It was something they both had in common, they didn’t need to spill out everything in their mind the way so many people do.
In the summer, if there had been a good rain, then a few sunny days, and she knew he would be out, she was likely to put on her faded dress, take the trench shovel to the back gardens, and dig herself a shallow bed, exactly the depth and shape of her body. Tern had felt the tightness in her chest, the familiar need, as soon as she woke. The tulips and irises were finally hitting their stride in the early April sun, the soil leftover damp from the relentless March rains that had threatened the farm’s early plantings.
Dave left by 6:30 a.m. most mornings. He spent most of his time Monday through Saturday loading and unloading his truck, making deliveries sometimes an hour or more each way for their own produce and flower farm as well as pickups and drop-offs for other neighboring farms. Eating reheated oatmeal peppered with fat raisins with one hand as he steered down the drive, he put his supersized coffee light with milk and sugar in the left holder, huge red water thermos in the right. Tern used to cut up fruit for him and put it in little containers but it would come back untouched and brown. Sometimes he made himself an egg-and-sausage sandwich if he knew he wouldn’t be stopping for lunch. She thought on the whole she got off easy when it came to the cooking—a small pot of steel-cut oatmeal every other day and dinners at night. He ate most lunches in the towns he stopped in, learning from the locals where to eat. She knew a lot of women who had to pack lunches for their husbands, too.
Tern drank some of his leftover coffee as she circled the front garden beds. Her own purview was to water, weed, and watch house and garden, and today she focused on pulling out the stiltgrass and dandelions from the cucumber and radish beds. The beds were dewy and cool, and the weeds came up quick. She was happy to find her new gardening knee pads at hand, hanging on one of the stakes. When she was done she washed off the puffy plastic and gave all the front beds a good spray before the sun took over the day. The pull to pick up the trench shovel was growing stronger in her, but she wanted to water the back beds first. As she turned off the hose she heard a car coming up the drive. The sign out front clearly said OPEN 12:30-4:30 PM M-F. Anyone she knew would have texted. Probably a customer pushing their luck. She knew she looked like hell, her hair up in a messy hair-tie bun, her old dress, but she walked towards the house with a closed face.
It was a kid. A boy. Tall and skinny, a teenager. She could see his profile through the grease-fogged window and through the cloud of tire-lifted dirt. He brought the car to a stop and hiked the window down, not smiling, offering a nod. It was Shelley’s son from down the hill. Tyler.
“Sorry to stop by, like, but I was wondering if you needed any work done? Maybe part time? Ma thought there was a chance you might need someone. Or maybe later this summer?” He squinted against the low rays of the morning.
“Tyler, right?” she stalled. “Why don’t you come in for a minute. You drink coffee?”
“Yes,” he nodded, excessively. She smiled and tried not to stare at his small moustache.
“Follow me.” He turned off his car, which shuddered to a stop, creaked open the heavy rusted door. She heard the metal slam behind them. They wiped their shoes on the coir mat. Tern washed out the old coffee dregs before pouring in fresh water with the same pot. It was due for a vinegar rinse.
“Milk? Sugar?” He shook his head.
“Me neither,” she agreed. She made her coffee strong and black and liked to see the oily rainbow at the surface, the way it briefly stained the inside of a white mug.
“How’s your mom?” She had been tight with Shelley in high school. Now and again they ran into each other at the Hannaford. Shelley had been the kind of artsy, dyed-hair-and-ripped-jeans girl back in the day who people thought would leave town after she finished college. In the end she came back and six months later married Sean, her high school boyfriend. They ran a tee-shirt printing business right next to the main grocery store. She and Dave had done a run with them early on and her faded purple GRATEFUL FARMS with the green-and-orange trumpet vine was still her go-to shirt.
Thief, trailed by Barley, burst into the kitchen, all wiggle and slobber, nudging at Tyler who unstiffened and petted them gratefully with long strokes.
“Ma’s good.” He kept his eyes on the dogs, smiling at Thief who was nosing at the cloth bag at his feet. Tern wondered what was in it.
