CZ Studio and Radio Verte presents The Wild Wind by Corey Zimmerman.
Chapter 16
The Wild Wind
Given the time of year, as long as the country doctor arrived in time,
usually all went according to plan. Yet when it didn't, it simply did not.
Seeing how locating a country doctor in those days often required considerable effort. One might
assume the ideal time would be at night, given the odds the doctor may be at home in bed.
Nonetheless, two trips were required. One to the doctor's home, where he is awoken in his pajamas.
Then, with the medical bag in hand, a journey bedside to where a woman screams in pain.
Indeed, none too happy with the timely ordeal.
Those trips by horse-drawn wagon could often be up to 10 miles at best.
Expressly, if the subject in labor was but the wife of a humble farmer,
and lived far off upon the plains. In just the complicate matters,
one must also take into account the season and the weather.
Count yourself fortunate if your water breaks on a starry summer night,
and wise if conception was calculated according to the stars.
Yet we are all human, or once were, and we are all undoubtedly aware accidents do occur.
And just as a seed might fall from the pocket of a pair of bib overalls,
a farmer may plant the fertile soil on a perfect day, without ever considering the almanac.
In the year 1900 of the Gregorian calendar, the nation's population was 70 million.
Casey Jones had crashed his train. The Philippine-American War waged on,
and the groundhog had seen his shadow. Luckily, the hornets had built their nests high before
the late season blowout. The war was over, and the war was over.
The nearest doctor was but a mile away, good hoodoo. It had been a relatively warm,
sun-filled day, with a joyful choir of birds. An old farmer down the way named Morris,
sitting upon his porch, smoking his pipe, spotted a few rabbits running across his field,
a lick of breeze upon their tail. The tobacco in his pipe smelled sweeter,
and his hogs began to squeal when the rain began to fall thick and heavy,
icy, just as the sun began to set. The songbirds went silent, ushering him back into his house
to stoke his stove, as mama heard her own fire crackling louder than usual. As,
Sam, you prepared your pot pie for supper. As the moon rose behind the veil of clouds,
the dogs howled, and Pa kept on chopping wood to warm the widow's heart down the road,
until the thick and heavy rain turned to thick puffs of snow, and a strong gale began to blow.
The shingles on the widow's roof flapped about and blew away with the breeze,
and with a gust her gait flew open.
Pa took a sweet time, letting the widow know her wood was stacked neatly in the woodshed,
offering to stoke her fire once more, which she obliged before he threw his axe in the back of the
wagon.
Pa switched Rowan Beauty, who pulled the wagon through the ruts, as Pa dug through his mind for
an elaborate foray of words that might offer an excuse as to why, why he was down the road,
once again.
Pa knew better than to switch Rowan Beauty. They both knew the way, and both had tender hearts,
but Pa switched him anyway. As Sam, you ran for the doctor, as mama clenched the quilt in her
fists and the agony between her teeth.
Mama once saw the world through faithful blue eyes, until her apron kept falling off, until she
lost a hairpin, and it was then she knew precisely why the widow had accidentally stepped on her toes
at the funeral.
Pregnant and desperate, she pricked her own finger and dropped the blood in Sam's soup,
and then paused coffee in the morning. She dropped a hairpin in a bottle and tossed it in the river
full of hope. Yet he said, you can only roof houses at night, seeing the warp in the day,
until the day the biscuits burnt.
When Pa walked into the house with a jumble of words in his mouth, he himself found it hard to
swallow, his stomach growling at the scent of your pie. Mama clenched her teeth, Mama screamed out,
Pa ran to the bedroom, and Mama kicked him away.
Pa retreated for the corner, where he hid in a shadow. Yet little did Mama know, I was dying
inside her. You see, the cord had become a noose around my neck, or possibly I wrapped it around
my own throat, not wanting to set eyes upon this dusty old farm, which awaited my bloody body.
But Sam, you returned with Dr. Zollo, and he quickly calmed Mama in a way Pa never knew how.
