Seed

I would spend hours out among the collection of Arkansas pines that hugged the eastern edge of the property, breathing in their ethereal presence that seemed imbued with a bygone, forbidden magic. Instead of unloading the semi, assembling the dining table and chairs, doing anything to further the idea that you and I were now permanent, stationary creatures trying out that thing called domesticity, out there among the pines I remained, trying to decipher the undiscovered language hidden in the bark patterns, hoping to find the answers, a reason for our new life in the heart of the heart of the country. And though the house would eventually open itself to us, I would—selfishly, I realize now, no matter how much you told me otherwise—pass the time out there while you searched for temp gigs to tide us over until the farm was up and running, contemplating the chaos of the passing weeks, ignoring those to come.

What had made us turn away from the peripatetic lifestyle we had once adored? We weren’t getting any younger, that was for sure; you noticed my hair starting to gray—too early at 35, as had happened with my father, and his father before him. Now we grew tired more easily, had to take more frequent bathroom breaks after tearing through the tar-black coffee from those metallic urns in truck stops across the country.

It was in the middle of Wyoming, delivering derrick arms to the money-leeching, earth-destroying oil refineries, when we decided that the time to settle down had arrived. We were eating fish sandwiches wrapped in shiny, yellow foil when the spark ignited seemingly in unison, when we realized we didn’t own plates. We made a checklist of the things we didn’t own in the dust caked on the side of the truck, joking that it’d be easier to make the list of things we did. After that, after tossing those impermanent foil wrappers into the trash, we realized that the list bothered us, that we wanted Things. The list stayed glued to the side of the truck for the entire trip, through the Badlands, the eastern plains, and beyond. When we thought the rain had finally claimed it, we were surprised to find a superimposed image of the list, a ghost of it, like a grease-smear on a pane of glass, remained.

So we pointed at a map of middle America at random, started driving there without a plan aside from the macro version forged from our ideals, emptied our savings account, and bought the farm. We were going to start our own life of cardboard boxes. They were strapped to the back of the truck, which we decided not to sell until we made sure that we could handle our new life of stillness. The bed frame, the coffee table, a curio cabinet, (the plates, of course, which had started it all), each of the shrink-wrapped boxes stacked neatly on top one another like the puzzle pieces of our new life.

Our first week of “would you look at that?” mornings boded well for our new life of stillness. Either of us might whisper the phrase as we saw the sunrise crest over the pines. The sun was our only neighbor, our only friend. Sure, we had our fair share of early mornings in the past, back when we sliced and sutured our way across the country. But there is a special kind of dedication to waking with the same sun each morning, the same view. As if we had taken a new lover for ourselves, we would undress the scene from our picture window as we stood naked and unashamed in one another’s arms, until all its color was stripped away.

Eventually, we got around to building up the home, assembling the furniture, the bones of our new life. This must be what they call “settling,” but it didn’t feel like settling in the other sense of the word. With the steady build of clutter that four solid, immovable walls bring, a new side of our relationship revealed itself—a thing at once exciting, foreign, domestic. I knew we had grown to love one another in a more tactful way those first months. In some ways nothing had changed at all; we were alienated enough from the community we had moved into, so that out on the farm it could sometimes feel just like the old days, of knowing nobody, of feeling more connected to the wheels beneath us than to any person. The people we encountered—waitresses with tired, crinkly eyes, strangers buying groceries, walking to their rusted cars—were transformed to nothing but shades of humanity with whom we had little concern. The thousands of headlights and streetlights we passed on the interstate were barely comprehensible as belonging to anyone, of having any use except for our own benefit. Coming to the farm made us realize that each bulb signified a thing of importance, a complex collection of souls. We longed to join in the great mystery, to expand our world and come out stronger because of it.

