Brennan Burnside
In mid-June the mulberries are ripe on the Haruf estate and Lincoln indulges his brother Harvey’s request to take his son Andrew to the family grove. The Haruf estate is ten acres of peach and apple trees in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and in the summer it looks as if the season’s ambition is to reclaim the sky for its own. Lincoln is in the middle of it all, messy brown hair with a growing bald spot in the middle, standing on the top rung of a ladder Harvey lent him, gathering the highest berries in a Wal-Mart shopping bag. His shoulders are sore and his fingers are petrified into sullen claws, dyed purple from the pokeberry bushes he got into earlier (thinking they were mulberries, at first). Later, he’ll take everything he gathers back to Amanda, his new girlfriend, who will cook him a pie to celebrate his new job, his six months of sobriety and their four-month anniversary. She, herself a recovering addict now in nursing school, knows how important anniversaries are for people like them.
Many things have come together for this moment. His position at the community center teaching art fell into his lap (although assisted somewhat by his father’s community pull) and he’s starting to believe in God or, at least, that life has a personal investment in him. And Amanda. What a beautiful, sexy woman. I’m so lucky, he thinks as his fingers stretch to pick another berry. He’s starting to reconsider his previous view on fate. I deserve this, he considers, but it just took a bit too long to get here. “This moment. . . ” he says softly, then utters a phrase that his father had often directed at him: “. . . what was the big hold-up?”
*
He has always felt unease around Andrew: his ten-year-old nephew has autism and cerebral palsy, is still in diapers and mumbles in the amorphous tongue of infants. Harvey, perhaps, thinks it is only a further step in his recovery, but Lincoln sees it as a subtle “fuck you” in shiny wrapping paper. The berries seem to bend away from him when he reaches for him. Cursing under his breath, he sighs defeatedly and wipes his brow. Sweat is stinging his eyes. He hasn’t looked at Andrew in several minutes and feels guilty, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the kid is okay. He’s fine. Head rolling back and forth. Almost like he’s listening to a pop song. Lincoln sighs and turns back. He accidentally disturbs a tear-shaped nest on one of the branches while reaching for a mulberry just beyond his grasp. A cloud of wasps attacks him. His arms flail and he can see Andrew through the cloud and he looks amused. Knowing nowhere else to direct his frustration (and certainly not in the mood to self-reflect upon his own role in the matter), he screams, “You fucking piece of shit—quit smiling!” He is surprised by his anger, unsure if this is directed toward his nephew, his brother or himself.
**
Lincoln left Harvey and his parents on their family’s thirty acres of rolling plains when he was seventeen to attend art school in Philadelphia, continuing to receive support from them as he dropped out of college, became addicted to heroin and fell into the revolving door of rehab. He only recently returned to his family’s land three years after both parents died. Last speaking to them on the phone five years earlier, much angrier than he was now. Coming back and seeing their absence though? It was revelatory. Now, most of what he was is sediment at the bottom of that ocean of tumultuous self that composes himself. It has no beginning or end, just nodes of intensity. There are still fragments of it floating around. Radicals that make him scream at Amanda or pull out his hair when is one’s looking. The ones that cause him to look on Andrew with a rootless inner rage. . .
The absence he felt when he first came back home revealed itself to be untrue. After all, the air was thickened with memories of past summers when friends and family would all come to harvest from the groves of mulberry trees. If anything, there was too much here. Things cannot be escaped. Time is an illusion. He remembered the annual family festival complete with games and music: cornhole, sack races, strange rituals he finds hard to wrap his head around now. Things were so unbelievably perfect then, timeless. Everything around him was heavy with his youth, regret, nostalgia—Lincoln kept seeing all the things he could’ve been when he thought of the grove. Nights at home were rough. He cried a lot. A lifetime of willful delusion was suddenly crashing around his feet. Much of it had held up what he’d decided was a functional life. All of it was a smoke. His conception of himself (or whatever he’d call the mess he’d been trying to build) was taking a hard-right cross to the chin.
Still, Lincoln kept dreams in reserve for these kinds of moments, strictly for self-preservation (a total implosion not being particularly useful right now). He still refused to acknowledge his vicious silence and the sordid twelve-year voyeurism of Harvey’s own rise and fall through the peculiar peephole of addict narcissism (yes, he wasn’t the only tragedy of the family, just the loudest one): from Harvey’s marriage at nineteen to his first and only-born child’s diagnosis with cerebral palsy, severe autism and developmental delay, followed by a divorce that left him heart-broken and dependent on anti-depressants. He wondered if Harvey had ever thought of asking him for advice, being they were both addicts of one kind or another. He never did, but Lincoln wondered if he’d ever considered it. It would be in his best interest, he’d often thought. Lincoln couldn’t help but not think this way. It caused a warmth in his gut that rose until his shoulders. It was almost like being back on junk. Almost.
***
Lincoln closes his eyes and bends over the top of the ladder, hoping the wasps lose interest. After a while he hears the violent buzzing subside slightly and he opens his eyes. He is dizzy and nearly loses his balance. His arms grip the top of the ladder and he feels how unsteady it has become. He sees his hands stained with pokeberry blood and feels angry at the ineptitude at the core of his being. “This moment. . .” he says and he can feel his tongue swelling. It can’t just be me, he thinks, something else is doing this. Although his vision is blurry after multiple stings, Lincoln feels he is surely not hallucinating as he watches Andrew rise from his wheelchair, grab the legs of the ladder and cause it to tilt. . .
. . . the tree becomes widened as if it is the only one in the entire property. . .
. . . the land stretches from its roots and becomes long arms opening in welcome. . .
. . . Lincoln feels as if he is floating. . .
. . . he sees a flock of geese stop in mid-flight. . .
. . . he admires their grace, their flagrant dismissal of gravity. . .
It becomes clear to Lincoln now that he has done everything wrong. That he has locked himself inside of himself and must change. Must escape from his head. He wishes he knew how to speak to Andrew, to ask him if he has found methods of coping with his own incarceration. There is much he can learn from him. So much. Yet, he has come too far. He cannot turn back. His hands flail in slow-motion. His body feels as if it is distending. I feel high, he thinks. His organs loosen from his body. It feels weightless.
**
Andrew sits in his wheelchair, silently gazing as Lincoln’s body completes a parabola and disappears behind a bush of pokeberries. The mulberries drift from the bag and, momentarily, join a passing flock of geese in flight.
*