Being Dead in South Carolina

by Jacob White

  In his ruddy heart he knows he was made for rougher living. At fifty-eight he has the back and the hands of a Viking. His chest and arms are ruggedly freckled. Slack red curls, sagging lips, and wide-saddled eyes bear the gentle drape of generals. Once alone in the house, his physical capacity for survival announces itself: his muscles arch, he grabs at glasses too hard, swipes at the phone; his body thinks it is being turned out into the wild.

  He tries to stay out of the house.

  He spends weekends roving his yard, snatching up weeds, toiling against night-creeping rot. Growing up next to an Iowan cornfield, he was reared on the threat of rot as some are on religion. His wife and son, he thinks, heeded neither—those slack stares they gave him toward the end suggesting there was nothing to be done. He begins to think often of his own father, how they used to troop through the rows of corn, the soot-eyed man sometimes stopping and unfolding his pocketknife to reach up and excise a black, oozing pustule from an ear of corn. He showed the glob to his son with a short, prohibitive grunt before slinging it to the dirt and slapping the blade clean on his thigh.

  He weeds, he trims, he mows. He works all weekend, early to rise, early to bed. He has always mowed the enormous yard once a week—the yard is perhaps the sole mark by which his family was known in the neighborhood—but now he also devotedly tends his wife’s old flowerbeds. Lantana, verbena, agapanthas—Garden Club champions. He cannot stand the sight of their wilting. He fertilizes, cultivates, weeds—still they do not perk and sing with color as they once did for his wife. It is summer, and the lingering light allows him a couple of hours in the garden each evening after work: he peels black cotton socks from his stale, pasty feet, steps out into the vigorous blades of grass, among which his feet appear cragged and root-like, as if recently unearthed. He fingers the fragile stems awkwardly, but with time he gets better. Some mornings, even, he manages forty-five minutes or so of distraction on the way out to his car—posting a flower here, rolling some pine straw there. He arrives at the office several times a week smelling of salt and loam.

  At his desk, Fran brushes and blows from his reports the black soil that peppers from his fingernails. With great lightness he reels through paperwork, nodding his chin gingerly at clients on the phone. On his desk stands a gold-framed picture of his wife at thirty-three, and a larger one of his son, very young, kneeling in an orange T-ball uniform. Occasionally, after several days of arid weather, he thinks about the flowers, and realizing how far the drive home is, he feels anxious.

  At night, as he lies waiting for sleep, he feels his heart—slumping through its work, nudging the surrounding flesh, sending faint convulsive twists through the rest of his body. He lies there feeling each tenuous tug and thinks how this is all that keeps him here.

  He is fifty-eight, he wants never to die.

  • • •

  He fled the Midwest and the grim tyranny of his aging father. He fled like the wide, outrushing flatland, like a gust. He was seventeen. In the South he found people busy at new settlements: neighborhoods grew right out of the forest. He’d wanted then to escape the dreary cycle of corn, the stalks like evenly measured days allotted down the rows of years; he’d wanted to start something, to rip something of his own from the earth. The last thing his father said to him, hollering it off the front porch, was that he was typical.

  He picked up a job landscaping the virgin neighborhoods by day, then nights drove over the border into Charlotte where a community college offered business classes. His stature and broad face gave people confidence; they mistook his Midwestern rhetoric for a kind of wisdom, hardy with nut and grain. He bought a suit, became a salesman, then outlet manager, and soon regional vice president of a refrigerator company. He met a woman named Juna, a waitress where he lunched. With her he returned to one of the neighborhoods he’d helped landscape—right on top of a long dormant plantation: he’d cleared pine groves and dismal outbuildings not unlike those that littered his own farm back home, scooped out fallow crop fields, churning up exotic red clay. What he found upon his return, four years later, was a gated lake community of small hills and cozy valleys, fairways and unexpected coves.

