Weeds in Bloom
Authors: Robert Newton Peck
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS
BASHER FIVE-TWO
Captain Scott O’Grady with Michael French
THE BEET FIELDS,
Gary Paulsen
CAUGHT BY THE SEA: MY LIFE ON BOATS
Gary Paulsen
GUTS,
Gary Paulsen
CHINESE CINDERELLA,
Adeline Yen Mah
COUNTING STARS,
David Almond
FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS
James Bradley and Ron Powers, adapted by Michael French
ISHI, LAST OF HIS TRIBE,
Theodora Kroeber
Know a man by those he honors.
M
Y BOOK IS YOUR
A
MERICA
.
An album of my old friends and your new ones. Real citizens you deserve to greet, and know, and possible remember. You shall know me by the people I have known.
There is no plot.
A happy marriage of Yankee and Confederate, it rambles along Vermont dirt roads and Florida’s red clay, meandering like a cow path, seeming at first to go nowhere. But a cow path usual gets to a goal—a freshet of cool water, a barn at milking time, a puddle of shade beneath a meadow elm.
Or a maple.
On the outside, maple trees are rocky hard in their rough tough bark. Yet inside, a sip of springtime sap is sugar sweet. Also in spring, cow manure spread across a pregnant farming field produces a
nourishing fragrance. Part of the unseen overture of birth. New life, not yet up. Brown creating green.
Innards differ from hide. That’s the mission of my manuscript, to show how plain people can sparkle.
Poverty can etch and furrow the faces of the old or smolder in the eyes of the young. Yet hardship is not always yoked with hardness of the heart. Along with rural innocence, many are graced with charm and backwoods wisdom. Horse sense and cow warmth. They are fresh milk, not from a store but from a stanchion, still bubbling, uncooled and unpasteurized. Raw.
They can decipher the moonlit bugle of a blue-tick hound, dig up cure-all ginseng root, and perhaps steep you a natural remedy for miseries that might plague your body, or cloud your mind.
A few still plant by the star signs.
Others may hunt beneath a possum moon. Or tote around a horse chestnut (a buckeye) in a pocket to prevent an ache. They can skin and gut a rabbit without a knife, and mash wild red choke-cherries for a coughing child. Or snip off part of an implanted porcupine quill to let the gas escape from the shaft in order to reduce its size, and then extract the bloody barb from a newly educated Fido.
Some can locate a bee tree and use the melted comb wax to seal a jar of rhubarb conserve. They
drip their own jelly. Their cookstoves, cast only in black, burn nothing but gathered wood to raise biscuits that raise children that raise Cain.
Complaints are rare.
Our American poor are proud of who they are and what crafts they can accomplish (such as fashioning a crude collar for a mule), and will willingly share chow or shelter with a stranger. At times their generosity is a widow’s mite, their smiles braving adversity to spit in its eye. After personally digging a grave with their own shovels to bury a loved one, they grieve privately.
Somehow, as uncanny as this may sound to you, country people sense that I came from a humble home and a mix-blood background. Although many are illiterate, they can heal far more often than they can hurt. In a way, for you, I harvest wild herbs of humanity. Some I have known since boyhood. Worthy of gathering.
All, save one, are American, chapters and verses of our nation’s past and present. Stars in our flag. Not fancy folk. So please expect no long-stemmed roses from a florist. They are, instead, the unarranged flora that I’ve handpicked from God’s greenery.
Weeds in bloom.
Vermont Boyhood
“W
AIT UP
, R
OBERT
.”
My mother’s soft voice couldn’t catch me. Being seven, I had to be first up the round and rocky slope.
Conquering the summit, I turned to wave triumphantly at Mama, Papa, and Aunt Carrie … still climbing. Feet apart, standing astride the treeless top of Lead Hill, I looked far beyond my three family seniors to view our five-acre farm. Below, in the distance, stood mighty Solomon, our ox, with Daisy, our milk cow, black-and-white Holstein specks ankle-deep in silvery crick water, the tassels of their tails flicking the flies of August.
Otherwise motionless, surrendering to a summer Sunday.
From a split between two massive slabs of gray granite atop our minor mountain, juniper bushes
erupted to offer smoke-blue berries. Awaiting my elders, I chewed a few; then, moving a few feet away found a treat less tarty. Gooseberries. Pale green beads.
