Harvest Night
by Steven Rose, Jr.
(owned,
written, and copyrighted by Steven Rose, Jr., used by permission)
I was very near to being a prize
winning poet until I found out what my true roots were. Just a little before
I discovered them, I was drinking a Brazilian rum-and-Coke in the old
University Café in Woodvale. It was an ancient place that had been there
since before I was born. My grandparents told me that it sprung up on, what
was once, farm land.
Everything inside that café seemed to be decaying. The walls were stained
with gray patches from smoke that had steamed out of the kitchen, and the
pale green paint was peeling; the building was really depressing. However,
it was more depressing for me because it always reminded me of the times
that I had gone in there with my parents when I was a little kid.
They had moved back to Mexico to start a business and I had no friends to
hang out with in the café. My friends had already ripened into serious
relationships and careers, but I was still toiling away in the dry soil of
my talent in trying to establish myself as a winning poet. I put more of my
time into writing poetry than anything else. I think that's why I never made
it to those aspects of life that I call the tropical islands of Romance and
Love, like my friends did. I had very little time for social activities, so
I went to hang out at the café every evening after my classes. I always
hoped that I would meet a very inspiring girl there.
I did.
It was the end of the day. The sun was falling below the horizon, burning
the sky in gold all around it. I too was falling and burning away like the
sun. Towards the end of the previous semester, a girl I really liked from my
poetry writing class turned me down after I asked her out. We had been close
friends for a whole year and she had never revealed to me, until that day,
that she was married. What was, for a whole year, the ripe green pasture of
hope had burned to nothing. She had been the sixth girl in one year whom I
asked out who had no romantic interests in me.
I was trying to write a poem about this, but I was so damned down that my
mind was dried up and blacked out of all poetic energy. I was hoping a
Brazilian rum-and-Coke would fire my creativity back up. I was drinking my
sixth one.
Just as I was finishing it, a girl shoved through the double doors of the
café. Her appearance was dark. She looked like one of those Mestiza Mexican
girls except her skin was a very pale brown. (This might've of been because
she was wearing a lot of make-up.) It nearly looked white against her raven
black hair and her black clothes. A pair of black frame cat eye glasses
masked over her Asiatic eyes and a charcoal red lipstick was painted over
her thick lips. In relation to that, she wore gray eye shadow. Her hair was
strait and it veiled past her shoulders a little. Across the crown she wore
a pale green headband. She had on a pair of bell bottoms and a long coat
that looked like a cape because it was unbuttoned.
She walked over to the counter to order. The whole counter area was draped
with strings of garlic, grapevines and tomato vines except for the cashier's
area where there was an arched opening. The girl looked like she was at
peace with herself even though she appeared very solemn. At that moment I
thought, she's an apparition who has come from beyond this world to save me
from my despair. She was even more attractive than the girl who I was
mourning over. One of the things I found most attractive about her was that
she reminded me of characters from Gothic novels. They're my favorite kinds
of literary characters.
I got the impression that I had known her ever since I was a kid. When I
looked at her, all of a sudden I felt these sensations as though I were
racing back through several events of my childhood. My whole being felt like
it was racing back through: an old decaying grocery store, with the cool
smells of fresh watered fruits and vegetables, my grandmother pushing a cart
in the dark place; my mom's parents' house in the country on a summer's
afternoon nearing autumn, the leaves still a rich green on the trees, but
the sun falling in the west, lighting up a pale gold fire across the tomato
fields that stretch infinitely away to the west; my older cousin Maria's
bedroom with her and her friend, two dark, feminine faces with dark frame
glasses and glowing, white grins between thick, red lips. My whole being
racing back and back to . . . the kitchen of my grandmother where a cool,
fresh carrot is being chopped at regular, repetitive intervals; back and
back . . . into a fall evening at my mom's dad's sister's white-washed
Spanish style house, surrounded by a garden of roses and flowers that bloom
from vines that hang down white wired arches, a field of golden corn stalks
in back of the house that are lit up by the gold light of the falling sun,
the sky to the west on fire; Back and back and back! . . .
