The Adventures of Flash Jackson Page 18

  “I’ll be damned to motherfucking hell if I’m wearing this, you old Amish cunthead,” I said, very quietly—whispering, in fact, because if she’d actually heard me there would have been no end to my mortification. I just had to let it out. Then I wrapped everything back up again and headed back to Grandma’s. Who did she think she was, anyway?

  But of course I ended up putting on the dress, because by then my own clothes were already starting to take on a bit of a peculiar odor, and the new things were clean. I put my foot down at wearing the apron and bonnet. Thankfully, Grandma didn’t push it. She knew the dress was a big enough stretch. Ordinarily dresses embarrassed me, but there was no one else around to see my discomfort, and I soon realized how much cooler it was in hot weather than jeans, and how much freer it felt to move around. This dress wasn’t designed for cool, of course—not when it was dark blue. And I would have preferred it if it wasn’t quite so long. But I solved that by tying it up around my thighs in a big side knot. I could tell Grandma didn’t approve, but she didn’t say anything about it either. I suppose by then she’d already realized there were going to have to be some compromises made if we were going to get along for any length of time.

  We didn’t talk much. Grandma had probably already been toothless when King Arthur was romping around Merrie Olde England on his horsie, and that made it pretty hard to understand her. Plus, as I mentioned before, her English was never that great to begin with. I’m not even sure, to tell the truth, if she was speaking English mixed with proper High German, or Low German (which was what the Amish spoke), or if it was a language that had been taught to her by a bunch of drunken squirrels. It sounded that garbled. She taught me the names of the herbs she used, but I could never figure out if those were her words or real words. I guess it didn’t matter much. I wasn’t going to be presenting papers on the legithatic arts at any major universities. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans whether anyone else knew what we were talking about. I just did my best to follow along, and filled in the blank spots with whatever words seemed most likely to belong.

  We started our days early, before sunrise. First I carried water: buckets and buckets of it, over and over, until my arms felt like they’d been stretched about two inches longer. Then I chopped a little wood, which seemed like fun for about a day but after that was about as exciting as wiping your butt. Then we ate breakfast—usually potatoes, greens, and whatever we had managed to trap. Grandma was an expert in making squirrel traps and rabbit snares, which were her main source of meat. Needless to say, I learned how to skin and clean a critter right away. She made me. I never have been the squeamish type, but I have to say that at first it made me never want to eat meat again. Take your average rabbit, for example, just a cute little bunny. First you slice the belly open and clean it out, and then you rip the skin off in as close to one piece as possible. Then you’re left with a steaming gutpile, a sad little empty fur hanging there like a recently discarded coat, and a pathetic-looking creature with no skin and no guts and two big googly eyeballs staring back at you. I started losing weight almost immediately. Grandma’s idea of cooking something was to scorch it until it was blackened and crunchy, regardless of what it was. I guess this was the best way of preventing disease, but what you gained in hygiene you lost in taste. Everything we ate tasted like charcoal. Later, I would learn that even this was efficacious in preventing upset stomach, since charcoal coats the lining of your gizzards and absorbs acid better than anything else. Try it sometime, next time you’re camping—help yourself to a little chunk of it, no bigger than your fingernail. Just make sure it’s burned all the way through and it’s cooled down enough to put in your mouth. You think it’s going to be gritty, but it feels as smooth as silk and has no bad taste at all. You swallow it down, and voilà—no more upset stomach.

  After breakfast, which we ate straight out of the cooking pot, we were usually off on some kind of herb-gathering expedition. Grandma had a territory that must have covered ten square miles, and included every variation of terrain that one could find in our neck of the woods: soggy bottomland, dry hilltops, cool shaded areas, sun-blasted meadows, acres of forest, spots where for one reason or another nothing much grew. Every kind of land produced its own kind of plants at different times of the year, and every kind of plant was useful for something. Grandma had memorized the uses of what I would estimate to be at least three hundred different kinds of plants, and those were only the ones she told me about. And when you consider that each plant had at least two and sometimes four or five uses, you can see that’s quite a bit of learning she had in her head, and all of it without the benefit of the printed page. She was a walking pharmacopoeia.

