CZ Studio and Radio Verte presents The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
Chapter 7
The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
I was peeling carrots when a bird flew into the window.
I found him twitching upon the ground and was left little choice but to twist his head off his body, leaving it to dry on the mantle.
Life in those days was lived by the law of lore and everything revolved around the weather and seasons.
A rainbow in the morning meant rain on the horizon, icky bones, houseflies, or fragrant flowers in the humid air.
Surely a gathering of clouds like a flock of sheep will herd up on the western front.
A red sun in the morning meant it shall be a beautiful day if you spotted a crowing rooster on a fence post or bees flying far from the hives.
It was indeed a sign of fair weather as bees will never get caught in the rain.
But an owl hooting during the day, noisy geese and chickens refusing to come out of the coop, I knew it would be a rainy day.
But Paul carried his hoe through the house for the field nonetheless.
Paul swore by the woodpecker which should echo around the 26th of March.
By then the oak leaves should be about the size of a squirrel's ear and the corn should be planted so the large ears will grow near the bottom of the stalk.
When planting, Paul was always sure to say aloud,
Here is one for the worms, one for the crow, and one for the rat thief, and here are two to rot and two to grow.
You can expect a good crop if the weather is dry in June.
If some of your stalks are really white and have no green on them, don't pull them up, for if you do, someone will drop dead in the field.
Paul always walked backward after a good harvest, throwing his handkerchief over his shoulder into the field, leaving it behind for good luck.
Paul spent his whole life in those fields, a life lived at the mercy of the rusty nail, the cat's meow, the caterpillar's nose, how the flies fly and the bees buzz.
His life's work was measured and proven by the success of countless harvests, routines cultivated by tradition to be taken to heart.
Regardless of the last harvest, each new season began anew, with patients clicking their hoes together and bumping heads, a good sign.
If it rained while plowing the field hardened by winter, corn should be knee high by the 4th of July.
And Paul could finally take a deep sigh and wipe his brow and come in for a cold glass of lemonade.
Paul broke his back in those rows, corn was his life, and his life was corn.
He worked with hundreds of insane patients under his care, but in all honesty, Paul worked alone.
As the patients whistled and sang, plucking slugs under the blazing sun, all the way through autumn when those ears were golden yellow, Paul kept to himself in his eyes on the horizon.
He had a deep understanding of the land and sky, and everything in between the scurried or flu or grew, all but myself I suppose.
I remember his large items apple as he swallowed mama's lemonade.
As he held a tight glare, wrinkled brow, I barely knew the color of his eyes, but my heart ached when he walked in at the end of a day's work for supper.
His chin dropped, his gaze toward his muddy boots, unsure of what he was supposed to do after all those years.
I tried to see what Paul saw on the horizon, but come to think of it, Paul had toiled in nothing but dirt since he was a child.
And I'm not too uncertain, Paul had hopes and dreams like the rest of us, and like us all, for risk of showing a lack of appreciation, he never spoke of them aloud.
Or perhaps it was only his back painting him.
All I could be certain of, living a life of constant grime under his nails, rising with the same sun that reddened, burnt, and leathered his skin, made for a worn out man sat at the end of the supper table.
Holes in the knees mama stitched up on Sundays, always layered in a continual filth not worth bathing off.
A ring of dust outlined his body upon the sheet as he snored away by sundown, and I always wondered why he didn't just sleep out there in the rose, as he loved that corn and that corn loved him.
However, I suppose Paul scorned the corn as well, cursing it from the moment the rooster crowed.
Regardless, Paul provided for his family, and he treated the patients just as well. Whether he whistled about with them or not, they tilled together, planted, and cared for every kernel, millions upon millions.
All the while, Paul kept a watchful eye over every sign of the day, the sun, the clouds, and his ear to the birds, and the feeling of the air upon his neck.
I now see Paul was as sensitive as a poet, and come harvest time, seeing how he would be feeding thousands upon thousands of patients, he delivered his work with pride.
Paul was a quiet man, but Paul was a good man, and he stood on his own two feet. To me, he was an oak tree that would stand forever.
I cut my finger deep, slicing a loaf of bread, and soaked up the blood with a wash rag.
After rinsing it out in the sink, without thinking, I hung the wash rag on a doorknob to dry, before sitting down to rest a spell in Mama's rocking chair.
The sound of the rain was soothing, but then I heard three creaks from the stove as I made tea, and I swear I heard Paul call out my name, and I'll admit, I forgot to stop the chair from rocking as I stood to holler back to no response.
Come suppertime, I found Paul face down in the mud. He had been there for some time, so it was a struggle pulling him out, as his roots had already grown deep into the field, into all he ever knew.