And it was perfection, the trying, the building, our growing locus of comfortability. Something purer than love crept its way behind your eyes; I noticed it when I would pass through between rooms, or come in from outside—a distillation of emotions. Words alone cannot trace the meaning of those looks. To this day I try to decipher them like some philosopher bent over a dusted tome, in a tower on the edge of a planet made of living nightmares, the pagan words failing to materialize on my cracked lips. Alone, without you.

Root

We found an abandoned dog wandering along the gravel shelf one day, half-starved. We had always wanted a dog. No longer burdened by the fabricated rules of our previous life, it was all we could do to pick out a food that he might like (though he’d eat just about anything when we found him), a collar, a stretch of cloth where he could rest his head, though he often preferred to plop down wherever he pleased. We decided on the name Jerky—our good boy.

Jerky would go on walks with me out to the pines while you were busy with the hired hands, plotting the land, laying fence posts and developing crop schedules. We decided you would lay the groundwork, so to speak, since you were born the child of ranchers, and I would come in after, filling in the gaps, helping where needed. Part of me wondered whether you had always preferred it this way. On long hauls, I would always let you take primary behind the wheel. You decided when we would rest, what shortcuts might save us time, which construction zones might be best avoided. I’ve always been the type of person who, under too much pressure, is prone to implosion. You were the opposite, and so, why mess with the system now? Not everything needed to change, did it?

It was all I could do some days to trust in the creation of life around me; was that not what large droves of humanity did every day, those among us who do not question infrastructure, do not question what sacrifices had to be made to deliver mail, to take garbage elsewhere, to be burned sustainably? Jerky and I were at an understanding on our little walks. We each understood our place as we weaved ourselves between those ever-lasting trees as the system cranked away out of sight and mind. We trusted in your judgment, that you would speak were it to become too much for you to handle.

And yet, there were days when I had my doubts, when you would come back, covered tip to tail in mud, euchred by the weight of the day, and all I had accomplished was assembling TV trays we might use as we watched…well, we didn’t own a TV yet, did we? The wash of warmth in your eyes and laughter as you watched my pathetic ass serve you a quiet, distraction-free dinner of baked potatoes and hamburgers on our balsa-scented trays and pretend to click an invisible remote control at the papered wall told me you weren’t sick of the situation, at least not yet. I hope you never caught my probing eyes trying to catch you out of character. I never once did, you know.

Eventually we got things up and running and we were turning a profit through the magic of your level head and commitment to hard work. You taught me the life, the tasks I was to perform each day, the ones we would do together. Before long, as summer speckled our skin, the semi’s tires grew comfortable with the earth, and yet an unspeakable pact had kept us from parting with her. Jerky was getting rounder in the middle, and he could chase, fetch, catch—the trappings of his previous life melting away. Life is a resilient thing. Just when you think you’re down and out, it surprises you.

Stem

We loved moving our bodies, letting our legs carry us instead of the wheels of any great, stinking machine. By the end of each day we were collapsing onto one another for support as we changed out of our denim and into something more forgiving, something linen, something breathable, something not yet faded by the sun. We might walk the three miles into town and share a beer, letting the townspeople sit at the bar and give us their hushed mutters, muted between the clink and scrape of bottles against bar top and pool balls against cues, which we returned with our own. They had heard of us, the two men out in their strange corner of the country. We couldn’t blame them for being curious, for turning us into parlor talk, into living versions of Sodom and Gomorrah, but we, hardened by the trucking life, had learned to return nasty looks with even nastier ones. On the road that was how things worked. It was eat or be eaten. And so it seemed the same here.

Things might have ended differently if we had the capacity to change in this regard, allowing people in when it was almost like a phobia to us. Or at least it would have changed me, made what came easier to manage. Perhaps instead of sitting in a quiet corner of the honkytonk we could have sat right at the bar, attempted to strike a conversation with so-and-so, whoever might be hunched over a drink, made friends.

But we didn’t.

Would it have even made a difference?