  Those first years, he grew drunk with faith in himself. He spent a prodigal amount joining the country club. Then came the boy, wearing the corn-blond crown of the quietly chosen; they waited for it to grow out, darken. It did not. Others were drawn to Wynn as a boy, but approached him slowly. The father, too, approached his son slowly, afraid of his own weight and hard edges, afraid of . . . of what? Those days, the boy ran around so easily with others at the pool, the laundry often turning up the faded rags of tee shirts that drifted among neighborhood boys, and the father had known then it couldn’t last. He now wonders if that lack of faith showed in his eyes, if that is what drove the boy out into loneliness—to quitting sports by junior high, to hunching into the backseats of their neighborhood’s seediest loners, to sleeping on couches.

  Years seeped in. He watched the skin under his wife’s eyes turn the fragile blue of tepid milk. Her eyes themselves, he noticed after sixteen years, had worn down to the steel—clicking at him, then away from him in the silence of their house. Only over her flowers did her eyes soften, did her mouth open with forgetfulness.

  The neighborhood is still easy to get lost in, one enclave dissolving cunningly into the next. Even after twenty years there, wandering a few thousand feet from home gives an astonishing sense of removal. Walk a mile, and one is delivered to another country, some short back street not visited in years, or ever. Visitors cannot decide how large or small the place is. They turn down cul-de-sacs, thinking it a way out.

  After packing off his wife, he drove around some. Every night for about a week he drove through the neighborhood, losing himself to streets that ignited shameless nostalgia: Fairway Ridge, where he used to stroll Wynn when he wanted to smoke a cigar; Sandy Cover Circle, where one night he and Juna tiptoed through back yards to reach the lake shore, but kept getting lost; Blackberry Lane, a long, narrow street he knew he’d been down once, but was unable to remember when or why. The streets, it seemed, laid out distant memories to be explored at leisure, as if what was forgotten could be recovered by mere navigation. But after some weeks of this, the elusive streets, even those deep-shadowed back streets, were just streets and reminded him of nothing but themselves.

  He tries to stay off the roads. But his house is just as bad. Finally, he removes the curtains, lets daylight bleach the once warm family corners.

  The neighborhood still carries the word Plantation in its name. The people who live here think of it as such, refer to their home as the Plantation, and this defines home for them like nothing else can.

  • • •

  He develops new customs.

  His wife never grew vegetables. Tomatoes, cucumbers, an herb garden alongside the house—the endeavors of an amateur with soil. He begins to eat the things he grows. He is surprised by the succulence, by the freshness of what he creates. The brisk tomatoes taste like a life he could’ve had, might still. He plants five apple trees along the front edge of his yard.

  He continues to play lightly over the Garden Club flowers—society garlic, butterfly bush, salvias, scabiosa—but grows impatient with their coy fragility, their fading yellows, their determination to wilt. He loves his hardier crops, their fatness, their soil-busting drive to eruct. They make a mess of the garden. It’s like having boys roughhousing out front all the time. His hands get sore, blister.

  The garden grows that summer into something tropical and out of control. Elephant ears explode from one corner of his house, the front porch shored up by clumps of swollen tomato and cucumber, peppers, even some small apple and orange trees, lemons, things that bend their stalks with obscene tumescence. Several neighbors suggest, rather shortly, he take a plot in the common gardens by the park. The common gardens occupy a swath of power line clear-cut. “You can play Farmer Joe all day long t
here,” Jack Haber chuckles, with no help from his wife. The retirees halt before his house on their daily walks. Some appear on his front porch, ask what is he doing—What is this trash? the wives’ flaccid arms gesture. The neighbors are bolder now that his family has left him; he is surprised to find himself being bolder back. Briskly he sees the old men and women off his porch. Confused, they walk back up his driveway, leaning on each other, averting their gaze from the sprawling flops of watermelon.

  “Staying busy,” is his usual reply to these neighbors now. When they stop coming around, he begins going entire weekends without speaking. Monday mornings at work, his voice comes out hard and stale, and he recoils from it. He takes to not talking at all outside work, except to dribble a few comforting words over what flowers remain. The verbena are gone, the lantana too. More flowers pale and die. Then he tears open the ground where they stood.

