The Day Before Thanksgiving
I am tromping across a frozen swamp this morning, foraging for scatterberries. The gunmetal gray sky is loaded with unreleased snow. It’s predicted to begin lavishing deep inches of the powdery stuff over the whole region today. The heavy hush and stillness that precedes a snowstorm always strikes a rhapsodic chord in my heart and inspires the recitation of love sonnets.
But I never actually do that. I can’t. I don’t know any love sonnets and refuse to learn any.
I come upon an artificial Christmas tree decorated with silver tinsel (for birds to gather and use to fancy-up their nests) and portraits neatly scissored from my high school yearbook (class of `91). My own photo is not among them, much to my relief. I hate recognizing myself. My memories of the other faces are vague and nameless.
And then I wonder, Why is this tree here at all? And why does my life seem connected to it? My family didn’t even decorate for Christmas. I didn’t buy my yearbook.
I turn away from these uncomfortable mysteries and continue gathering scatterberries in my glass colander. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving at my grandmother’s house.
I am bringing a scatterberry pie.
The forest is cluttered with dead forest. Branches and leaves conflict everywhere. The forest floor is a complicated mythology written in twisted twig hieroglyphics. Every step snaps apart the architecture of the text, destroying whatever message the brittle cuneform jumble is trying to convey. Rocks and pine cones serve as clumsy punctuation.
Alas, I am illiterate here.
Turkey day tomorrow. I am sure my grandmother is already preparing the dinner. She usually serves stuffing, crescent rolls, green bean casserole, butternut squash and other traditional comestibles. Everyone raves about her butternut squash. As a child I never much cared for butternut squash until my grandmother cut an incision into my thigh with a boxcutter and crammed a handful of her hot squash into the wound.
After that I finally understood what everyone was raving about.
Along my scatterberry search, I stumble upon a folding TV-tray set with a commemorative plate of Jesus and a 1970s collectable drinking glass with a lead-paint rendering of Ronald McDonald on the side. The portrait of Jesus on the plate is taken from the famous “Head of Christ” painting by Warner Sallman (1892-1968). Written around the edge of the plate is the verse from John 3:16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, etc. etc….”
I look around the frozen bog to confirm I am alone. I know no one else is near because every step on the frozen jumbled duff causes a sharp firecracker snap! that echoes around the surrounding environment. There is no way to sneak up on anything. I am sure I am the only soul around.
I gaze at the tray. It is really there. Like a real-world collage. Like an ironic ad in an upscale magazine. Like a study for an art class. The set decoration in a bad dream. I ponder its significance. Staring at it.
Then I abandon my confused musings and continue the scatterberry hunt. The snow begins to fall…
The Day of My Birth
I was a precocious little fetus. There’s an ultrasound somewhere of me trying to yank out my own umbilical cord, as if I were trying to unshackle myself from my uterine prison. I either wanted to free myself or kill myself by unplugging my oxygen supply, thus avoiding the blood-gushing trauma of birth.
I did neither as I recall. I surrendered and got born instead. I did not cry at the time. That came later.
My parents chose not to have me circumcised. That also came later.
Our Church
I was raised in the Southern Baptist faith. My father was a fundamentalist pastor. My mother stayed home with us kids, seven in all. I was the middle child. Three siblings above me, three below. Every one of us a male.
When my father came home from church he usually locked himself in his “study.” The family wasn’t allowed inside. He locked it from the inside when he was inside and from the outside when he left. My older brother Paul once tried to pick the lock with a stripped pipe-cleaner but my mother caught him and informed our father and Paul landed in the basement for a week.
Our father was a man of God. He didn’t spare the rod.
Whenever my brothers were released from the basement they were usually half-starved, pale and shaky, their legs and buttocks crisscrossed with red lacerations thanks to an old copper TV antenna—our father’s disciplinary instrument of choice. It was strange since we never owned a television set.
The cellar was Hell. I was cast down there three times for minor infractions. It was where I cultivated the rage that sustained me in my 20s, the period of my life when I committed my unspeakable sins…
The Day Before Thanksgiving
The snow flurries have commenced in earnest, erasing the arcane runes of the forest floor. I pluck a dozen scatterberries from a bush hiding behind a majestic elm. The bush is skeletal, having shed its silvery leaves with the first frost of autumn. It is just bare branches and berries now. I am tempted but don’t eat one. I am already worried I won’t find enough for a whole pie. The recipe falls apart without three heaping cups of ripe scatterberries. The crust becomes impossible. There are no other berries on earth that can serve as suitable substitutions. And obviously you can’t buy scatterberries at the local grocery store.