I would still be alone, terrifyingly alone, even if we had managed to add to our social sphere. There are some gaps meant to remain unfilled. There was no changing that very real fact now; the daydreaming hurt more than the living, hollow nightmare of each moment. No, it was best to never pretend that I didn’t receive the phone call. It was best to imagine myself growing exponentially, forming into a star in the sky instead. So much distance between one of those blinking lights and the next, and yet seemingly no distance at all when viewed from humanity’s inconsequential viewpoint. So while there may have been someone to help me just a few streetlights over, or drinking alone at a booth in the far corner of the bar, someone to lend a hand, to push food into my mouth, to force the trappings of a good boy onto me as we had Jerky, the distance, the void, would have remained, like it or not.

And instead of attempting to shrug it off that night at the bar, I laughed at something you said loudly, that high, impetuous laugh that told you immediately I was showing off, the one I had perfected over the years. The kind of laugh that wasn’t an invitation for others to join. Your shit-eating grin brought about my actual laugh, and the two bled into a swirl of colors and lights as we got drunk enough to walk our way home through the town and onto the backroads, cursing the townsfolk and their sorry, swollen asses as we took swigs from filched bottles of lukewarm beer. We’d show them, every one. I kissed you under the moth-beaten streetlights in some quiet little neighborhood whose name has been wiped from my memory, our tongues crackling with the carbonation from the drinks as they touched, the faint sounds of the evening news bleating away from each little house on the block.

As we crunched up our driveway and finished our drinks, old Jerky came out and greeted us with a holler, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, what remained of his tail wiggling around like a live fish had latched onto his haunches. Jerky and my man against the rest of the world, trundling up the property against a blanket of stars, the distant pines like a smattering of giants on the horizon, sizing us up.

For a moment, in a swirl of drink turned sour, the trees did move, did inch forward toward me, maybe just one inch, or maybe seven-thousand and fifty-two—but it was enough—enough to magnetize that sense of dread that had kept itself choked down in the depths of me, to spin the compass out of control. The feeling crept its way down each node in my spine until I found myself drowned, suspended in the murky waters, nothing more than a confused, sodden, and worthless boy.

What had I even accomplished?

How is it that you stayed with me for all these years, when someone better had come along again and again, in each new face that smiled at you, each that turned back for a second look?

Without you, I am nothing.

Was I thinking these things, or were the pines whispering to me?

It all seemed so fucking hilarious and terrifying to me that I couldn’t keep it together anymore. Behind my eyes were flashes of all the life I had lived intercut with scenes of me walking deeper and deeper through the copse of pines. As I shrieked in drunken nonsense like a flock of gulls suspended at the shores of sanity, and you went inside to fetch a glass of water—for you had learned it best not to try and move me from my fetal position in these situations—old Jerky drooled on my pant leg, not sure what to think. He couldn’t tell if I was laughing or retching or sobbing either. None of us could. His tongue was still unrolled, his eyes a mix of emotions. Relatable, I thought as the vile fugue carried on as it did.

In the end, as it always was, you would bring me down from That Place. We sat along the old fence row, backs turned from the trees, after you had calmed me; you brought the wireless out and turned the knob slowly, testing each station until we found one that suited us—some local transmission playing big band classics. An old staple of ours. You were such a sly and lovely bastard, you know? We would listen to those tired songs, your hand tracing delicate patterns over the veins in my arm for what I had no way of knowing would be the last time, until my mind returned from wherever it had gone, that distant planet I kept hoping I’d see the last of, and yet never would, really.

Leaf

Now and then I find myself in the middle of life, none too sure I how I arrived there. I might be shaking hands with a banker, or throwing a few coins into the Salvation Army collection jar, all the moments leading to the action mysteriously gone. Did I even wake up that morning? Did the phone ring 39 hours and 27 minutes after we sat together listening to Chet Baker and accompanying symphony of bullfrogs? Is this entire thing a lie: us, the farm, the accident? Was it days or months since then? I can’t be sure of tangibility anymore; I’ve had it all siphoned out of me. Wrung out.

