Flickr Fiction Friday: Uncle Andrew

I had that weird “stepping back in time” feeling coming to Grimma and Poppy’s farm this week. Coming from the airport and driving through this endless flatland sort of warps the mind every single time. Living with mountains and coming down to the plains makes you feel like you can see forever… even though there’s nothing much to see. Farms. Fields. Flatness.

It was strange being in the backseat of the car with Mom and Dad driving, and be the only one. Faith, Leif and Charity are coming, and Hunter will have to leave for Seattle right after the funeral to make his meeting with Nike, so I’m the only one of us kids here. Once I would have killed for the chance to be the only grandchild at Grimma and Poppy’s, to be the center of all the attention in that house that had seen sixteen generations of my family. Not this time.

It was bad, worse than I thought it would be. When we got to the house, the goats and their kids were at the fence, and not seeing Uncle Andrew tromping along in his big old boots, pushing back his hat and wiping his face on those big old white hankies Grimma made him carry, stepping over goats and swatting at them to get to the gate… it started my throat aching as if I was choking on a rock, and Mom started sobbing right off. A farm hand pulling back the big barn doors shoved back his hat when he saw us drive in, and another one removed his in kind of a respectful gesture. When we got to the house, Poppy was sitting on the porch – sitting, when he never sits at all, not when there’s work to be done, and the hands to manage. Grimma came out of the house without an apron, and she and Mom just sort of melted into each other, crying.

It didn’t seem real to never see Uncle Andrew again… not having him bring me a flower, or a piece of comb from the hives, or a piece of fruit from the orchard or a pretty rock or an arrow head… it didn’t seem believable that I should have to do without him.

When we visited Grimma and Poppy’s when I was little, it was always the same. Mom and Poppy would talk politics with Charity, Grimma would go on about the canning and Faith’s latest 4-H project, Dad would talk engineering and irrigation and Poppy would complain about the farm hands, and try to talk Leif or Hunter into staying through the beginning of autumn to help get in the corn and pumpkins, but nobody had much to say to me. I was a strange child; Grimma called me addle-witted, Mom called me fey. I had been dreamy since I was small, and could be taken with staring into the distance for so long, wrapped in daydreams that teachers at school actually put me in the class for children with developmental delays, despite the fact that I read four grades above my own level. My parents, gifted with four other brilliant children were by turns exasperated and disappointed by my lack of promise, saying my name as a sigh or a prayer, “Oh, Mercy…” Yet Uncle Andrew, with his tall muteness always seemed to hear and see me, distinguishable from my brothers and sisters and all their clubs and activities and accomplishments. He saw me, even when we were all five still at home and a herd underfoot. A great bear of a man with great huge hands and a long, loose stride like he owned the earth beneath him, Uncle Andrew always had a smile for me, and he seemed to notice everything I did. Even though I was the youngest, and not as pretty as Faith or outgoing and athletic as Leif, or smart as Hunter or Charity, I secretly hoped that I was Uncle Andrew’s favorite. I guess I just took it for granted that he would always be here, just like I never think about Grimma and Poppy or Mom or Dad ever dying. I just never thought…

No one even knew how old he was. Poppy always says that one day, Uncle Andrew was just there, at the edge of the field on the back corner of the lot. He was maybe three or four or five, maybe a small six or eight. He didn’t talk. He never talked. He never even made sounds when he cried. He was just… there, funny light colored eyes, funny white hair, the color of cornstalks all bleached in from summer sun; a little boy with a serious face, brown arms bare in little denim overalls, and when Poppy put out his arms to him, he came. He planted himself into the farm like a seed, and he grew, well past six feet, and as he grew, the farm grew around him.

Nobody from the village knew a thing about him. No one from the other farms could say; Grimma always thought he must be a baby one of the Amish girls got on rumspringa, and they dropped him off in hopes that some other family might welcome him more than theirs. Eventually, the county let Grimma and Poppy have him, adopt him, since back then it wasn’t so hard to take on someone else’s child, especially not one who wouldn’t or couldn’t talk, and they went on like that. Poppy was glad of him; Grimma’s other babies all had died, stillborn, before my mother, and every farmer, in those days, at least, wanted a boy to carry on with the land. Mom wasn’t always thankful that she had a big brother; Andrew’s size and his silence intimidated the boys from the neighboring farms and village, and Mom always joked that it wasn’t until she left for college that she even got asked on a serious date. Uncle Andrew never had any other education but the agricultural school – he finished vocational courses in high school and worked on the farm, and though there were doubtless girls who would have run his direction with even the slightest encouragement, Uncle Andrew never seemed to be connected to anything but the earth, the farm. Everything he touched there seemed to come to life – the fields, the orchards, the apiary, even Grimma’s herb garden. Grimma’s roses won year after year after year that the State Fair. Poppy was fiercely proud of Andrew, and it seemed that the farm would serve him long as his inheritance later on.

Later on… Uncle Andrew had been as healthy as a horse, Grimma said on the telephone, over and over again. Hardly ever a day sick, never a day without working outside. No one ever thought he wouldn’t survive to take on his inheritance, in the end.