  I wasn’t allowed to write anything down. Well, that’s stupid—I couldn’t have if I’d wanted to, is what I mean, since I didn’t have anything to write with. But the information came so thick and fast that I knew right away there was no chance of remembering all of it. I would have to stick to the big points, and come back to the smaller ones later. Our first few days walking the woods together were rough this way. I got bored easy, I got distracted by everything, and I wasn’t used to the constant hiking. On top of that, I was having my period, and though I had thought to bring tampons from home I was cramped and grumpy. By noon I was tired and ready to go home, and I don’t mean back to the shack, either. Those days a month, all I want to do is curl up on the couch with a good book and some chocolate ice cream. But my grandmother wasn’t even interested in listening to me complain.

  “Give this for swollen joints,” said Grandma, pointing to a tender young stalk with wide, ferny-looking leaves. “But only pick it in the spring and early summer. Steep it in hot water for an hour. Then pour the water over fresh leaves and steep it again. Repeat this three times. Then give it as a tea. But if you pick it in the summer or fall, it will cause stomachache. So make sure you have it laid up beforehand. You can use it dried.”

  Never mind I’d never heard of anyone ever coming down with a case of swollen joints. Next time I did, I was prepared. This was my heritage. This was the sort of stuff I had come to learn.

  Well, strictly speaking, not just that. There was also the looking-in-the-water stuff, that business about Lifting the Veil. That was what I was most interested in. I wasn’t feeling scared of it anymore. I wasn’t scared of anything anymore, in fact. I was ready to drop all the rigmarole and drama. I just wanted to know.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Grandma, only it sounded more like “Ich k’no wa yor tagginabboud.” Of course she would say that, I thought. It was just like her. She never gave me a straight answer about anything, at least not anything important. Grandma, I would ask, where do I take a crap? Right over there, she’d say. Grandma, where should I throw these squirrel guts? Toss them behind that tree, she’d say. Grandma, what is the meaning of life? Shrug of the shoulders, a roll of the eyes. I don’t understand the question, she’d tell me. Ich hab keine idea. Ich not k’no. I have no idea. I don’t know. And who cares? Life is not made up of such questions. Life is made of smaller things than this. Those are what is important. Those are the things you should be paying attention to.

  Of course, if I’d had my eyes and ears and heart open, I would have seen that she was answering the question, as directly as she knew how. What she was trying to say was, there was no secret; there was no hidden meaning. There was only what was right in front of your nose. But at seventeen years old, I couldn’t accept that. I could only accept that life was composed of great, unknowable things that had yet to be discovered, and that maybe I would be the first to discover them, because it certainly seemed like no one else out there had the slightest idea what was going on. But I wasn’t as open as I thought, not as smart as I wished, not as ready to learn as I was going to be. Like I said, I had gone to the woods to find out how to become me. I didn’t know yet that I already was me, that, like an acorn, I already contained all the blueprints I needed to blossom into fullness, and that the real tas
k at hand was to wake up, slow down, and pay enough attention to realize it.

  All that stuff notwithstanding, though, I knew Grandma did know secrets, that she had unseen powers at her fingertips, and that maybe she was just waiting for me to show her that I was ready enough to learn them before she would condescend to teach me. So I did my best to show her that I was ready. I didn’t complain about anything, not even when the questionable quality of the water and the rough diet left me with a case of galloping diarrhea that never completely went away during my whole time with her. I didn’t bitch about the clothes she wanted me to wear. I worked hard, even doing things she hadn’t told me to do, trying to guess ahead of time what was needed, what had to be done. I memorized everything I could about her fantastic store of herbal lore and lay awake at night repeating recipes for various concoctions to myself, just so I could impress her with my knowledge. I learned the difference between a cold infusion and a warm one, what a poultice was and how it differed from a wrap, how to steep something just right so that you didn’t kill its beneficent qualities but brought them out in their natural unharmed state, like a baby being born underwater. In my mind, I was ready. And I kept after her.