“Tyler, I’ll be straight with you. Dave and I do most of the work around here. Sometimes we have a big project, like remaking a stone wall, or digging holes for a new garden bed, but that’s probably all we can offer you—a one-off kind of job.“
“Yah, I get it. Don’t worry about it. My Ma is just making me go around looking for work, but I wasn’t counting on it.” Tyler glanced at the coffee machine, probably wondering why it was not yet spewing coffee.
“But I’ll let you know. And we pay decent: 20 dollars an hour.” His eyebrows lifted. “I’ll check with Dave. Leave me your number.” Tern pushed over the edge of the local newspaper with a pen. Finally a tiny, brown stream of liquid trailed into the glass pot, paler where it caught the light. She saw him looking at it too before he bent over to write and wondered what it would be like to have a son like him, what it was like for Shelley to see his new moustache and stretched-out body, no longer a child you could swing onto your hip. Tern remembered having them over years ago, Shelley setting up the pack-n-play for his afternoon nap while they had lunch and caught up on their lives. Tern pureed him some squash soup from garden veggies and mashed bananas for dessert. He had been all smiles and giggles, and she remembered how the top of his head had smelled like both the soup and the bananas when she held him before his nap.
Sometimes the stark fact of dying made her breath go away, made her cold and a little shaky. Who would bury them? What would they say?
Tern could hear the dogs scrabbling in the side garden now, Barley’s sharp, high bark, signaling surrender to Thief, always the winner. Barley was the baby, the one who slept at the foot of their bed. They had the cats, too, napping upstairs after their breakfast, Linnea most likely in the linen closet and Spider in the bed. Linnea had even found her way to Tern’s garden bath once, sniffing around her head curiously, then distracted by something better down the farm. They had the fancy koi fish, her husband’s pride, unfrozen again, kicking around their muddy green waters. Some of Tern and Dave’s happiest moments on the farm were going down the pond in late afternoon sun, to enjoy their flashes of gold, red, and white. There would come a time, maybe after one more round of dogs, when they would not have more pets. They wouldn’t like the idea of burdening anyone. She worried about the fish, though, who would likely outlive them. She should make sure their new aerator was working. Tern wondered if she should take Tyler to see the koi while they had their coffee, but those days seemed past.
“Do you have any produce yet?” Tyler asked, relieved that his task of asking for work was done. “My Ma said to buy some if you did.”
They only had the pale beginnings of lettuces and cukes, a spattering of beans and peas, strawberries still white on the vine—only the flowers and seedlings ready so far. She took him to cut a bouquet of irises for his mom. The reason she had the perfect amount of coffee mugs in her shelf was due to Shelley. It started with Marie Kondo and then the Swedish death cleaning. Shelley lent her the books in a plastic bag on her front door handle since they were social distancing. Tern skimmed over the silly parts. It wasn’t rocket science. Thoreau had said it best: “Our life is frittered away by detail—simplify, simplify.” It was just about throwing things away you didn’t really need. She’d made her way through the rooms of her house, one at a time, to clear out huge bags of stuff. Jeans from her 20s, musty raincoats, black leather boots she had worn for years, re-gluing the soles every month. Tossed. It took her a few tries to let go of the silver tank top that draped so perfectly in the middle of her breasts. Dangly plastic earrings, old sparkly makeup went straight into the trash. Textbooks from her environmental studies degree: yellowed, marked, covered in a sticky dust went into the fire pit. Good riddance to all that paper. She’d hated writing those essays which were just about saying what other people had already said but shorter and with a time-consuming bibliography, index, and source notes. What was all that for, in the end? She was glad she never quit, not even when she realized that she was not making any real friends, that the others were laughing without her, not inviting her to their parties. The ones that raised their hands and spoke so easily and never seemed to be confused. She had never landed a single job from that degree. Everything she knew about the earth that meant anything to her she learned every day from her garden. The Muir, the Emerson, the poetry, she held onto, putting them back on the empty, wiped shelves. She liked to bring them camping to read with Dave’s steaming coffee in the early morning.
