Horrible Harvest

I was raised on tearing things asunder.

Had a hand in it even ‘fore the war, and I carried it on after Appomattox took me out of my grays. That’s what you need to know on me. I ain’t good. I give it a try when I was younger, but it never stuck, and as an old man, I’ve just run dry on energy, and ain’t got nothing left to fight the world with. So, I let it roll by with neither fist nor bullet from me. Folks take it to mean I’ve turned over a new leaf. That I’ve turned saintly and charitable in my old age. Ain’t a thing further from the truth. I got wrath left to give. I just ain’t got muscle and breath enough to deliver it.

You wanna know the truth on it, I miss my rage. Mad me? That fella got shit done. The current state of me, the one with aches and creeks in his bones, the one with a sour belly and enough burn in his heart to melt a hole in his chest, that fella? He gets shit done to him, and I ain’t a fan of it. It’s frustrating as hell to hate the world as deeply as I do and not have the goddamn gumption to put it down. I’m hard on the inside, but nothing more than wiggly old jelly on the outside.

Most men my age got family to soften their spirits. Beyond the ones I was born with, I never found my way into kin. Never took a wife. Never give rise to offspring, and all the joys and cries that follow. It’s just been me.

I had me some friends. I did. Most was as low on the list as me. A smaller number were middling to better than average folks who give hand outs and shoulders to cry on to those in want of such lift ups. A smaller handful were downright angels. Fleshy housings of godly kindness that give out smiles and purpose to the desperate and hopeless. And I’d be pleased as a peach to tell you even a fraction of their ways rubbed off on me, but not a single speck of it clung to me. Fact is I’ve stood graveside for all their send-offs, and each time I felt a little less tethered to all the good they done and ever more bitter that the care they put into the wellbeing of others didn’t seem to make the world entire a better place. Hell, it didn’t even have a lasting effect on my little shit-chunk of a life.

My bad was an infection that ruined others. Even turned Felix to rancid ways for a time. He shed himself of my influence once he got distance from me and was struck dumb by love. He holstered his sidearm and pocketed his knuckles all for a plump gal by the name of Sally. She give him six children, and they give him twenty-eight grandchildren. Good times come with all of them. Tragedies, too. Some more tragic than others. Time will have its entertainment no matter how you treat and view the world, and nothing pleases time more than a man up against it. If God is curiosity like Momma said, then he’s curious as hell how far a man will fall before he finds the fury to beat boulders to dust.

I was shot out of the loins of a man who pounded granite mountains into deserts, so I come by my dispossession honestly. Horace Tennyson was the hardest man that ever lived, and standing under the blaze of the day at Felix’s funeral shoved me back to my days under his parental disregard. The three of us, Douglas, Charlie and me, we was all nothing more than fieldhands working his postage-stamp sized rice farm in the swamps of the Lowcountry.

Goddamn summer in Charleston is misery. It is hotter than hell itself. The heat competes with the humidity for supremacy. Sweat runs. Clothing clings to your skin. So much perspiration collects in your glands that your hands, feet, and face swell as your pores struggle to release a tide of the pungent fluid. Hot, heavy air invades the lungs like smoke from a brush fire. The midges swarm and nip and swarm some more, gnawing, biting, chewing on any naked flesh they can find. The unlucky, blood-drunk ones get trapped to your wet skin after a frantic slap while feasting. They collect there. On your wet skin. From a distance, they look like freckles. A day spent in the heat of the Lowcountry and you emerge a mottled work of agony.

This here was the formative brutality with which my youth was constructed. When mother nature attempts to bake, baste, and bite you all at once, you learn to hope for lesser windfalls. Surviving the rotation of the globe beneath your feet is fortune enough.

And surviving was not an easy task when you lived on the banks of the Ashley River. It was especially hard to avoid the grim reaper during the dog days of ’57. Like any other planting season, Daddy had us ankle deep in the slop of the wetlands, planting seedlings while the days crawled at a snail’s pace from the stifling heat of the early morning to the demon-cursed humidity of the late afternoon. Such was the life of a rice farmer. Bugs, snakes, alligators, God’s wrath, they all made our days trot along without an ounce of haste. We was nothing but slugs crawling across hot coal from one tick of the clock to the next.

Young as I was, I’d seen more than my share of time on a deathbed. I’d been bit by so many copperheads I’d built an immunity to their venom, or so Daddy used to brag to his drinking buddies. He left out the parts where he forced me to work through the fever and then sleep outside where I spent those evening hours vomiting and groaning from the fire-like pain in my joints. He’d beat momma silly to keep her from taking up vigil at my side in the creep of the bog that surrounded or little one room house. I hadn’t built up an immunity as much as he had built up a tolerance for my near-dying. Hell, there was a time or two where he had Charles and Douglas dig up a shallow grave for me at night and laid me down in it to save him from having to do it during work hours.

Momma done her best to be a tug to her husband’s calamitous fatherly instincts. She worked her soul ragged pulling us to her good-natured ways. Her life was a jumble of frets. She worried herself skinny every time dawn come, and we made our way to the paddies. She let go of the worry when our weary and broken bodies give into rest on our fluff of pallets she put together with chicken feathers and straw. They wasn’t comfortable in the least little tiniest of bits, and they was crawling with mites and weevils, but she cobbled them together over the years with bits of cloth and debris that accumulates on a homestead built up from mud, might and fear. While daddy’s boozy temperament kept sympathy skulking about beyond his dark spirit, her facility for disquiet left boulders of agony lodged in her otherwise empty, yet distended belly. She was fat with the constant unease of life, and her endless hunger to give it ease to her boys.

Me and Charles was only separated by a few years. We was as close as two prisoners serving out life sentences together. There weren’t no others our age within two-days ride from us, so we was bonded by a lack of options. Didn’t mean we got along. We fought one another two-three times a week, but we cared for one another nonetheless. He was what momma called a mild boy. Shy, stupid and sullen sums him up best. He was older than me, but I was always taking up for him whenever Douglas got his back up about some sort of nothing Charles done.

Our brother by half was a near perfect copy of daddy. He had years alone with the demon when his momma died, so more devil wore off on him than us. I tell you true I hated the fire out of Douglas, but I had a weird draw to him, too. I learnt from Charles that he buried his momma by himself when she died giving birth to his own dead-born sister.  He had to wait until daddy drank himself under before he took to digging because our monster for a father declared she was a waste of a womb that didn’t deserve no grave. “Let the woods et her up,” he said before tipping the mouth of the bottle to his chapped lips. As much as I had hate for Douglas, I knew he loved his momma. A thing like that gives you the idea that if he can love one thing, he can love another. A person who can love has got goodness in him somewheres. It was an idea that I’d lose faith in time and time again because there wasn’t a day spent on our little rice farm where he wasn’t nothing but a hateful cuss. I can’t put it no planer. Life was hell. What we spent on labors and misfortune come back to us in misery and more misery still. If it weren’t for the day we come across the advance man, our day to days would have eased on from our miserable lives as dirt-poor farmers to dead in the ground dirt-poor farmers some decades later, but the advance man, he got us off onto a whole different kind of hell entire.