five/18

6/25/2020

Esther slumped, like a grain sack half-full, upon the tailgate of a 1973 Chevrolet C10. The old farm truck never changed - crusty, faded yellow and white. The one difference was the absence of Uncle Ross.

“Darlin’, please, stay outta Granma’s sewing room”, she recalled his gravel voice.

Scales of rust fluttered down onto the bumper as her booted foot drummed the bedside of the wheeled workhorse. Esther could recall her uncle setting the single rule the first night of every summer visit. She broke it.

Beneath a violet sky, eastward of Plant City, Florida, was an empty mailbox heading 200 acres of rotting agricultural ruins. Friedrich Berries and Wine was a strawberry farm that peaked in the ‘90s and slowly went sour. Today, only vinegary dregs remain.

The farm was shuttered, name and glory were only kept intact by a girl in a plywood fruit stand. Esther earned enough during summers to provide food and electricity all year. Her homemade preserves would put any old hen’s recipe to shame, said the local tv station, and so BnBs vying for their share of snowbird dollars described the gutted old farm as quaint. She knew the place was better described as a dumpster. But while Uncle Ross was still there, it was her special dumpster where you could get some really great strawberries.

She’d parked for two hours waiting for a parcel from the pharmacy she and her uncle relied upon. Ross needed medication, and Esther relief from chores. 7:43pm, daylight gone, the postman hadn’t come.

A sliver of paper and herb burned to ash between the fingers of her dainty, dirty left hand. She thought of what happened yesterday and sighed. Maybe he would forgive her, but even if he hated her for eternity that would be okay. Ross would have vindication. It was worth it

Red-orange flickered the looming shadow cast by overhanging oaks and illuminated a small leatherbound black notebook that she held. Hand sized, an inch thick, in gilt a small compass icon and the digits 2001 had been embossed toward the bottom of a cover banded shut with twine.

With a deep final draw of her last medicinal joint, Esther adjusted her chestnut ponytail and pulled a tattered Devil Rays cap down over her preened brow. Clear hazel eyes and high, tanned cheekbones were marred only by freckles summer sun had dashed across her face and slight dark circles. “Hurry the hell UP!” she brooded, exhaling a small cloud. As it disappeared skyward, a bucket behind her left shoulder thumped as she flicked the spent butt in. She tucked the tiny book into her ruck like a sacred artifact.

Dwindled pot stash and darkness beneath her eyes were the only traces left of last year. She looked nothing like the girl who missed the past two summers at the farm. Now 17, Esther was 89 pounds and chest high to her 6’2” uncle. Ross had been spared sight of her when she was too sick to visit and for that, she was glad: he didn’t need to see it again. In the years since he had lost his sister, brother, and mother, he had missed everything Esther didn’t bring to the farm; birthdays, holidays, every softball game, and the entirety of her struggle to live.

As if it had eternity, a big blue behemoth with a magnet that read RURAL MAIL on the side sauntered up. A guy in some pretty gross cargos hopped out.

Purposely too loud, Esther exclaimed, “Jesus H. Christ, finally!”.

Peering over his shoulder, garish-shorts-man plopped a carton into a mailbox styled like a barn. He huffed, from his lip a glistening brown wad shot mere inches off the driveway. Before he stopped thumping his can of Cope’ to put in another pinch, Esther, box in hand, was already inside the musty farm truck cab.

Esther guided the two-tone dinosaur lumbering over a hundred acre overgrowth back to the house. Back when Granma worked the soil, the farm was double its current size. Wine was still selling, but Granma mortgaged half of her land. She couldn’t bottle enough wine to save her little girl. Esther was namesake of her aunt Esther Jane and with that came her legacy. They shared birthdays, heredity for cancer, and even looked similar.

Sometimes Esther felt like someone put a quarter in her aunt’s arcade console to buy her another play at life. J. David Friedrich, esq, would hear nothing that could absolve his brother or tarnish his sister. It would mean he was wrong. Esther knew his narcissism: To be incorrect was verboten.

“You don’t get second chances”, her father told her whenever his brother came up in conversation. How could this not also be true of his sister? Why couldn’t she be an individual?

Esther would phone Uncle Ross burning curses into her father’s soul, sobbing. Without pause he would interject, “That’s your daddy, Este, an’ you only get one a’ those. Stick it out for me a while longer”. Ross was the only soul still permitted to use her childhood nickname.

Pointing the truck into the garage she cut the burbling V-8 and slid down the bench seat scooping up her ruck and her own notebook. This one floral and had a spine made almost entirely of duct tape. It expelled a post-it note that flitted in her wake. Scrawled in her rounded script read only a date.

5/18/2002

In spring, John left to pursue a law degree, he never carried passion for working soil. Ross departed soon after for the Marine Corps. Not much time passed until he met active duty. Three weeks into his first tour he was hurt, discharged. He moved back home with a role as the business brain of the family farm. Onward, Ross was Granma’s right hand but lacked a left one. Everything seemed to run perfectly at the farm with Ross and Granma working together, until the accident.

