The Great Upending

by Beth Kephart

  When?

  I try not to think that thought.

  I think it anyway.

  After

  Black smoke.

  Black char.

  Black clouds.

  Black earth.

  Black hay sticks.

  Black leftovers where the hay shed was, like the tooth we pulled from Old Moe’s mouth when he couldn’t even whinny for the pain.

  We’re not supposed to cry out here.

  We’re not supposed to feel what I am feeling.

  We’re not supposed to be afraid.

  Phooey

  Pile of lasagna. Three jars of applesauce. Charlotte’s preserves and Jane’s sourdough—their marriage made in heaven, like they always say, which they pink tractored straight to us, after the fire was bickered back and the goats and Old Moe and the machines were saved and the volunteer brigade did a last pick-through of the hay shed that is no hay shed anymore. We lost some breeders, one of them Hawk’s best bird. Hawk’s big eyes are full of hurt, his skin is smudge, he’s got Band-Aids on his finger burns, and Dad can’t stand, and Mom won’t sit. Mom just keeps on pacing.

  “Lucky, all in all,” she says.

  And doesn’t mean it.

  We’ve lost all the hay that wasn’t in the field and all of the hay shed. Every white wall on every other shack or shed is a charcoal mess and the house is yick, it’s top to bottom with the smell of burn. No money for scrub. No money for a new shed. No money for the hay we’ll need. Insurance takes months. We’ll smell like fire for a long time now and the pond is practically gone. New cash problems on top of old cash problems.

  We baled the hay when it was damp.

  Lucky, all in all.

  Charlotte and Jane didn’t knock. Nobody does. They just came in, an hour ago, fresh overalls on. They had two baskets in their hands and there they stood, congratulating Mom and Dad on the minimized damage, the good working plan. Congratulating Mac on the excellent condition of his slurry truck, him having water in there instead of cow poop. Congratulating Ruth and Michael for the water in their tank, and Isaiah for his ABC and his horse that galloped up the road, then trotted back and kept Old Moe company beneath the shade of the tree. Old Moe and the goats I saved. Old Moe and the goats and the birds and the pigs. Safekeeping.

  “Lucky,” Mom said. Her voice flat. Her eyes dark. Her mood black, though she was trying hard to see the luck in our bad luck.

  “Bread and jam,” Charlotte said. She drummed her chubby fingers over her thin waist. “Straight from our kitchen. Fresh.” She has white hair and a young face. Jane stands crooked because of an accident in a ditch and her hair is two long braided ropes, each braid a different rainbow color, and each braid never the same.

  “You’re—” Mom started.

  “You’d do it for us,” Charlotte said, scratching the mole near her ear. She’s a lady full of twitch.

  “Already have,” Jane said, “plenty of times and you’d never even count it.” She took Charlotte’s hand, maybe to stop the twitch, maybe because she could see how hard it was for Mom, standing there talking in the blackness of her mood, to get the two of them back up onto their tractors and home, because the sun was going down and we could already hear Isaiah and his horse on the long drive, heading near with his mother’s cheese and his father’s jars of sauce, and, after him, Mac, with his lasagna.

  “Mildred special,” Mac said, when he walked in, and we knew what he meant—that Mildred hadn’t fought our fire with her fire because Mildred is always afraid, has always been afraid, since she lost her baby kittens to a fox. Mildred never leaves the house when any danger strikes. Mildred says that she helps best through meat-and-pepper lasagna, and everyone tells Mac to thank her.

  “Thank her for us, Mac,” Mom said.

  “Try to eat,” Dad says now, to Mom.

  He finds a spatula and cuts us squares. We sit, even Mom sits, and eat off the flapjack plates that Hawk washed a minute ago. We eat lasagna with a side of cheese and another side of sauce. We save the sourdough for breakfast.

  “We’ll be fine,” Dad says, trying to help Mom, and what he means is, Tomorrow we get up and turn life back on again, which is one of his sayings, because it was one of those sayings that hang on the wall behind dusty glass to remind Dad, which is to remind us, what our family is made of. Dad’s parents died before we were born. This farm became his when he was young. He doesn’t talk about the hardest days. He just reminds us of what we’re made of.

  We eat.

  I look at Mom, then look away. She’s working on her mood. She doesn’t need an audience.

