TW: Death, War, Blood

I don’t understand why we cut down trees to make houses. Trees in their natural state are strong, rooted so deep into the ground, it takes a force greater than stone and soil to rip them out. We say when we build homes that we are laying down roots. But we aren’t, not truly. If houses, made of wood, grew roots stretching into the core of this earth as their mother trees did, they would not be ripped to shreds during storms.

That is how the house looks before me now, ripped into millions of little pieces. Of course it’s not truly millions of little pieces, although that sounds better. There are splinters and shards, even some whole planks that survived the test of the weather. Isn’t that interesting? How trees can brave storms without even a scratch on their bark and yet planks of wood are so easily ripped apart. And then there’s the dust. Tiny little particles that coat my lungs as I search through the rubble of our home. When you come home, there will be no standing structure to return to.

We were out of town when the storm hit. Off at the funeral of yet another boy who lost his life overseas. The military said there was nothing left to bury, so we lowered an empty coffin into the dark black soil. Blown to bits they said, just like our house. I didn’t know him, not really, not like I know you. I didn’t cry, but mother did. She must have been imagining what it would be like for you to be in that coffin. But I wasn’t doing that, and I didn’t know him, so I didn’t cry. I hope I would cry if you were in the coffin being lowered into the ground. I would hope there would be a body to bury. Maybe you’re already in a coffin, in the soil in another place, under the waves of a vast ocean that separates the two of us. Maybe you were blown to bits like the boy we buried yesterday. Like our house after the storm. I would hate that. An empty coffin is worse than a full one.

I wonder if bodies grow roots into the ground as trees do. Maybe that’s why those that are dead never come back up once they are buried deep. It takes something more powerful than stone and soil to pull them back up. The pastor would say that power is God. That on the last day God will raise them up from their wooden boxes, uproot them from the ground. Whatever that means. The church was the only building on our road that did not get completely destroyed. Divine intervention. If the Divine truly intervened then why were the rest of the houses torn apart? Why is there a war? Why are you gone?

When you come home, I wonder if you’ll have any faith left. You were always the more pious of the two of us, but I hear that war changes a man. That the things you see make you believe there is no God, for how could an all powerful God allow this to happen. There’s a man who sits on his stoop on Sunday mornings, crowing out at the people passing by on their way to the chapel how foolish they are for believing in such a God. He’s a veteran from the Great War, the kind that gets blackout drunk most nights, but especially the nights in which we get news that another boy from some town nearby has died overseas. His stoop is gone now, swept away into oblivion just like he is right now, passed out in front of the church.

I’m on my knees, carefully lifting planks and sifting through pieces of wood and glass. I’m trying to make a path to the middle of the pile of rubble that used to be our house. We were only in the other town for a weekend. All of our stuff is somewhere in this pile. Mother and father don’t know I’m here. I walked all the way from Aunt Mary’s house two towns away. When we heard of the storm, the destruction, father thought it was best to move in with his sister until we could rebuild. I hate it there. It’s stuffy. No woods. No trees. The grass is always too perfectly cut, too perfectly green. The world needs a little brokenness to feel whole. And her place, her town, it’s too perfect for what’s going on in the rest of the world.

My arms feel like they’re filling with lead at each tug on the wreckage. As if continuing to lift the pieces of wood somehow transfers the weight of the memories they hold onto, to me. Flashes of green leaves, of cuts in the bark, of roots pulled up from the deep, like some animal being ripped out of a hole, writhing and squealing. I see flashes of you then. The green blanket you would tug around, knitted by our mother, of the scratch on your chin from the cat in the woods, of the way you would tear at your gifts for we did not have them as often as children of 6 and 9 would like. I see flashes of how I imagine you now. A green uniform, muddied and wrinkled, of cuts in your flesh, bloodied and ripped through by bullets, of you writhing on foreign soil, screaming.

I have to stop. I’ve torn up the rubble in desperate search of anything that survived the storm, a picture, a stuffed animal, that green blanket that you would drag along the floor until it was ripped and soiled. There’s a cut on my hand, a few splinters sticking out. I didn’t even notice. When you come home maybe you can find something. When you come home maybe you can put the broken pieces back together.

“Anna” a soft voice calls from behind.

I don’t turn. I know who it is.

“What are you doing here?” He asks.

“What does it look like?” I snap back.

I hear him sigh. Then there is a hand on my shoulder. Shuffling in the dirt as he lowers himself onto the ground. I look over. He is dirty. Very. His shirt, which I imagine was once white, is almost brown with dust buried in the wrinkles and folds. The hem of his pants is covered in mud. There are scratches on his face. I wonder where he was during the storm. His bad leg sprawls beside him in the rubble. It is the only reason he is not overseas with you right now, and I know how much it pains him that he’s not. Selfishly, I’m glad he’s not. Joseph, the one thing that has stayed constant in this ever changing world.

“Hey Joe” I sigh, stilling for a moment, holding my hand close to my body.

He takes it, cups it in his fingers and moves it side to side, examining it. He huffs, then begins delicately plucking the pieces of wood out of the cut. There’s a trickle of blood, a little crimson river, meandering down my wrist. Joe pulls a piece of clean cloth from his pocket and begins to wrap the fabric around my hand, twisting and turning around my wrist and thumb to secure it. He plants the softest of kisses where the cut lies under the cloth. He then turns and begins sifting through the rubble himself.

When you come home, you will meet him. I hope you approve. The sweet boy from next door who moved in only a short while ago when owning land in his hometown became too expensive. Who defended me when those awful O’Connor boys tried to steal my groceries like they used to when we were younger on that wooded road with its red dirt and long stretching shadows, the darker copies of trees that looked over our heads. You were always there to fight them off, even if that ended poorly most times. I remember the look on mother’s face that one time we burst in, you with a missing tooth and a mouth full of blood, me without my basket. Father sat in the corner, chuckled to himself.