Today Grimma and Poppy looked so old. Grimma’s skin seemed paper thin, and Poppy looked frail and tired like I’d never seen him. Today even Mom had lines in her face like I’d never seen. Everywhere I looked I saw death hanging over us, death breathed in and death breathed out. After the service on Sunday, with the house filled up with mourners bearing molded salads and the cloying humidity of grief, I couldn’t stay and keep from screaming, lying down and giving in to the fear that seemed like it was rising up and choking all of us. That’s why I went there, to the field.

The field has always been where I am anybody and nobody. Tunneling under the razor-sharp stalks, sitting hidden while the jackrabbits hopped by, I am invisible, and blend in. In the field there isn’t any Charity to be smart and stunning, there isn’t any Faith to be ambitious and industrious. There isn’t any Hunter to ignore me, or Leif to mock me. There is no one to whom I must compare myself, nothing that has any expectations. I can sit in the hollow of the earth and be a part of it for hours, and no one ever finds me. At least, no one ever found me but Uncle Andrew.

The summer I turned twelve I stole a pack of cigarettes from the gas station and brought them to the field to smoke. I burnt my fingers on the match, and the smoke singed me. I coughed until I puked, and Uncle Andrew was suddenly just… there. He didn’t tell Poppy he took my smokes and brought me a drink, wiped my cold sweat with his bandana and trickled cool water on my neck until I could hold my guts. He never even shook his head at me, communicating in his silence disappointment or disgust. I know I could have set the whole field on fire, but he never said. He just sat with me, and then he was gone, leaving behind a round white stone quartered with a jagged streak of gold.

The summer I turned thirteen, I came to Grimma’s with my hair dyed black and my jeans all ripped. Grimma couldn’t stop herself from going on at me, telling me I looked like a skinny little hoyden, but that was the summer Uncle Andrew taught me to drive the tractor. I think I fell a little in love with him then, sitting with my back against his broad chest, steering, feeling the power of that machine in my nail-bitten hands, smelling the soapy clean scent of the bulwark of safety behind me. When we came in from the field, I felt like I was somebody important, even though Poppy said I’d probably mow down the corn, and that he’d better not catch me driving without Andrew. When his back was turned, I raised my black-polished middle finger at him, dark red lips sneering, and Andrew caught me. He just looked amused, and I felt like I was being silly. It didn’t matter what Poppy said, anyway. I would never try driving without Uncle Andrew. Without him behind me, the tractor was beside the point.

I was fifteen when summer lightning struck the barn and set it on fire. Poppy had taken the goats to pasture, but the jennys were still in the barn, and I was set on rescuing them myself, but Uncle Andrew had swung me behind them, and gone into the barn… in the fierce wind and hail, he had gotten all but one of them free before a rafter burned through and the roof pinned him. I remember dropping to my knees and screaming myself raw when they brought him out on the stretcher and the ambulance from the county hospital took him away. He only stayed in the hospital overnight before Poppy brought him home, said he was sickening worse away from the farm.

His ribs were cracked, his right collarbone was fractured, and he had thirty-nine stitches in his right thigh. I hardly left the house for the rest of that suffocatingly hot summer. I waited on him and sat with him and watched him, I ran the fan and brought him cool slices of melon and iced lemon balm tea; I read him stories, I laid wet cloths across his head. My grandparents were touched.

Grimma proudly told Mom that I had all the makings of a fine nurse. My father, who’d been despairing of me ever finding my feet, was thoroughly cheered by this. Since Charity looked to be heading for a career in law and Faith to one in engineering, he looked to his last girl to become the family doctor while his boys became captains of industry and finance. My mother was more realistic, and told Grimma I couldn’t stand the sight of my own blood, much less anyone else’s.

“You’d never know it,” she told Mom doubtfully. “Mercy’s hardly left him. She’d sleep in there with him, if I’d let her.”

Poppy said I was a good girl, since to his mind, women did right by sitting and waiting on men, but after talking to Mom, Grimma grew strange, smiling in that maddeningly sly, adult way when I offered to bring my Uncle a tray. She took to telling me I’d make a good wife someday. Only Uncle Andrew made no judgment. Sometimes, when I read to him, I would look up and catch him watching me, a tenderness in his eyes that would make my throat catch. None of us was ever demonstrative; Grimma would just as often swat us and grumble than hug us, even when we were small, but that summer, I dared to sit next to Uncle Andrew’s bed and lean my head against his arm. He touched his fingers to my hair from time to time, and with that I was satisfied.

This past summer, I had my tongue pierced.

The first time he heard me speak when we arrived at the farm, Uncle Andrew noticed the slight lisp, the click and the buzz of the metal stud against my teeth and looked at me, curious. He never grunted, never mimed sounds for speech, so I was caught off guard when he suddenly stood and faced me, reached out with his large hand and gently touching his thumb over my bottom lip, indicated I should open my mouth.

As his finger touched my lip, I swayed. It seemed for a moment that lightning fused my spine; I lost my balance and stumbled, blinking, arm hairs standing, suddenly aware of every inch of my skin. The piercing suddenly seemed in too intimate a place. How could I open my mouth and stick out my tongue? Why had I done it in the first place? Everything was suddenly too intense.

