It was a day for cyclomowers.
I must have heard it, the tractor pulling the snapping blades, cutting through grass and flowers. Whack whack whack. No sleep so deep but that you would hear that. Who could fail to hear the roar of a 190-horsepower John Deere? Who would lie down and sleep in the grass at mowing time? Who would do something like that? Then you’ve got only yourself to blame.
You’re right, all of you.
Who would lie down in the grass at mowing time?
The front wheel of the tractor crushed my sternum and broke my back, but the blades missed me. The man up on top saw me, but too late. Some call that luck, others misfortune. Musashi says: the Way of the Samurai is the unflinching acceptance of death.
As to what happened afterwards I can only guess. Although I was clearly on my way to the end, sometimes I think I waited — for some reason to come back, a single reason to grasp at a branch along the river of death and start in on the road home, inch by inch, back to where I came from.
Maybe Joe was that reason.
That was a long time ago, and I can’t really get to it anymore, I was too far gone for clear-cut memories. Sometimes it’s so far away that it seems as though I made it all up — the tractor, the dream of the hero, the return to that brighter place.
The memory of my dreamtime.
The body floats just below the surface. There is no pain, no one is missed. Close to the surface, where the light breaks through the water, it is clearer, you can taste the sun.
‘Look,’ someone says, ‘he’s dreaming.’
The hero’s dream. A hero will come, the sound of his heavy footsteps precedes him, those who are outside go in and close the doors; heroes never bring only good fortune. It’s cold, we smell woodsmoke. It tumbles from the chimneys and mixes with the mist that has settled over the fields and roads.
The newcomer whistles a quiet song. He will bring good cheer and sow confusion. He bears new times like a sword. He will shatter our illusions and break through our terse backwardness. His feat will bring beauty, but we will chase him away; this is no time for heroes.
There are hands that lift you up, there are hands that put you down. The body approaches the surface, it has grown lighter, a little lighter all the time. That light, oh hell, it breaks through my forehead like a thermal lance. I am born for the second time. Blind and helpless, I wash ashore. Around my bed they’re talking about Joe.
I’ve learned to shuffle around on thin, crooked legs, always holding onto something with my good arm to keep from falling. I wait, in the little house at the back of the garden, for my parents to die. I live in a rectangle. There is a twin electric hotplate, a microwave oven, a table and a toilet. The bed is behind the table, against the wall. Ma’s the one who put the plants on the windowsill. You don’t have to do much with them, they stay green all the time anyway. At the back I look out on the old cemetery, at the front I see my parents’ kitchen and dining room. At meals they sit with the lamp on above the table; every day The Potato Eaters is called to mind at least once. I eat at my own table, I don’t like being watched. For me, eating consists largely of waiting: waiting for the spasms to go away and then quickly taking a bite. Sometimes that works, other times not, you can’t always feel the tremors coming.
Every morning Ma waves to me from the kitchen across the way. Then she brings Pa his coffee. I don’t have to be there to hear what that sounds like. After breakfast she comes over and helps me dress. I get coffee and a sandwich. When I go out I roll over the tile walkway in the garden to the bike gate, which leads to the street. At lunchtime Ma brings me a warm meal, at night I heat up a pop-top can of hot dogs and eat them with lots of mustard.
Sam built the shelves for my diaries, I like the looks of them. I see order. Artificial order imposed on everything that’s happened.
Every word I write, I write between spasms. During an attack the biro sometimes goes flying through the air.
The inside walls of my house are covered in light-brown plastic panelling with a wood pattern. That’s easy to clean; in the winter the garden house is humid and a speckled mould grows on the walls like barnacles on a ship’s hull.
Dirk has already moved out of the house, he prefers to live alone with his covert filth. Sammie’s only home at the weekends, the rest of the time he stays at a boarding school for young people with learning disabilities. The junkyard is doing well, business there always runs in direct proportion to the general prosperity. Dirk works there full time and someday he’ll take over, although Pa doesn’t seem anywhere near stopping.
‘Good morning, dearie,’ Ma says when she comes in in the morning. ‘How’s about a nice cup of coffee?’
To that end she brings with her a faded plastic vacuum flask from which she pours strong Java. I drink my coffee with a straw, just like all other hot beverages that can cause second-degree burns when you knock them over in your own lap. My favourite straws are the flexi ones you can bend to a forty-five-degree angle. Ma makes my bed, then sits down at the table.
‘Oh, that’s nice. It was time to take a load off.’
That’s just the way she talks, her words are pure comfort. And that’s how she keeps the peace around here. Ma’s kind of small, but still she’s a mountain of a woman. Her flanks are covered with a floral-patterned dress. She tells me things she’s heard from other women. Usually about disasters. She likes disasters the way she likes cookies with her coffee. I listen to news of accidents, illnesses and bankruptcies. By talking to each other all the time about other people’s misfortunes, women pass fear along. Fear with a capital F. And although they feel compassion for the luckless bastard in question, they’re thrilled that it happened a few doors down; the volume of suffering in the world is divided into unequal portions, and the bigger the neighbours’ portion the smaller yours will be. Sometimes there’s information in there that I’ll be able to use someday for my History of Lomark and Its Citizens (don’t laugh). Looking at Ma as she talks, the melancholy love I feel seizes me right by the throat.
We’re condemned to each other; me, her damaged fruit and very personal catastrophe, and she, who, like old horses, carries the world’s suffering on her back.
From this side of the table at least she seems to be getting smaller. I’ll be around long enough to see her grow completely translucent and then disappear without protest from the face of the Earth — good mother Marie Hermans, née Maria Gezina Putman. Always there to lend a helping hand, a good woman and a loving mother. God rest her soul.
At the registrar’s office in the town hall I once tried to find out about the background of the Putman family, but got no further than Lambertus Stephanus Putman, the first Putman to live in Lomark. He came here in 1774, betrothed to a local girl. They didn’t marry in the village itself, but just across the border; in those days after the Reformation the Catholic Church was banned around here. Lambert drowned in the great dyke-break of 1781, but with five children he had scattered enough seed to become the patriarch of a new Lomark family.
Not a family that made much of an impression, though. Only a few things have been preserved in the ‘Old Judiciary Archive of the Right Seigniory of Lomark’, such as cadastral drawings, deeds, procès-verbals and baptism certificates. Whenever a Putman had to sign something it almost always says, ‘This cross being the signature of So-and-so Putman, having declared the inability to write.’
Even the crosses weren’t very good.
They worked at the brickyard or as fishermen or farmers with a few fruit trees in the orchard, and that was pretty much it.
I think about them often. The air I breathe contains molecules they must have inhaled too, I look at the same river they did. It’s been partly channelized now and there were no breakwaters back then, but it’s still the same water with the same cycle of rest and flood. I sometimes wonder whether all the Jakobs, Dirks, Hanneses, Jans and Henriks felt the same way I do, whether they also hoped so badly that it would all turn out better someday.