Sam, you took Mama's side, Mama pushed and pushed until my head, as blue as a blackberry pie,
emerged, slid into his warm gentle hands. He removed my auspicious veil, I saw ghosts.
Dr. Zollo quickly cut the noose from my neck and handed it off to you, Sam, to throw it in the fire.
Nonetheless, I felt that cord wrapped tightly around Mama's heart all her life.
There was a chill in the air as the doctor held me upside down, and Mama screamed when she saw my
lifeless body dangling from my feet. He swatted my backside again and again.
Silence, slap, silence, deadly silence.
Sam, your praying hands clenched Mama's own, and tears pooled in both of your eyes,
while Pa hid in the darkness. Slap, silence, slap.
The doctor then placed his lips upon my own, exhaling into my lungs, expanding them with the
breath of God, until I finally let out a god-awful cry. I wailed as the dust of my body
was buried in pure white snow. I was wrapped in a warm blanket and placed in Mama's arms,
and we cried together. If I were given a choice to retain one memory, Sam, one I could lock away
in a vault within an immortal mind, where not even the unforgivable claws of senility, nor death
itself could grasp at it. It would be that kiss of love, the kiss of love that I could never forget.
I was born with blue eyes, as you know. All babies are born blue, and the large amount of hair on my head,
well, it was meant for trouble.
Dr. Zola rubbed afterbirth on Mama's nipples, and I wasted no time in suckling them dry.
He brushed the back of his fingers upon the soft spot on my head, and then ran them through my
toe-head, messing it, blessing it. He congratulated Paul with an honest shake,
thanking you, Sam, for all your help, and then he left as he had came. A god.
The following day we stayed in bed under a quilt, and she asked you, Sam, to turn all the mirrors in
the house toward the wall, and then to sit beside us in a chair, and to read aloud.
Paul kept his distance as Mama turned her back, exposing my face just enough for him to take a
brief sight. Of Sarah, Mama whispered.
Paul didn't debate it, but when he reached his rough and soiled fingertip out to touch my rosy
cheek, Mama pulled me away, saying, don't, you'll give her a stutter.
Mama buried my face in her breasts, for the window was much too bright.
We stayed in bed for days, listening to your thunderous voice that shook the tiny bones in
my ear and filled the pure white void with glorious myth, and if even for a time, Sam,
I was blind to the muddy reality that would soon be revealed by the melting snow.
I kept your file locked away in a drawer, Sam, separate from the others,
never willing myself to open it. You were unlike most of the patients on the hilltop,
you seemed perfectly normal to me. Yet there was something peculiar about your normality,
which made it even more difficult to open your file. I'm not sure if I was afraid of what I might
discover, or if I felt awkward invading your privacy. I had much respect for you, Sam,
but it was your intrigue that I adored the most, and the unconditional kindness you always provided,
wisdom you never ceased to endow upon me, a void you filled within my heart.
Sam, you were Sam, and I wanted you to remain Sam.
Sam, well I was a wedge that had come between my parents, and I felt this way ever since that night
I heard them shouting. I could have sworn I heard them blame the pregnancy. In fact,
I heard many words, words of loss, blame, shame, heartache, and loneliness.
The deeper I poured myself into that night, sitting quietly on those stairs, I found myself settling for the fact that Paul was but a simple man,
a simple man who simply met another lady down the road. It was all so simple after all.
The lady was a widow, and Paul began stopping by to see what she might need, and to help out around the farm.
She owned a simple farmhouse amongst a simple field, arid and dry. Yet one on rainy days became a sea of mud.
The paint peeled from her house like an old birch tree, and since her husband was planted six feet beneath that tree out back where the corn never grew,
she asked if Paul might mind mending her fence, as for her broken heart, if you might tend to it as well, I suppose.
Paul gave his heart to the widow's empty chest, a chest never to be filled.
There was simply too little promise, and there was me, the wedge, the same wedge which had come between
Mom and Paul was driven between Paul and the widow, whose gate slammed shut in the wind,
whose roof kept sagging and needing repair, whose woodshed needed filling, until the earth finally settled,
the dish falling to the floor, spinning and shattering.
