This Busted Up Thing
When I am working on the farm, I think of the ancient Confucians more than I ought. In early Confucian tradition, it was understood that the body and life you have is a gift from your ancestors. This of course explains much where Confucian expectations of filial virtue are concerned. After all, having a life and body constitute a significant sort of debt to discharge. Filial deference and gratitude seem a tricky business to me – hard to do when you’re the younger, nice to get when you’re the elder. It’s a virtue I like more for my daughter than for myself. But it does seem right to me that there is something rather more collective than individual in the way that we are made.
Before there was ever any “me” to speak of, there were the people who combined to produce me. This is a truth told all over my body. I have my grandmother’s neck (and should, by rights, add “alas” here since she would). I have my other grandmother’s German hausfrau frame. I have my father’s bad feet, my mother’s high cheekbones, my grandfather’s twitchy legs, and blue eyes descended from a whole tribe of blue-eyed people. I even carry traces of those who died long before I lived, or so I have been told. That the lid of my right eye droops is what my grandfather called the Pentecost Eye, a bit of bodily glitch passed down from ancestors named Pentecost, people who reside several gnarled generations back in family history. Sometimes I fancy myself like a car cobbled together out of spare parts, a bit of him, a bit of her, and a bit of those from way back when. The Confucians would have me understand those parts as held on lease, features not quite mine since they are also and more fundamentally ours, my family’s.
In early Chinese tradition, one of the filial duties was to return your body to the ancestors as they gave it, whole. Having been given the gift of one’s bodily self, treating that self carefully was the least one could do – not for the filial any crimes that would in ancient China get you punished with an amputation, nor would they have a taste for tattoos or other voluntary and permanent alterations of one’s physical, ancestral landscape. It’s this bit of Confucian filiality that most snags my thoughts when working on the farm. For it seems to me that taking on the family farm, keeping it whole and in the family, is surely the most filial thing I’ve ever done, yet it is also and at once what surely condemns me to delivering on death a far more wrecked body than I would otherwise give back. I come to think in fact that my ancestors may be different than all the rest. I imagine them a special tribe of Ozark Confucians, their version of ancestral bequest the gift of a body and also the gift of a place to ruin it.
***
I have not worked the farm long, but already it tells upon my body. I no longer wonder why all those old men at the feed store trudge in from the parking lot with a gait all stiff and stoved up. The trip into town does that to me too. Sitting in the truck after being upright and on one’s feet in labor feels like rest until you try to walk again and find every joint protesting. Too many things the farm requires are like this – fine while you are at them but unmerciful if you stop. I have learned not to sit unless I’m ready for the aches and pains it will awaken. But worse than this are the inevitable injuries.
I broke my toe by dropping a telephone pole on it, the pole too heavy to lift but still I tried because it would have made a sturdy cornerpost for fencing. I mildly electrocuted myself trying to repair some busted wiring on an old workhorse cart. I have stumbled in the dark against a boulder in the rain. I laid that time in agony so long that when I finally stood, I could not tell if it was rain or blood I felt then running into my boot. As it happened, it was both and the scar this left behind works as a reminder not to dash through rain in dark, but just get wet instead. Weather is a general challenge, as the chilblains in my hands can now attest. At least these only bother in the cold and mostly leave me be. More persistent and abiding are the pains I carry in my wrists. Too much wrangling this or that has left them permanently frail, though at least for this I can in part fault my academic job. For a life of lifting and a life of typing are a mix to make a mess of wrists. Worse still are my congenital vulnerabilities and my inability to guard against them well.
I am allergic to the stings of wasps, but wasps can’t always be avoided. I’ve been stung while repairing the metal sheeting of the barn, a job that had to be done, the sting a peril necessary to court. I’ve been stung while moving timber, disrupting a nest where none by rights should be. I’ve been stung while brushhogging out in open pasture – that time a winged little bastard dealt me the blow just because I happened to pass by him. Each one induced fine swelling, for at swelling I excel. Most of these I just endure, but I have also learned that stings are not all alike. Some venom is more potent, some strikes more prolonged, some stingers imbued with an extra bit of irritating filth. The worst send me to Urgent Care for a round of steroids and a chance to awe the doctor. When last I went, she marveled, “What is all of this?” And then commenced a recitation of all she saw upon my arm: sunburn of course and sting, but also a lacework of punctures and deep lashes acquired in cutting thorn trees, along with two circular blistered burns from torching what I’d cut. (If a bit of ember lodges near your elbow, best not to close your arm in reflex from the heat, for this will make two matching burns, each a mirror of the other.) Oh, and poison ivy, she observed, you have a bit of poison ivy starting. This last alarms me in a way that little else will do. I have a talent for poison ivy rashing and in this I seem unique. No others in the family seem afflicted as I am. Or if they were, the affliction they have left me lodges forgotten far up in the family tree. I’d like to blame the Pentecosts, for it was one of them who had me at my worst with it.
