by Ruth Ozeki
“Up—” I stammered. “Upstairs.”
He carried Lloyd quickly toward the porch, and I stumbled after.
The bespectacled man held the door open and cleared a path through the kitchen. “You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said, smiling. “I’m Daisy.”
We climbed the stairs. The kids held back, watching. Momoko was nowhere to be seen. She must have been hiding in the seed shed.
I had rented a hospital bed and had it installed in Lloyd’s bedroom, and, entering now, I saw that while we’d been in Pocatello, Cass had turned back the covers and found some cut flowers for the nightstand. The bed lamp cast a warm circle of light upon the pillow.
The tall, bearded man entered the light and lowered Lloyd onto the bed. My father’s lips were still moving. He opened his eyes.
“Lord,” Lloyd whispered, his hands still clasping the bearded man’s neck as he searched his face, “ ‘I am poured out like water. . . .’ ”
“You take it easy and get some rest now, sir,” the man said, disengaging Lloyd’s arms, settling him, then pulling up the covers. “You’re just all tired out.”
I watched the last remaining strength drain from my father’s frail limbs as he gazed adoringly at the face of the stranger.
“Y?” Cass asked.
“Short for Yeats. That’s my last name. First name’s Melvin.”
“Nice to meet you, Melvin,” I said. “Have a cup of coffee.”
“Just water for me, please. I don’t do caffeine.”
“Are you Church, Melvin?” Will asked.
The man looked perplexed.
“He means Mormon,” I interpreted. “Latter-Day Saints. It’s big around here. They don’t do caffeine either.”
He shook his head. “No. Life is my church. And if you don’t mind, I prefer to be called Y.”
I put a glass of tap water on the table in front of him, then poured coffee for Will and Cass, who hung back alongside the kitchen counter. Cass had brought over a pot roast for dinner, which was in the oven. I was hungry and wanted to eat, but the children were restless after the somber car ride home and hovered now around the edge of the newcomers’ aura, drawn to them. They were strange and exotic in Idaho, but they reminded the kids of Pahoa.
“I hate my name, too,” Ocean confided.
“Why?” asked Y. “Ocean’s a beautiful name.”
“Mom, can I be O?”
“No.”
“I want to be O.”
“Forget it, Ocean.”
Cass and Will sipped their coffees and watched the strangers the way they watched the wind when it turned, bringing weather.
“Yeats is Irish, right?” Will asked. “Like the poet.”
“That’s right.”
“Will Quinn,” said Will, holding out his hand, testing the wind’s direction.
“Hey,” said Y. “Fellow Irish. Right on.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Pick up the old guy like that. Carry him . . . you know.”
Y shrugged. “Used to be a psych nurse.”
“A nurse?” Phoenix said, disgusted.
“Men can be nurses,” said Ocean. “Just like girls can be doctors.”
“And men can be cows,” the big man with glasses told her pointedly. He came over to help me with the tea.
“Your name isn’t Daisy,” I said. He had a nice face. Buddha-like, behind his glasses.
“No,” he said. “It’s Geek.”
“I think I prefer Daisy.”
“That’s cool.”
Y was laying his rap on Will and Cass. “Trained as a nurse in the service and worked at a VA hospital back east. Then I met Lilith, and she turned me on to a whole new way of being. Things started to groove, so we just took off. Hooked up with buddy Geek here and went in on the Spudnik. Then Charmey came on board. Then Frankie. Others join us now and then. Life on the road, dig it? One big flow.”
I turned to check Cassie’s pot roast in the oven. I was looking forward to their flowing right on out of here, but Phoenix’s eyes were shining, and Ocean was entranced.
“We came here from Hawaii to meet our grandma and grandpa,” Ocean was saying. “How come you came here?”
