Fruits of the Frail [2010]

Why you talking about old shit?

“You’ll be best to sit along that cold basin, my friend.  The river’ll turn over, passing you.  Just sit there’ shivering, squirming, sinking – waiting for the next morning.  Right here, less you don’t want my daughter, such precious flesh.”

The fat man called 'Pa' stood there in front of Daniel as he sat on the old stool, thick of the river passing behind them.  Patches of clover remained untouched, growing in clumps about them.  No one would pick those things; this the garden.

Pa's fat belly pressed his overall straps, stretching with each breath and each word was a bit toward another snap.  On the way over, when he dragged him off to this pace, he saw the fat man’s ankles bending beneath him, the leaning tower from all those postcards.

“I’ll tell you this much:  Those pants of yours will rot straight off your behind by the time it’s up, that stool there just barely sticking outta the ground, like a wheel on its side.  Boy’ll be out each day with a bucket of fish from the long part of the river.  Grab the fish and relieve yourself in the bucket.  Sit back down and wait.  It’s all for you.  Reach for the passing stream when you’re thirsty.  Your face’ll grow long and we’ll need shears to recognize you.  There’ll be a night of snow.”  The trail took him back through the woods to the small house with the carved window, belly sloshing and testing those straps with each step.

Waves of uncaught fish swam along before him but he couldn’t reach.  One of the servants, a black mute, cut the field down early that morning.  The bare basin now, summer a week gone.  When the little boy came with his bucket, he asked how many days it’d be from then on.

“Ninety-nine I suspect.”  He was no choir boy.  “They paying me a quarter a day they said.  Gave me about half yesterday, said if I didn’t see it through, they’d take it all away and I’d get the switch.  Yesterday’s the first I worked off, catching all these fish while you lay there in bed with your head wrapped like the mummies from the market comics.  My math says it’s ninety-nine more days to go for you.”  The boy checked a polished watch from his work shirt’s front pocket.  He was covered in dirt and handed over the bucket.

“Well there young man, I thank you.  Helps me to draw lines in the soil or build a stack of clovers; even throw a blade or two into the stream each day while I watch the field grow so tall as I sit here, sinking.”  With a turn, the boy checked his watch again.

“Sir?”

“Yes, boy?”

“What’d you do for this predicament?”

“All by that girl.”

The boy grabbed the bucket before he could finish, rushing off through the woods, avoiding the switch.  The black mute’s head turn as he passed, turning back to take down a tree.  The bucket swung with the boy’s run, shards of grass sticking to the dents in the tin, swaying.  The field dyed orange when the sun fell behind him as his hands plunged into the bodies of the cold fish.  His thoughts turned to virginity when he took the first bite and his eyes closed tight.

“I don’t know the exact way it started.  I recall sneaking up to her bedroom late one night, the stars stuck in black places.  It was to be like that story of the long-haired girl; man came straight up her scalp.  I fell out the window when her Pa rushed up; scrambled and fell into the dark that holds the stars.

I aimed to surprise her, I know.  Kiss her awake with snowflake lips.  You know, just bring the winter months into her hands.  When I came to, I coulda swore that same dark witch from the book stood over me; thorn bush below struck and blinded me.  When she opened her black mouth to scream nothing came out.  They took me inside and patched me up, scarecrow man I am.”

When the boy ran back home, the bucket’s innards stretched the trees.  Fields finally starting to reach out for the sky.  The sun wiped dew from garden.  The boy didn’t come – two days waiting.

To sit by a field, some woods, along a basin, a river sprawled about.  To never swim or climb trees or even hide in the brush from the eyes everywhere.  Each day the house they lived in drew closer with the black mute’s work.  He could see the eyes of Pa staring out at him.  Waiting for a move, ragged chessboard of this garden.  When he stared back they’d wait a bit, those eyes and fade behind the fresh-drawn curtains.  They were so big, those eyes.  The kind that didn’t really have color, just big black rabbit holes set to small snow fields; impure blizzards.  They were the unset world; the balance back and forth; his pupils grew and shrunk as the day passed.  Pa?

He thought about theaters.  The folks sitting there without a peep, eating and watching the players, the hard work for a few cents.  Sprawled out to forget the day.  Sitting on the stool; sinking for his audience as parts of the world become giants, all along just wondering.