I managed to survive that unknown space of time after the phone call through the littlest of graces. I would go outside and look at a single blade of grass, hoping to see it move, grow, as if trying to trade my life for the magic of nature. Jerky would join me; something wet clung at the corner of his eyes now, though—was that always there? The tears told me he understood, that he missed you too.

When my hair grew long enough that it needed to be tucked behind my ears, I hacked it off with a pair of dull scissors at the kitchen sink one night. I was shocked to see all the strands that fell were gray, lifeless and wilted. I began to piece together the days by the physical changes to my body. To shave my face was three days, to buzz my hair to the skin was three months. Time slowly returned to me as if from a long vacation. Three seasons had passed, lost forever.

Jerky and I no longer visited the pine trees. I scolded him for wandering over that way each time we went out of the house. Not after that night at the bar, what had happened to me, to you. I couldn’t rid myself of the skeletal darkness that had replaced my reverie of that place; I had been tricked, underhanded. There was something of an evil lurking there that had lured me in like a will-o-wisp, only to sink its fanged teeth deep into my soul. It was shocking how quickly that which you once adored could turn on you.

I found the small secrets you had left behind for me throughout the house. Triangular claw-marks of ripped paper with words written in your hand. “Don’t forget whiskey!” one read, tacked to the fridge. “JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR?” said another hiding inside the bathroom cabinet. I unearthed the clothes beneath the bed we said we would donate or mend, the articles that had grown tired in the season we had spent together on the farm. I crawled inside them, wanted to live a collapsed and broken life as they had, so close to you until my own demise, one that seemed forbidden, and yet fair.

In my dreams we were together, back on the truck. It surprised me now how many dreams I still had of that life, of countless hours stacking like forks in a drawer I had tucked away inside the cabinetry of my brain. Sometimes I would dream only of driving, of up and downshifting without end, wordless.

In one, I was sucking at a large, syrupy drink I had grabbed at the last gas station we had visited, the kind that let you pump together different flavors into a calamity cola. The windows were rolled down, the howl of wind mixing with the radio mixing with the taste and aroma of every flavor of cough syrup simultaneously. You were saying something to me, but I couldn’t quite hear it. The wind was whispering directly in my ear—a replay of the phone call had replaced the radio now. The headless voice saying, through the garbled connection of our landline on the farm (the old rotary phone was somehow embedded into the truck dashboard), that there had been an accident, that everything possible was done to save you, and yet—

You were screaming at me, slapping my face with your words but I still couldn’t hear them, though they were all I desired, the only company I wanted to replace this god-awful looped phone call. The saccharine taste of artificial watermelon and sour apple was replaced by something dry and coarse as I sucked at the straw. Soil poured out of it, covering my lap, sifting down to the floorboard, tiny particles swirling in the tangle of the howling wind, assaulting my vision.

Oh my god, how you were screaming.

And suddenly the sound of bones rattling together, of something dry, wretched; that death moan at the end of summer. The scene had changed. We moved through the high cornstalks, now hollow vessels, and you were ignoring me, no longer screaming—in one of your moods, probably—and I was moth-filled and nervous, choking back the words I longed to say. Those words carried a mealiness to them, a litany that felt as forbidden as the quiet syllables uttered in the garden of eden. I had tasted the sour apple, and everything changed. You were gone, forever now.

But what were you saying through your silence? What was this dream disguised as reality?

I would never know, could only guess. Forced to forge my own path for once in my life, I wrenched myself awake in a cold sweat, dressed, and walked deep into the property to that familiar place, where the giants stood waiting expectantly, their long arms outstretched in embrace.

Flower

The day I buried the last of my darkness was the day Jerky and I visited you as we made our way out of town in the semi.

He’s aging early too, his ears tinged now tinged with gray. Maybe it’s you who aged me, maybe that’s how it works, and now it’s accelerated all the more by your absence, blotting away the last of my color, so that what remains is a tattered and gaunt and broken husk of a man, a cornstalk myself. But like the excavated cornstalk, I still contain the promise of new life in the coming planting season.