So, I resist snacking on them. Besides, I don’t want to risk cracking a tooth.
Once I pick the bush clean, I move off to resume my search. Scatterberry bushes only take root and thrive in hiding places. In natural nooks and hollows, furrows and niches. They are difficult to track down in the wild.
The snow is getting heavy already. I hope I don’t get lost. The wind picks up, making the trees creak…
The First Day of School
I attended a strict Christian school called Great Golgotha Grade School in Shedding, Kentucky. It was an ugly brick building originally built as a Cold War fallout shelter. They taught us to fear God there. That we were all sinful disgusting scum and only obedience to Jesus could save us from the eternal torture and torment we all deserved. God hated atheists, Communists, the government and Catholics. He hated me. Hated his Creation. Evolution was blasphemy. Feminists were the concubines of Satan.
I was targeted by the teacher on my first day of school. I was six and already terrified. My desk was in the front row due to my stupid last name. I sat mere inches away from the teacher’s oppressive desk. It was like sitting before a throne.
Our teacher was Mrs. Graystock. She was old and built like a barricade. She had fat wobbling jowls and when she yelled they expanded and shook like an aposematic display meant to fend off predators. Her eyes looked like cigarette burns. The corners of her scowling mouth excreted a white substance when she lectured. I had to face that face for three eternal years.
I thought that if you scraped some of the white residue from her mouth with a wooden tongue depressor and spread it on a glass slide to study under a microscope, you would see pointy demons squirming in the white muck like children frolicking in the snow.
But on the first day of school Mrs. Graystock took one look at me and immediately disapproved. I don’t know what I did to make her hate me. Maybe she just hated every kid who sat in the front-and-center seat. I was conveniently close at hand.
I dropped my pencil right in the middle of a sermon about the Book of Job.
The pencil rolled under the desk to my left and I slid off my seat to retrieve it.
Mrs. Graystock slammed her pointer across my desk. It sounded like a gunshot. Her pointer was a polished wooden stick even more menacing than my father’s copper TV antenna.
“What do you think you’re doing young man?!” she yelled, jowls jiggling like a pig on a spit.
“I dropped my pencil,” I said, panicking. I don’t know how my bladder held it together.
“In this class we wait until the end of the lesson, raise our hand and ask permission to leave our seat.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” I said.
And then she seized my ear and dragged me to the front of the class where she hit me with her stick. I screamed and that’s when my bladder finally spilled itself. She called me an example and I didn’t know what that meant. She said I had to atone. That term was lost on me too. She whipped my bottom twelve times. Once for each disciple. She spat out each one by name. Judas Iscariot was last and came with the hardest strike.
The Day Before Thanksgiving
I find another scatterberry bush hiding behind an old upholstered couch. The couch has an orange, rust-and-tan floral design. The flowers have wavy impressionistic petals and stems. The couch is a three-seater. It belongs in my grandmother’s house but she calls it a “divan” and doesn’t allow food or beverages anywhere near it. Which is kind of ironic since it is stained with blood. The drying bloodstains account for the rust color.
There is a dead deer on the divan, its thick muscular neck impaled with a black carbon arrow.
I stand in the snow and stare at it for a few cold moments. I detect a whiff of cedar and mothballs in the frigid air. The deer is male. Mature. It has antlers. They look like stiff, supplicating fingers. It is a fresh kill. Its purple tongue is sticking out.
I wonder why there’s no snow on the couch. It’s accumulating in thick drifts everywhere else. It is as if the couch (divan) is impervious to the effects of the weather. Like it has its own core body heat or retains room temperature even in the elements.
It is ugly, forsaken furniture. With neglected venison splayed across the cushions.
I look around for signs of a hunter and then move warily behind the couch to collect the scatterberries I know are there. I discover a jackpot and gather around twenty berries. My glass colander is nearly full now. One more bush and I will complete my task.
The bitter wind whips snow into my face, blinding my eyes and making it hard to breathe. I trudge onward anyway. For the berries. For my family. For tomorrow…
Our Family Dwelling
My brother Cain came up from the basement after seven days with red welts slashed across his cheeks. It was the first time our father had used the TV antenna on that part of the body. I knew now he had done it to make an example of him. My brother had to atone for commiting the sin of Onan. It scared the hell out of us. Our father was strict. He ruled with fear. With piety.