Sensibilities often sharpen quick enough, yet once broken, everyone knows they will all break apart in time.
And being swept under the rug will do no good, only harm, inviting the hoodoo.
It is simply to ask for a wrap upon the door, and in time,
Paul returned to our field, yet our home remained arid, even on rainy days, when he left his muddy boots on the front porch.
Paul may have returned to his family, but he was working on Sunday. Your hands will stick to the plow, they say.
But Paul burnt leaves and chopped wood, defying the fate that might strike down upon him,
going toe to toe with the hoodoo, but he forgot about the rest of us, and what that might mean.
Or maybe it was just too late, too mysterious, too worrisome.
I'm not sure if it did any of us good when he left his heart down the road, broken like that dish upon the floor,
lying unswept, stepped over again and again and ignored.
Until that night, Sam, you took me from the stairs and made me Swedish pancakes,
the same ones waiting upon the table each morning, along with a girdled book, one from your own collection,
one for me to carry along to the schoolhouse a mile down the dusty road.
As I made my way each day, my belly warm with pancakes, I read.
My pup Jojo, the rascally little mutt, with a cute smile and a pink tongue too big for his own britches, dangling off his right fang.
I buried my thoughts in those written words and ignored the farmhouse where the shards lie,
where the paint had long peeled like an old birch.
and art's
lessons.
Looking out the schoolhouse window with the vast blue sky, golden chariots rained above,
as Jojo laid in the green grass below, wagging his tail as our eyes met in a gaze.
After school, I'd make my way back down the road, and some days rainbows would appear to the east,
and I'd dodge mud puddles with my tiny feet.
Yet my mind too consumed in words to notice the sloping roof.
Nonetheless, I felt that itch on my left foot, and as I passed by the sea of mud as raindrops battered the pages
in my windswept dress, the flies would bite and the clover leaves while they turned upward in the ditch beside the road.
When I arrived home, German sweets lingered in the air, and Sam you were always there to mess my wet hair with a rag
before sitting me down by the fire, taking the book and reading it aloud as I sat on your knee.
Each page dried at a slow pace as each word soothed my heart, as the fire warmed my bones and the glowing wood crackled.
You would read for an hour and then finish preparing supper, in which I always dropped a biscuit for Jojo.
And after supper, Paul still covered in dust and dirt and mud, belly extended, too exhausted to remember to kiss me goodnight.
I remember the stained outline of his body upon the bedsheets as they hung to dry in the breeze upon the clothesline.
Once Paul was snoring, Mama would disappear somewhere within the house where she would weep her soul out to seep into the cracks of the floor.
Mama left me for sadness, Sam, ghosts we had become.
For I did not know as a child the responsibility was not mine to bear, as the luxury of wisdom comes with adulthood
and besides, we all like to relish in guilt.
We relish in the thought of control, even in situations where we certainly possess none.
We wish not to be victims, but victimizers.
So as Mama abandoned me, I abandoned her.
As Mama wept, Paul snored. Hollow chest, hollow eyes, hollow home.
There was nothing left but to sweep the shards up in my palms, to sweep the crumbs of the German sweets into the cracks of my heart.
Who do had struck my childhood like the plague?
Yet Sam, you did your best to provide me a daily vaccine.
Your tonic was a concoction of kindness, attention, food, and words.
And as much as you frustrated me, messing my hair, your words, your deep German accent, exotic and rare in every way,
unlike the common words spoken by Mama and Paul, crackling in my ears.
My heart aglow.
Sam, you were from a different part of the world, and of another time, of strange blood and a different mind.
But you utilized that mind, that brilliant mind to water and feed my own, filling me with wonder,
keeping my heart whole and my thoughts full of hope.
You handled me with care, never letting me drop, never allowing me to spin nor shatter, nor being swept under the rope.
This Sam, is why I never opened your file.
Never allowed the shards to spill out amongst the cracks in the floor.