“At least tell me the other guys looked worse” he had said as he squeezed your shoulder.

“Oh, they did, sir,” you replied.

“Attaboy,” he laughed.

He doesn’t laugh anymore. Very rarely Joe can get one out of him, like you used to. But even then, there’s not much to laugh about. Joe said he wants to marry me. I said not yet. I want to wait for you. We will marry when you come home. It is wrong not to have one’s brother at their wedding. It is wrong to have you gone at all.

I find a piece of a picture frame, a squashed basket, a sheet turned brown wrapped round two pieces of wood, the ugly pink flowered curtains mother loved, the ones that have been the same since I was born. I meant to ask you before you left if they had been the same since you were born too. When you come home I will.

“Shit” Joe breathes.

“What?” I say turning to him.

I wonder if he has cut himself on a wood plank or piece of glass as I had. Just to the right of his kneeling form I see a scrap of green fabric. It’s darker than I remember your blanket being, but that might just be from dirt. I lunge for it. Joe catches me, tries to turn my shoulders away. His eyes look strange, as if they were a body of murky water that one could drown in. I reach again.

“It’s Andrew’s blanket, I have to-”

“No, Anna” his voice is hard.

“Let me go.”

I push against his chest, shove his shoulder as I crawl toward the fabric. His fingers tighten around my wrist, but I’m untangled enough to tug on the fabric with my free hand. It’s caught on something and won’t break free. His fingers loosen and I pull my hand towards the pile, beginning to remove planks. I want to set the blanket free.

“Anna, stop.” Joe says.

I keep removing the rubble.

“Please.” He sounds like he’s pleading.

He sounds all wrong. I keep removing the rubble.

“Anna”

“What?”

I turn. He’s crying. Glistening rivulets that turn brown as they course through the dirt on his face. They look like the river we used to play in as children. You and me.

You.

Oh God. God, please. No. God, if You’re there please-

I keep digging. Joe pulls on my shoulders, grabs at my arms, my shirt. I can feel him getting weaker, crying softly next to me. I keep digging. I see a dull button, a spot of blood. More green fabric. I keep digging. No, no, no, no, no, no. More green fabric. A belt. A boot. I keep digging. Finally, your eyes. Green, like mothers. Hair the same color as mine, matted with blood. But your eyes aren’t green, not anymore, not really. They are dull, missing the sparkle, the mirth. They are no longer the color of the leaves as the morning sunlight shone through, but are now the dull color of your uniform. Your mouth is agape. As if you tried to say something. As if you are drooling in your sleep. But your eyes are open. And you are not asleep. And you are not awake. And it is no longer a question of when or even if you come home. When you come home? No. I was foolish to hope for that.

You did come home.

…

She asks me to dig the hole. To say a blessing. To help her lower the body into the ground. Just the two of us. She does not involve her parents. She says she will not tell them, not until the war is over, and she can say he was blown to bits. Like their home. He was blown to bits and there was nothing left to bury. Her parents would not be able to take the heartbreak of their son returning, only to be killed by blunt force trauma to the head when a tornado ripped their house apart. So she says. She did not cry. Not how the poets depict women crying, all soft and lovely, howling like bird song into the wind, gentle tears caressing their faces. No, she did not cry like that. She cried like a feral animal caught in a trap. That is the only way I can describe it. It is not to be demeaning, or cruel. But it is simply the only image that I can conjure that helps me make sense of what she did in that moment. Her hands were ripped bloody from her search through the rubble. She tried to pull him out, wake him up. She screamed, tried to rip him from his place on the ground. I held her then, and she thrashed and writhed. And then she began to howl. To keen a long, low, guttural note. Something primal and deep that did not let up for air. I could feel her tears and saliva soaking into my shirt, and I just held her and rocked her like I had seen my mother do for my younger siblings when they were sick or hurt.

She screamed so loud the people left in the town came to see what had happened. What tragedy had befallen their small patch of land that was worse than the one that tore up half the neighborhood. She screamed at them. Not words, just sound. She went over to his body, crouched low, like an animal protecting her young. I stood then, told the townspeople to move on. The drunkard did not. He sat in the mud, dejected, a bottle in hand.

“There goes another one” he slurred. “At least it wasn’t a bullet, or infection, or a plane crash, or a mine, or…”

He kept babbling on but I ignored him. I returned to her. She cradled his head. And we sat. When she seemed to have expended all her emotion she wiped her face with her sleeve. Her hand smeared blood across her forehead. And then she lifted his shoulders and signaled to his feet. I obeyed.

Here we stand, the two of us beneath this tree. A big oak. One that survived the storm.

“The roots will cradle him,” she says. “Hold him tight. Keep him in the ground. He won’t get taken by a storm ever again.”

She found the blanket in the end. Instead of keeping it, she wrapped him in it. Swaddled him. I can imagine him now, swaddled in the blanket, cradled by the roots of the tree, asleep. I don’t tell her that eventually the tree will use him as nutrients as his body decomposes. That it is cruel to not have the parents of the child be present for the funeral. That her mother would want a body to bury, not an empty coffin. Her world is already so cracked, she doesn’t need me adding to the brokenness.

Maybe it is better this way. For him to have returned and died in his own home. For him to become part of a tree that can stand against the weather. And maybe one day, become part of a home that does not blow away. Be a plank in a wall that does not get torn apart. In a world where brothers, and husbands, and sons are not blown to bits and sent home in coffins. In a world where sisters, and wives, and mothers do not weep and keen and scream for their lost ones. In a world where people and trees grow roots so deep they are able to pull all the broken pieces of the earth back together and hold fast.

Maybe.