  “You hear something?” Mom says, and we all stop the half-heartedness of our chewing and fork scraping so that we can listen. Mom has the best pair of ears in the house. I have the second-best pair.

  “Someone at the door,” I second her suspicion. “Knocking.”

  “Strange,” Dad says, but there it is again, three soft taps, like someone who doesn’t know us, but everybody knows us. Mom gets up. She opens the front door. We leave the lasagna and cheese and follow, all of us smelling like fire and Mildred’s lasagna, which is garlic beginning to end.

  “Phooey!” Hawk says, when he sees who has come. “Phooey! You’re here!” His favorite bird, the smartest one, the best egg layer on the farm, the worst loss of the day, as far as Hawk had been concerned. Phooey is our prize Ameraucana. Lays her sweet green eggs in the cab of Dad’s pickup. Has more to say to the peahens and the guinea fowls than she does to her own kind, and now she’s here—inside The Mister’s arms.

  Because it’s The Mister standing at the door.

  His eyes are big and green and bright, and his cotton vest is red, and his shoes are red, but his hands, his face, his hair, his shirt, his pants are snow snow snow. He is a man built out of snow.

  He is at our door and Phooey clucks.

  “You bad bird,” Hawk says, and takes her gently, and doesn’t look at me because if he looks at me, The Mister will see how we are looking at each other with the secret we can’t tell. Maybe even Mom will see, and Mom’s mood can’t have cause to get blacker.

  “Hard day,” The Mister says, “for the farm. I’m sorry.” Like he watched the whole thing from his lighthouse, on his unicycle, circling around. Like he didn’t come to help, but he’s sorry. He looks sad and tired now, and I know what Mom is thinking. I know that Mom is worried that he’ll leave us now, that we’ll lose that rent, that we’ll go under even more, and that can’t happen.

  “Yes,” Mom says, putting her best face on. “Very hard. Under control now, but hard. Unusual circumstances. We hope… Get us some rain and the smell will die down. Get us some rain and—”

  “Just came to say I’m sorry, ma’am. And to bring you the bird. Quite a bird. Phooey, you say.”

  “Phooey,” Hawk says.

  “Best name I’ve ever heard for a bird.”

  Hawk goes red in the cheeks. Looks at me quick. I look away. I look back and now we’re all just standing, staring—us at him and him at us. His hair is like a snowdrift. His fingers are longer than fingers should be. His red shoes are very red, the red shining through the dust of the field he must have walked through, from his lighthouse to us, with Phooey in his arms. I notice speckles on his shoes now. I notice speckles on his vest. He sees me staring. Catches my eye and I see and don’t have to imagine precisely what Hawk said, last night, seems like a year ago: The Mister saw us spying. The Mister spied on us. Mom can’t know. Ever. Secret made and secret kept.

  “Grateful,” Dad tells The Mister, “for the bird. Real grateful. What do you say, Hawk?”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sara?”

  “Thank you, sir.” The Mister nods a little. There’s a feather on his vest. It shimmers in the falling sun. He sees it. Takes it. Stuffs his pocket with its silky threads.

  “Bird seemed a speck bereaved,” The Mister says. “Seemed like it wanted to go home.”

  “Best news of the day,” Mom says. �
�You finding that bird. You want to come in? Join us? We have lasagna.”

  The Mister shakes his head. His white cheeks turn red. He looks down at the dust and the speckles on his shoes. “Work to do,” he says, and waves one hand. He turns and leaves us standing there—Hawk’s chin buried in Phooey feathers, Dad’s hand buried in the smoky curls up on his head.

  “Let’s try to finish dinner,” Mom says, and that’s what we do. Phooey stays in the crook of Hawk’s left arm. Our forks scrape our plates.

  We eat.

  Nobody here wants seconds.

  The Thing About Seeds

  Dad says that, long time ago, this house was a barn, a place where horses lived and roosters, too, and goats that scared at nothing. After that it was Cow Central, and after that, generations of Scholls before this generation of Scholls turned the Cow Central into the house where we are living now—each generation making its own fix. Each generation turning, like Dad says, a house into a home.

  Home is where the Scholls are.

