Roots and Vines

Kudzu’s foreign verdant vines drape a dying wood behind a gray hollow apartment building. I’ve always thought that plant’s name sounds like it could be found on the label of some vagabond’s rusted musical instrument, a windpipe of some sort, that bleats a gray air’s bleak tune. That tune played coolly over the vine’s fecund jungle. The afternoon rain emitted steam from the earth’s cooked crust as I swear those vines extended toward me, growing to me as they breathed in the natural rejuvenating cycle of the sky. 

I never minded kudzu all that much, it covered the entirety of my backyard woods, or what was left of it, in a deep green, 2 or 3 acre patch, only severed by sharp vicious highways. I just liked that the cars were curtained and muffled by this nebulous green, something I could imagine looked like anything. I didn’t think about the slow death those oaks were suffering at the tentacles of this ever-expanding green monster. I didn’t really care. Fire burned things down so they can grow back even better. Maybe that's what kudzu was doing. I didn’t know, I just knew I didn’t like looking and listening to the cars' consistent bustling grind. I liked our green veil. 

Some older man in my family, my father or grandfather I think… can hear them now, grumbling about this fertile invader overtaking our beautiful American landscape.

Oak, cedar, pine, all gobbled up by that great green wave. They’d start talking about how it was an ASIAN vine and those short-sighted builders brought it over here to control erosion, but look what it’s done, come and taken roots and branches, making a home out of its conquered probably never to leave. Or that was how my male relative would put it, not ever having any real ecological knowledge on the subject. But I let them go on, complaining loudly about the green, while really I heard them talking about another color or species altogether. I sat and imagined dinosaurs or giants in the leaves while the old men talked of fear and dying. 

It was thirty years of staring and wondering in the different green beaded curtains before I finally accepted their expansion.

My lungs labor over the weighted hot moisture in the air. My head swayed back and forth as if governed by a loosely swung pendulum gliding from side to side, in a desperate effort toward stability and balance. As I sit suffused in this deathly green forest, I begin to think of my roots. I lose the feeling of my body and see the black road through the vines.

My father died driving me to school. I can’t remember if it was him or my grandfather that would rant so much about the Kudzu, but I remember he died driving me to school. Dad didn’t like a lot of things. He didn’t like what he didn’t know or agree with and that was fine. He’d found a rut in a gradually shifting muddy patch of southern splendor which he could survive in until some fatalistic collapse made history of its very existence. Been working for Hardin’s textiles in Amden, Georgia for 30 years before that goddamn builder’s truck condensed and disposed of my father in more of a spectacle than he ever deserved. John Mane labored in a line running stitches for bedroom curtains, tablecloths, napkins, and the brightest softest handkerchiefs you’d ever seen (he’d say they looked like a bride’s veil, fabric for the best times). He’d avoided combat in Nam by working in the tailor’s shop, patching worn rips on uniforms of training and war.

“I could feel the man who was in ‘em last. His fear or his joy, feel the life that wore out those clothes.”

“How could you do that?!” I’d ask from the passenger seat of our Ford explorer, hoping the explanation would contain a touch of magic and otherworldliness.

“Well, first I’d start running my fingers over each seam, each tear, each hole. Really get to know the cloth, talk to it, and he usually ‘ll start singing right on after that. Tell me the tale of his master and I work heartily on and listen, thanking that poor weathered skin for its yarn.”

Papa was a hateful man to the other world, but within his rutted muddy hollow, his kin and those fellows that had the touch of locality upon their scowl—to those men and women he gave a perverse, isolated, loving, familiarity which baffled and amused. That barstool monk every low-down country holler is honored and cursed with that paints the scenes of all from night to night, heavily perverted and biased with the local spirits. He fulfilled that caricature.

***

“Need any more John?” A rhetorical question tossed from behind the bar at my father on his stool. He would eventually be cut off cause he either passed out or was delivering an oration that the bartender judiciously decided not to fuel any longer.

“Hell Jim, fill her one more time won’t ya?” His slurred speech barely overcame the volume of the jukebox in the corner. Twelve albums that had found a home in this machine for over a decade, blues and classic rock, cycled one after the other in the same order, uninterrupted, except closing time or when some natural occurrence rips the fragile power away, a thunderstorm, tornado, car accident; something worthy of stopping the music. I imagine his stupor was similar to mine. I get behind his eyes sometimes in my delirium to feel the pain that sent him to the stool.

His body was slumped over the brass bar and laminated wood, in his gray uniform jumpsuit sipping the neat pours of whiskey with measured deliberateness, savoring the final drops.

           “Jim, why ain’t you over there in the jungle killin’ them bastards? You know my damn bone spurs or I’d be over there knockin down those savages with the rest of em!”

           Jim grinned at the excuse performed in John’s last breath, “My Mama’s sick, you know that. Me being the only child, they exempted me so I could stay home and take care of her. I don’t have any business being in Asia killin’ folks anyway.” Jim continued wiping down the empty stools and flipping them onto the bar for closing.

           “Shit, if my feet didn’t hurt so, I’d be more than happy to take out a few of those animals. They’ll have us all saluting the Soviets and swiggin’ on potata’ juice by the end of it! White man’s gotta make his stand ya know, sometime or another, he’s gotta stand up to all this evil trying to wipe him out.”

           “Alright John, none of that here and you know it!” John didn’t hear him.

           “People used to believe in something around here, now most of ya happy to just disappear and make way, well I believe there’s a reckoning coming, whether we want to fight or not, the times are gonna hit us, ready or not, they’ll smack us hard.” He gulped his last comfort then staggered and swerved on home.

