CHAFF AND GRAIN TOGETHER by A. E. Payne
A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
– George EliotOne time, in a field of ready wheat, the plow took the tails off a line of cats, mother followed by four kits, unseeable in the moving ocean of husk and seeded gold. Another day, a tractor tipped over the lip of a rise created by spring flood, the farmer’s organs crushed to the beyond. No one could detect that lip, the midsummer crop so thick its surface hid the underneath, but she’d seen it all. Things like that happened on a farm. Hard, hard. Life and its endings. So when she milked cows before dawn to relieve their need, she tied my uncle to a tree. It was possible for a two-year-old to drown in the dark waters of the coolie out there beyond the barn, and he was a wanderer that one. A rope around an ankle, she believed then, could save a person from himself.
Forty years later, when I was just a girl, her barn still had kittens in the hayloft, the spring plow turned up buffalo teeth and arrowheads, but there were no longer cows in my grandmother’s stalls, instead the postmaster kept ponies we could ride like the Plains Indians of the past through the fields. Free, and all because she asked him to make this possible for us. In those days, the slap of the mud room door signaled adventure, and there was bingo on a muggy afternoon, sugar cookies, a cold beaded glass of lemonade on the screened porch, mashed potato dinners that never ended, and I loved her, love being so simple then.
From my chair at the table, I watched her feed everyone breakfast, dinner, supper, and somewhere in there coffee and pie, and as she asked if we’d like more, she was already slapping the next pat of mashed potatoes on the plate. Giving, she was always giving. To herself? Not much, one reasonable serving. Serving. How our perspective widens as we grow. Was that the price she felt she must forever pay?
When they carried my grandfather in from the fields, she made a bier for him. This moment is one I must imagine, for though her children still lived at home, it is a memory never discussed. Did she clear the vase from the dining room table? Smooth level the couch in the living room? Or did the men at Halcrow’s Gas across the street bring a makeshift platform for her to cover with fabric? He still would have been warm, moveable, almost alive and yet not. Was there a streak of burn on his chest? His head or the soles of his feet? His clothing ashed, was the mark of lightning permanent or something she could wash away with warm water and a cloth?
They’d had a fight. A fight and he’d gone off to plow. Crossed the fields into the approaching summer storm. Nine out of ten live, they say, but for him, and for her, his was the one.
In the years that followed, she grew mean. Because even with Sundays in the tiny clapboard church, plain bronze cross shining on the lace-draped altar, even with a freezer filled by Folgers tins of cookies and maple bars ready for unending drop-by women, even with three children upward and through college plus the child practically deposited on her back stoop after her brother dropped dead at forty, even with the Red River miraculously flooding on schedule so the soil was rich rather than washed away, and the farm, run now only by her, somehow turning a profit, even then they condemned, She was hard on him.
As those early years passed, she stood rigid in the light of judgment she felt but did not understand, and angry, I suppose, at what they didn’t either. Pictures from that time show her before she blended snowy white, cream, and pink. Her lines are fierce, a sharpness of horn rims that doesn’t dissipate with the fading sepia of a photo or the softening edges of selective memory.
That swath of time was so long, even I met its final vestiges. When I hung upside down from the top bunk to scare my sister through the rungs of the ladder, when I did that and fell on my head and cried, lucky I didn’t break my neck, she came in and spanked me, and I was betrayed by her anger. She was in town, watching us, giving my parents a rare night out, once again responsible for a life, and I did not yet understand the inherent terror, or the blame, of loss.
Don’t forget to mow, she whispered at my wedding; she, by then only able to see the outer reaches of my hair, she squinting up hard at my face, my hands between hers, she saw. Don’t forget, she said, because what she recognized was something familiar in my own movement of lace and gold against the polished black, a future of disappointment and judgment and silent grief, when all she wished for me was enormous love and laughter. Don’t forget to mow, she said, gifting the domestic action of responsibility as a tolerable rope around my ankle, a rope that could keep me safe, and I heard her, though not the myriad layers of meaning at the time. So cute, I thought, mow! But clearly her wish inhabited me because here today, in my open palm, are the words, cupped and studied, the same number of heartbreaking years into my marriage as the year of her storm, jealous that she got lightning.
They’d had a fight. A fight that drove him off into the approaching weather. For her there were no long nights exchanging words that never arrived at a place of rest. For her no counseling when there was no chance. No false promises of hope. A summer storm. A strike of energy. A quick and final solution. No one to blame.