I had seen that girl somewhere before! She wasn't just a girl I was
romantically attracted to. I said to myself, it's as though she's of my
blood and I am of hers. But I feel romantically attracted to her! I wanted
to meet this girl, but I had to find out where I knew her from. I couldn't
develop the relationship into a romantic one if I was related to her. So I
walked over to the table that she had sat down at to ask her if I knew her
from anywhere.
She was cutting up and rapidly chewing the meat on her plate. She reminded
me of how a cat chews up its food. There were only three huge pieces of
meat; there were no vegetables or bread. I thought to myself, this girl is
more of a carnivore than I am. I have always hated eating fruits and
vegetables ever since I was a little kid. However, I've always loved them
for their bright colors. I've always loved all plants for that reason.
When I asked her if I knew her from anywhere, she looked up from her plate
and her dark eyes stared directly into mine. They looked as though they were
staring out of a skull's eye sockets because of the dark gray eye shadow.
After staring at me for a few seconds, her eyes widened as though she did
recognize me form somewhere. But she looked shocked. She snapped, "I don't
recall you from anywhere."
I asked, "Did you ever go to Woodvale Elementary School?"
She paused holding a glass of wine near her lips. I figured it was wine; it
was a dark red liquid which she had poured from a small clear bottle that
she had pulled out of her coat. There was no label on the bottle. Her
shocked expression grew into a disgusted one. She said, "I never went to
school here." She said this quickly as though she didn't want to admit
something.
I said, "Where did you go to school at? I know you form somewhere, but it's
been a long time. It's been since we were little kids . . . ." I had just
realized that even though I remembered seeing her when I was little, I
didn't remember her being in my age group. I only recalled her looking the
same age as she was now or even older . . . old enough to be my mom! So I
said, "I think I knew your mom.“"
But she cut me off right there and snapped out, "Excuse me, but I don't know
you from anywhere. I never even lived here before!" Again she said this
quickly, but this time she sounded very angry. She jumped up and walked out
the door. This girl attracted me a lot either for the reason being that I
was romantically impressed with her or because I had a significant blood
connection to her. Therefore I followed her but kept a good distance away.
I followed her all the way up to Manuel's Mexican Market. The store was
closed but I could smell the red and green chiles, the garlic and fresh corn
tortillas that were inside. I could also smell cooked, salted beef, pork,
and chicken. The store specialized in meat. The girl rushed to the door,
yanked on it violently and said, "Oh, shit!" She sounded as though someone
was going to die because she couldn't get inside.
She rushed on down the street, and I continued following her. After a while,
she walked into an old residential area. A lawn mower was buzzing from
somewhere far off. Everything else around there was so quiet that it was
like being in the Woodvale cemetery. There was a burnt odor in the air, the
kind you can smell in any neighborhood during the fall season. It was as
though Halloween was already there, although it was only the 13th of
October.
The girl kept walking until she got to a pale, green house that was dimly
lit by a lamp that hung in the porch. It was a two story Spanish style house
with no lights in any of its windows. To the left was a huge garden full of
grape vines, garlic, red roses, fiery orange pumpkins and a small forest of
towering corn stalks. A white wire arch over grown with rust and vines lead
into the garden. The girl shoved open the left side of the front double
doors, darted in, and slammed it.
All houses in Woodvale looked familiar to me. I had lived there all my life.
But this house looked so familiar that I felt as though I had been in it
before, with my parents and my mom's parents, visiting somebody related to
me when I was very little. I knocked on the door and rang the bell several
times but nobody answered. I tried the knob on the left side of the double
doors and that side opened. So I walked in. I was in a long corridor with a
dim green light at the end. I walked towards it. At the end, the corridor
branched off to the left into another, only this one was way shorter in
length, more of a recess. There was a closed door at the end where the green
light radiated from underneath. I had a big feeling that the girl was inside
so I knocked.
