FIRST PLACE GRADUATE ESSAY

Sage
by Jacoba Mendelkow

       My nephew is buried two hours away from my home. In April 2008, he just died. Stenosis of the Colon, the doctors said after months of saying it was nothing:that it is acid reflux, that the vomiting was normal. And when he told his mommy that his belly hurt, she laid down to comfort him and he died. Just like that. He was twenty-months old.

       Hung-over and sleepy-eyed, I was surprised to hear my phone ringing next to me on my make-shift bedside table, 6:32 a.m. Honey, my mother said, it’s Weston. He died. And I gasped loudly enough to wake my husband sleeping next to me. I’d been prepared for such a phone call in early hours to tell of death two years ago when my brother was fighting a losing war in Iraq. I’d begun to prepare myself for my own parents’ passing—my father already outlived his own father. I know I will lose him to a heart-attack. My youngest brother was serving a Mormon mission in Miami—he sometimes wrote of gunshots and murders—it could have been him. Instead, Weston just died before the sun decided to rise.

       I wait by the phone, hoping to be called again to meet my family and grieve. I want to feel arms around my waist as I shudder through my sobs. I keep my daughter home from school; I wake her to tell her in the same way my own mother told me. Honey, I say, it’s Weston. He died and she cries like I did—shocked at first and lonely next and we cry together. I spend the day in bed, though I am dressed; I am prepared to meet and discuss arrangements. I am prepared to juggle the tears of his parents. My mother calls in the afternoon. You may want to come up. We’re all here. And I leave the isolation of my home, drive to the other side of town and park my Oldsmobile on the curb. My mother walks in a hunch. My step–father has blood on his shirt. He begins to weep when I ask without thinking what he has spilled there.

       When they buried Weston they chose the cemetery in the valley where he’d spent most of his small life and today I drive to see him. In April, when he died, I didn’t follow the lines of cars through the lush green hills to place his body into the already fertile earth. I’d been teaching poetry to third graders (my own daughter’s age) and his funeral and interment was the day of our final parent performance. There simply wasn’t enough time. I chose them, and my commitment to their art and voice, instead of my commitment to my family—the children would miss me if I wasn’t there. I needed to be with them—I needed their hope, I needed to see their eyes glisten. I needed to feel their spirits and not think of the child we’d lost. Standing before me with shaking notebook in hand, reciting for proud mothers and fathers the poetry I had helped them write, I believed my decision was justified.

       In April, in Arbon Valley, the earth begins to thaw after months of hard winter snow and drifts sometimes 10 feet tall. The men talk of moisture and hope for the months that will come, the crops they will plant, the price of seed and fuel. I imagine the line of cars, and my weeping family within them, climbing Highway 38 through hills surrounded by plowed fields and natural meadows—Bureau of Land Management lands used for grazing livestock. I imagine the sniffling as the drive continues, conversation moving from the death of a boy to the life that surrounds them, the earth becomes ready as they drive onward.

       I drive today, nearly six months later, with my daughter and husband to plant flowers around his grave and bring life to this lonely place. A cemetery as old as the homesteaders’ farms; many of the graves are unmarked and collapsed over the returning–to–dust remains of settlers. Surrounded by farmland, fences prevent unnecessary disturbance by tractors turning earth. Raw wooden fence–posts lean from rotten bottoms and ceaseless wind. It’s been a hot summer; stalks of green winter wheat pop out of thick soil in straight rows. This is the only green I see.

       I am here to plant flowers, purple and white crocus plants to bloom in early spring. I want to remember him. I want others to remember him. My intentions are also wicked: I use this excuse to visit my mother. As we drive I prepare myself for the things she will say about my child, my job, my degree, my new husband, my failure. I warn and remind my daughter of the words she should not say and the jokes her grandmother will not understand. I remind her of rules: don’t open the refrigerator without asking, the computer is not a child’s toy, Sundays are days of rest, television is full of evil and worldly pressures for sex and money. I prepare us all for her sharp words during the two hour drive. I plan to plant these flowers without my mother: I am prepared with shovel and water to say hello, and goodbye, to this boy.