But what a thing to say. We work our whole lives to be good, and where we arrive in our unhappiness is this? In the wish for an end, to wish for her end, to see it as ease, here I am. Such callow self‑indulgence the belief that no suffering could ever be as bad as one’s own. Judgment flows like beads through my counting fingers: naive, selfish, wrong, doubly a monster; I take my rosary and drape it over my eyes, forgive me Father for I have sinned. I shall not covet my grandmother’s grief. I take my fingers and blur them across my face and chest. Say a prayer in another woman’s shoes.
In my terror, I end the prayer: But still. Aware that in these words all prior magic is undone. But still, is my amen, because life decided for her what she could never have decided for herself. What no one should have to but sometimes must. I press my hands to my brow and plead, She didn’t do this to her children.
When lightning struck, the faces at her table ruptured with grief, but they remained, pointed in the direction of the crackle of chicken on the stove, the moving spoon filled with white potatoes. None were cast out. Nature not choice. And though their faces broke long from loss, they were all there, day in and day out, awaiting her touch. Not like now, where the end is a decision that sends children back and forth across town, my table one day full, one day empty. Two closets, two sets of cats, four hearts breaking. The adventurous slam of a door transformed to the sound of beginning, or end.
But it’s all an end, isn’t it, and nothing is simple. To fantasize death as a substitute for courage is nothing more than solipsism’s darkest heart, the fool’s wish, a tyrant’s desperate greed. To fantasize death’s burn on my children? Oh, oh, for her hand on my shoulder now.
In the solitude of my body, there is this. Of all the things I wonder most: did tiny kernels of wheat, green turning gold, fall from the cuffs of his pants as she straightened and arranged him? Were they the very kernels that before had brought her to rage, made her press fingers to brow? So tired of sweeping those kernels each day from the kitchen corners, the carpet on the stairs, her clean pressed sheets. Their constant contribution to her daily work forever unseen (the floor she washed for him on her knees, the bedding she forced through the wringer, the boys’ pig she must send to the slaughter, the spit, the polish, the nurture, her life’s work repeated day after day after day, her silence asking him please, please see his footprint, brush himself off, and acknowledge, even a little, the causes of her labor, please, do this for her).
When it was over, did she take one small kernel, that symbol of living and unchangeable strife, and put it in her small white box of paste glass and fake gold? With all that had changed, did its luster shine real against the dark velvet or did it remain, even then, another piece of failed love’s thin costume? Did lightning change the way she saw the world or did the longing to be seen still smolder? Won’t she tell me?
Come back, I call across the years as I imagine her, holding my hand and loving the peripheries of my face, please tie me to a tree. Where are you to help make fast the knot around my ankle, the thick itchy scratch of rope tight against my skin. Stop me, I cry to her, because it is the coolie I am in danger of, the dark water of mistake, drowning rather than salvation, tangled roots and snappers, a place from which I fear I will never return.
Yet there is this I also know to be true. In the late season of her life, my grandmother recaptured her sense of humor. Despite an increasing veil that let in the world from only the outer corner of her eyes, then a drifting chip of blood that left her saying words she did not choose – so much indignity, pain, endings – all this she bore. In the end, she learned, there was no rope strong enough, and she had first to leave her farmhouse, the attic still echoing with the memory of long gone footsteps, for a low building full of old people. But this fate she chose, and daily she pushed the blind grandmothers in wheelchairs to dinner and later sat in the room with others who couldn’t see, to listen to the news and the farm report on the radio. She was funny again, she liked to laugh, a laugh that was flannel-wrinkled like her face, and she was happy. So unexpected, the soft glowing cloth of well-being, how it can weave through the past to lighten even the most spiderwebbed scars of loss.
Time is all there is.
In my own yard of strewn toys and shovels, the cry to be seen echoes age-old and fresh through my veins, and equally age-old and fresh, it goes unanswered. But how can I long for the freeing crash of a plane, the stall of a heart, any quick-strike action that would simultaneously burn loss permanent in my children the way my own father was seared? Even when life’s harvest rises so thick that no one outside can know the underneath, the easy path, nestled glittering against the darkness, is still fool’s gold.
Each time we were together, my grandmother took my hand and patted it as if it were a treasure. It’s that touch I long for. Reach across time to me, I call to her. One monster to another. You, who they blame for the death of your husband, to me who would wish the same. Reach across time and assure me, that despite the ragged harm from life’s unforeseen pain, the truth I live is far different from my fantasy’s costume. Hold me one more time and search the peripheries of my face. Show me that somewhere, however buried in its outermost reaches, you can still detect amongst the chaff those seeds of beauty’s truest gold
A. E. Payne has published fiction in Nimrod and Puerto del Sol. “Chaff and Grain Together” is her first creative nonfiction work to be published.