Magnolia

“Running Through the Rye”

Well, these would have to do. She wanted McIntoshes but they were dull and bruised, their skins should have been not just red but crimson and dashed with bright chartreuse, certainly not this listless maroon. She dropped Pink Ladies into the flimsy plastic bag one by one, and turned toward the oranges. For a moment she lingered over the brilliant mounds; then she laughed. What did she want with oranges from Publix anyway? Soon enough she'd be in the grove with every kind of citrus fruit within grasping distance. She swung the neck of the bag into a knot and went away to the first of the check-out lines. The man in front of her piled case after case of Coca-Cola onto the conveyor and then one small apple pie. She pitied his blood sugar. The back of his neck was bright red and seamed, the hair badly cut and growing out. It reminded her of her father's neck in the summer. She shifted weight, one booted foot to the other, and rubbed her arms. It was downright chilly in the store. Had they missed the memo about the high today being 40?
The cashier smiled at her and began swiping through the items. Bag of apples, two bottles of water, a package of Fig Newtons and one of Pringles. Enough to keep her from the munchies today and on the drive back home in the evening. The damned buyer--why couldn't he have given her a concrete time? Even in his emails he'd seemed fluttery and absent-minded, and this proved it. Not that she minded hanging around the house all day waiting for him, it'd be nice to walk on the property again, but she had things to do, like everyone else.

Groceries tucked safely inside one of the "green" recycled bags Alex had bought her, she walked out to the car. The man with the Coke and apple pie was getting into his own car in the lot, a shiny hybrid. She'd have pegged him for a Chevy or Ford, at least. You never could tell with rednecks now; some of the richest people she knew drove monster trucks and went mudding for fun. A bee clung to the driver-side window of her own Honda. She brushed at it and it trundled away. Her fingers were coated in gold dust. She wished they could mine bees for gold, then remembered that there was supposed to be some bee crisis anyway...maybe they would become worth their weight in gold, or honey. She slammed the door, checked the mirror. The parking lot was surprisingly empty for morning in a town of housewives. She pulled into the scant traffic on Courtenay and headed south. The town crawled by. She would have sworn this road became longer every time she drove on it. She hated driving in any instance; she missed the city with its public transportation and miles of paved walkways; she disliked the rubbery feel of her car's ancient steering wheel, the way it peeled and rubbed off on her palms in hot weather or when it rained. She cranked the window down and tilted her head, doglike, toward the keen November breeze. The ugly Catholic church slid by in a melting of gold and sun glittering on that awful geodesic dome. She breathed in deeply, nostrils flared, enjoying the damp, rich scent of weeds rotting on the shore to the east. That scent, horrific in the noses of foreigners and tourists, was one thing she missed in the city, where she was always far from living water.

The road curved away toward the west and narrowed, changing its name in the process. The buildings became sparse and plenty of land shone in between them. Grazing cows did not lift their heads as she sped by, pushing the old Civic to higher and higher speed. There were never cops out this far, she reflected, and jammed her foot against the floor. The Honda sped up, slow but obliging. The breeze through the open window struck smarting tears in her eyes but she cranked the window lower and breathed in hard. The scent of the air had changed from the heavy, dead smell of riverweed to a sharper aroma: scrubby and harsh and clean. The land smelled scoured, though she knew it lay latently verdant under its mast, pine needles and brush piling up in secret rich fertility. It had been a dry winter; she thought offhand that a fire would be a mercy. But there had been no fires so far this year.

The turn came up abruptly, and the Honda almost didn't make it around the curve as she jerked the steering wheel and herself out of the reverie. The wheels groaned against the sandy white gravel of the road, spitting up pallid clouds. She slowed to avoid a tall black dog that came bolting out from one of the sidelong homesteads. It barked, a low, coarse sound, and chased the car for a moment, then veered away into the pine woods which lined either side of the road. She slowed further as the end of the road neared. She felt reluctant to enter the property again, but there it was, the dead end of Pine Point, the ornate iron gate off to the left and its beckoning long stretch of hard dirt driveway. She put the car into park and went up to the gate, pushing its heavy halves apart just enough to allow the small Honda entrance. White dust came away on her hands; she wiped them against her jeans and got back into the car.