  “I already did it once, you know,” I said. “At home. I looked for Frankie when he was missing.”

  “Den varom willst Du k’no from ich?”

  “Because I don’t know if I did it right.”

  “Find ’im?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aha.” Arms crossed, eyes focused on some point beyond me, lips clamped around the pipe she’d taken to keeping in her mouth at all times, whether it was loaded or not.

  “So what does that mean?” I asked. “That I already know how to do it? Mother told me it was dangerous. She said I didn’t know what I was doing. She said I shouldn’t mess around until I’d been taught right. And you’re the only one who can teach me.”

  At the mention of her daughter’s name, my grandmother must have remembered something. Maybe having me around had awakened her feelings of disappointment, if she was capable of something so personal, at my mother’s long-ago departure. Maybe Grandma felt like she’d failed my mother; maybe she felt that my mother had failed her. Her eyes narrowed and she spat on the ground.

  “She vent into die Welt,” she said pointedly. She went into the world.

  “She fell in love,” I said. “Can you blame her for that? She met my father and she fell in love.”

  At that, Grandma did something she’d never done in front of me before. She laughed. She threw her head back and roared wheezily, rocking to and fro on the front leg of her stool, bracing herself with her gnarled hands on her knees.

  “Liebe!” She howled, her bare gums shining in the sunlight. “Ho ho ho ho! Liebe! Ach!”

  Apparently Grandma thought love was funny.

  That was the end of that conversation. I got up and stomped away, my ears burning. I would have to try again later, when I’d recovered my composure. I was getting better at understanding her—not just her speech, I mean her—but all the same there were times when the old lady seemed like a code that not even Miz Powell herself could have cracked, not with a hundred Enigma machines working away twenty-four hours a day.

  Summer was soon ending, and my leg was nearly back to its old self, though it still felt too spindly to run on. I had removed the knee cast myself within a few days of getting it. I wasn’t ready yet, but I couldn’t stand having it on anymore. I was none too happy to realize that I’d gained a lot more weight during my recent period of enforced inactivity—how much, I refuse to say, but Grandma never tired of poking me in the stomach as though I was a prize pig at a fair, smacking her lips in satisfaction. For a while I thought she was planning on eating me, but then I realized what was really going on: She liked me fat. She thought it meant that I was healthy. Well, maybe that’s how it used to be seen back in her day, but in my eyes it only got in my way and slowed me down, and I decided it all had to go.

  Luckily, there wasn’t anything special I had to do to get rid of it. Eating the garbage we ate three times a day would have caused a giant to shrink down to the size of a thimble. By the time the leaves were starting to fall from the trees, that same old Amish-made dress was flopping around me like a pair of bat’s wings, and I decided it was time to go home and get myself some fresh duds, ones that didn’t reek of my own odor.

  I expected a battle, but Grandma didn’t seem to mind. I wasn’t a prisoner, she reminded me—I had come of my own free will, and I could go any time I liked. She had no interest in forcing me to do anything. I told her that meant I might be gone a few days. When the words were out of my mouth I realized they were true, and my heart leaped for joy. I was getting the hell out of the woods for a while. I felt like a sailor about to go on furlough in a town full of cathouses.

  Grandma, of course, merely shrugged. She didn’t even say good-bye, mean old cuss. She just went about her business as though I’d never existed in the first place.

  “Well, fine,” I said to her back. I had gotten used to her by now and wasn’t anywhere near as afraid of her as I had been. Mostly I was pretty saucy with her, but not in a disrespectful way. I couldn’t bring myself to flat out abuse her. “I’ll see ya when I see ya,” I said, and I headed down the trail.

  It was a long walk, but I got lucky. I didn’t see anyone who would have wanted to stop and chat with me on the way home. I wanted to stay far downwind of everyone until I’d had a chance to take my first bath in over six weeks. I even slunk by Miz Powell’s place on the sly, dying to run up the porch steps and ring her doorbell but forcing myself to think of how great it would be when I got myself all sudsed up and sank deliciously into a tub of hot water. Something told me she knew I was passing, though I didn’t see her on the porch, nor in any of the windows. She had built-in radar of sorts, she did. I could feel it pinging me like I was a submarine.