Uncle Andrew had caught my shoulder when I swayed, but when I couldn’t meet his eyes, he stepped back, out of my space.

“It’s… I pierced my tongue,” I mumbled, ill at ease and mortified. “It was stupid. It’ll probably fall out. I don’t know why I did it. I…Faith says it’s tacky. Mom says this is just a phase…” I felt the backs of his fingers brush my cheek, and went still. I wanted so much to hold his hand to my face that I felt afraid. Normal girls weren’t obsessed with their Uncles, didn’t want them to touch them or to kiss their hands. I was sick. It was wrong.

I turned and ran.

I hardly spoke to Uncle Andrew all last summer, and I barely looked at him. I wanted to too much. Grimma noticed and said it was a sad thing when a girl grew out of her family. Poppy didn’t say much, but he frowned at me, and told me to get inside when I sat on the fence and watched the farm hands when they came in to lunch. Leif told everyone I just needed a boyfriend, and Faith told him he was sexist. Fortunately Charity and Hunter were at summer school and summer jobs in the city. I didn’t need to hear their assessment.

Then Grimma called on Tuesday to say that Uncle Andrew was dead.

At the service, I looked at all the mourners, farmers with big hands and pale foreheads, their wives and families as solid and stolid and plain and brown as the earth itself. Were we his real family? Was there someone else there, someone silently mourning him, having lost him in life? I saw a tall boy in the back, his simple white shirt and dark pants marking him as maybe one of the Mennonite boys who hired themselves out to Poppy’s farm. Had I seen him before? Was he a brother? A cousin? A secret son?

I bolted from the house, in my good shoes, over the drainage ditch at the edge of the road and into the cornfield, anguished and sick, my hands sliced as I incautiously thrust the stalks aside. Why hadn’t I ever done… something, anything to apologize, to atone, to tell Uncle Andrew how much I loved him, in a way that was even a fraction of the truth? Why couldn’t I have been more normal, more appropriate, more the kind of girl that could be likeable and liked? Had he died because of something I had done? Was it some punishment, for secret fantasies?

I crawled into the rustling space between the cornstalks, the dry, sweet smell welcoming me to that sun dappled place. I pulled my knees to my chest and rocked, trying to breathe through the sobs that kicked against my chest, trying to escape. I was lost to the sounds of my breath strangling in my throat, so I barely heard it.

“Mercy.” A husky voice, soft.

I drew breath, sharply. Silhouetted against the light, one of Poppy’s farmhands stood at the end of the row, tall and broad and silent in the stillness. One moment no one was there, and the next, he stood blocking the light.

I struggled to my feet and stared, startled, my heart bucking wildly in my chest. None of Poppy’s regular farm hands, generally taciturn and middle aged, had ever followed me or spoken with me unless they had to. They were not unfriendly, but generally had no time for awkward, skittish seventeen-year olds used to all the modern conveniences and comforts of life in town. I couldn’t make out his face, but I was sure that this boy was new, and thought he could score points with Poppy by speaking to me. I was determined not to answer him.

I began to move past the boy at the end of the row when he moved into my path, awkwardly trying to leave me room to walk. Embarrassed, I stepped closer to him as he stepped closer to me. We almost bumped heads. I looked up, irritated. It was the Mennonite boy from the service.

“Who are you?” I demanded abruptly, suddenly shrill. “Why were you at Uncle Andrew’s service? Who are you to him?”

In the uncertain light, with the cornstalks above our heads, the boy’s eyes were so pale as to be colorless. They widened in surprise.

“I’m… Jack. Jack Greenman. Your folks hired me on end of the summer. I’ve worked here for four months. I was here the day your… he… Andrew… It seemed only fitting…”

I nodded jerkily, now sorry I had questioned him. “It’s fine,” I said dully. “I… I just thought…” What had I thought? That Uncle Andrew’s secret family would know more of him than we, his real family did? That somewhere there yet existed some part of the man I adored, and if only I asked enough questions I could find him again? I closed my eyes to staunch an unexpected flood of tears.

“Mercy,” Jack said softly, and the hair on my arms raised. My eyes flew open.

“How did you know where I was?” I blurted, suddenly afraid.

“It wasn’t hard,” he said, halfway smiling. “I watched you.”

I stepped back, shivering. How had I not noticed? In the dimness, his hair was as bleached as the cornstalks which rustled around us. His odd eyes were on my face.

“I don’t know who you are,” I babbled, “but go away, do you hear me? Go away. I don’t want you watching me. I–I’ll scream. Poppy will fire you. Just… leave me alone, don’t–”

“Mercy. Don’t be afraid,” Jack said, and brushed my cheek with the back of his hand.

He stepped away from me after that, led the way out of the narrow lane of corn which whispered in dry voices of the secrets of summer past. Still I stood, frozen, my hand against my face where his touch still burned.

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This pictorial inspiration for this week’s Flickr is from the collection of Tom Debiec. Find Fliction with the usual suspects:The Gurrier, Teaandcakes, Elimare, Chris; Aquafortis, Valshamerlyn, and Mari, our newest victim.