“Are you gonna stay?” Phoenix asked. “You can eat dinner with us. We got lots of food, and you can camp out in the yard and—”
I spun around. “What the fuck, Phoenix!” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Everyone was looking at me now, and in a flash I saw myself as they were seeing me, wearing Momoko’s faded, flowered apron and brandishing a wooden spoon. Two months in this house and I’d turned into what I would have become if I’d stayed—a small-town lunatic housewife.
“That’s okay,” Y said. “We don’t eat flesh.”
“But,” Geek said smoothly, addressing me, “now that you mention it, we would like to camp out here for a while. We came here to learn about the seeds.”
“The seeds?” I looked around the room for clarification, but no one seemed prepared to give any. What do you do when a caravan of hippie activists shows up and wants to camp in your driveway? Cass opened her mouth, then closed it again. Will sat back and studied the refrigerator.
“We’re called the Seeds of Resistance,” Geek said, as though that explained something. “We traveled all this way just to meet you.”
“Me?”
“Not you,” said Y. He bowed his head. “M. and L. J. Fuller,” he intoned. “Seedsmen.”
“We’re on a pilgrimage,” Geek said. His eyes were shining behind his lenses, as though the contemplation of my parents had lifted him into a transcendental state.
“Why on earth . . . ?”
“They’re awesome!”
“They are?”
“Totally radical.” Geek pulled a worn pamphlet from his pocket and handed it to me. “Look at this!”
It was one of Lloyd’s photocopied newsletters. I turned it over. To Our Customers . . .
“Have you read it?” Geek asked. “This is like radical shit.”
“Yummy . . .” Will glanced over at Cass. “We’ve been meaning to tell you. Folks around here know about it and make allowances, but Lloyd’s been getting a bit carried away recently, and some of the stuff he goes on about is pretty nutty. . . .”
“Nutty?” asked Y, eyes still shut. “That’s a sacrilege, man! He’s totally profound. M. and L. J. Fuller are like prophets!”
“Prophets?” Will looked bothered, like he’d felt the weather in the room take a sudden turn for the worse.
Y opened his eyes and spread his arms wide, as though offering benediction to the worn tablecloth. “They are prophets of the Revolution!”
Momoko had come in from the garden and was hunched over Lloyd’s desk in the dark. A single reading light illuminated the desktop and the sheet of paper she was trying to read. Her face hovered inches above the surface. I walked up behind her and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“Lloyd’s home, Mom.” I fingered the straggling ends of my mother’s hair. And your daughter is having a nervous breakdown. And there’s a caravan of hippies camping out behind the barn. Oh, and you’re a prophet of the Revolution.
At least the labels on the furniture were right.
Momoko looked up and nodded absently but didn’t move. I patted her back. Her hair was thin, but pure, pure white.
“Come, have some pot roast.”
Momoko held up the sheet of paper and tapped it with the side of her finger. “Did I pay this one? I can’t remember.”
I took the paper from her. It was the damn gas bill again. I waved it in front of her face.
“This is old! I told you. It’s three years old. Look at the date!”
She squinted at the tiny print. “What date is today?”
“Oh, Mom! Just get rid of it!” I ripped the bill in half and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket.
“No!” she cried. “Don’t throw! Maybe we will need later!” She leaned over a
nd retrieved the pieces from the wastebasket, spreading them out on the desk and smoothing them down. Her movements were slow; it seemed to take forever. I watched, hypnotized by her trembling fingers, by the torn, jaggedy edges that refused to meet, but I was unable to move or to help or to walk away.
“Where is Scotch tape? You see Scotch tape?”
They were like birds now, her hands, as they dipped and hovered over the desktop, trying to find, trying to find. . . .
Then, with no warning, they fell to her lap. Shot out of the sky.
She looked down at them. “Lloyd is home,” she said to her old hands. She sat for a while, thinking deeply, then nodded to herself. “I make him nice pot roast. He is meat-and-potatoes kinda guy.” She stood up and shuffled off to the kitchen.
organs
He was there, the strange man who’d carried him. There when Lloyd woke, leaden, trying to breach the oily surface of sleep; still there when sleep pulled him down again into its cloying depths, closing above his head without a bubble or a sigh. All through the long night, Lloyd could sense the man’s silent attendance, and he was glad.