The rusted knob rotated to the left and the door creaked open. An old
Mexican looking man stood there with a stunned expression. Like the girl, he
also looked very familiar to me. Suddenly his eyes strained wide open in a
half surprised, half worried look. He said eagerly, in a heavy Mexican
accent, "Oscar! Come on inside! Your sister's been looking for you all over
this town." He pointed to what appeared to be a huge, thick grape vine,
about the size and width of the average full grown woman. But the stump had
been carved into a nude sculpture of the upper part of the girl who I had
seen in the café. Her head hung down as though she had been through a big
defeat. The old man continued, "I've been looking for you and the rest of
the family all over Latin America and this country for a very long time.
Ever since you were a baby! We thought one of Creek's farmers kid napped
you."
I did not understand anything that this guy was talking about. However,
because he looked so familiar to me like the girl, I got the feeling that I
was related to him too. I asked him, "Where do I know you from?"
He stared at me for a few seconds with that shocked look and then said, "You
don't remember me? I'm your grandfather, your mother's father. You were very
little when you saw me last."
I said, feeling shocked, "You're really my grandpa? The one who moved back
to Mexico with my grandmother?"
He nodded with a solemn look.
I said, "Are you and Grandma back from Mexico for good?" I hadn't seen my
grandparents on my mom's side ever since I was three.
My grandfather said very intensely, "No, we have to go back right away.
You're going back with us. And your sister is going back with us too!" When
he mentioned my "sister" he sounded really pissed.
I was confused why he kept mentioning a "sister" of mine. I said, "I never
had a sister."
Again, he looked shocked. He said, "Your parents never said to you that we
took your sister with us to Mexico before you were born?"
I couldn't say anything. I thought, he has to be lying. But he told me, "Mel
Creek, the farmer we worked for, threatened to take her away from us if we
didn't pay the rent on his house that we lived in. We couldn't afford to pay
it. We couldn't find anyone else to work for before he would take Andrea, so
your grandmother and I had to leave with her. Not only did we have to leave
but we had to come up with a way to hide ourselves in Mexico. It took me
many years to do it.
"I thank God for the grape vines that we worked with, even though the
conditions we worked under were unbearable. I discovered that your father,
mother and grandmother and I had been working in the vineyards so long and
had breathed in so much oxygen that comes from the vines that, with a
special chemical, we could altar our own forms to a grape vine's." He
pointed to the giant grape vine again. The sculpture was no longer there; it
was just a regular stump. Then he continued, "I found out that we've had the
ability to do that ever since way before you and Andrea were born. I really
wish we could've known about that then."
The old man walked over to a shelf where there were more of those clear,
glass bottles like the one the girl had in the café. They were all filled
with a dark liquid. There was a table with a white sheet covering an
Anglo-looking guy all the way up to his neck. A tube snaked out from a wine
cask that was near the table and disappeared somewhere underneath the sheet.
A dark liquid flowed forward and backward at intervals through the tube.
There was a splashing noise coming from the cask in intervals as well. The
old man rushed back from the shelf with a spray bottle and sprayed a cool
liquid over me. Suddenly my arms grew into two leafy vines. My true roots
were being revealed.
The whole time I was in that room I could hear the buzzing of the lawn mower
outside growing louder. But by this time I found out that it wasn't the
sound of a lawn mower, but of a tractor. It sounded like it was coming from
just beyond one of the walls of the room. Suddenly the old man looked away
from me as though he just noticed the metallic growling. He looked like he
was going to have a panic attack. The growling was getting louder. The vines
of the giant plant started to sway violently. The girl who I wanted was not
really a girl, and even if she was I couldn't have her. She was my sister
and like her, like my parents, like my grandparents, I was only another crop
to be picked.
The End