Farming is not all labor to productive purpose, at least as mine have always done it. My great-grandfather sacrificed a healthy grazing pasture just to make a ball field, one uncle periodically turned scraps of wood and metal into sculpture, another built an entire replica frontier cabin, complete with outhouse. Sometimes, in short, we lark in follies, undertaking work where none is strictly needed. This family tendency explains why my brother and I conceived a wish a few years back to unearth the cistern dug by my great-great uncle, Johnny Pentecost, a cistern, as it happens, surrounded by an overgrowth of poison ivy.
Without a well, a cistern is a useful way to collect the water that you need, but once the need has passed, an open cistern becomes a peril. A cemented hole more than a dozen feet deep becomes a hazard when weeds and brush quickly come to cover where it sits. So too, a hole that deep is not a thing to waste in a rocky land like ours where holes are dear because they’re hard to dig, so mine have always used their disused cisterns as a place to put what trash we cannot burn. This makes them archaeological in their way, their contents modest artifacts of what our family once had and used, and then discarded. This is how my brother and I developed a desire to excavate Johnny Pentecost’s cistern. There are other cisterns on our land, but Johnny’s personality entire was quite suggestive, him the sort one might expect to fill his cistern with the bones of enemies or at least some fine old bottles once he’d drunk them dry.
Johnny Pentecost arrived in the Ozarks as he fled the law and crossed the Mississippi to give them the slip. Just what he’d done to put the law on him, I’ve never heard it said. But he drank hard and apparently fought harder. He claimed he’d once shot and killed a man who tried to part him from horse and his back bore scars from fights pursued not with guns, but knives. He came to live where he did not because he bought the land but just by squatting there, setting himself up on what was someone else’s. Once he was thus established, the owner decided it was prudent not to press the point. When government aid came to the Ozarks during the Depression, old Johnny was known to be creative in counting what livestock were his. The first time the government agent showed up to take a head count of Johnny’s stock, he had all his own there for the counting. When Johnny found out that fewer stock would bring in greater aid, he concealed some of his for the next counting. A little money on the dole was good, more money on the dole was better, and no need to be over-precise in measuring what constitutes one’s state of want. Despite all of this, Johnny was not wholly without religion. By his own account, he had read the Bible seventeen times, but about this he avowed that he “just couldn’t live it.” I’ve always felt a special affinity for Johnny Pentecost and not only because I have the Pentecost Eye. I haven’t read the Bible seventeen times, but I can’t live it either.
In preparation for our excavation, my uncle mowed all that sat around Johnny’s cistern. In this, he cut the poison ivy there, but don’t mistake that for a good. It meant we did not see it and cut poison ivy leaves stubs raw and wet, its irritating oils uncontained and oozing freely. In the days that followed, my brother and I dug out the earth that covered in the cistern and in the process bathed ourselves in oil. By the time we reached the bottom of the cistern and knew that Johnny left us naught, the ivy had already done its worst.
On me the poison ivy worked like plague and I was left a month entire to suffer, my body a contamination of itching and the bone deep aches that itching made. Any touch of sun or heat was unbearable. I laid indoors all daylight hours, making a tormented study of the rafters in my room. Neither could I sleep, not just for itching but for the wakefulness so many steroids will induce. Restless every night, I took to driving through the dark just to feel the air upon my skin. When I could drive no more, I’d finally park my truck in a broken little town nearby – the town as desolate as me, its buildings mostly hollowed husks, its hundred souls asleep. Too tired to drive on and naught else to do, I made a study of the feral cat that nightly stalks those streets. It was in the distortion of this time that thoughts of my filial predicament most began to rise in me.
