It was a hot day, the kind of hot that made ants stay in their hills due to fear of spontaneous combustion, where the shade was a little broiled, your neighbors trash soured, their dog fought for bits of breath, children rode down the street alone on BMX bikes that were hand-me-downs, and your freezer was empty of fudge-cicles because the last hot day you thought it was the end-all-be-all of heat, until today. It was this kind of day that he went into his backyard to build a raised bed. The kind that involved screwing large planks of wood together and filling it with sticks, then dirt, then whatever plants his father had.
He was wearing a pair of jorts—a newfound Quarantine style—with a Pink Floyd shirt, a headband, a pair of crocs, and a well shaven broom mustache. That implies it was a good mustache, which it wasn’t, it was an awful hack job done with a dull razor he got for turning eighteen. He was twenty-four now and just opening the pack of razors to actually shave—to break up the day’s burning monotony by changing the way his face looked. Wearing a pair of thirty-dollar leather gloves, he had to squat, crawl, and sweat his way through the construction of a raised bed.
This isn’t where it begins, though. It can be traced to the twilight years past 1965 when his father, the other character of this story (if you don’t count the raised bed), was still a kid. The whole world was what you could do outside. He told stories like Gilgamesh, that were hyper-realized fantasy or reality. It’s impossible to tell since everyone believes the myth.
One time he fell off a girl’s bike that he rode down a very shallow hill. She was a bit too big for the kids’ bike, which bore a mid-70s banana seat, so it wasn’t out of the question that it collapsed under his father as he went down the hill. He rolled and the earth peeled the skin away from his body, becoming more scab than child. They sprayed him with a squirt bottle to keep the blanket from sticking. That was his childhood.
He felt his children wasted theirs in books, films, and video games-- which was not out of the question. Media was a way to step outside of their small world and town. In quarantine, these small worlds were all they had. One morning you could be in England warning of a Nazi invasion the next you could be fighting Demons on 2163 Earth then end the night by discovering Scuba diving with Jacque Cousteau. Yoo-hoos and frozen waffles rounding out a diet of shut-in madness. Though, this was not right. Children, his father thought, should play a sport or build their bookshelf. Tactile v. Analytical. Though, he was not a child, he was still his father’s child. A child who woke up early on a Monday to watch Art House films, worked on a novel, and played Yoshi’s Island. A child who helped out of a policy called Love.
The father’s answer, like any religious man, was carpentry. He’d seen it on YouTube, a man in the Southern Hemisphere had built a raised bed and so the father wanted to build a raised bed. It was, in his mind, for the mother to work in the garden. However, the father needed it since he was out of shape. Years of living with a bad back had made him sedentary. He became a Bacchus without the alcoholism, lazy but not incapable. So, when he saw the ad he reacted like any man and ordered lumber.
He didn’t want treated wood (which he would get) and he didn’t want to walk into a store (Lowes, in particular). So, when he ordered ahead, he found himself driving circles in the Lowes parking lot looking for pickup. Forty minutes of waiting amounted in him walking in and telling a nice cashier that they didn’t get his wood out. To his surprise they hadn’t pulled it from the shelf. So, the father picked out the lumber, the box of sixty-four screws and came back to the van to load it up. The son, he of this story, was reading The Man with the Getaway Face on a Kindle. His enjoyment slightly abated by his father’s constant questions and yelling out the window at everyone.
When it came to building the raised bed, it was an arduous process of measuring, notching the wood, using chalk lines, buzz saws, folding chairs as sawhorses, notes on napkins, and finding a place to put them. They were all in the back yard, nearly six inches deep and drilled together by the son. He had gone ahead and charged the battery, plugged it in and screwed in sixty screws. He’d learned to work a power drill when he was eight. They were building his room and he put in a few screws in the drywall in front of the desk he works at now. You can’t see them, they’re painted over.
Once the bed was built, it was carried to a spot just off the main garden and sat down. The lawn wasn’t mowed since he hadn’t mowed it. His brother was inside. He couldn’t handle the fathers constant yelling, remarks, and overall sour attitude. So he hid away inside. Their hiding had absorbed their life to a point that they forgot to mow the lawn. Also, they had an infection. Maybe that comes in later, he can’t remember since time has flattened out into a single pill.
Quarantine was a year unto its own, crushing the concept of Time in an arm-wrestling match for the ages. Humanity was a spectator, trapped on a side-line staring out as human concepts battled. So, when Quarantine pinned Time, Humanity was given a new clock that said “sunup, sundown.”
The raised bed sat on the un-mowed grass and they had to fill it with a dry, rotted wood. The father thought it would be great and the son didn’t question him. He took a mallet and began smashing wood. It only took three logs to find the ant colonies. Fear made them cluster. Heat made them mad. They burst out of wood like a dirty bomb. The father didn’t care or look, while the son brushed ants off his body. Their little legs crawling along skin, instigating a flight or fight response that left burning welts of fear on his body. He never knew that he was scared of being covered in ants till they blew up in his face.
After a couple dozen more ant logs, the base of the bed was filled.
Now, the hard part was sitting out compost. It required pulling away a cage around a pile of rotten vegetables. Moving the dry stuff off the top, ‘dry stuff’ being branches, leaves, and sticks, and shoveling piles of dirt into a sifter which sat over a smashed-up wheelbarrow. Shovel after shovel, the dirt filled up the sifter and the heavy bits sat on top as the son slowly sweated across every inch of his body. He felt like a pissed-in sock and he only felt worse when his dad yelled at him to not stop. To not stop whenever sweat rolled in an eye, when he inhaled a puff of dirt.
His father was paged and had to leave for an emergency that took five hours. The son worked the full five hours, till his body was a little weak. When his father got back, he asked him to work more, and he did. The bed was soon filled with dirt after a day and a half of work. It took around fifteen hours to complete, twelve of those dedicated to sifting dirt. So, while the son sat at the table unable to feel the cool air because his body was too hot to the touch, his father asked the question he grew to dread: “You ready to build another one?”
Comments