It's Fiction Friday. Here is a short piece I did some time ago. The reader may judge personally as to the degree autobiography might be involved.
The Delta’s Girl
By Jimmie von Tungeln
For B
The girl
leaned forward from her seated position and rested her chin on her arms. This
gave her a steady view of the endless cotton fields in front of her. She stared
across the rows carved into the flat land and bounced a twig held between her
teeth up and down several times. Then she removed the stick and turned her
head, holding her long auburn hair to one side so it didn’t cover her face.
“Well,” she said. “What do you think?”
The young man glanced between his legs to see if the grass was staining his trousers.
“About what?” he asked.
“The delta,”
she said giving him a look that a grownup might give a non-attentive child. “It’s
great isn’t it?” She reached into a shirt pocket and fished out a barrette that
she then opened with her teeth. She slipped it into her hair on the side facing
David. This exposed her face and with it that expectant freshness he found so
unnerving. She locked her eyes so as to trap him into the truth.
He dodged
her eyes and shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“Just
okay?”
“I’ve lived
too long by the ocean, I suppose,” he said. “I guess I miss the smell of salt
air in the morning.”
“Makes
things rust. That’s what salt air does.” Her eyes bored deeper into him. “This
air makes things grow. Besides, it was Uncle Sam made you live by the Ocean.”
He shrugged
again.
“Look
here,” she said, twirling around so she faced him on all fours. Then she
pointed at the ground between his legs.
He obeyed
without thinking and looked at the patch of grass between them. He looked up at
her face, lopsided now with one side of her hair nearly touching the ground
while the other remained in place, held by the barrette.
“What’s
this, do you think?” she asked, spreading a group of longer blades of grass to
reveal a single, frail, green–topped stalk quivering in the spring breeze.
“I have no
idea,” he said.
“It be Lespedeza,”
she said laughing. “Everybody knows that.” Then she ordered him “Feel.”
He reached and cupped a hand around
the slender plant. He could sense the early struggling of life and had the
rather sudden sense of a stirring within himself, weak but insistent like a
thought bringing someone from a heavy sleep. He jerked his hand away.
She let the grass cover it again.
“My granddaddy always said you had to spread Lespedeza seed on the snow for it
to put up right in the spring. Bet you can’t do that by the ocean.”
She turned
back to a seated position on the warm ground and looked across the new-plowed
field again. He had the impression that she was finished talking for the
moment.
He studied
the soft curve of her back contrasted against the long straight furrows. The
silence unnerved him so he said, “It’s okay here.” She didn’t respond so he
added. “I guess next to the sea, I like the mountains best.”
She turned so
suddenly that he thought she might be angry. “That’s just it,” she said, as if announcing the solution.
“What’s what?”
he said.
She smiled
and the smile completely unmanned him, a trick he had learned to dread.
“You see,
here you have to create your own mountains.”
He fought
for time. There was a trap opening. He could feel it but, being on unfamiliar
ground, he hadn’t a clue as to its form or origin. “Your own mountains?”
“Yes,” she
said and her eagerness and certitude kept him unbalanced. “That way, you don’t
suffer constraint.”
“Constraint?”
“Yes,
constraint. Your mountains can be as big as you want or as small. They can be
covered with snow or even have a giant cherry on top like that one there.” She
pointed to a thunderhead on the horizon, topped by a round black cloud that did
indeed seem to radiate a red hue in the late afternoon sky.
He laid his
arms across his legs and rested his chin on them the way she had done. They
both watched the fields spread out before them like charts drawn to illustrate
perspective.
“How do
they plow them so straight?” he asked.
“They have
a marker on an arm of the tractor that they use as a guide from the last row
plowed,” she said. “Like this land itself―each generation is built upon the
values of the last.” She paused and then added, “Daddy’s been doing it so long,
though, he really doesn’t need a marker.”
He looked
back at the fields and he felt a breeze that swept him forward for a fraction
of a second—not really long enough to register fully— and pulled him into those
long rows and he saw the tedium of, year after year, coaxing life from this
fecund land. Her voice jerked him back the way a young calf is jerked as he
comes to the end of the roper’s lariat.
“It would
be truly sad, wouldn’t it?”
He focused
on her and processed what he thought he heard her say.
“Sad?” he
said.
“It would
be so sad to know that you had actually to be where the mountains were in order
to have them. That you couldn’t just have them whenever or wherever you chose.”
She turned
away from him and became quiet again. He knew not to speak, so he stared at the
falling sun on the horizon. The bright orb burned his eyes but he neither
blinked nor turned away. He continued to look directly into the sun’s fire and
then he saw the mountains. His mountains. They soared with a comforting majesty
from the delta to heights only possible in one or two spots on the planet.
Snows whipped from their peaks and circled the vast jutting rocks. Their
pristine beauty broke his heart but he continued to watch them.
Confident
that his mountains would endure, he looked toward the girl. The sun had blinded
him, though. He only saw streaks of fire darting like hummingbirds before him.
“I’m blind,”
he said.
Barbara
turned toward him. “No, you can see now,” she said.
Sure
enough, she came into focus. The barrette had fallen from her hair and the long
strands hung from both sides and framed her face the way the evening sky had
framed the sun. Now her face, always tinged with the ruddiness befitting a
farmer’s daughter, glowed as had the sun in the distance, almost raging in its
self-assurance—at once both fearsome and motherly. He could see her clearly and
also the mountains behind her and the long straight rows between them. He saw
the rows and felt their precision, even smelled the soft rotten smell of the
fresh earth. Then he smelled her—the smell of the earth and shampoo and soap
and innocence and something else he couldn’t define, maybe strength. He reached
and drew a bunch of her hair through his fingers. It was silky and pliant and
offered no resistance, feeling cool to the touch. He watched the released ends
bounce against her arm and felt the stronger growth of something within him. He
drew his arm away and looked back at his mountains.
She smiled
at him and said in a low voice, the sound drifting by his ears like a spring
breeze, “You’ll do. You know that don’t you?
He sat still in the silent expanse
of his delta—the fresh earth staining his clothes—loving her with a simple fierceness
that mocked the power of the earth itself.