The house and yard looked the same; they would never change, she thought, rolling slowly up the trailing drive. The house was organic, born rather than built, the lawn overgrown. She could barely see the house behind the vertical canopy of trees, its grey-green paint blending into the pines, loblollies, and live oaks dripping silver moss. The more exotic trees, a silk-floss and a thorntree and persimmons, flirted with her eyes in the brilliant midday sun. She parked at the top of the drive and stepped out, grabbing the sack of apples. She fingered the key in her pocket as she followed the paving stones to the front door. She stopped on the porch, scratching flakes of paint loose from the dull red door--and dropped the key into the potted bamboo which she had left after the funeral, after the house's contents had been cleaned out, thrown away, boxed up and given to Goodwill or crammed into her own attic. The new man would find it there, or he would call her when he got here. Whenever that was. She stepped off the porch and loped across the lawn. She wanted to see the backyard and the miles of land, she was not interested in the shell that had been her home; the house was dead, now, but surely the land was still alive, even in the driest November to date.

There it was, the long backyard fenced in with more of the black iron, the weathered cedar picnic table near the south edge, the live oak strung with bird-feeders and lanterns and windchimes by her earthy-if-not-exactly-superstitious mother, their glass and wood and copper wires weathered and cracked. The St. Augustine grass had browned and turned crackly underfoot in the months that the house had been empty. She climbed atop the picnic table, dropping the apples, and shifted her weight from side to side as though she were on a ship. Her mother had never let her do this as a child, shouting that she would break it, this picnic bench that her father had built, did she want to break her father's hard work? She rocked back and forth, throwing each leg to the side, swinging her arms in broad circles. The cedar creaked under her boots. She drummed her feet on the tabletop, began a clumsy, shuffling dance from end to end. She would do a cartwheel if she knew how. She threw her arms in the air, closed her eyes and lunged, dangerously close to the edge of the table. She swayed. Her head tumbled as she tricked herself into thinking that she was falling.

And under the stress of her weight, so much more than it had been the last time she had longed to dance on top of the picnic table, and the heavier weight of twenty years and more of ice and burning sun and summer downpours, the cedar wood gave up. The tabletop cracked down the middle, and as she lurched one knee down to the bench on the left side, the table's legs splintered and crumpled, and she and the wood tumbled down onto the dry grass. Part of the bench cracked against her shin as she hit the ground. She grasped her leg, bunching up the denim of her jeans, and whistled. A small cut slashed across her shin, and soon there would be a beautiful bruise to go with. She pushed pieces of the ruined picnic table aside and stood, carefully testing her weight on her right leg. Yes, it would hurt soon, but not so much that she couldn't walk. She braced her legs wide and faced the stretch of scrubby woods beyond the iron fence. Somewhere a jay screamed. She closed her eyes, leaning on the back gate, listening to the air. After a few moments it became loud in her ears, though there was no note of traffic or people from the direction of the road. She heard the jay once more, heard small rustlings that were lizards and skinks scrabbling for somewhere warm to stretch out, heard a pair of mockingbirds and was that a cardinal? heard the secret sounds of trees muttering in the swift breeze, rubbing their bark and leaves against one another as though trying to start a fire themselves, to burn out the dead growth weighing down their roots. She opened her throat as wide as it would and breathed slowly, tasting the winter. Behind her eyelids she saw the forest before her as though each tree and bush and animal had a skeleton of fire. Keeping her eyes closed, she walked forward, pushing the black gate out of the way. She trusted herself to walk blind on the narrow overgrown trail which still wound through the brief patch of scrub. The smells and sounds of the air were perfectly familiar. She put her hands out and pushed forward, allowing pine needles and cones to scrape across her palms, scuffing the toes of her boots against knobby roots. She felt rather than saw the woods open up in front of her, a sudden marked temperature change as she came out of the closeness of the scrub. She opened her eyes. And there they were, the acres of farmland which lay broad and golden, sown with rye for the cattle to forage on during the winter. She didn't like it when northerners assumed that Florida had no beautiful foliage as they did; these woods and fields were proof enough to put that to lie. The scrub flats were dotted with Florida maples, hornbeams, and river birches, which were just beginning to show their lovely russet and red. Spreading from among the evergreen pines and oaks which still bore leaves and moss, the deciduous trees created a scene around her which was enough beauty for any Vermont denizen.

