Home Meadow

The man was on his stomach in the grass, legs spread, up on his elbows like a sniper taking the prone position before firing. But he was not shooting. He had tripped over a hidden root and dived straight down onto the green carpet of blades and leaves. His right knee hurt where he’d struck the ground, and his back ached from lying on his belly, a position to which he hadn’t been accustomed for some years. Bass Fletcher (whose Christian name, Alabaster, had been shortened by his father within the first seven minutes of the child’s earthly life) was not known as a particularly studious man. He was, however, a close student of everything around him in an interior sense. Never displaying on his face the penetrating, lingering scrutiny he gave every creature and object within his sight, he spent his solitary moments inventorying and reviewing all that he’d encountered during a given period of time. Today he was looking at a patch of his front lawn, a patch directly in front of his eyes where he’d fallen.

A few red ants tippered around the grass roots, some of them carrying white flecks as cargo. The dirt itself was black as only delta dirt is, the rich, alluvial soil that had once made cotton king, and that had blanketed many a Southern saint during the silence of sleep or whatever happens after the last unbroken blink. Bass watched as a black and red centipede undulated around a dead leaf and the stalk of a dandelion and drummed along towards his face. He flicked the centipede away with a finger, not liking the too-colorful looks of it and suspecting it might be venomous. Some large black ants appeared to his right, and Bass smiled, noticing the precision of their arrangement. He looked back to his left and saw that the centipede had righted itself and was again moving towards him. Bass thought to squash it, but then stopped his hand as it was rising.

It’s crawling towards me because it’s alive, thought Bass. It is a life. Does its life matter? He balled his hand into a fist, put it on the ground, thumb side up, and placed his chin in the divot, ignoring the fresh pain in his knee and his back. He watched the centipede. It matters to him, I guess. As he watched, the centipede veered off away from him, and Bass scanned the grass again. A slight movement some feet away from him caused him to lift his chin from his fist, and the movement twinged his back again. He started to try and get up, but the movement turned out to be a brown spider making its way across the forest of lawn plants. The words “brown” and “spider” made Bass uneasy, as he had heard of brown recluse spiders but didn’t really know what they looked like. Their malevolent reputation caused him to watch for just another minute, hoping the spider would do something to either confirm or allay his fears.

A wasp swooped down and lit on the grass between Bass and the spider. Its coloring was dramatic: orange wings, orange and black segmented body, and neon orange antennae. The wasp moved in jittery jerking movements, like a tiny football player performing grass drills. Just as Bass was squinting to sharpen his focus, the wasp sped over to the spider, fastened onto it, and sank its stinger into it. Immediately the spider partially curled its legs under its abdomen and became still. The colorful wasp began dragging the wasp away, tugging it between blades of grass and the stalks of weeds. Bass watched until the wasp had gone from his sight. The brutal beauty of the suddenness of the attack had left him breathing rapidly, and he became aware that he was sweating a bit. His back and shoulders pained him, and the knee that he’d fallen on was hurting a bit more. Time to get up.

Later, showered and sitting in front of the television with his feet up and an ice pack on his knee, Bass thought of the miniature dramas he had witnessed earlier. His thoughts were not so much what he’d seen, but rather what he had been tempted to do. He had come very close to killing the centipede. And if the spider had crawled on his arm, he most certainly would have killed it. And if the wasp had been zinging through his house instead of his yard, he would have brought it down with the fly swatter and thrown it in the kitchen garbage can. But none of these acts of everyday violence had occurred, and why? Because he had watched. He had remained prone and still, and had watched. If I hadn’t been hurting, if I’d stayed down there, what else would I have seen? He adjusted the ice pack and turned the volume up on the television, but he paid no attention to the typed-out accounts of murders and terrorists and Supreme Court cases and accusations of racism and plane crashes and food shortages and celebrity peccadilloes passing like a slow freight train across the bottom of the screen. His mind was in the grass.

***

“But it won’t be long before people will drive by and think of us as white trash,” said Madge.

Bass stood with his hands on his hips, staring out across the front lawn. “If they do, that’s their problem.”