  I lie awake. I listen. I think of Molly taking charge. I think of Charlotte and Jane and Mac and Ruth and Michael and Isaiah, slurries and hoses and buckets, the volunteer brigade with the shining truck and the sound of the fire dying. I think of how the wind didn’t blow and that kept us safe and how Old Moe kept the pigs tame and nuzzled Isaiah’s quarter horse and how the birds screamed holy terror and Hawk couldn’t catch them, and then I couldn’t catch them, and how not all the birds came back on their own, especially Phooey, who introduced herself to The Mister. The Mister knows our secret and The Mister did not tell. We’ve lost half our hay and all our hay barn and we smell like smoke and our farm is smoky gray and tomorrow our life will go on, despite there being hardly any water now. Despite the fire stealing the water from our pond.

  Life will go on, Dad says. Every day has a next day coming. Words from the sayings Dad quotes.

  Next day coming.

  Sometimes, maybe, I’m not so sure.

  The dark air stirs in empty bowls. When the shadows fall, I can hear them. The pipes croak. I picture Dad with the big folds of skin under his eye. I picture Mom and the dagger lines around her mouth. I picture Hawk in the room beside mine—his flashlight on, his book opened wide, his pages turning, Phooey back in the breeder’s shed, safe. Hawk reads stories to make our real-life story seem less full of trouble than it is. Hawk reads Treasure Island like Treasure Island is our cure.

  Maybe believing and bravery are the same thing. Maybe I don’t have enough of either one in my blood. Maybe I’m not big enough to be who I want to be, which is a really super-strange thing to say, since I’m so very tall. I’m taller than Hawk and I’m taller than Mom and I’m also taller than Dad, and my feet are flat as flapjacks, and also, I have trouble seeing far, and pretty much too much of the time it feels like someone jumped onto my lungs and heart. They’ve got a name for this, and that name is Marfan syndrome. Marfan. It all comes down to glue. I’m a body built out of stretch. When the doctors tell me what is wrong with me, they show me pictures of my heart, then pictures of my aorta, then pictures of my aortic root. When other people try to guess why I’m so tall and thin, they can say the meanest things, even when they don’t mean to be mean, and I always remember what they say, I always remember how it feels. I remember, for example, this one time, when Mom and I drove all the way to the beach so she could teach me her favorite game of all, which is Skee-Ball, how we drove for hours, then we parked. We walked out on the boardwalk, saw the sea. We ate purple cotton candy and nutty fudge, and then we got in line for Skee-Ball.

  “Mom,” the little girl behind us said. “Mom. Look!”

  “Honey,” the mother hushed her.

  “No,” the little girl said. “Seriously. Look, Mom.”

  I hated that. I hate remembering it now, lying here, when my tongue tastes pretty much like fire, and my teeth do too. We can’t wash our hair. We can’t blow away the smoke. I can’t get the sad stuff out of my head, and now Hawk sighs. Clicks his flashlight. Closes his book. Downstairs, Mom and Dad shuffle off to bed—Dad in his boots and Mom in her flip-flops—and after a while this whole place gets so still that all I can hear is my heart: the spontaneous mutation in my genes, the problem with my proteins. The aorta in my chest bulges, like a fist. It keeps getting bigger; dilation is the word. One year ago, my aortic root measured 3.5 centimeters. Four months ago it measured 3.9. A bigger number is a not good thing. A bigger number means the tissue is thin and getting thinner, and my aorta could break, and after that, 98 percent chances are, I wouldn’t be here to tell my story.

  Three days ago, Mom and Dad took me to see Dr. G.

  Three days ago, I found out the bigger number is getting bigger.

  Three days ago, Mom and Dad and I got the news that I’m officially in the danger zone, and all of this was before the fire.

  We’d taken the long drive, the three of us. We’d left Hawk to take care of farm things. Dad had put his Deere cap on and Mom had pulled her hair into a pony, and we’d gone hours past white houses and silver silos and red barns and hex signs and a hundred years of rust in a thousand backyards that looked like mostly blur to me. We’d gone down a highway beside a river and then we’d turned toward the city and then Dad parked in the underground garage, the back end of his pickup truck hanging out like a tongue.

  We took an elevator that was built like a freezer to Dr. G.’s floor. We waited in chairs covered by zigzag cloth. They gave me that gown the color of kale, that belt the color of broccoli, and then there were rooms and scans and machines and techs, until finally Dr. G. himself arrived, with his purple tie and his kind eyes and his bad news, you could see the bad news in the kind parts of his eyes. Mom held my hand. Dad swiped the cap off his head. All the way home in the cab of the truck, we didn’t say a thing, and when we got home, I said, “Hey, you, Hawk, you like your lonesome day?” because what was I supposed to say?