“Tell Shelley hello. It’s been a while.” Tern wrapped a strand of iris foliage around the bottom of the stems. “Actually, I’ll text her. Give her these in the meantime.” He took the flowers awkwardly, signaling thanks in his shoulders. She resisted the impulse to tell him she remembered him as a little boy as he returned to his car.
She had always liked kids and Shelley had done a good job with this one. Tern was sure she liked kids because she had an urge to wipe their snotty faces with warm, wet washcloths. Aging, as it was, felt mostly like shrinking, a little too aware that somewhere down the line you won’t be here, and it didn’t really matter. Sometimes the stark fact of dying made her breath go away, made her cold and a little shaky. Who would bury them? What would they say? It was painful to think of one of their siblings doing it; none of them would want to, it would be another stab of bitterness between them.
Tern watched Tyler’s car making more dust in the S-curve of the drive, then added the cat bowls to the dishwasher and watered the indoor plants. Today was Friday, and she was about prepped for tomorrow’s Farmer’s. Tern worked the Saturday and Dave worked the Wednesday. They used to work them together, but it was better this way, and the unloading and loading from her station wagon was manageable. The vegetable, herb, and flower seedlings were sitting patiently in their cardboard boxes, squares of brown paper, jars, and gingham ribbon for the flower bouquets laid out on the butcherblock for the morning cuttings. In the summer she offered corked glass berry concentrates, in the winter she made herbal soaps and salves, and in the spring she pressed birdseed donuts. As the house heated up in the stronger sun, Tern tied the bows and strings onto the birdseed, packaging some into gift boxes of four.
Her husband wasn’t a mean man. He was someone who always thought of other people when he made a decision, she had noticed early on. He wasn’t one to make any rushed moves; everyone’s opinion mattered, hers too. Tall, with a beard, a thick face and body, wider on his top half, people assumed he drove a pickup truck and they were right. Others wondered if he belonged to the Gun and Rod Club or sometimes if he went to gay bars looking for other bears, or maybe both. Neither was true. For better or worse, though, when he entered a space people tended to notice him. She would look sharply up at him in these moments, wondering what they were responding to before they even saw him fully. His bulk was both reassuring and a little frightening. She didn’t know if he knew how he came across to people. She’d see him flex his muscles in the mirror, but always with a grin when he saw her noticing, a shared laugh. Early in their marriage he’d throw hard items against the ground when he got angry, sometimes breaking things, and she had done the same, mirroring him, but he had never before touched her roughly, had always apologized if something broke in the wake of his fit. It was something she liked about him from the beginning, that he was a big man who was also a softie. When they first dated and he visited her family farm she noticed him gently petting the puppies and kittens, putting them down when he worried that he might hurt them by accident. Only recently he seemed to have lost some kind of hold on himself.
They joked about her being a housewife but that was pretty much what she was, so it wasn’t that funny. Dave did some grocery shopping and cooking. He did their eggs on Sunday—they weren’t that old fashioned—but when he came back from deliveries he was sweaty, tired, and hungry, and she often felt like things would go better if she greeted him holding out a cold drink, wearing a pink apron and a smile. She never did any of that, but she had learned to give him some space when he first got back; he was better after a shower and a meal. It took her a while to realize the Wednesday Farmer’s was a break for him, a chance to sit instead of drive, to talk to neighbors and tourists instead of being alone in his truck with the radio like he was the rest of the week. She felt most tenderly about him when he headed over, wearing his favorite tool belt, to fix a window in the greenhouse, to shore up one of the sheds, when he built shelves for their living room. Dave took the time to round edges, to change the sander with finer and finer paper. He would paint a wall two colors and a third for the trim. He took a full day to hang a door so that it would slow-close to the perfect click that first time and the thousands of times after that. There was a good chance that same door would work perfectly for the next owner of the house, and the next, and no one would even think about it. But Tern did, each time she walked through it into the outside air.
