This Heavy Silence by Nicole Mazzarella

Author:Nicole Mazzarella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paraclete Press
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

June was barren. My basement shelves, long stocked with Mason jars full of dill pickles, green beans, beets, potatoes, peas, and apples, were empty. Only in shadowy corners could I find occasional jars of bread and butter pickles or stewed tomatoes. In the barn, a rock weighed down a pile of empty Pioneer Fielder’s Choice seed corn bags. We had planted forty bags, with 80,000 kernels a bag, on one hundred acres. Stanley and I had filled the plastic hoppers with seed and alternated driving the tractor-pulled planter through the fields. Seventy-five acres sprouted the starts of soybeans. My grain bins were oversized birdhouses. The flutter of swallows echoed in the metal bins like sheets left on the line during a windstorm. I smelled harvest in the dust of dried corn that covered the walls of the bins. I would feel unsettled until they were full.

Summer hid death better than any other season. From my porch, the fields appeared green: Granny Smith apple green when wind twisted the leaves with the coming rain, John Deere green with sunrise, and pine needle green under the haze of afternoon heat. I walked the fields often because green, upon close inspection, hid insects and disease. My brother taught me these things when I ran barefoot on the path beside him, begging him to teach me everything he knew. I thought then that his chores would become mine, and I wanted to do them well. I believed that I scrubbed clothes, hung wash, and baked three days a week with my mother only because I was young. When she forced me to iron the same pillow case four times with the flatiron, I only sighed, because I believed I wouldn’t need these skills once I was old enough to work with my father and brother. My brother died in the summer. I later learned this was the only reason I took over his chores the following day.

On a Wednesday evening during the first week of June, the rain of the past two weeks stopped and Mattie announced she had a summer job. I had not expected either event. The forecast had called for rain until Friday.

I rubbed Worcestershire sauce on the roast planned for the following day’s dinner. Meals followed a scheduled rotation, which I thumbtacked to a pegboard inside the cupboard. I kept fifteen meals on the rotation and cooked the dinner meal before supper each night.

Mattie brought in a quart of strawberries and set them on the counter. She smiled too brightly when she asked if she could help.

“Did you get the quarts ready to sell tomorrow?”

She had and she had already put them on the stand that Stanley had built near the road, so customers could drive by to pick them up. We kept a Hills Brothers can with a slit in the lid for the payments. Trust made some customers so nervous that they parked their cars and searched us out to hand us the cash.

I motioned toward the carrots.

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