The scrub forest opened up before her feet, sloping away into the fields. She shaded her eyes as the sun glittered on the golden rye, then closed them once more. Untrimmed, cropped only by unmotivated cattle, the top of the rye brushed her thighs. She ran her palms across the rough tops of the grain, plucked a stalk and smelled it. Behind her lidded eyes sprang up a vision of herself at eleven, maybe twelve: running full-out through the thick grains, braid snapping whiplike behind her in air that held a frigid scent even in her mind. What had she been running from, or toward? Was it joyous running or a fearful sprint? What was in the distance, what lay behind? Her sun passed into clouds and the wind picked up, whippeting the grass, snatching at her hair, now chopped sensibly short. She felt her lips blue. She went forward through the field, prodding at the memory, trying to draw its threads together. Who had she been at age twelve? Who was her best friend? Who had braided her hair that morning? Who had thought that a plaid skirt and bare legs were a good idea in winter? It was hard to remember that far away, down the years and across, there was too much in the way, too many faces and sounds. She drew in a deep long breath, hoping for an olfactory flashback as the heady rye scent hit her nose, but there was nothing--a haze of childhood nostalgia, tinted gold and green and deep brown like the scrub, scraps of smaller clothes which smelled of the lemon oil her mother mixed with detergent, scarred knees and elbows, hair wet from swimming in the springs nearby. Where was the distinction? They could have been anyone's visions. The days had slipped away. There was nothing more in this place that had cradled her.

Why had her parents called this place Arden? She thought that it must be from the Bible, or Shakespeare, but literature was not her strong suit and had never been.

She reached the cattle pond which splashed across the northwest corner of this pasture. The rye was crushed down near the water's edge with hoofmarks and duckweed grew in clumps on the surface. She stooped and grasped a chunk of soil hardened by lack of rainfall and the hard freezes the area had been getting recently, and pitched it out over the water. It soared a little way, and then dropped near the pond's middle with a small splash. She brushed reddish dirt from her fingers and sniffed the air above the pond. It had some of the heavy river-smell, but mixed with the musk of the cattle who stared at her from the fringes of the water. One hefty cow nosed the sack of apples in her hand with a chilly wet nose.

"No apples for you," she said to the cow. She petted the cow's head, smooth and fawn-colored with an irregular white stripe running from one ear down to her deep chest. She moved her hand along the crest of the cow's back, rapping her knuckles lightly against the hard muscle of the shoulders. She resisted the urge to place one hand on front and back withers and heave herself onto the cow's back.

Somewhere her father laughed and said, "Cows are not for riding, Kora." His large brown eyes, like a cow's eyes themselves, winked at her in the air over the pond. The cold sun struck glints from his glasses, and his mustache was quirked up from the smile.

"Kora!" her mother called, faint and tired. "Leave the cows alone."

She swung around, toward the scrub, in time to see a disappearing flicker of her mother's long silvery hair, bright among the pines. She shook her head and slapped the cow's rump sharply. The cow whuffled, moving away toward the water.

She shaded her eyes, looking south. The house perched at the end of the long broad pasture, a toy at this distance. Discarding the view she walked swiftly, heading for the citrus groves which bordered the back and side of the house property. The scent of the fruit reached her almost before the trees came into focus: sharp, a flaring of sweet and tart, voluptuous. The trees were heavy, the lower branches dragging on the soil; tangerines were scattered across the pathway like jewels or the small bright balls they had used for drinking games in college. How had the neighbor kids not raided this trove yet? Some of the fruits were rotten already. She tore a hole in the plastic of the bag which held her apples and plucked a few tangeloes, a grapefruit and a navel orange. The bag was drooping under the glorious weight of ripe citrus; she retied the ragged edges together. She looked at the fruit in her bag and on the ground. She was not even a little hungry.