  Holy crap, I said to myself. You’ve never felt like that before.

  And myself said right back to me, You’ve never spent six weeks in the woods before with an old wit—I mean, an old legithata, either.

  Which made me think maybe Grandma was already rubbing off on me more than I knew.

  Mother was glad to see me, but she refused to come near me until I’d stripped and thrown my clothes into a garbage bag, which in turn went straight out the back door. Marveling at how much weight I’d lost and at how well my leg was working, she drew me a bath and threw in plenty of the kind of bubbles I liked, chattering away like a magpie. There was all kinds of news to catch up on, none of it very interesting, of course—this couple was getting divorced, so-and-so moved to California but didn’t like it, a big car manufacturer was thinking of putting a plant in about twenty miles away, which would finally mean plenty of jobs for everyone. I listened with half an ear while I let the water soak into all my crevices and loosen up the dirt. Then I bade her wait outside, if she didn’t mind, while I stood up and scrubbed myself all over with one of those scratchy sponges that just about take your first layer of skin off, making you feel sort of like a peeled banana. I looked down at the water and saw that it was all brown, so I pulled the plug and turned on the shower, and stood there rinsing myself until the hot water ran out and I started to shiver. Lordy, it was good to be clean again. It made me wonder why I’d ever gone out there in the first place.

  Mother had a big dinner going by the time I came downstairs. I was half-starved, but I could hardly eat any of it—not because I wasn’t hungry, but because after the lean feed I’d been getting, it all just tasted too rich for me. She drowned the mashed potatoes in butter, and she’d made little hot dogs wrapped in bacon like you might serve at a Superbowl party, and so on. It was the same food I’d been eating all my life, but suddenly none of it appealed to me, and just then a flash of genius came over me—you know, one of those moments when you’re able to see your own life as though it belonged to somebody else, and pick apart every little thing that’s wrong with it—and I said: “You’ve
been making me fat.”

  Mother hadn’t shut up since I walked in the door, even yelling up to me from time to time from the kitchen while I was in the bathtub, but that quieted her down quickly, let me tell you. She stared at me with her mouth hanging open and forkful of food halfway to her mouth.

  “What did you say?” she managed to reply.

  “All this stuff is killing us,” I said, gesturing at the laden table. “Look at it. It makes us fat, all of it. All this time you’ve been telling me I was big boned, but I’m not, am I?”

  “Well, Haley,” she said, “all big boned means is that you can’t help being—”

  “But I can help it,” I said. I stood up. I was wearing my old jeans and a flannel shirt, and I had to put a belt on to keep the pants from slipping down too low around my hips. I had never worn a belt before—it was one of my dad’s, and it was too big for me. I must have looked like a foundling. I took the belt off and pulled the waist of the pants out to show her how much extra room I had. “Look,” I said. “I can help it. I’m thinner. I really am.”

  “Living out there like an animal would make anybody thin,” she said, her dander up a little more now. “If you’re accusing me of deliberately making you unattractive, then I—”

  “Well, hold on now, buttercup,” I said. “I have never in my life felt unattractive. If I walked naked down the street, men would practically sprain their calf muscles trying to jump me.”

  “Haley Bombauer!” said Mother, scandalized.

  “All I’m talking about,” I said calmly, “is that you have been killing me with food.”

  I wished I hadn’t put it that way, because Mother started to get kind of weepy eyed. She put her napkin to her eyes and leaned her elbows on the table, and sure enough I heard the sounds that when I was younger always used to make me stop whatever I was doing and run to her side, putting an arm around her until she stopped. But I didn’t feel like doing that right now. I was sorry she was upset, but I was onto something, and I didn’t want to let go of it just yet. There would be time for apologies later. Besides, I wasn’t going to say anything that I couldn’t unsay. I wasn’t mad. I was just telling the truth.