  His adulthood impulses of prudence—the need for groceries, management of bills—surprise him. These remind him he is a father, a manager of life projects. He has kept his scruples.

  One Saturday, shopping, he runs into Ron Chiswell and his son Terry in the breakfast aisle. “Where in hell you been hiding, Fran?” Ron says, though everyone knows. Even Terry, a childhood friend of Wynn’s, tactfully scans cereal boxes. “Don’t tell me you’ve been playing over at that Quail Hollow course. We got no one to beat up on us out there, Fran.” Fran can’t help but chuckle. He misses the way friends hollered his name over the heads at cocktail parties, a name suggestive of some somber strength, as if, were he not careful, he would rip the seams of his suit. Now, when his secretary or the teller speaks his name, he feels only an impulse to slump his shoulders.

  The coffee shelf’s thick aroma works on them. They chat. Ron glances back at his son, then down at the wreck of tuna cans spilled across the bottom of Fran’s cart. “What say you to dinner, next Friday? Sue’s been wanting to have you.”

  They were just golf buddies, really. All his friends were just golf buddies.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Fran says, chuckling.

  The summer hits a hot, dry flare before a fall wind seeps in one morning. He watches the delicate petals he has tended all summer bear up for a few days against the stiff chill. He is anxious at work. As they begin to die, he feels alone for the first time, and is touched with a self-pity that drives him to tears one night standing in his doorway, the dark falling faster than he has become accustomed.

  He lets off the whiskey, scared at how he weeps for no one but himself.

  But once the flowerbeds are cleared, he feels shed of something, some final sinew of rot, as if the flowers themselves had been strangling weeds. He begins to winterize his vegetable garden, and these plants bow out of their season with dignity, making in their roots, stems, and seeds their own shrewd plans for survival.

  Winter, he rolls in and out of bed. Some nights he forgets to adjust the thermostat and sees the ghosts of his own breath rising from his bed. The holidays come and with them two calls from his wife, the first to ask of word from Wynn (none), the second to work out which Christmas parties she’ll attend. He says he will be a humbug this year; he tries to say this with levity.

  Several times, after driving home through Christmas-lit yards, he tries calling the number his wife gave him to reach his son—a roommate’s cell phone. But each time, the first half-ring stumbles against a haphazard beep, then nothing. He doesn’t know if he is supposed to talk after the beep. He doesn’t know if he is out of time.

  His own boyhood winters were hard, lonely stretches of life. He remembers once when, very young, he asked his father for a cob of corn. His father grabbed him by the arm, jerked him from the table and out into the wind-driven snow, pulled him out to the middle of a wide empty field. “You see any corn? You see any for miles?” Fran was in his long underwear—they both were. He went to cry, but as he did, the thin skin over the bridge his nose, tightened by freezing wind, split—he heard it. He sucked in a breath, and his father stared down at him, seeing what he would do.

  In this way, winter keeps him from weeping again.

  • • •

  Then, one morning in late March, he steps off his porch and walks into the yard. The grass has begun to green in some places. A chill morning wind blows; brisk ripples course up his chamois shirt like a rain-fat river. Like something arrived from a great distance, something long in the coming.

  He does not go to work. Instead, he drives south into Rock Hill. He returns in a rented truck, pulling a trailer with a small tractor and furrow.

  The tractor is loud. It rips open the morning like some chortling herald of spring. He begins in front of his house, tearing red swaths across the lawn, the sod peeling back in flaps. Throughout the morning he plows up rows until he is running alongside the street.

  He plows up the garden, even. He decides to uproot the chest-high apple trees, too, just as the leaves are beginning to bud. He drags the compost of his first fruits across the upchurned mud.

  As he pulls the furrow across his once pristine lawn, ripping loose large tatters, his yard disgorging great wakes of clay, he feels the sad thrill his son must have felt wheeling up the fairway Bermuda in his car. Security caught his son doing this twice. Both times he had been alone, searching for who knows what in the night.