       But instead, we pass the cemetery and continue to my family’s farm. I am worried about being late for lunch, arriving too late to help with its preparations and feeling the weight of my imposition on their Sunday. I have brought a salad, some rolls. I will feed them and visit my nephew on my trip home. Perhaps on this day I have prepared myself for failure. I am convinced that a fight will erupt soon after my arrival. I often find myself slipping into defense. Around my mother I become reactionary, impulsive. This irritates her. It infuriates me. Thus, I am prepared to tip–toe and am armed with homemade pesto dressing to grease her gears of happiness.

       I’ve wondered for years about the true relationship I have with my mother, about the way I feel about her and the way she feels about me. And despite all my wondering and thinking and trying to understand the relationship we have, I never feel any more secure than I did so many years ago. I’m grown, I’ve not lived at home in a decade, I am respected in my job. My teenage mother students look up to me, my teaching evaluations are respectable, I buy organic milk, I donate money to charity. I do these things because they make me feel like a better person. I search for this acceptance in her—to be acknowledged as smart or kind, to have her ignore the tone of my voice and instead see me in the way I’ve tried to see myself. But this isn’t to be and I wonder if she feels the same way about herself that she feels about me. Perhaps this is why I feel rejected, perhaps she feels ambivalent toward herself like she feels ambivalent toward her children. It isn’t a stretch to think so, I feel it too: toward my child, toward myself, toward her. But it isn’t as simple as this: yes, perhaps we both feel this way. There is more to it than that, she must feel something for me more than ambivalence. But I’m not sure that she does, and perhaps this is sometimes how my own daughter feels. How can so much resentment be born from love?

       Today she is different from what I expect: happy to see me, hugs all the way around. I begin to prepare a supper and she is in the kitchen, telling me stories and jokes. Her voice is cheerful, lilting up and down—the way I sometimes remember it like long ago. I think you’ve lost weight, she says to my husband and balls her fist and taps his stomach lightly. You always make a nice salad she says to me I just don’t ever think about eating the way you do. I am uncomfortable in the kitchen next to the stove she’s installed herself, she tells me of the hole she cut in the wall to make it fit and points to exposed floorboards from the carpet she’d ripped out while my step–father plowed his 2200 acres. Be a dentist, not a dental assistant, she’d always said to me as a child—she’d taught me to be better than those women happy to clean teeth and be less than men, she’d not understood limits, she knew how to help herself. She’d not had a choice after my father left her to care for all those children. A roof leaked? You caulk it yourself. Trees difficult to mow around? She’d cut them down with a chainsaw.

       I worry that I may ruin this visit and so I smile too much and say too little. She asks me to cut potatoes and heat roast beef for sandwiches, and she does not offer to help. Her arms are folded across her chest, and she stands in a corner. My hair in my face, I bend over the marbled linoleum counter. She watches me use the knife she has suggested I use. I feel that perhaps I am doing this wrong and grow anxious. My daughter is outside swinging in the trees, and I see her through the kitchen window facing east. My mother asks me about school. She’d gone to the same college years ago, her GPA better than mine, she asks me because she is smarter than me and wants to remind me. She tells me that writing is a simple thing though her own manuscripts pile high in her office—stories rejected once and twice, she never sends them out anymore. It is simple, she says.

       They are getting divorced, she tells me. The judge has ordered therapy for my brother and his wife. They’ve gone through a lot this year, said the judge. They need help. My step–father nods; he went to counseling when he divorced his wife. My mother took pills when my father left her. I had a prescription for Paxil the year of my divorce. When I left, I took my daughter with me. My brother cannot do the same—his son is buried in the dry Arbon soil.

       And it is dry today. No rain in the valley for some weeks, and my step–father talks about the wind and the danger of fires. Everyone here is afraid of fires. Last year a family lost 90‰ of their crop right before harvest. Today, with dryness all around us, we climb into my air conditioned car and drive through dirt and wind to Church Road, and up, east, to the cemetery. My mother has come along to plant crocus bulbs in the earth and I am glad. We will do this together in a moment of silence. I want to reach her, place my hand on her hand, wrap my arm around my daughter. I want to feel her veins rippled through the skin of her hands and touch the softness of her arms. I want to comfort her and allow her to comfort me. Yet, I do nothing and watch my step–father bow his head as we drive through the wooden gates: “Arbon Valley Cemetery” barely legible on the carved wooden sign.