  You’re so brave, the doctors say to me, but I’m not brave. I’m just a kid who has some problems with her proteins. I’m just a kid who loves her farm and the people on the farm, the animals and birds and even snakes on the farm, and, for the record, I’ve never seen a bear. I’ve got eggplant and tomatoes and lettuce and carrots and zucchini and onions and sweet peas and the start of kale in my garden. I’ve got a museum of seeds in the cellar. I’ve got threshers and I’ve got jars and I’ve got Mom and Dad and Hawk and us, and do you want to know the best part about seeds, the thing I know that helps me breathe when it gets late like this and I’m full of worry?

  Every seed contains the future.

  Every seed is like a promise we shouldn’t break. Every seed, and I’m lying here, remembering, staring hard into the dark until the near air breaks into grays and blacks and shadows and the shelves with their things are real to me, and I am real to me, I can’t help myself, I can’t stop myself, my mind is full of whirl, and I’m remembering.

  I am four and Hawk is three and we make a neat fit in the front seat of the Ford pickup, between Dad at the wheel and Mom on the other side. We’re headed down Mountain Dale for the Bunions’ fresh ice cream. It’s peach season and the ice cream will be thick with fruit, the fruit hard as ice until I hold it in my mouth and it thaws out and becomes tender sweet. And Mom’s singing. And we’re driving.

  I am five and Hawk is four and Old Moe is having a party. “Ten years old today,” Dad says, strapping a party hat to Old Moe’s head so that he looks like a unicorn now, but only for a minute, because the horse bucks and off the hat flies. Off Old Moe’s head and over the fence. It gets picked up with some breeze and then it falls and Hawk catches the hat with the top of his boot, like a horseshoe pole would ring a horseshoe, and Mom says that Hawk wins and we want to know: Hawk wins what? “Hawk wins the first piece of Old Moe’s pie,” Mom says, and it’s a really good pie, a summer pear pie, and we all have to wait, after dinner that night, until Hawk eats the first slice, which he eats so slow, in honor of Old Moe, he says, slow enough that Mom fin
ally says, “All right, Hawk. That’s enough. Now it’s everybody’s turn.”

  I am six and Hawk is five, and the yellow bus stops on Mountain Dale Road and lets me off at the end of our farm drive. Mom is waiting for me, and Hawk, too, a big sunflower in his hand to welcome me home, the bright droopy thing in Hawk’s hand, almost as tall as him and dropping dried seeds out of itself. “Sweetie, what’s wrong?” Mom asks me, because she can see my tears even though I’d tried to rub them off, even though I didn’t want her to hear what the other kids were saying. Hear it from me, which she will, if she asks.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom asks again, and I am not two minutes off the bus or ten steps down our drive when I start telling Mom the whole mess of it, how the kids at school were making fun of how tall I am, making fun of my long feet, making fun of my smile. I’m telling Mom through crying, and Hawk is pulling that sunflower behind, the end of the stalk dragging up dust, and I want to know why I’m different, I want to know if I’m different, and Mom says, “Why don’t we see someone who knows more than we do, and see if he can give us some answers?”

  “What do you mean someone?” I ask. I remember being that young and that size. I remember standing there, asking.

  “I’m thinking we might visit with a doctor,” Mom says, which is how I know she’s already given thought to it, the doctor part, that she’s been worried herself, that she’s been hoping for a why, that maybe I look a little bit like I need answers, and maybe Dad and maybe Hawk know it too, but none of them ever mentioned it, none of them wanted me to worry.

  I am six and Hawk is five and I remember, because this is how it all began, and I remember what the doctors said, one doctor after another until we found a doctor who knew, who would say the word “Marfan,” who would tell us the truth. Marfan is not a disease, it’s a disorder. It’s not one symptom, it is many. It is not a single path, it is not a predictable future; every person who has Marfan has a different life to live. “Ever hear of Sergei Rachmaninoff?” the doctor said. This was Dr. G., the one and only Dr. G. “The composer and pianist? Some believe that he had Marfan, and look what he did: used the length of his fingers to reach the piano keys that he needed, used the height of his body to conduct the orchestras.”