***
Awake while others slept, my skin a hairshirt I could not remove, I thought more provokingly of bodies than anyone ought to do. I assigned to Johnny Pentecost a malevolent haunting nature. I imagined his ancestral Eye cast upon my sleepless, itching own, and his would glint with mocking laughter. Not for him unnecessary labor undertaken on a lark. And so not for him any pity for my plight. He came to feature in my mind as one who would make sport of others’ pain, especially such a self-inflicted, foolish kind. If you’re dumb enough to dig for treasure in the cistern of welfare cheat and squatter, you deserve whatever tax in pain you later have to pay. We were not so alike after all, me and that vengeful dead sadist. Compelled to look for pity elsewhere, I’d find it in myself.
Self-indulgent and dramatic in my misery, my mind would travel the dark road back toward home even as I sat parked on the dark street. Perhaps, I thought, I will go to the graveyard and just lay now upon my grave – like all my living kin, I have one there just waiting for the day. I could cast my tortured body down and let the ancestors have it back, blistered and early. Perhaps I would hurl curses all the while and reproach them for what they left me. More likely, I would hope they’d deal me a bit of sympathy and take me into their worn out, tired company. These ancestors knew both work and what it meant to stop. I wagered none of them liked Johnny either. Together we might rest atop that rocky hill and from its height we could in utter idleness just watch the farm go wild. Its pastures and forests would soon be overtaken by all we had each, in each our turn, tried so hard to resist: thorn tree, wild rose, thistle, buckbrush, knapweed, Johnson grass, and gooseberry, relentless problems all. The landscape would finally and at long last be left alone to tend the ways it wants to tend, ourselves free but to bear witness and without the fight, the way one can with troubles not one’s own. But in the prospect of such imagined and complete relief, my thoughts would turn, as distorted thoughts will do, and I would fancifully imagine the farm entire in a singular compression of its past and populated all at once by all whom it had injured.
Babies died there, their mother, my great-grandmother, a bit more dimmed each time in these accumulated sorrows. In the farmhouse bedroom, my grandparents had sat awake when one of theirs had almost died. Somewhere along the lane, my mother lost a toe when she was only tiny – never for her any sandals that would betray the fact. Then there is the barn where many slowly wrecked their hands in years of milking. And out beyond the barn stands ground that carried the current of lightning through my grandfather and this had happened more than once. Somewhere runs a stretch of fence near which he accidentally opened his own leg with an ax. One hillside had my uncle flip the tractor and dive away to merely bruise before it crushed him, a tale he told me once in caution. And up another hill stands the gate where that uncle one night shot himself and died, that spot of concentrated pain the greatest of them all by far. Some places on the farm are worse than others but I did then come to expect that over all of it, the place entire, stretched generations of our aches and pains: whole crowds of cuts, punctures, stings, burns, bruises, fractures, entire fields of wounds and, sometimes, shattered hearts. I would then wonder where on the farm I might find a place where none of mine had sometime hurt. I doubt such a spot exists.
To imagine all that hurt and all that hurt at once is quite the trick, a transformation of the place. Maybe this is, by better rights, the real ancestral landscape, the great collective injured, aching body, the place itself but one accumulated howl of agonies unending. Unless of course some one of us should make an end and shuffle off that land of sorrows, just call it quits: If the landscape is our pain, it’s a pain we could sell off at auction. I marveled then that none had done it, at how all had held it fast. In some romantic cast of mind, this might bespeak a familial resolve, ourselves made noble in endurance. But that is not my cast of mind as I sit wakeful through the nights unending, made half mad with itching. I expect instead no one of us can at last and finally begrudge what it will do to us, for we all are snared by our collective suffering. Each individual body will give and give because those others gave theirs first. And then, but only then, when one body is exhausted, the generation next will lay what’s left among the rest, the bones themselves absorbed along with all the others. To keep my body whole would be, I can’t help but think, to make it also lonely.
I never could get past this, parked and itching there upon the quiet street. My thoughts would stall on just what it could mean, for me and also for all of us, both the living and the dead. Soon enough the feral cat would grow restive, a sign of dawn’s approach. He wants the mourning doves now stirring in the growing light. They have made a dovecote for themselves in an empty building, that refuge for the doves also a treasure for the cat. He wants to kill those doves, but they are also many. Because I could not stand the light, I’d point my Eye homeward and leave before what happened next.
September 2019