I left his handkerchief where it lay, the first cob of corn having been covered in white silk that year, and I believe they somehow missed a row planting seed as well, but mostly I just hoped amongst those rows, Paul's soul dwelled in peace.
When the corn was sad and the ears hung low, I knew it was him, as sure as I knew Mama's weeping echoing into the rafters at night.
The day of Paul's funeral, I awoke early to a bright red sunrise, and I hurried off in my best dress to the row where I found his body, and I buried a kernel of corn, remembering to say, and here is one for Paul as a crow flew away.
Mama stopped washing the bedsheets that day, only hanging them to air out on the clothesline backed by the old oak, and the filthy outline of Paul's body remained, and in the right light as the sun was about to set, it appeared just on the other side of a thin weaving of threads.
Paul stood on his own two feet.
When Junior insisted we take little William to the rodeo, even Mama came along. It was a marvelous time, as we rarely took outings beyond the hilltop. Watching the barrel erases, I felt a deep sadness overcome me, remembering the day I was bucked from old rowan beauty.
How I missed my dear Richie, how I missed the taste of blackberry pie upon his lips, how his ocean eyes swirled blue and green as the sunlight crossed the sky. My heart bled black like a fistful of berries in my own inner moonlight.
Yet with a forceful smile, no one knew what I was feeling within. As the horses trotted the clover pattern, it briefly crossed my mind, as many thoughts do from time to time, often at the most inopportune moments. As William trotted upon my knee in the stands, I pondered.
No one really knows what the hearts and minds of those closest to us are experiencing, as if the closer we inhabit one another, the more blind we are to one another, who they are, and what they feel, which is often buried deep within themselves, brushing flesh nonetheless.
Falsehoods and forced smiles are settled upon to get through the day, avoiding the unspoken, pretending to understand one another, one another's human condition. Yet a family more often than not becomes a covenant, one that worships and matters, favoring solely the fair-weathered plains that provide simple emotional survival.
Whether out of ignorance or supreme frailty, the inability to accept the harsh realities of watching loved ones inescapably perish, all the while wearing a smile upon our faces, the mask is preferred.
The veil which hides the hideous, unbearable truth, a truth one cannot withstand knowing that those we love cannot endure the experience of wilting like a flower in the chill of autumn.
The cold, hard reality of loss, and yearning, loneliness, and dread, knowing that we all must suffer alone in our final days.
I sighed. As little William rode the pygmy pony, I looked around at the delight on the faces of my family, and I thought of an astounding idea.
Grasping my hands, Dr. Zolla looked at me with eyebrows raised. I don't think a pony is such a great idea, Sarah, but look, I have an idea. He had his chauffeur drive us over to Ward E, and we walked down the long hall to the last room on the left, where Richie sat motionless in that long stair, one I had grown long accustomed to.
Come on, said Dr. Zolla, grabbing the handles of the wheelchair, pushing him out of the room and back down the long hall, and out of the front doors. I followed as Richie's head bobbled before me.
In the rose garden, Dr. Zolla insisted I take the handles, saying, go on now, push. So I took Richie on a little stroll through the roses as I had many times before.
Now faster, he shouted, and I sped up a bit, and we made a loop passing the doctor, as he said louder, now run, Sarah, run.
I looked back at the doctor with concern, worried Richie might fall as we weaved through the garden, but the doctor insisted, faster now, faster.
I tightened my grip on the handles and I ran, and Richie's head fell back toward the sky. Passing the doctor again, he jumped out of my way with a grin and pointed down the long path across the lawn, shouting, now fly, Sarah, fly.
My tiny feet ran with all their might, my dress flapping about, my hair in a wild frenzy, when Richie dropped his hands to his sides and spread his arms out like wings in the breeze, and we flew like we once had, chasing the wild wind.
I turned off the path onto the lawn and pushed him in circles round and round until we barreled over into the grass. I grasped and jumped to my knees, shouting in concern, Richie, Richie.
Sparkles of silver, green, and blue, blue-green, blue-violet, cornflower, and Persian blue were midnight blue, cadet blue, aquamarine, navy blue, ultra blue, blizzard blue, cerulean, teal blue, pacific blue, robin's egg blue, denim, bluebell, outer space, wild blue, yonder blue, sky blue, along with the slightest grin.
Caressing his cheek as he lay tangled in his chair and I whispered in his ear, we will never be lovelier than we are now.
That evening, I pressed a single white rose in one of my favorite books, Romeo and Juliet, for I have been nothing in life, if not a star-crossed lover.
War. It gathers quickly on the horizon. Dark clouds, ominous, threatening, turning until the static lights up the night sky in streaks of a thunderous clap.
