Heliotrope
It was a student of botany that fertilized my mother after an auction in Chapel Hill. It was in the grass, on a hill, under swelling clouds of dogwood. The date was the twenty-sixth of May and the bell in the bell tower over my parents’ heads chimed an air-trembling cascade of liquid sound. The day was drenched in new sun; the black earth so pungent and spongy that sprigs of green fairly rose up and unfolded before you. Or so my mother wrote in a letter to her lawyer, a postscript sent along with her will.
Eleven years later the brakes gave out on the truck that side-swept my mother toward a telephone pole as she crossed the street, unknowing. She wilted down the pole, they said, her face white, neck limp. I try to imagine what she might have been thinking as she trustingly stepped from the curb. I like to think it was an important thought, a leap for library science. Although, I doubt it. Not that she wasn’t an intellectual–she was; she knew more branches of knowledge than a tree has limbs, obscure enclaves, and little pockets of knowing. Most likely, she was lost in mining a metaphor, or noticing painted gingerbread on a boutique’s eaves.
I have an aunt that digs in Sudan, an archeologist. She flew home for the funeral and took me in. She tried to explain why she couldn’t keep me, though she really needn’t have bothered. When I wasn’t numb over the loss of my mother I was curious about my father.
My aunt found him for me, he hadn’t gone far. He was still a botanist, now faculty and he still lived near Chapel Hill. I found out botany meant plants and I began to picture him surrounded by jungles of breadfruit or exotic plants with blooms the span of your hand. He was on a sabbatical, she said. That one I had to look up. It sounded religious, a penance or something and I worried he might be down on his luck with his green thumb.
The driver waited in the car while I went to the door. No answer. Was I just to wait till he returned from being sabbaticalized? Perhaps he skipped town. I’d have to become a gypsy and live off the wilds of the Carolina backwoods. I pictured myself eating wild nuts and berries, a stone for a pillow. A woman with raggedy hair came from the house across the road. “Halloo, there,” she said. “Raleigh’s never around during the day. He might as well live at his greenhouse, far as that goes.”
She eyed my trunks that the driver unloaded. “You and Raleigh related?”
“My dad is all.”
“Raleigh?” She slapped both hands on her thighs. “That’s news.” She grabbed my luggage and started dragging it over to a garage behind the house. She pulled a string that popped a lever and the door flew up. There were panels of furrowed greenhouse glass that leaned against the walls and columns of black plastic plant pots stacked several times over to the ceiling.
She turned to me, wrists at her hips, hands flapping behind. “You know, your hair’s got the same bend to it his does. Eyes, a lot alike. What’s your name?” she said.
“Shelby Antony Briggs,” I said.
“Kind of a boy’s name,” she said. “You’re what? Nine, ten?”
“Eleven. I’m small, is all,” I said.
“Where’s your ma?” she said.
“She went to Sudan to dig,” I said.
“Dig what?” she said.
I shrugged, looked around at the house. It looked very old. The doorframe so stooped and cramped, it looked like a dollhouse. A stone wall about to my chest ran half way around the back yard, and collapsed in a mound of rubble.
“It’s a little ramshackle, but look up there,” she said.
In the crotch of an old tree, the trunk the size of a small car, there was this adult sized tree house that connected to the upper story of the house.
“He should’ve been born a squirrel,” she said.
The rest can be found in Confrontation‘s 72/73 Fall 2000/Winter 2001 issue. http://www.liu.edu/cwis/cwp/clas/english/confrontation/confrontation.htm