a joist to sit on and rested her feet below her on the stairs.  Her intention was to inspect the insulation and take a breath from the chatter below as well as that which was bouncing around the inside of her head making her doubt the whole deal.

The house originally sat on some land over by the railroad tracks.  Beth used to visit it with her parents when she was a child. The vacant old house had been placed perfectly under an oak grove surrounded by kudzu eaten land that her parents fantasized could be worked for profit. They would ride the ungated acreage on Sunday afternoons.  Beth perched between them on the bench seat of the old Chevy captivated by the volley of these young people’s dreams back and forth over her head. The original owner never sold until Beth’s grandfather was able to talk him into selling just the house. Beth's parents were well past Sunday drives when they got to watch as their Oak shadowed dream creep down the county road on two flatbed trailers and come to rest atop a hill bald of all growth except a few pines and underbrush. The house became a rental immediately and weathered many tenant renovations.  Simple add ons really that amounted to nothing more than excuses to not pay rent. The house outlasted her parents’ marriage and eventually passed on to her father’s brother who did nothing to elevate its condition; until today when he deposited his only niece at the front door.  Slips of light from the day were stealing in through the clapboard siding and broken attic vents. Beth wearily pointed the flashlight over the attic floor to survey the damage but surprisingly found nothing more than dry fluffy insulation throughout. There were no boards down for storage, no light, no perks but no leaks or moldy smells either. Beth knew buying from her family was a deal with the devil. Her mother would warn her not to do it. She knew what they were capable of, dirty land surveys, pay offs to inspectors and judges all in the name of family land. The history poured over her like a cold shower. Her grandfather loved this house but never gave it to her father, the offspring who spent his life watching it deteriorate like a burned out lighthouse looking over a sea of neglect. Beth ran the flashlight over the scene once more looking for rat nests. Out of the corner of her eye she caught movement but too smooth to be a rat. At first it looked like an electrical cord twisted through one of the attic beams but the smooth quiet motion revealed otherwise. The snake startled her at first, her years in the city still close to the surface. But the shock of her proximity to the reptile hit  her deep enough that she was able to regain herself in time for her nerves to smooth out before her body reacted to the initial adrenaline surge.  Fight or flight.  She remained still and watched through narrow light the black snake glide through the attic beam as smoothly as her grandfather had once driven the fields in his old chevy surveying the fields; knowing all the potholes by heart but in no hurry to get by them. Its length indicated it had lived in this quietness for decades, the stillness of the attic its domain. Beth had been taught as a child that to kill this type of snake was sacrilege to your home and hearth, opening the door to a plague of rats and vermin to a barn, crawlspace, or well house. To know this was a sign of belonging to this place. She remembered her grandmother cursing tenants who moved into their houses from the university only to kill the rat snake under the porch simply because it was there. As a result, money would then have to be spent on someone to spray or set traps. Beth had been taught the nuances of the serpent, a pointed head, a brown diamond pattern, and of course the rattles of a death warning.  All instincts of survival and all meant to be fear’s calling card. The rat snake had none of these, only a tongue and eyes meant to frighten the weak. Beth sat in the darkness as the snake passed like a quiet freight train at midnight. She would buy this house. She would get an honest survey, hire a lawyer and she would fix what was broken and make it her’s. The roof was free of leaks and the crawlspace dry, everything else could be built to be made strong again.