***

Bass let go of the handles and reached into his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and mopped his face. He leaned his pelvis against the reel mower’s handles and listened to the buzz of grasshoppers and locusts around him, his heart soothed by the placid drone of summertime with the chanting of birds offering a high counterpoint above the lower, steadier sound from the grass. He caught his breath and turned to look behind him. The mark of his progress was a narrow path through the growth that rose almost hip-high on either side. Since he had decided to let them grow, the lawns had only required a quick push of the old reel mower down the path he’d laid out. The short-cropped trail meandered in a gentle arc from the front door to the left, then back to the center of the front yard. From there it curved around to the right towards the road and stopped just before the property line. When birds looked down in passing, the path they saw looked like a large, backwards “S.”

It took a long time to mow even the narrow path, because Bass watched the grass in front of him with such care. The clover was up, and honey bees were active in the drowsy heat. Bass pushed the mower forward in little jerks to shoo the bees off of the flowers so that he didn’t harm them. The bees would lift a few inches, find another clover flower, alight, and then be shooed away again by the slow turning of the wheels and the soft shirring whisper of the blades. If he saw any creature, be it mouse or cricket or daddy-long-legs, Bass would pause and give it time to clear the path. If it was stationary or too slow, he would assist it out of the way. Last week, Madge had watched him doing this and had tore into him at the supper table with a twelve-minute lecture on his foolishness.

“I swear to heaven, Bass,” she had said, tapping her spoon against her coffee mug. “You don’t make a bit of sense. Stopping and letting the dad-blasted bugs get outta the way before you push the mower a foot. I guess you’ll be hugging trees next?”

Bass had finished chewing his food and had taken a long swig of tea before putting down his glass and wiping his mouth and rising with plate and cutlery in hand. “No, I don’t plan to hug any trees. I don’t plan to cut any down, either. I’m just trying to spare little lives, Madge.”

“Well, good Lord,” she had snapped back, “You probably kill two dozen something-or-others just walking across the blasted yard! Jevver think about that? There’s about a million bugs and things down in the grass. You can’t avoid ’em all!”

He had placed his dishes in the sink, turned, and looked at her. “I know that. And I hate to think on it, actually. I wish I could spare every last one of them.”

Madge had stood up and grabbed her own dishes at that point. “I guess if a copperhead snake crawls up in bed with me, you’ll want to give him a bottle and a pacifier. I guess if a bull with rabies comes tearing through our living room, you’ll offer him something cold to drink.”

He had sighed and turned away, calling back over his shoulder. “Well, if any snakes or bulls show up, let me know. I might be willing to make an exception.” She had been slamming plates around and muttering as he went back outside to the yard.

And now he stood again in the yard, where he was spending most of his waking hours these days, leaning against the mower’s handles, watching and listening, breathing in the cleanest of aromas, aware of his own heartbeat, his senses jangling with the nearness of bird and beast and blade and bud. The tall grass and wildflowers on either side of him shimmered with the passing of breeze and of tiny feet out of human sight. His pleasure rose within him, but was checked by the pressure in his chest, a low, insistent squeeze that made him bend forward and take a few breaths down to the bottom of his lungs. He felt better in a moment and continued pushing the mower. Better take one of those allergy pills, he thought. Pollen’s bad today.

***

Madge sat on one end of the sofa, watching her husband’s face. She knew Bass was angry because of the flush in his cheeks and forehead. So far, his voice was controlled, but she knew this wouldn’t last long. Larry, the head deacon was speaking.

“Bass, we don’t particularly want to be here, talking to you like this. But it’s a matter of appearances. It’s a matter of what’s proper.”

Bass Fletcher waved his hand and shook his head, his eyes closed against the sight of the churchmen gathered in his living room. “It’s a matter of me doing what I want on my own property, Larry.”

Larry leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands in the official Beseeching Position. “I get that, Bass. I really do. But when a neighborhood association comes to the church to make a complaint, we can’t ignore it. And they wouldn’t have come to us if you hadn’t ignored them. Ignoring doesn’t help anything.”

I wish I could ignore you, thought Bass. He opened his eyes and looked at the men, then at his wife. Madge stood up and went to the kitchen, thinking some sweet tea might serve as a calming agent. Bass looked from man to man, watching them watching him. Finally, he spoke, and his words were slow and heavy, his intent being to at least appear to remain calm.