A seed shall serve him; it shall be accounted to the Lord for a generation.
When dawn broke and he opened his eyes and could focus again, he saw the man perched on the straight-backed wooden chair by the bedside, somewhat blurry in the gray morning light filtering in from the window that framed his head. The man was not sitting properly in the chair, Lloyd noticed, but balanced on top of it, cross-legged like an Indian. His eyes were cast down to a distance just short of the bed, staring at the braided rag rug, or perhaps at Lloyd’s worn slippers. Sometimes his lips would move. Sometimes his eyes were closed. Praying, Lloyd thought, and so he closed his eyes and prayed, too.
Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is none to help.
The door opened quietly. Lloyd kept his eyes shut, pretending to sleep. “How is he?” he heard his daughter whisper.
“He’s cool,” said the man. “Slept like a baby.”
“Is he sleeping now?”
“I think he’s awake.”
“Dad?”
Lloyd listened to her tentative footsteps approach his bedside, felt her peer down into his face, felt her breath against his skin. He opened his eyes. “What?” he demanded.
She jumped back. “You scared me. I thought you were asleep.”
“Then why were you talking to me?”
“Good morning, sir.” The man interrupted before she could answer. Lloyd looked at him and saw things now that he hadn’t noticed before. The clutter of metal rings that perforated his earlobes. The ratty dress he wore. The matted, fleecelike hair. Lloyd had shorn sheep with shorter pelts. And cleaner.
“Why are you here?” Lloyd asked.
“Because you need me,” the man answered.
“Get my wife.”
“I’ll help you, sir.”
Lloyd shook his head. He struggled to sit up, then sank back against the pillows. “Get Momoko,” he said.
“Dad.” Yumi was wheedling him now. “Mom’s out in the garden. Y can help you.”
“Why? Why what?”
“Because Mom is too weak, Dad. You know she can’t—”
The man cleared his throat. “ ‘Y,’ sir. Like the letter. That’s my name.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“It’s short for Yeats,” the man said. “But you can call me Melvin.”
“Melvin, why don’t you cut off some of that hair?”
Melvin looked up from the operation he was performing upon Lloyd’s naked abdomen, swabbing the area around the puckered stoma. “Would you prefer that?”
“I’m just afraid you’re going to get it caught in that glue.”
He glanced away as Melvin applied the adhesive to his skin and reattached the ring. His skin was like paper, and he feared it would tear, but it never did. He tried to avoid looking at the stoma itself. He looked back again as Melvin slipped the plastic bag over the ring and secured the collar. The apparatus made him feel not quite human, as though he were sprouting some kind of kitchen appliance from the side of his torso. It felt brittle, like the shoot from the eye of a potato. But with or without the bag, his body was strange to him now. It was old, an old man’s body, and Lloyd couldn’t quite fathom how or when that change had occurred.
“All set, Lloyd,” Melvin said. He peeled off the latex gloves and dropped them into the trash, then brushed the thick locks back from his face and readjusted his kerchief.
Lloyd shook his head. “You ever try taking a comb to all that mess?”
“No, sir. That’s the point.”
“What point?”
“They’re dreadlocks. You’re not supposed to comb them.”
“You mean, you grow ’em out of your head like that on purpose? My goodness. What does your wife think?”
“Lilith isn’t my wife.”
“You’re living in sin.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, sir.”
“What’s a nostomy?” It was the girl asking. Ocean.
“Colostomy,” Melvin said. “It’s the operation your grandpa had.”
“What kind of operation?”
“They put a little hole in his stomach.”
“Why does he need a hole there?”
And now the boy answered. “Because his asshole doesn’t work anymore, so they had to drill a new one.”
Ocean. Phoenix. Ridiculous names.
“Melvin,” Lloyd called out.
“Yes, sir?”