Sending the dynsians of the thicket running for shelter, the winds chilling the bones, dust blinding the eyes, the flash, the bang, shaking, it has begun.
War. When the sky opens up and hell rains down, soaking the earth with blood, muddied with sorrow, wind twisters unleash like hellhounds, leaving nothing in their path but pure destruction.
Little puffs of fur floating about the breeze, sunset engulfing the unplanted fields, littered with bones, the blade inciting violence upon the flesh, as the songbirds had long moved on.
As corpses froze to the ground and the skies remained gray until the spring, when the land and the bodies thawed, and the breeze wafted the stench as the trees blossomed with flowers and leaves.
War. A dreadful machine, mechanics, industry, and steel, doom rolling on tires and tracks in the stomping boots of mechanized mines, from frontier to frontier, where the silver geese flew.
The wings made of a million iron parts and pieces, so deafening to the ears, one cannot hear the crunch of the bones.
War. Round and round the earth like the current of the wind, never to cease, until the cease of man, the incurable disease of our kind thrives.
War. Inevitable war was our fate, its sights set upon us all. For what reason, why, and who? Mysteries long sullen with boredom. A roll of lost ice, when the birds return to find their barren land, and the densings of the thicket and the meat come out from their holes.
With light deprived eyes, pale and pasty, they squint upon the brilliant blue sky, upon the ravaged fields, and those fed to the earth, smoldering ruin and wreckage, half-sunken in the mud.
War. Melancholy, bitter and cynical, yet reflective and thoughtful. A privileged young man, indecisive and hesitant, yet jealous, rash, and prone to impulsive acts. A privileged old man, calculating, ambitious, politically driven, lusting after sex and power, haunted by guilt and love.
War is to kill our paws, and to shatter our teeth in our own clenched jaws, of self-hatred as we rape and feast upon the flesh of our mamas.
War. When we dare call a man a wooden box, when mothers and wives, babies in their arms, boys want sons, men gone grey, await at the station for brothers and cousins and husbands to be. For those upon the trembling tracks of iron, hiding behind smiles of false pride, hiding their blackened char from their sons behind purple hearts, only to darken young cheeks with the palms of their trembling hands.
With what they hope might be love.
War. When one can speak to the dead, and the dead speak back. Yet what is heard is one's own voice circling back around in the wind, with the train's whistle spewing black soot into the brilliant blue sky, as the soot settles upon wooden boxes.
War. Looking despairingly at a man who could no longer love from his wheeled chair, a paw who will never know his son, a heart that craves death, searching for lies to breathe another breath.
War. A mere shattered raw.
Rucksack slung over his shoulder, government purchase ticket in hand. Junior did his best to reassure us he'd be well behind enemy lines. He held me tight, making sure to look deep into my eyes as he said goodbye.
I watched as he boarded the train, with that same shine his paw Richie had in the eye of his own, and Junior made his way toward the Second World War. For nearly four long years, I waited for the day we'd be standing on that same platform, awaiting for his return.
Little William clung on to his mother's leg, too young to remember his paw's look.
His eyes lit up as he saw who must be his paw hop off of the train on his own two feet, but was saddened to watch as he walked right on by. A cruel joke, William thought, and if not for his ma's tight grasp, he might have chased the man down and kicked him in the shin.
But with a brief glance back, William saw the man's dull eyes.
As heroes were doubted upon by ma's and wives, sisters, sweethearts, and paws, a military escort carrying two tickets, one for himself and a first-class fare for the deceased, a flag for a funeral, and blank rounds for the graveside, delivered Richie to us in a flag-draped shipping box.
Mama collapsed into my arms, and William watched wide-eyed, confused why his paw was in a box nailed shut. Boxes were to ship things, not men, he thought, not my paw.
And with an old hammer, I turned away and nailed shut my heart, and I became war.
It was a disquieting time, but especially for Mama, as she wept through the nights, her own eyes dull, her face pale.
And with an unsettling silence one evening, I peeked into her room, but found her bed empty, the kitchen empty, the barn empty. She had gone, but the following morning they had found her swinging from the twisted tree by the neck.
Furious, I took Paul's rifle and blew the feathers off a crow on a fence post, and I threw it upon the burning hot coals of the stove, for hell is a place with no birds.
Now I am not proud, but after putting Mama in the ground next to Junior and Paul, I shut the door on William and his mother. I closed the curtains to the world, and found myself alone in a dusty field, where I lived like a stray with what I deserved, an empty belly, an empty heart, a relentless hunger one cannot rid of, a hunger that gnawed on the bones, chewing relentlessly on the meat of the soul.
Not the chirping hunger of sunrise, but the howling hunger of hell.