Tall Grass

by Ann Pancake

She is born in tall grass there between the apple trees, them like crippled old people looking on, and the bugs looting heavy after she comes.  Timothy beards sloppy with it.  Their seed a dry seed.  Mother fourteen years old and this when it is mostly white men work the orchard, only a few Puerto Ricans for the dirtiest jobs and no blacks, but her grandaddy watches her close, though she grows up rust-colored like the rest. A rust-speckled enamel.  Sweat bees, bottle flies, wheeling away from the mess in the grass with her birth on the bottoms of their feet. 

Fried sour apples and canned meat she remembers earliest, the shanty a kerosene throat gob of a winter. Come summer, she plays in the peach rot in the corner of the packing shed while her mother bags, winesaps rumbling the antiquated conveyor belt, and the women laughing full from their throats. Let’s get it in high gear, this from Mister, but the women just crow, and it is only Ervin, locust husk on a high stool, who mutters and bulls.  There she learns bees.  Her lip stung and her crying obliterated in the ungreased gears and the apple chutter and the hoots of the women, her lip ballooning to fill the rafters.  Busting past those to rub the clouds. Later, in early winter, she will squat whole afternoons in a forgotten crate along one of the orchard rows.  Frost smoking mysterious off petrified grass, the grass, she sees, in clumps thrown forward, like women with fresh-washed hair, forward thrown in clumps. Heaved like that.  And the deer in the distance trodding this hair tender.

Teenage 1970’s and the migrants, Puerto Ricans and Jamaicans, African big-bundled heads walking rigid-backed the shoulders of the county road under the drench of an Appalachian August night sky.  The brown people get shanties like hers, but the black ones are put up in abandoned schoolbuses, and the scent from the dining hall a foreign breeze so much more complicated than salt, black pepper, and pork. She stands the edge of the lot, breathes it before heading home. Thirteen, she is packing now, and Angelino rides to the shed on the flatbed behind Mister’s tractor, Angelino pulling the crates, ball-muscled in his arms, and flinging fruit on the line. 

Conceived, then born, she reconceives in tall grass, her Angelino kneading her between the legs, speaking surf in her face, rolls out and sprays. He has come, he tells her, across an ocean, and an ocean is something she will never see. This on Sunday afternoons, her grandaddy not letting her out after dark.  Unromantic dog day sun, the grass bleached and the bees bad in their wet. Her creeping to the little creek in the hollow seam after it’s done, lying full-length in knee-deep water and glad to take stones in her back.  And she reworks it in her head until she reaches a point between a weeping and a come, which she will know no better than the ocean. 

Her mother a grandma at twenty-seven, her own a great at forty-two.  Her grandaddy has raised two generations, but balks at three, and the old man, Ervin, agrees to marry her with a television thrown in.  Shocking handsome by three years old, her son is dark, curly-headed, looks like none of her people, and she calls him Angelino, but the old man calls him Karl. The old man rubs his infant skin at night with Ivory soap, wishful at making it lighter.

In the early ‘80’s, the orchard bankrupts and the shanties are empty year-round except those of the whites who have no place to leave to. Lush apple waste, the trees untended, unthinned, but still sapping, budding, blooming, swelling, to shrivel knot-hard on branches or rot and smear in the grass.  Deer ranging bold, and the yellow jackets, delirious. Her mother by now has taken up with a chicken catcher a county over and appears on holidays to straddle the front stoop and cuss the out-of-state tags driving dirt in the shanty as they pass up the hill to their new weekend homes.

The other children come rust-haired and speckled like herself. Her forced to sleep between the old man and the wall, a familiar old-people odor of stalish urine and a yeast unwashed.  And her life a weight, thrown again and again, against that wall.  One weekday in January she must escape the house, the little ones intolerable fussy and the woodstove stoked like Satan.  She bundles them and goes, Angelino with the three-year-old by the hand and the baby smashed across her chest, riding sidesaddle the fourth in her belly. The cloud cover is a patchy flannel, and the sun, straining from the far south, falls through in tired pieces.  Above, the weekend homes castle the ridge among acres of uprooted fruit trees pitched in heaps to die. She drives her children ahead of her to an interruption in the grass.  The tall grass, winter-blonde and humped, abruptly close-cropped and brittle.  A lawn. Mama, can we see inside?

Finding a chunk of limestone smaller than her fist, she shatters a rear window, bloodying her knuckles a bit.  Works out the shards with her coat doubled over her arm, and then she boosts her Angelino through. He meets them at the front door and every footfall on the plush rug is a gasp, a pleasure, under a gallery of self-photographs the second-homers have hung.  The chocolate pie they discover in the refrigerator is missing only one piece. She feeds them from a single spoon, deciding dirtying more would be bad manners, while each weekend face beams from the wall. And between turns, her babies wallow, luxurious, in the cream carpet.