Whatever happens happens for the good.
Bean whispered, you could place your hand in a ripe fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon. He posed like a peacock, his wingspan electric, glorious in the absence of wings. The hues on his face shifting in snug sunshine. He said, “Whatever happens happens for the good.”
A SCUT OF EARTH BY ELIZABETH KIRSCHNER 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 93
The plastic on Grandma’s couch could almost be said to glisten or glow like the weaponry in heaven. Frictionless. As if slicked with some bottle of anointing oil, an ark which preserves the small and distinctly mortal dents the body makes.
We hold onto what we cannot hold. Adorn the sofa with Vaseline, or gold, or polyurethane wrapping. Call it ours even though we don’t own it.
Consider the garden of collards and heirloom tomatoes, Grandma’s long, single braid streaked with gray like a gathering of weather as she clucks down each row.
Grandma falls, her arm angled like a cellist’s, her fists in front of her face, like mine when I was born.
I carry her, a skeleton made of flowers, and put her down on the couch. She closes her eyes, sees a fecund emptiness. Grandma lying there like a still-life with a toy gun or the God of nothingness.
One night a deer sprang onto the road. Bean hit her, crushed her pelvis, but the doe, not dead, pulled herself into a ditch. Bean stunned her with a tire iron and cut her throat. I thought of St Francis, a wooden saint scooped of its life. I’ll leave less than this behind.
I press Grandma’s skin to mine—her fingers touching the crown of my head where I pray they remain during this life and into the next.
As I look out at the meadow below the house where the pollard willows gnarl, sip from the gnat-speckled pond, I think about Bean who stepped in front of a train. He roped his dog to a tree, tacking on a note that read “Take care of me.”
Does anyone else know that a loaf of bread and a dozen eggs was Bean’s daily breakfast? I doubt it. He was only five feet tall with a head soft as pate. Slim on brains, but I loved him.
Bean taught me how to run the chainsaw, to cut a key from a blank, to bust into a car without breaking the window glass.
He fixed slot machines and gum-ball machines, made mechanical decoys with pulleys and weights. “Zehr gut?” he’d ask and I’d nod, but usually I didn’t understand him.
When I was nine Bean taught me to drive. We cruised the corn stubble with our midget guns poked out the windows of the truck, his The Black Prince and mine Little Red Fox. My father put blocks on the pedals so we could reach the brakes.
We shot squirrels and ruffed grouse and when I shot a pheasant cock Bean had the feathers made into a fancy band for a hat.
“Good enough for who it’s for,” he said as he plunked it on my head.
Bean’s false teeth pinched so he didn’t put them in. His idea of a lady’s gift was a meat slicer. Who wouldn’t want to ponder a mound of pink bologna slipped fresh into an outstretched palm?
As a child he’d hitch his pony up, beat it all the way to the train to fetch the bales of tobacco, then haul them to the shop. If he dawdled and was late, Grandpa would unbuckle his wooden leg, beat Bean with it—never you be late again!
The deer wander the high peaks, rippling like figures underwater, like figures one dreams and forgets, shapes drawn and erased so only the pencil’s impress remains. As the air softens, the pollen powders the yard with its scented chalk, there among the decapitated plastic flora, all the bright junk that rushes to the pixelated surface in the final minutes before remorse douses the world.
High-tops on the phone wire already mortared, like crows. Roof rat in the plum tree, its intricate listening synching with the taps of woodpeckers, thin as language.
Alone, unwashed, I roam the house, tend to my grandmother, displayed on the plastic sofa, a sarcophagus. On my night-stand, the corpse of a pear, immobile as March. I shudder awake, no hint of who I am, go out to the dovecote, watch the birds, their tuff and lift, think about Bean. The blue ache, a sky all for itself. I feel how thin the lattice is that holds me, fretwork of rot while a gorgeous storm cloud layers in like oil. Bean whispered, you could place your hand in a ripe fruit and withdraw a beautiful afternoon. He posed like a peacock, his wingspan electric, glorious in the absence of wings. The hues on his face shifting in snug sunshine. He said, “Whatever happens happens for the good.”