Clear Springs Read Free Page A

I’m flinging pellets of fish food out onto the water, trying to get it beyond the pondweed, which extends out all around the banks of the pond, except for the clearings I’ve made. When I pick up the empty fish-chow bucket—a plastic ice-cream tub—I find three crickets caught in it. They can’t jump more than two or three inches straight up. There are two small ones and one large one. The smalls have striped backs like lightning bugs. They have feathery arms and legs and feathery feet. The large one has a long antenna it loops toward itself, then extends out tentatively, searching. The other antenna is grossly shortened—cut off by some vicious fighter-bug? Or did it come like that? Suddenly I realize that looking at crickets this way is the essence of what it was like to be a child here, immersed in the strange particulars of nature.
    From the pond, in the green lushness of early summer, in three directions you see only fields of soybeans and corn, with thick fencerows and washed skies. A movie could be filmed here, a historical drama set in 1825, and it would seem authentic—except for the soundtrack: the noises of the highway, the air, the feed mill; the blare and thud of music from cars whizzing past. If you turned the camera in the other direction, toward the road, you’d get all the visual cues of the present day—the wires and poles, the asphalt, the Detroit metal, the discarded junk-food wrappers and beer cans thrown from cars that have “twentieth century” written all over them. You would also see abrown farmhouse with two rickety outbuildings, a red stable, and a small white house in a lovely woods that is mowed and trimmed like a park. And you would see the chicken tower, lord of the landscape.
    Late September. The soybeans aren’t quite ready to harvest. Some of the leaves are still green, but the pods are fuzzy and brown. The crop this year is full of weeds from outer space because the strongest herbicides have been banned. Something short of Agent Orange has been used this year, and the path to the pond is bordered with weeds, some a good ten feet tall.
    Mama and I walk down this path to the pond. She uses her fishing rod to fight the weeds and snakes. Oscar trots along, thrilled to go with us. Miraculously, he never goes near the road.
    “That’s Johnsongrass,” Mama says, pointing her rod at a clump of what looks like a trendy ornamental grass. “You can’t ever get rid of that. Your Daddy used to cut it off and dig it up and dump it in the creek.”
    “What’s that one?”
    “Hogweed? Horseweed? I can’t remember. But at the joint sometimes there’s a big knot and inside is a worm that’s good to fish with.”
    “It’s horseweed,” she says presently. “Not hogweed. Hogweed is what you call presley—pig presley I always called it. The hogs like it real well. It’s got real tender leaves.”
    “Pig presley?”
    “When we raised hogs I’d pull it up and give it to them, and Lord, they’d go crazy.”
    “What does it look like?”
    “It grows along on the ground on a stem and has tender leaves. It looks rubbery.”
    “Purslane? Parsley?”
    “I always called it pig presley.”
    “Is that one of your weeds that will take the place?”
    “No, pig presley’s all right. It’s good.”
    We reach the pond just as a small heron escapes in a slow-motion flight over the creek. The pondweed has died back a lot, and the reflections in the pond are clear and still. The main house, inside its army of old oak and maple trees, is reflected in the pond. The chicken tower rises above the trees. The tableau is upside-down and innocently beautiful and abstract.
    Mama gestures to the southeast and says, “If the wind is this way, I smell horse piss, and that way I smell cow mess, and over yonder it’s tobacco curing, and from the north it’s chicken feed.” Her rod follows her directions. She laughs: her big, loud laugh. “If that don’t beat a hen a-rootin’!” she says. Her laugh