***

“OH yeah!” That was typically all I could ever say to one of his outlandish claims, as I usually stifled the overflowing laughter. He’d double, triple, quadruple down on his story at the slight hint of any challenge. A willing patron never offended him, so I was always a loyal audience. Not educated or aged enough to understand the weight of his hate, our hate, I never challenged him. His soft juvenile humor deviated toward the offensive as those of his age so often do. A culture he’s as staunch, if not more, a defender of as he is of the fantasies he enlivens for me in our car. The man sitting in the car right now, driving beside me telling about how he could talk to the soldiers through their worn-out clothes, the man who imagined magic and wonder for his son on his way to school, hated. He hated. The people he hated, who they were, the enemies of a battle he was never really in; even if they weren’t, they were to him. Even though he wasn’t really him and they weren’t really them. In the theater of his mind, everyone fulfilled their roles while he played the victorious guardian of the gates.

That white guardian that this country falsified into legend, that foolhardy counterfeit hierarchy illogical and dead flowing through the minds and bodies of those lost cause sentries. The same illogical futile fury that raves about the green vines that propel and cover our trees. A hate that condemns anything contrary to the unnatural specter-like code invented by ghouls of a decrepit vanishing civilization. A code placing order to all things including colors, giving quality and sanctity to an evil rutted white land. This man created his anger from the boiling ineptitude of a character fallen short. When the little love and wonder he had sprinkled down from him and took root to flower in me, he saw the shallowness of his own emotions, the meagerness of his constitution (that was his focus). A man wanting to be a man, killing himself at the drinking trough to seize that manhood he lost in youth, in cowardice, in a grotesque slow eventual battle of mortality. He knew the size of his impression, his effect on the world. So, he imbibed and repressed a million times over the lost opportunities of himself and his haunting kinsmen.

Thoughts of him are jaded by years of disgust. I can’t hate him, that wouldn’t be the right word. He died on a good note. He died telling me about those soldiers’ clothes, he died telling me an exaggerated story made intimate by the rare paternal care in which it was crafted.

“Look down at that thread and watch the boys run bravely through those jungles, let em’ stop Communism in its tracks, that fearfully dreadful beast, one darker and more dangerous than any thought up in fairy tales or myth! IT could devour the world if our brave men don’t keep running down the savages that spread IT!”

I didn’t know what communism was then, I just knew it was a scary monster because Dad told me it was, and I knew my Dad put clothes on the soldiers protecting us from it. I sit in front of the stitches of the green vines and remember his parting lesson of xenophobia and ignorance with fondness, as my vision fades, my eyes roll back, and my blood runs with a new poison, a poison I chose for myself. That seems to me the only words I ever remember him saying, or, at least it is the only memory I can still see, him trying to entertain me and educate me in his American fear as we went to school. He died three minutes later. 

When you make orange juice there is a moment before the fruit bursts, before the thin membrane containing the blood of the orange is compressed to the point of explosion, and you can see the strange liminal shape of pressurized composition preparing to be released. My father’s body had no such moment, he was all in one great rush transmuted to the essential pulp of man. His body was violently bent at an acute angle by the ripped and shattered metal door. The force and reverberation of that shock, that reaper’s abrasive stroke, still shakes me. As my needle pulls a brown and black liquid from the cotton before my eyes shut, before I shut them, I reverberate in that old moment. I shake as the vines grow around my ankles, as I give in to their pull. His body and brains, eyes and limbs, all extricated from their formal membrane sprayed across his only living memory. I still corporeally intact, but dead, shaking and balancing on the dilapidated stage my father was pulled from. Now I lay in the veil of my childhood, still splattered with the death of my roots. I lay down, slip a needle into my vein again and stop the shaking.   

           The indefinite shape of those vines and the interlacing nuance of their mounds always felt like a new experience. I came to be near something he hated but I liked. A contrast or delusional distinction which could break the familial repressive cycle of hate and destruction. Maybe not just familial but a cultural hate to be overcome which was generationally sown in, genetically fettered to the soul as a solitary weight pulling me down a bottomless hole.

           Beads of the afternoon mist accumulated still on my skin and rolled down. As I so often do in front of this suffocated forest, I contemplated the influence of my progenitor’s hate. Mystified by the sparse moments I have to recollect, I find myself in constant interrogation over what makes me hate as he did. I claim to not hate him but the obsessiveness of my repeated analysis points only to that human baseness of loathing. While he could see the love and imagination of my childhood and find sorrow in his own lacking, I found an inverse pain in the hate he possessed. I never left the car. I am but a conflicted memory cursed to float a haunted estate, a disappearing estate.

           When a great disease infects the world, the toll of the illness is deep and lasting. The children that come after struggle still to cast away any remaining rotten flesh of the parent’s ill. Knowing the illness and the fighting against that illness can breed a new kind of corruption, one that rots out any essence of the being that was before, whereby, a vicious cycle of human suffering begets an individual of suffering, a person who suffers as a foundation of their being.

           I closed my eyes, laid down in the vines, and felt the needle drip. I struggled no longer as I watched vines breath and turn black. The sky turned off and I lied far away from that broken Ford, far away from that ancient illness, and gave in to the ever-expanding green. I chose not to fight on the stage anymore. I was lying down melting into the wood or the vine and I turned off the sky. My father, man of that kind, was quiet and didn’t question me and I couldn’t hate anymore. I could no longer pass down his pain, I ended it.