Red Washmire D11 Fin

Beads of sweat fall down my knuckles making the hoe slip and slide in my hands. I need gloves. Not just for the back breaking labor, spring may have arrived but, it is still cold as all get out. One of the neighbor boys lost a toe to the frost the other day. His momma had to lop it off with a kitchen knife. His screams echoed the quarter mile to our farm. My Gram said that if they don’t cut it off it’ll rot, and the rot kills. I really need some gloves.

The sun is setting. If I lose the light, I won’t be able to finish drilling and the soil will freeze. If that happens… I don’t want to think about what happens if that happens. I wipe the sweat off of my high brow with the back of an onyx flavored hand. “Red come inside!” Gram’s voice. My heart sinks. Phil is going to be so mad about this. I look to the porch and see my mother’s mother. I wave my hand, signaling back. I’m going to take my time coming in.

I saunter to the barn to wash up. I have to duck under the entrance to get in. My 6’ 3” frame is too tall for the doorway. I pump a little water out of the well into the basin. I do not want to go inside. I look at my reflection: A dirty face in dirty water. High cheekbones like my father and dark, coarse, frizzy, unmanageable hair like mom. It shoots in every direction, like a tomato dropped on the pavement. My face looks backwards and wavy in the water. My ecru eyes look empty. “boy you better get in here!” Phil’s voice. “I’m coming white man” I think to myself. I dunk a dirt black hand into the water and slash some on my face. I do not want to go inside. I slip out of the barn as fast as I can. My broad shoulders bang against the doorway, and head towards the house.

“Boy when I say come inside, you best come inside!” the old man shouts meeting me at the porch. I could kill him. I’m three times his size. I could tear his fat arms out of his sockets and beat him about the head until his legs shook and life left his body. But I don’t. I won’t. That’s not me. I’m not a violent person. I simply bow my head, give him a look that says “I’m sorry”, and trod inside.

“Phil, let the boy be. You know he ain’t right” My Grams soothing words pierce the hearth of my ears. “I know he ain’t right. What kind of man you think I is? I’m not going to pick on a boy too dumb to even talk.” I look up at the man my Gram remarried. You know, I don’t think I’m dumb. I mean Phil is right, I’ve never spoken a word in my life, but I don’t think that makes me dumb. I know plenty of people who talk and talk, and that sure doesn’t make them smart. Phil doesn’t ever shut up, and he’s about the dumbest man that walked the earth. Muteness doesn’t look good though. There was a rumor at school that I was an Avox. Our teacher thought that was ridiculous and forced me to show everyone in class my tongue to prove that I (as she said) was “just an imbecile”

“What you looking at boy?” Phil twists and contorts his wrinkled face till it looks like it might pop right off, like a rubber band pulled farther than it can handle. Wouldn’t that be a sight to see? I smile and look down at my shoes. Giant red boots my father gave me before he went to work on the Caroga Plantation. “He’ll be back in the fall” My gram told me. I hear her words echo from last summer. I hope she’s right. Dad’s the only adult in the world who puts up with me. I see myself as meek, but a lot of people think I’m uppity. They say that I’m faking being a mute. Phil used to get drunk and try to beat the words out of me. That was before I hit my growth spurt. Now he (and basically everyone) gives me a pretty wide berth. They still say things, sure. But there is not even the threat of physical violence.

I’m just scary looking, I guess. But I don’t feel scary. I feel scared. I stand up and walk to my room. Phil says something I don’t hear. I lie on the cot, and close my eyes. I can feel my feet dangling off of the edge. I curl them up in a ball and try to drift away.

I live here with my Gram her husband Phil and my mom. My parents are both alive, to my knowledge; it’s just been a while since I’ve seen my dad Red Sr. He went to work at the Caroga Plantation last summer, and I haven’t seen him since. He sends a little money every once in a while, along with a letter for mom and me. (although now that I think of it, since Phil found out about the letters, they started showing up empty) Mom hasn’t really been the same since dad left. “She was always an odd bird” Gram used to say. “but she just cracked when Red left.” She doens't come out of her bed much. She just lies there, crying pitiful tears streaking down her face.

We live on Phil’s old farm. We farm potatoes and leeks in the winter, and we just finished the harvest. Times are a little less lean then they have been. I know soon the peacekeepers will take nearly all of our harvest, but for now the four of us are as well fed as we have ever been. We’re doing much better than those around us. The frost didn’t kill our whole crop like it did the neighbors to the east. In the spring we’ll harvest the onions and carrots that Phil and I planted when dad left.

My gram is a sweet old woman. I don’t really understand how she puts up with phil. Her husband, my grandfather, died before I was born: starved in a particularly cold winter 20 some years ago. She met Phil when I was 10 and we moved from the plantation my mom and dad had been working at to Phils quaint little farm about 3 miles away from the town square

I don’t have what you would call friends. It’s mighty hard to get to know people when you can’t speak. I think I frighten people. At school the teacher ignores me, which I suppose is better than the alternative. “School is a waste of time to someone too dumb to speak.”

As I lie on this cot fighting memories, I wrap my arms over my knees. I see the scar on my left knee I got when I was 5. I tripped down the stairs onto my father. I bled for a little while, but he bandaged me. He sat me down on the porch of the old Fredi Plantation and told me to “hold tight” He said that’s what his father used to tell him to do when he got hurt. He said “you want to know how to stop the tears?” I nodded wells of salt water corroding my face “clench your fists” I did “tighten your lips” I did that as well. “and close your eyes as tight as you can” and I did that too. I opened my eyes, my face still moist from the streams of acid rain, but the leak was fixed. My dad smiled at me. He put his arms around me and held me close. He kissed me on the top of my head and told me he was proud of me.

This cot is a gash on my heart. This home is an empty shell: a corn husk. I clench my fists. I tighten my lips. I close my eyes as tight as I can. And I drift to sleep.