       Many of the graves in this place hold the remains of children. One family, friends of my mother, have buried three here in the past year: one gone to cancer, one lost in a car accident, another, they say, died from stress—I’m unsure what this means but cannot ask the question. I do not want the answer; I’m uncomfortable in the place. Weston is buried in a plot purchased by my parents and they show me where they will rest someday to the north of the smallest one. My roots are somewhere else and Weston rests alone. But he is buried near others in this newest part of the cemetery and this comforts my parents—the oldest graves follow the crooked fence—Weston rests in the center. He is with other children. This isn’t what they really mean: as Mormons, my parents believe in eternal life and eternal families. They believe Weston will live eternally with Christ forever in Paradise. To be taken so young is sometimes a blessing. Weston isn’t here, in this cemetery, but in Heaven where he waits for his parents.

       I used to believe in eternal families until my father left. Imagining my mother alone in heaven, without a husband there as she was here, surrounded by five children who tortured her, was unfair and unthinkable. He left her, he left for someone else, he took her eternal future and walked out—and he didn’t care. That is what I believed then: if he would have loved us, and loved us forever, then he would have stayed and not gone to live with his secretary. Sunday school teachers would tell me that it wasn’t for me to understand, that it was all part of God’s plan and that he knew what would happen before we did. His puppets they did not say this word. I say it now). But I believe in fairness and getting what you deserve; I believe that if this were true then God would have worked it out for my mother before my father took off and she’d not have been punished eternally for his sin.

       My step–father walks the dirt paths with me, nearly too small for a car to pass. These were the roads of wagons and buggies. These paths are history. Lives and deaths are imprinted into the soil, marking time in packed earth. He is this kind of man, good and hard working, of the soil and the earth. He believes in God and, I believe, he has given my mother hope again. Here, he says, this is Bitter Brush. And he points to a yellow flower on a green–brown leafless stalk. Its roots dig deep and it survives here in this cemetery. These are the plants that can live in a place like this, roots pushing through soil, digging deep and surviving long, windy winters. It is the determination of the plant that allows it to continue to grow (even inches a decade) in this sort of place. My mother is like that: digging in, picking up, moving on. She’s always been like that and I think of her here and I’m glad she’s come with me to plant these flowers for the baby Weston.

       Wild plants are everywhere. Even the domestic, an evergreen shrub, a lilac tree, are overgrown and sprawl wildly outward reaching out of this place. Giant Sagebrush, he says. Its roots are twenty feet deep. He points to a bare patch on the mountain. You see that, my step–father says, that dirt patch. It’ll be planted to wheat soon; it’s new land—my brother has pulled the roots of sagebrush from the earth. I told him to work hard, he says. It will help him heal. My step–father believes this. He’s had to heal before when his wife up and left him. He understands the way someone else can rip your heart from your chest; he understands my mother and the way she gets when the winter has been too long.

       Rabbit Brush, my step–father says, pointing to heavy stems coming from the dirt. And because this is my second time in this place I ask why the cemetery is wild. Why is there no grass? There is cultivated, planted, planned order all around in the fields of wheat keeping order away from wild and chaos. And he answers, Up here, there isn’t any water. The dead don’t need to drink; the desert a suitable enough burial. My mother joins us, pointing upward, east, into a field now plowed under. There is a body out there, a man who killed a woman. She was homesteading. They wouldn’t let him in here—it’s consecrated ground. I imagine the loneliness of living in this place, wildness and brush and murder. A baby, a woman, a family of three, dead. 

       My mother holds large kitchen spoons in her back pocket of her dark blue jeans. These serving spoons, the kind I used to plant flowers around our home as a child, are to dig holes two or four inches deep to plant each bulb, pointed side up around the grave that holds my nephew’s body. I have a shovel. My mother holds her spoons in folded hands and rests them on her chest useless because the ground is hardened from the dry summer. My husband shovels, cutting into the edges of a tomb. I kneel next to the grave and drop the small bulb into place, pushing then patting dirt over the small hole. My step–father waters the bulb; my daughter wanders through the graves looking at names and dates. My mother watches us and stands back away from our group. Many of the headstones have a single date that serves purposes of birth and death—here, Weston is surrounded by children.