There was a spot shaded by young trees where she liked to dig. The earth would be at its freshest, that wonderful damp. It didn’t take her long to scrape out her shape because her earthen bed did not need to be deep, just into the A horizon. She threw her dress on some branches and lowered herself snug into the dip, feeling that full-body chill begin to permeate her frame. She didn’t bother to shift the big rocks, just adjusted her legs if needed. Idly, she took up the small pebbles near her hands, allowing their weight to press her fingers more firmly into the dirt, rolling them around in her palms like the Chinese balls in satin-lined boxes you see in every yard sale in the township. They scratched against her rings, but she liked how they tendered the sore muscles of her hands and gave her their weight. At a certain point the buzz from the soil would gather in various parts of her body like small armies of ants, waves would roll up and down her spine, the frisson of black soil nutrients enlivening the skin of her entire body. When she finally sank into the earth that final millimeter, trusting it would hold her, it would happen.
She buried into it, a lost mother she was meeting for the first time, tossing and turning towards comfort as the hour or so passed.
She remembered the day when the urge to meet the soil first hit her. Her husband was not a mean man, not really. But there was that time, and when he left, the door of his truck banging, she ran to the back garden, pulling off her clothes before she even knew what she was doing, digging into the earth with broken fingernails. She even took her underwear off that time–that had been important because of what he did—he’d shoved himself into her, pushing aside the flimsy membrane of her underwear with his rough fingers as if it were something he did every day. The same fingers that had given her so much pleasure in other years. That casualness was what she kept going back to in her mind. Did she know him? Had he done this to somebody else? She wanted to ask, but she also never wanted to talk to him about that day, ever. The pressure of the tumbling soil falling from the sides of her earthen bed against the hairs of her vagina had felt reassuring. She even hoped some of it was making its way inside her the way it was creeping into the cracks of her bottom. Like the way the cats cleaned their coats with layers of gravel dust on the walkway in the morning sun. She had felt something of that rush, a low buzz, even that first day. After she took the hottest shower of her life, she felt cleansed and calm. She slept on the couch for weeks until one day, she came back to the bed and Dave rolled over to hug her, tight.
These days she kept her underwear on just to be more comfortable, though of course the bra and the rest of it always came off. It was like the massage her friend Libby gifted her once for her birthday. Tern was glad she had thought to ask the front desk lady how much to take off and was surprised how many clothes could fit on the two tiny pegs in the room. She struggled to pull the thin sheet over her backside before the woman came in. That place felt like an uncomfortable cross between a doctor’s office and a sketchy happy-ending joint, and she had not liked it overall. Here, inside the earth, she felt like she could breathe, and it was the opposite. So much was always happening around her, and all of it felt right. A mouse or a vole or a chipmunk—she didn’t always catch what it was—would rove over her body semi-hidden by leaves, twigs, cones tumbling down from the short sides of her shelter. Once, a squirrel, curious, threw acorns at her face. When she noticed herself thinking of her husband she felt a tightening in her body. Ants and beetles were inevitable, and bothered her, especially when they fell into her hair, so she compulsively flicked them away, or fished them out, but once she settled in a state of calm, she could allow them their space and time to crawl onto her, and eventually, to go on their way. She watched her thoughts take form, drape over her brow, dissolve in the air above her. The sun filled her eyes, her skin, turning the soil a lighter, crustier brown.
It’s always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried at once;
a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising.
Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming,
on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn,
as the round earth rolls.
She had memorized these words over the years from the framed John Muir poster opposite their toilet. She loved the way the phrases rolled against the pastel blue mountain and yellow sun background and how they opened a breeze across her chest. She said the words to herself, mouthing them to the jays who whispered in the trees.
It wasn’t drinking like her mother thought—it felt instead to her like sheer disappointment. Exactly about what she didn’t know. She couldn’t figure out how to talk to him about it, or if she should even try. It was something they both had in common, they didn’t need to spill out everything in their mind the way so many people do. The more people talk about complicated things the less sense they made. So they spoke instead about what needed to be done on the farm, what they would do tomorrow, about the vacation they never seemed to take. But all that not talking and wiping food scraps off countertops and filling up dishwashers made a crack in their lives that let him become the person who could push her, hard, against a wall and force back the thin wall of her underwear for his own satisfaction. And leave her against the wall, sore, crying, sweet Linnea coming to visit her when she finally slid to the floor.