“Nothing.”
Why were all these children in his room all the time? They had the whole house to play in.
“How come he can call you Melvin and we can’t?” Ocean asked.
“Because he’s an elder.”
“What’s a nelder?”
“Elder, dummy,” Phoenix said. “It means the same thing as ‘Tutu.’ ”
“Your grandpa’s older than us, so he’s an elder. We must give him respect.”
“Just ’cause he’s old?”
“Yes. Because he’s old. And wise.”
With the ancient is wisdom; and in length of days understanding.
He grew to tolerate them, Melvin and his friends. He liked the way they gathered in his room, settling around his bed, to listen to him talk about seeds and farming. The air in the room changed when they all trooped in, like someone had opened a window. They smelled of oxygen and peat-moss.
Momoko liked them, too. She sat by his side on a chair they’d brought up from the parlor for her. Melvin’s girl, Lilith, usually sat on the end of the bed, and sometimes she’d massage his feet, grown fat with the edema that had turned his toes a purplish gray. Like dusty grapes or stunted spuds. Dead things. He was shocked every time he looked down and saw them, and at first he tried to hide them under the covers, but these kids didn’t seem to mind.
“Let me rub them for you,” Lilith said. “It’s good to keep the circulation going.”
She was Ocean’s favorite, and the boy liked her, too. Turned red whenever she stood near him. Lilith had started teaching Ocean some kind of dance, and sometimes he’d look out the window and see them leaping and spinning in circles and waving their arms all over, bundled up against the cold. Modern dance, they called it. Expressive. Improvisational.
They reminded him of the Young Potato Growers, the way they watched him as he talked, carefully taking in every word. Young people had such clear eyes. It had been a long time since anyone had listened to him like that. He tried to remember his yearly speech. Seasonable cultural practices.
“What else?” they urged.
Protecting your potatoes from pests is important. It is crucial to plan the applications of pesticides to harmonize with seasonable cultural practices.
“Too many P’s!” they howled.
Lloyd nodded sheepishly.
“Were the agricultural-chemical corporations paying you?” they wanted to know. “Kickbacks? Sponsorship? Is
that why you promoted their products?”
“No,” Lloyd said. “They supported our events and the like, but that wasn’t it.”
“What was it, then?”
He shook his head and looked at them, eyes clear, brows furrowed, trying to understand. He sighed.
“Well, that’s how things were back then. We just believed.”
“But people still believe!”
“No,” Lloyd said. “They don’t. Not like they used to.”
“But they’re still using it! You said so yourself. The chemicals, the poisons—”
“It’s more complicated than that. Margins are tight. Prices are down. You need higher yields to make a profit, and inputs maximize your yields. A lot of these fellas, they’re cash poor. Got their whole lives tied up in their land and one season’s harvest. Not a whole lot of room for error. It takes guts to try something new, far as I can see.”
“But when you listen to these guys, all they do is say how great the stuff is—”
“That’s all it is,” said Lloyd. “Just talk. Deep down they know.”
“—all the while it’s killing them. It’s like they’re junkies, man!”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that.”
“When did you stop believing?”
“Well . . .” Lloyd closed his eyes. He didn’t know how to answer.
Any resemblance to the Young Potato Growers stopped with the way they dressed. The Young Potato Growers were a clean-cut bunch, but this lot was a disgrace.
“Are they poor?” he asked his wife. “Are they destitute? Is that why they wear that garb?”
Momoko shook her head. She was wearing a ratty old sweater with holes in the elbows, dotted all over with balls of pilled wool that clung to her like dung to a sheep’s bottom. Crusted bits of food and sticks and dirt had become part of the knit. Her trousers had tears in the knees and seat, which she had long since stopped repairing. She took a damp wad of Kleenex from the rolled cuff of her sleeve and blew her nose. The tissue disintegrated in her fingers.
“Momoko,” Lloyd said, “why don’t you change your clothes? Let Yumi find you something nice to put on.”