After Cain was released, our father retreated to his study. We didn’t see him for three days. Sometimes we heard him crying in the middle of the night.
Our father was a complicated man.
The Day Before Thanksgiving
I finally find the final berry bush. It is trying to hide under a natural lean-to created by several dead, toppled trees. They had collapsed into each other, forming a huge geometric maze of angled branches and massive trunks. I climb into it. I know the bush is in there somewhere. As I climb over and under and through, I balance the colander with careful, timid precision. I cannot allow a single scatterberry to fall. It is a medieval superstition that if a solitary berry drops during collection, the forager’s organs will turn to mud.
The interior of the cross-hatched copse of dead trees is as dark as a cave. It is difficult to see. I hope my eyes adjust in time to discern the berry bush. I am huffing, out of breath, struggling to hold my right hand steady, gripping the handle of the colander as tightly as I can without shattering the glass.
My family will never know what I have to go through to make my pie. What I have to endure. The sacrifices I have to make…
Back to School
The day before Christmas, Mrs. Graystock taught us about The Massacre of the Innocents. About how King Herod ordered all the male babies in Bethlehem to be butchered with swords because the Three Wise Men told him about the Nativity of Jesus and he felt threatened.
She lingered over the gory infant deaths and the class sat there, pale and stricken. A few of the kids cried softly, careful not to arouse her ire by openly blubbering. I didn’t move. I barely breathed.
I just sat and watched her jowls shake as the white stuff gathered around her mouth. Her teeth were crooked and brown from all the tar and nicotine she sucked into her lungs. I wondered why the tar didn’t discolor the weird cream that formed at the corners of her mouth. It was clean and white, as if her system was purging purity.
As she lectured—strident and chestnut-complected—a sheen of sweat appeared on her broad forehead. Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back tightly and collected in a severe bun behind her head.
She talked about dead babies for almost twenty minutes.
We learned later that one of the girls had wet herself during the sermon. She didn’t dare raise her hand. None of us did. Not while Mrs. Graystock was in the middle of her righteous, wrathful rant.
She said that Jesus, Mary and Joseph were told to flee to Egypt by an angel in Joseph’s dream, which meant she was screaming from the Gospel of Matthew. Luke tells the tale differently. He had the three flee straight back to Nazareth. I preferred that version.
The way Mrs. Graystock told the story gave me horrific nightmares that Christmas Eve night. I awoke with my pajamas pasted to my body with cold sweat.
On Christmas Day we prayed. No Santa Claus for us. No presents. No tinsel or red berry garland, ornaments or lights. Just our father and the Bible and eight bowed heads.
The Day Before Thanksgiving
I find the scatterberry bush in the center of the cave formed by the tangled branches and unyielding trunks. It presents twenty-four berries for me and I reach it without dropping a single drupe.
Scatterberries are dark purple when ripe, almost black. They are a cold-weather fruit wrapped in a thin translucent skin and the sweet, fleshy meat of the berry surrounds a stone hard enough to break a tooth. The stone is sometimes called the “heart” of the scatterberry. It is the dormant seed that leads to more scatterberries. It is ruby red in color and must be removed before the berry can be used. It is a pit, like in an olive or a peach. Some believe that it contains antioxidants but that is mere hearsay.
This bush has produced big berries and I pluck them all. The glass colander is nearly overflowing. There is no way I can climb out of this fortress without spilling any berries. I decide to eat a few before extricating myself. For the sake of my safety.
I don’t really believe in things anymore. But I still don’t want to risk my organs turning to mud.
So I will just sit here and rest and eat a few berries.
As they soften in my mouth, I use my finger and tongue to safely extricate the pits which I spit into the dark void. New scatterberry bushes will spawn in the spring.
The berries are sweet, with a hint of licorice. They are magnificent. It is a tragedy that they can’t be made into wine. They cannot be juiced.
It is bitter cold but at least I am out of the blizzard, protected from the wind and the snow and the weary confusion they carry.
I still have to find my way home and bake the pie. But let me rest first.
Right here. Where I am. Let me stay awhile.
I close my eyes and listen to the hushing wind.
Eventually, the dreaming begins…
Crumbling Asphalt 