“Those two probably have a whole bunch of us out here.  Sitting on these milking stools, for what?  Some girl I met at market last week?  She let me kiss her cheek after I paid for her bag of oranges.  She brought me home and I sat at their kitchen table, it was so small.  Three old chairs pushed in with such care.  In the corner I saw a matching one in the corner, covered in dust, just some hand-marks stretching the wood.

“While I waited she cut up a few of those unmarred oranges.  No yellow rind; there was smoothness.  Perfect copies of stars.  The skin peeled off in a twister, squeezing the fruit.  Steel split the star and separated the universe.  I didn’t move.  As the halves split beneath the knife along the cutting board, I saw her move just right and knew I could sit there for the rest of my life.

Juice dripped onto the wooden board and sank right in like I’m doing in this garden.  Once the pieces came to rest on the board, she cut them again and the sky divided.  World after world, decay raising life; seeds sank to the floor and by then, the metal was tarnished.  The second coming – right there in the kitchen.  When it came to cool, she put them on a plate and brought out teacups with saucers.  The boil finished and she filled the cups, the steam caressing her face.  Mary, my Snow White.  There weren’t words the whole time, just tea and oranges.”

The boy was back, his face spotted in the deep of the fallen leaves.  Groves of bent oranges that crushed with each step.  He hung his head, coat stretched out - carrying two buckets and a couple of jugs.

“They paid me extra not to come and I took the switch trying to anyway.  I told them you’d get lonesome and hungry.  They said not to worry.  I brought you some fish I smoked earlier this week, that black taste.  Some bread and jam.  These jugs?  Whiskey and water.”  He took off his coat and handed it over.  They nodded as breath began to freeze.

“What’s your name anyway, boy?”

“Cassio, sir.  I hear them whisper yours some nights when the fireplace roars.  Daniel, right?”  There was another nod.

They sat together until the light fell.  It had been at least an hour and they felt the eyes on them.  Cassio set next to the bucket the whole time, not even noticing the smell, reclining against a few sticks, soiled by the mud.  When he was ready he sat up and grabbed the bucket.  He went walking.

“Tonight I take the switch again, but it’ll feel right.  I won’t miss again, not for no one’s money.”

When the stars passed the river slowed into glass.  It began to snow.  From the house he heard cries.  Not the boy’s, but Mary’s.  Her cries.  Pa groaned, it seemed.  After a few minutes it was all gone and the boy’s voice heightened to the choir as the switch painted strokes, screaming through the night wind.  There were no sobs from him.

It was his last, everything was so high and it was good.  He tossed frosted rocks atop the river, waiting for the sound of holes.

“These frozen things will never look like oranges, not when they’re perfect and round.  Not even when the orange is straight from the ice-box.  He saw the hot tea again, from his stool and watched his breath freeze again, the same dream that kissed Mary, a decade ago by now.  It reached out to no one, the cold.  The garden flowers, discolored and unnoticed were deep and long-withered.

The snow crowded the crown of his head, collecting, falling everywhere, holding the land.  When his eyes were opened the boy was holding his left shoulder, towering above him, holding a perfect orange in his hand.  There were no stains on his clothes or marks across him.

He was finally sitting on the snow, the powdered dreams becoming ice.  Each season guilty, reshaping the land into the beauty of its own desires, a discourse of canvas and spilt paint.  What’s left is forced into hibernation in wood or rock, sometimes taking heed of holes in the mud or in the ice along the stream.  This was the last night of life.

The black mute stepped out from the cut trees and with his hands, begged him to stay put.  He saw Mary and the fat man called Pa, he was holding her to him while they were clothed and Daniel knew they felt nothing of the cold, dead fish in their hands.

He didn’t say a word.  He lived those kitchen memories inside one last time.  Cassio’s orange split into pieces and fell to the ground, tarnished by the soiled snow; it wilted there.  He thought of the summer.

“This is what it is to be lonely.  This absolute zero of God’s winter, all of us frozen solid.  Here I am, here.  Waiting for this woman to rid me of this.  She won’t come.  They won’t come.  My wings agape.”

He stood up for the first night of his life.  Rubbed his hands together, took the wilted orange in hand and as he breathed life into it, he was off into the painted sky.  When he awoke in his easy-chair, graying hair covered his eyes, the world was still there, wilting and blooming.  Just spinning.