Mothers, as a group, tend to know the thing to say. They know, when you come home from seventh grade with a red C- on your science project, it is only because ol’ Mrs. So-and-So is a good friend of Mrs. So-and-So,so little Elrod got an A because he has better connections in the high-stakes world of Alabama public education.
It is why, when I have done good in my life, I have given her the trophies. They sit in dust on her shelves. From time to time I fail, and she says the right thing then, too.
“Son,” she says, “I don’t need a plaque to know what kind of man you are.”
And that is why I love her.
MY BROTHER’S GARDEN
Southern Living , Southern Journal: May 2012
M y little brother’s beard has turned gray, and his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow’s hang on crossed broom handles. From a distance, there in the rising dust of the garden, he looks like he stepped out of an old family photograph, like my uncles, like my grandfather, men who knew the secrets of the dirt. He reaches down and pinches a false bloom off a squash. I do not know how he knows it is false. When I ask him these things, he just looks at me, puzzled, and says, “I’ve always knowed.” Today, every day, his rows are straight as a needle, immaculate. You could roll a marble across his ground. I watch him stoop to pull a single, solitary weed, and then I ease away, thinking: If you know, how come I don’t?
The South, like chiggers and divinity candy, is everlasting. It will always be, though it will not always be as we remember. The South of our childhoods rusts, peels, and goes away. Brush arbors have left no trace on it. Preachers who thrust ragged Bibles at bare rafters now shout politics from the pulpit. Civility, toward even those with whom we do not agree, is an heirloom. Quilts, the kind made for warmth instead of cash, are a thing of antiquity, their patterns a mystery slowly fading in an old woman’s eyes. Young men can play 5,000 video games but cannot sharpen a pocket knife; lost are the men who tested their truck’s electrical system byholding to a coil wire. I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.
I can still see my maternal grandmother, Ava, go at a copperhead with a hoe held together with black electrical tape; it never had a chance. My paternal grandfather, Bobby, worked 12 hours milling cotton, six more with his hands in red dirt. My uncle John wore out 15 straw hats and worked three tractors to death. Now it is Mark’s turn, to curse the drought, and the late frost, and the rocks in the earth.
Five years ago, he hacked and burned clean an acre of hedge- and weed-infested land, mixed the ashes with a prodigious amount of manure, and created an oasis in a rock-strewn mountain pasture. Now, season after season, he walks down the hill with an old, white German shepherd by his side—he named her Pretty Girl—and does battle with the things that would take it all away: a blight that appears overnight like a bad dream; and hungry insects, some he cannot even name. The old dog watches from a cool place in the dirt, and when thunder sounds in the distance she steps in front of my brother’s tractor and will not move, to tell him it is time to go in before the lightning gets there. A good dog will do that.
Because, you see, there is more than science at work here. He knows the science, the nature of the soil, how to plant—how far apart, how deep—and the hybrids and histories of seeds. But there is also magic—what some folks call folklore—that must be considered, like the singing of frogs, the stages of the moon. Most, I will never understand. For some reason, he named his tractors after family. The one called Ricky is slow to start, has a bad running gear, and its seat has
It is why, when I have done good in my life, I have given her the trophies. They sit in dust on her shelves. From time to time I fail, and she says the right thing then, too.
“Son,” she says, “I don’t need a plaque to know what kind of man you are.”
And that is why I love her.
MY BROTHER’S GARDEN
Southern Living , Southern Journal: May 2012
M y little brother’s beard has turned gray, and his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow’s hang on crossed broom handles. From a distance, there in the rising dust of the garden, he looks like he stepped out of an old family photograph, like my uncles, like my grandfather, men who knew the secrets of the dirt. He reaches down and pinches a false bloom off a squash. I do not know how he knows it is false. When I ask him these things, he just looks at me, puzzled, and says, “I’ve always knowed.” Today, every day, his rows are straight as a needle, immaculate. You could roll a marble across his ground. I watch him stoop to pull a single, solitary weed, and then I ease away, thinking: If you know, how come I don’t?
The South, like chiggers and divinity candy, is everlasting. It will always be, though it will not always be as we remember. The South of our childhoods rusts, peels, and goes away. Brush arbors have left no trace on it. Preachers who thrust ragged Bibles at bare rafters now shout politics from the pulpit. Civility, toward even those with whom we do not agree, is an heirloom. Quilts, the kind made for warmth instead of cash, are a thing of antiquity, their patterns a mystery slowly fading in an old woman’s eyes. Young men can play 5,000 video games but cannot sharpen a pocket knife; lost are the men who tested their truck’s electrical system byholding to a coil wire. I listen for the past, but I cannot hear it. The juke joints fall silent, cotton mills wind down to a final, solitary thread, and a last buck dancer shuffles off into the mountain mist. Then I see my brother Mark in his garden, and know that not everything must fade away.
I can still see my maternal grandmother, Ava, go at a copperhead with a hoe held together with black electrical tape; it never had a chance. My paternal grandfather, Bobby, worked 12 hours milling cotton, six more with his hands in red dirt. My uncle John wore out 15 straw hats and worked three tractors to death. Now it is Mark’s turn, to curse the drought, and the late frost, and the rocks in the earth.
Five years ago, he hacked and burned clean an acre of hedge- and weed-infested land, mixed the ashes with a prodigious amount of manure, and created an oasis in a rock-strewn mountain pasture. Now, season after season, he walks down the hill with an old, white German shepherd by his side—he named her Pretty Girl—and does battle with the things that would take it all away: a blight that appears overnight like a bad dream; and hungry insects, some he cannot even name. The old dog watches from a cool place in the dirt, and when thunder sounds in the distance she steps in front of my brother’s tractor and will not move, to tell him it is time to go in before the lightning gets there. A good dog will do that.
Because, you see, there is more than science at work here. He knows the science, the nature of the soil, how to plant—how far apart, how deep—and the hybrids and histories of seeds. But there is also magic—what some folks call folklore—that must be considered, like the singing of frogs, the stages of the moon. Most, I will never understand. For some reason, he named his tractors after family. The one called Ricky is slow to start, has a bad running gear, and its seat has
Similar Books
Mr. Darcy's Dream
Elizabeth Aston
One Thousand Years to Forever
Mary Moriarty
The Summer of Sir Lancelot
Richard Gordon
Scorpion
Kerry Newcomb
Flight
Neil Hetzner
The Payback
Simon Kernick
Satisfying Extortion
Natalie Acres
Hey Mortality
Luke Kinsella
Cat Tales
Faith Hunter