"Hello?"

She jerked and stumbled sideways at the unexpected voice. Her weight fell on the leg she had hurt in her picnic table dance and she winced, thunking down onto both knees.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I startled you." It was a man's voice, coming from...where? She swiveled and saw a large man emerging at the opposite end of the grove, nearer to the backyard of the house. He lifted one hand. "Hello! Are you Kora Crewe?"

She straightened, brushing the pine needles from her knees, and shifted the sack of fruit to her left hand. "You must be..." She winced slightly at the time it took to remember his name. "James Graves?"

"That's me." He smiled, slowing as he reached her, and put one hand out. She shook it dutifully; his hand was much warmer than hers. She felt the neat hard ends of her fingernails against his palm. In stature he reminded her of the Italian man from the first Godfather film, what was his name? She could see him clearly in her mind, the man Michael Corleone stays with when he flees New York for Italy. Don Something, of course. Tomas. No, Tomassino. Yes--tall, stooping shoulders, girthy, round anxious face. She shook herself slightly.

"I guess you need the keys." She fished in her pockets, then remembered that she had left them in the potted plant by the front door. “I’m sorry, they’re up at the house.”

He bobbed his head amiably and walked beside her as they went up through the grove. He said, "I noticed the old picnic table seems to have met its end."

"Oh yeah, I saw that," she lied blithely. "My parents used to have some trouble with the kids down the road...maybe they were trespassing?"

"I suppose they might be the culprits," he said, dipping his head.

She faced forward into the wind, deliberately. It had picked up as the day waxed, and it bit at her cheeks. She shifted the bag of fruit from one hand to another. They went through the black iron gate at the backyard; she raked the tips of her fingernails over the ornate molding, tracing the outlines of the ancient scenes her father had created in the metal. They skirted around the house on the right side and she moved ahead of him, up to the front door. She stooped and rummaged in the black soil of the little bamboo tree, then wiped the housekey clean on her shirt. She turned, holding it out.

"There you are, Mr. Graves. Only copy that I'm aware of."

He grasped the key and her hand with large, soft fingers. He smiled at her, a little worriedly, she thought. "Thank you so much, Miss Crewe." He looked around, up at the old dinosaur house, at the overgrowth spilling from every corner and niche of the yard. "I love this property, I really do. I feel almost guilty for being so glad you sold it...Didn't you want it, after your parents passed?"
"I have my own house now," she said. "This place just--I don't know, the property is wonderful, but it doesn't fit in my life anymore." Even to her the words sounded tinny and pointless, a hollow cliche.
`
"Ah." He smiled again and nodded again. "Well, my gain, as they say!"

She gave him a smile and shook his hand once more. "Enjoy."

He waved as she went away down the paving stones to the drive. When she rounded the bottom curve of the driveway and looked back up at the house the front door was closing. Through the tall windows which flanked the door she could see his large form moving into the dining room. She opened the driver's door of the Honda, she never left her car locked in this place, and got in, shrugging out of her jacket. She backed out into the lane, jerking the wheel to spit up gravel and a pale wafting of dust. It was done, it was done; she sank back against the head-rest of the driver's seat. Everything was out of her hands now. The land was already far away, the house diminishing in the rearview mirror and in her brain.

She knew she was supposed to feel sadness, nostalgia, sorrow for her lost childhood and the sale of her family's home. There was nothing bad in her memories--no molestation, no lies, no abuse. All that remained was hazy, rosy vagueness. She acknowledged some urge to recall what was, to recapture the sweet far tableau.

The road opened up in front of her and she shoved her foot against the gas pedal. It was time to go home. She glanced at the jacket tossed against the passenger seat. She wasn't cold.

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