“Forest bathing.” That’s the new one. Just another way of saying you’re hiking, but your feet are covered over in cow skin and no part of your bare self ever touches the earth. Those city folks wore outfits that cost more than her grocery bill for maybe the year. She’d looked up those brand-name boots. This is the real forest bathing, she thought, looking at her brown arm hairs clotted with soil and dappled light. She could see how the sun made the leaves above her look every color of green and yellow. Maybe she could make a sideline of this, charge tourists an arm and a leg, marking out chalk rectangles with numbers. Tern let out a soft laugh. No, this was just for her, and something she couldn’t tell anyone about, not even Shelley, if they got back in touch. Anyone would think she’d gone off the bend. Dave was a lover of nature, cared about land conservation, went on hikes with his mountaineering friends, liked camping, but he put no truck in new-agey crystals or tarot or I-ching or ghosts or Ouija boards or astrology. He wouldn’t like to know she spent her time this way.
Today the soil was so perfect she stayed a little longer. She felt a curious spiraling of dead and alive in these moments, nestled in the exact gap between those two states, yoking them together in her own body as dirt crept into the creases of her ankles, knees, belly button, the bottoms of her breasts. She buried into it, a lost mother she was meeting for the first time, tossing and turning towards comfort as the hour or so passed. Worms, cool and slimy, passed briefly over her skin. The webs of her fingers wedged into dark soil, the tips of her fingers burrowing into a still cooler layer. Only being killed and eaten by a beast of the forest could feel as real as this, she thought. Tern imagined being attacked by a bear, by claw and teeth, and wondered if she would run and cry out or if she would, at a certain point, let the beast at her until white bone appeared under reddened muscle and sinew, until her skin lost its color and she finally let go the rest of her life force. Would she welcome that final softening into the earth, a shrug back into from whence she came? She smiled at her own moroseness. Tern realized her fingers were wrapped around thin, tough mycelium and that the subtle heat she felt was coming from her own palms, traveling out of her fingers into the earth, and then, after a time, returning, softly, surely as raindrops, back from places she would never see. She hadn’t known she was part of it too. The sun made blurry rainbows in the small tears of her eyes.
Tern heard the truck pull up, stall, shut off, the door open and slam. She had just enough time to get up, wipe off the worst of the dirt with her balled-up dress, shake it out, put it back over head, pull back her hair with the elastic on her wrist, slide into her sandals. Dave spotted her down the path just as he reached the door mat.
“Why are you covered in dirt?” He turned to stare at the loose brown stains on her arms and legs. She wiped a stray hair with the back of her hand, leaving more dirt on her cheek.
She sniffed. “I pulled some of that bitter doc in the back beds. Sprayed me good.” Dave grunted. She wondered if he would smile at her, or if she should smile at him, but the moment passed. Tern knew this small lie was another thing that widened the crack between them. She felt like he knew it too, that she was holding something back, that maybe he was letting her because of what he had done. Dave held the door open with a wide hand. She followed him. Underneath her faded dress the nutrients and spores of the earth pulsed in starbursts against her skin.
Ana C.H. Silva lives in East Harlem, NYC and West Shokan, New York. Her poetry lives in various literary magazines and in her chapbooks: One Cupped Hand Above the Other, with Dancing Girl Press, and While Mercury Fish, with Finishing Line Press. She creates interactive community poetry installations and has been writing poetry and art reviews as an editor-at-large for The Mom Egg Review since 2016. She won the Rachel Wetzsteon Memorial Poetry Prize at the 92nd St. Y Unterberg Poetry Center, the Rocket Man Award from AimHigher, and grants for a Luso-American Fellowship from DISQUIET in Lisbon and the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference in Vermont.
Header photo by Maples Images, courtesy Shutterstock.