Age seven, in clothes Mama made, with my friend Sambo.
Aunt Carrie, a measure leaner than Mama, came to meet me. Then my mother. Papa finished a breathless last.
“Look.” I pointed. “Our barn and silo. Smaller’n toys.”
Hefting me high to sit on his sinewy shoulders, Papa gripped my knees, then asked, “How’s it make you feel, Rob?”
“Biggy. But not big enough. Someday I’m fixing to sprout up into a giant, like you.” Sigh. “I honest wonder when that’ll be.”
“After you finish being a boy.”
“When did
you
finish?”
While my legs straddled his neck, my hands felt Papa’s face grin. “Never quite did.” His head turned to flash a wink at my mother.
Mama smiled. “I hope Rob beats you to it.”
From where she stood, Aunt Carrie beckoned to the three of us. “If’n you fetch Robert over this way, he’ll see a sight to behold.”
Papa deposited me back to ground and we went to learn about whatever my maiden aunt had discovered. Turned out to be early fall flowers. Black-eyed Susans, neighborly to asters: yellowy petals surrounding a button. A brown hubcap, not black. Breaking open a dried center, Aunt Carrie blew away the husks to show me the Susan seeds. Tiny slivers, dark at one end, at the other a dull pewter.
“My,” said Papa, “now there’s a bunch of boys.”
Making a face, I asked,
“Boys?”
He nodded. “Every seed is a boy. Like you, it probable hankers to stretch at manhood and help to blossom a flower.”
Holding one between fingertips, I asked, “Do all seeds actual get to bloom into flowers?”
“No.” Papa shook his head. “There’s vegetable seed and stallion seed. As you’re my son, Robert, you are of
my
seed.” He glanced at Mama. “And of your mother’s egg.”
I blinked. “Like
chickens?”
My mother smiled. “Right as farming.” Then, following a hurried glance at my father, she added, “And that’s a plenty on seeding for today.”
With a nod, Papa’s long arm pointed downhill to our Holsteins. “See there, our dear ol’ Daisy knows something we don’t.” Staring at our cow, I asked what. “Well,” my father answered, “there’s a clock inside her that notes whenever it’s near to milking time. The hour of five.”
True enough. Daisy had waded out of the crick water. She headed herself along the narrow brown cow path, dodging through the dandelions and smack toward our barn.
An hour later, Papa and I were there as well. A hickory stanchion with a cotter pin was holding Daisy steady while my father squatted a milking stool. After wiping off her udder bag so that pasture grit wouldn’t freckle her milk, Papa began his twice-a-day devotion. Sunday included. A second later I heard the regular cadence of milk spurts chiming into the galvanized metal pail. There was a pure
church-bell sound to the ring. Daisy’s hot milk blended with her warming animal fragrance, hale and healthy. Like me. While my father milked, Daisy allowed me to reach up and scratch her ears.
Soft brown eyes offered silent thanks.
On workdays, whenever Papa had left our farm to butcher hogs, he’d return wore to bone and more tired than an old boot. Milking on those evenings, my father usual rested his brow on the comforty soft pillow of Daisy’s flank.
A plenty more’n once, I had seen Haven Peck do milking with his eyes closed. Possible in prayer. For me, the best prayers have no words.
At bedtime in the loft, my head on rough but clean unbleached muslin, lying on the rustle of a mattress tick stuffed with corn husks, my eyelids were curtaining a long day. Yet prior to sleep, my brain kept digesting what I had been told earlier, away up high on Lead Hill.
About how a life begins.
Papa and Mama had sort of explained how I’d got here. From them. The pair of people who loved me the most: a flower and a chicken. It made me crack a grin.
Someday I’d be more’n a giant.
I’d also be a seed.
I
WAS A LUCKY KID
.
Nearby to our Vermont farm a baseball diamond was paced off, graded level, and marked out. Truck-loads of red loam arrived for the infield. The outfield was little more than a pocked pasture of dandelions and daisies, and beyond, a rail fence festooned with poison ivy.
Gods played there.
Nobody like Mr. Tyrus Raymond Cobb of Georgia. Just a rowdy bunch of local guys with little education who toted black lunch pails to grunt jobs, working-day has-beens who became Sunday’s heroes. Our hometown baseball team. The Colonials.