“I have the right to ignore anyone who sticks their nose in my business,” he said. “I don’t recall electing this neighborhood association to anything. Fact of business, I don’t remember them being here at all when my daddy bought this piece of land and farmed it. I don’t recall them doing anything for me or my family, ever, except ask us for donations and pressure us to participate in the little shows they put on twice a year. I don’t need an ‘association‘ to know who my neighbors are, and my neighbors don’t need me butting in their business. So why shouldn’t I ignore them?”

Larry cleared his throat, started to speak, then stopped and smiled at Madge, who was bringing in some sweet tea. She didn’t carry it on a tray like in television shows; she had her large hands wrapped around four full tumblers and let Larry take the one closest to him. She moved down the line and gave one to the other three deacons, then returned to the kitchen to get one for Bass and for herself. Larry waited until she had returned and sat down, and then he cleared his throat again.

“Bass, the thing is, the people who live around you are worried about how your place looks. I mean, you’ve, you’ve — you’ve always kept everything so clean and orderly, and now your front yard and your back yard look worse than a hay field. When you’re down the hill, you can’t even see your front door from the road. Now come on, you can’t tell me you don’t understand why people are concerned about this.”

Bass took a sip of his tea — too sweet, but he’d given up that battle many years ago — thinking before answering. He peered into the faces of the men sitting before him and felt a swirl of disgust, pity, anger, and sadness move over him like a dust-devil. They’re worried about my yard looking like a hay field, but they don’t care about the countless little living creatures who love how my yard is now. They put out corn next to a tree-blind for weeks, getting some poor, dumb deer to get used to feeding there, and one morning they climb that blind and sit there in their two hundred-dollar camo outfits and their twelve hundred-dollar rifles and wait for that deer to come wandering up to breakfast, and they shoot him down and call themselves outdoorsmen and survivalists. They pollute the air with their riding lawn mowers and their leaf blowers and their weed trimmers, and they want to intimidate anyone who cares more about the living things and the peace of the evening than about expending energy in maintaining an artificially manicured presence in the community. They never think about how dependent they are on bees pollinating their food. They pray for and send money to strangers in distant lands they’ll never visit, strangers who murder each other as easily as I swat a mosquito, but they never spare a thought for the little rabbits and chipmunks and field mice and meadowlarks who live right under their sunscreened noses.

He took another sip of tea, put down his glass, and looked again at the churchmen. But I’m the villain, he thought. I’m the bad guy. Finally, he spoke.

“When’s the last time you sat outside and listened to the birds in the morning, Larry? How about you, Dave? When’s the last time you watched the owl that lives in your barn, Charles? How about you, Clint?” The men stared back at him, holding their glasses of tea, holding their peace. He pointed his finger at them, moving it back and forth like a gunner selecting targets. “You all make me want to puke. You come here, telling me that you represent the community. You’re deacons! You’re church people! You have no business getting involved in something like this, something no one should –”

Larry cut him off. “Actually, Bass, we have every right to get involved when you’re doing things that tarnish the name of Christ.”

” ‘Tarnish the name of Christ?’ Did you actually say that to me? You have no more idea of what…what….” Bass’s head fell forward, he tried to put his hand to his neck, but his arm fell into his lap and he pitched forward, knocking the end table over as he fell onto the floor. He lay on his stomach on the carpet, legs spread, his body covering his arms like a small child at naptime. But he was not napping. His body was sounding alarms at the tiny piece of fatty material that had broken off and zipped through the conduits of blood vessels and lodged in a place where it could act as efficiently as any man-made dam. Bass heard none of the uproar around him as his wife screamed and the men moved to assist him.

***

Bass Fletcher sat in his recliner near the window, looking out at the front lawn. He could hear the television behind him; Madge was watching a young woman read the news from a teleprompter. He tried to grimace, but the right side of his mouth was drawn down and didn’t move very much anymore. He could hear the delicate drone of a hummingbird outside, under the eaves. It was growing late, and he could hear the cows, the cows with their eternally sad eyes and massive, soft-lipped heads, the cows calling to each other across the bird-filled air of the shadowy evening hollows. Beyond the shade of the maple tree closest to the house, Bass could see the smooth, regular expanse of the lawn stretching out away from him, mowed down as perfect and unblemished as a knitted wool scarf.

~ by S.K. Orr