       Doctors sometimes cannot diagnose colonic stenosis—it looks like other things, perhaps like acid reflux. Often not detected until a child begins to eat solid foods when the child’s belly grows painfully full of waste and Weston’s belly consumed him, his midsection full of poison. Doctors sometimes label these children: failing to thrive—arms and legs gangly and thin. My mother complained of his smell as a newborn covered in spit–up of nearly all the food he’d swallowed, rancid splayed on bib, on blanket, on her t–shirt. Even milk caused pain. In one of every 20,000 children born with a severe case of stenosis, the colon is nearly completely blocked. Weston is one of 20,000. Colonic stenosis was first diagnosed in 1673. These children always died. Now children like Weston who undergo surgery have a 90‰ survival rate. Weston may have survived if we’d have known. But the doctor said it was acid reflux and his young mother believed the doctor. Perhaps she did not know about seeking another opinion and I imagine her crushing guilt. It is sometimes hard to believe that life could have been otherwise. I am afraid to wonder of such things myself and my guilt as a mother dwarfs as I think of Weston’s mother—my child is alive and in the cemetery with me, her’s remains alone and buried in this dusty ground.

       Mormon Crickets eat this land, laying their eggs in sagebrush, hibernating in brush, sleeping through the heat within its shade—they consume loneliness. They eat each other and themselves.

       One year my mother sent a cricket home with my daughter who’d been to stay with her during the summer. A jelly jar and a Mormon Cricket, this insect of folklore and destruction with robotic face, alien legs and body. Both prehistoric and futuristic grasshopper, it gave me the willies. I remember a story about pioneers who moved from the East to the Midwest and after banishment and terror, moved finally to Utah. They planted grain in the desert, they irrigated the land, they cleared sagebrush and jack rabbits. One day the crickets appeared and turned the sky black. The crickets consumed work and hope of homesteaders in Utah’s Salt Lake Valley, and the people prayed with arms folded across their chests and bowed heads begging God to remove this plague. Please, Heavenly Father, save us and He did. This is what they say: the sky grew black again and the gulls came, swarms and swarms and dropped down to eat the crickets. The people were saved.

       This story isn’t true. Mormon Crickets do not fly. They could not have turned the sky black because they move on the ground. They hop, like grasshoppers, and they crawl. They can move 50 miles a day and consume everything within their paths, but they do not fly. Perhaps this is the story that should be told: when it is warm enough, 80 degrees or so like the crickets prefer, they awake from hibernation in the belly of a sagebrush to scuttle out and feast on growing grain. And every year, the story should be told, they do this again. According to the “Mormon Cricket Fact Sheet” published by the University of Wyoming and the Wyoming Geographic Information Science Center, these crickets (that aren’t crickets at all) can completely destroy cultivated fields and consume hundreds of thousands of dollars of crops each year. States like Wyoming, Idaho and Utah have suppression plans in place to eliminate the crickets by using pesticides and insecticides. These poisons are sprayed on the plants the crickets consume, saving the consumption for humans, poison and all.

       Poison and wheat, crickets and sagebrush, a little boy buried in a box with a toy John Deere tractor near his tombstone. The loneliness is in my mouth, in my hands. The dust turns my stomach and I am suddenly exhausted. I call my daughter to me; she is entranced by the finality of bodies placed in earth and together we walk toward my car passing sagebrush, bitter brush, rabbit brush, rotting fence posts, a dwarfed lilac. My husband carries the shovel, my step–father his now empty jug of water. My mother carries her spoons. 

       We drive home through the dust.

       The crickets are gone now, passing through this place two months before; their bodies making roadways slick as oil as car tires crush and expose insect organs. Their eggs laid in the branches of the sage have already begun to hatch. Winter they hibernate, spring they grow, and summer comes and the crickets move—out of the sage and over Weston’s grave, perhaps snacking on the remains of the crocus flowers, moving outward to the fields of wheat and alfalfa. The people begin to pray and soon the crickets disappear. And like the flowers planted around this baby’s grave, they hibernate through the winter and find light again in the spring.