Your grave is out along the highway, chosen in another one of those moments that have escaped me now. I must have done it—picked your stone, a simple granite, your given name etched in strong, thick letters, the legacy of your life a paltry sum between the two numbers that signify your first and last breaths—but for the life of me I can’t remember when. Perhaps our good boy had handled things. We always said he was the best of us.

The place is beautiful in the middling ground between seasons. A fraudulent summer breeze in the air toys with the foreboding death of the gentle, rolling grasslands. Crops have been shucked recently, the soil loose and mealy, excavated. Along the fence line are the fossilized remainders of the summer burial months — artificial flowers blown by the wind, helium balloons sucked of life, American flags shredded to red, white, and blue ribbons, weaved among the pyracantha hedges.

Jerky runs out to the great walnut tree at the edge of the lot, sparked by squirrel or intuition, who’s to say. How I wish you could see him now. I try not to think of it too much: how your body is down there below me, your eyes and skin particles and ten toes and fingers dissolving into the soil, giving back—as was your way. I know it’s not really you, of course, and that the parts of you that matter have been buried elsewhere. I’m some shade of pragmatist, but these thoughts still haunt me all the same. I’m overcome with the notion to lay myself on top of you, so I do.

I let the grass bite at my skin, let it turn red with itch, as I take huge, lung-quaking breaths with my nose stuck right down into the earth, as if trying to reclaim the smell of you from the afterlife, the warmth you brought. The breathing turns to earth-rending sobs, turns to pawed hands clawing at the earth, turns to stars dancing behind my eyes, turns to prognosticating stillness. There I lie, six feet below you in spirit, inconsequential and nonexistent, nothing more than a dormant seed.

A century later, Jerky returns from his trip to the walnut tree; he’s carrying with him a little plastic rose. It’s for you, naturally. He brings me back from That Place through his damp nudge of nose, his tuckered-out little breaths in my ear. It’s much the same thing you used to do for me. My good boys, forever and always.

I pick the wet flower from his gums and reanimate the stiff petals into a true shape. The silk is of fine quality, barely recognizable as a facsimile. I place it next to the stone that signifies where your body rests, and return to the semi, firing the engine up and giving you a little farewell honk for good measure. I feel like smiling at the out-of-place noise, which is a good sign. I do smile, actually, which I am sure you are glad to hear.

I look to my right as I prepare to turn onto the highway and see the town that had so nearly been ours. We had more to learn before we could welcome it into our hearts, before it could welcome us, and our education had been cut short. Instead of returning to that place, I take a left, letting an open-windowed car pass by, the driver unashamedly craning her neck at what had to be a strange sight indeed, a full-fledged sixteen-wheeler pulling out from the little cemetery parking lot. I squint my eyes against the low sun as I begin my new journey.

On the bed of the truck, I like to think I am carrying with me all the memories of you, collected like cargo, though these deliveries are to be shared through the kindness I am determined to send out into the hearts of others. It is Jerky and I against the world now, and we each are hellbent to make it a brighter place through our loyalty and slobbers. I may need to do some work to get to his level, but I think you’d be so kind as to call me a quick study.

Truly, I do hope that I’ve succeeded in taking some part of you with me, captured in the chasms of my healing heart.

I pass by the old homestead for the last time, though the place is so nestled into the countryside that I can only see the Arkansas pines from the highway, that place I once deified and revered, and then feared and avoided. I know better now than to think of that place as an act of divinity, know what I left buried in that stretch of trees, what I plucked from inside me in the weeks and months after your funeral. I have my own roots nestled there now. Those seeds of germinated darkness I dared not leave to sprout inside myself, hoping against all else that they would be purified by the earth, stripped clean by the nutrients in the ancient soil, so that a sapling pine would one day form in your likeness, until, after years of support and shelter from its brothers, it stands strong and true, one against many against the backdrop of endless sky.