  He plants the corn by hand.

  • • •

  Summer bursts open like a soft fruit. His feet grow coarse from walking the rows. Toenails become discolored, gnarled. Calluses blacken. His hands become the hands of his father. When he comes in at dusk, he can feel the coating of salt on the back of his neck. His burning muscles cool into knots.

  Upstairs he undresses, steps into the steamed white tile of his shower, and lets hot water soften him. Later, fingering his clean, dried beard, he cannot help but imagine the silken tassels of ripening corn. The appearance of these tassels meant something to him as a boy. He can lie on the couch and think of this in the dark.

  He almost never drinks whiskey now.

  He sleeps heavily. While he sleeps, the corn grows.

  He retires, a year earlier than he is supposed to, without ceremony. Cleaning out his desk, he packs up the two pictures—terribly dated pictures, it only now occurs to him.

  At home, he occupies himself entirely with his crop. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, the phone gives off a single ring, and by the time he wakes, he cannot decide whether he’s dreamed the sound.

  The woman at his door has been his neighbor for twenty years since he’s lived here. Her small-featured face, with its pale lashes and brows, has made her local presence easy to forget. Her jaundiced hair is cropped like a boy’s, pricked with sweat. She holds a trowel in one hand and is mildly out of breath. “It’s just that,” she says, making only the scantest effort to blunt her forthrightness, “sir, I am a member of the Property Owners’ Association, a neighbor to boot, and I have to say, I can’t abide”—she sweeps her arm back at the ragged field of fledgling stalks, not looking. The sir is a carryover from when she used to visit, giving him a cold eye at the door as she asked to drop off a pie for Juna. With a heavy half smile and exaggerated butler’s sweep, he’d usher her and the pie into the kitchen. He never spoke to her.

  She regards him now as if she expects as much. Her face is moist from her own yard work. “I just cannot abide—”

  “I cannot abide this standing around, ma’am.” He offers up the old half smile, swirls his tumbler. He too makes only the scantest effort. He won’t play along with her salty neighbor act, despite the many evenings she sat for Wynn, the matronly support she gave his wife when things got hard; despite the respect he once had for the utter privacy she maintained throughout all of this—never could he fathom how she busied or reposed herself in that flat, dark brown, pine-shrouded house. She stammers on his porch. Her face is sweaty and flushed.

  “What are you doing?” She eyes him.
>
  This is the woman who will watch him grow old.

  “Staying busy.” Her face glistens as he tips back his glass.

  The old man taught him to harvest sweet corn when the ears are full and blunt at the tip; the husks should be in a green, tightly folded fist—Put your hand round that, feel. He taught the boy how to grow a sharp thumb nail so to pierce the end kernel: it should squirt forth milky white sap; neither dry dough nor a watery gruel—the too-late tears. He taught that peak freshness for sweet corn is measured in minutes, not hours or days.

  The silk should be drying to brown on the end.

  There are signs.

  By mid June, the corn has grown to his chest. A few neighborhood cats wander into the cornstalks to die. He finds them mornings—not curled up, as he would have imagined. He puts them under the ground.

  One evening, he looks down a row and sees a young boy. Crouched, the boy has his finger out, gingerly touching the snout of one of the cats. Despite an impulse to run the boy off, Fran has the presence of mind to ask, in a mild voice, if the cat was his. The boy stands, looks down the corridor. He gives a look made bold by grief. Fran remembers what lonely lessons a boy can stumble upon in these strange stalks, lessons that stiffen the heart against that first winter. He nods imperceptibly, about to speak again. But with half a stride, the boy disappears back into the corn.

  This is the first person he’s spoken to in two weeks. The father buried this cat as well.

  Even as he returns to these earthy lessons of stone and bone, he has never felt safer. Prostrate, surrounded by the lima-green stalks, he studies the travel of a caterpillar. He does not think about his corn, the threat this caterpillar poses; he thinks instead how wonderfully lost this creature is in its own kingdom.