On Sunday morning, May 18th, 2003, Ross blacked out while in command of a tractor. It had gone into a ditch by the time he came to. Simple as it seems, Ross’ story cleaved a family divide wider than the ties that bound it could ever stretch. One side believed his story blaming time in combat, the others including his twin, believed Ross intended the accident as sleight of hand.

Granma never trusted banks, the depression had taught her. As it had always been, the family knew her hiding place was the little book with hollowed out pages kept in her satchel.

Granma’s satchel was stowed around the seat of the Farmall on the day of the accident. It remained but the journal, holding a season’s earnings, was in the wind. Granma lost half the farm and, soon after, her daughter. Granma never blamed Ross, but half the family did. Ross swore he never laid a hand on the journal and made an oath that he’d never leave the farm unless he found it.

A year before the contemporary rendition of Esther was born, Granma died, then came John’s oath to never speak to his brother again. The farm estate was willed to the twins, only one was interested. When Ross was granted ownership, all production of the family brand ceased. He and the land, better or worse, withered together as time marched.

6/24/2020

Esther knew her uncle’s story verbatim, but no matter how she pried her father for information the lawyer inside pleaded the fifth., “Esther. Your uncle should have owned his indiscretion like a man, and I will keep my word until he does - in the sum of twenty-thousand dollars. End of story.” She knew her father to be quite talkative and his tight lips on the situation covered holes in his plot. She hated how he wouldn’t acknowledge him by his name or even as a brother.

Esther turned the inquisition upon her mother who quickly called her bluff.

“You are NOT going to sue your father, honey!”, Her mother chided her through a muffled phone speaker, “blood is thicker than water, but nothing is thicker than your Daddy’s skull”, then added, “you two are more alike than you think”. It didn’t matter what Mom said, it felt good to hear her voice. The weekly call was all she had through the summer, Mom would phone from some resort or beach. Before long they ended after exchanging a brief ‘I love you’.

Playing housekeeper for her ragged, depressed, wonderful uncle felt easier since she had become cancer free. Now pharmacy deliveries were only for Ross. The war and the suffering after it meant he would depend on pills for life. Esther knew what Seroquel, Prozac, and Diazepam were long before she could spell.

Last night they had finished what work had to be done to keep weeds from choking off the gardens, Esther leaned against her uncle and he against her, neither strong enough to accomplish much more than to stay upright. Both exhausted and content. That was the moment Esther decided she would defy her uncle’s rule.

Later, with Ross’ snoring, Esther crept through the house. Hung on a door a little needlepoint sign read ‘Marianne’s Sewing Shop’ with cute little flowers as a border. It was the only place left to look, the only place Ross refused. Esther wanted to cry or vomit in fear. This little den was the one place in 200 acres she’d never been. Nobody had for years. Grasping the brass knob permitted a stiff turn and click, a crevice spilled light into the entry.

Esther prodded the door, she had to set free the man who had never said a harsh word against the people slandering him. Loose floorboard tropes arose in her mind rejected as too easy as she spotted a yarn bag pinched shut by two crossed crochet needles. A literal ‘X’ marked the spot.

Dust rose as she toed the bag, bare foot. It was lumpy and nearly full. Esther dropped to a knee pulling the needles in the same motion. The bag went agape spilling rolls of yarn through dust like donuts in powdered sugar. One corner of a little book was just visible below scraps of paisley and gingham. She plucked it and fled. There was no covering tracks, it would be obvious the door was tampered. Uncle Ross is a Marine, after all.

6/26/2020, 5:18 AM

Esther fixed her uncle’s favorite breakfast in time for his usual rise at half past. Black coffee and his newspaper. She tucked the little black book into the folded Plant City Observer. She steeled her nerves and paced to Uncle Ross’ door where he sequestered the last 36 hours.

In her meekest she summoned through lacquered pine, “Hey unc’l, got your breakfast”, then a light knuckle rap.

Two words in a voice like bagged stones. “Doors open.” Esther shuffled in.

Ross stood, missing hand tucked in a pocket, lacking the usual prosthetic. Eventually, he broke the silence.

“Doug come yesterday?”

Esther replied, “guy with shorts?”

“The mailman, darlin’.”

“Yessir”

“Well, what’ve you got there?”, gesturing toward the tray she held.

She passed his coffee, laid the newspaper and contents on Granma’s duvet topped four-poster, and retreated. He sipped, flopping open the folded news before he could swallow.

Esther saw coffee erupt from Uncle Ross. “I don’t... but I thought...”, he sank to a footstool at the bedside. “Este, I - can’t.”

Bold, she rebuked, “Then I will.”

He cradled it in his big cracked leather hand like a wounded bird and spoke, “No. Think I have to.” Ross pulled back the twine. They both stared wide-eyed as Granma’s safe revealed the stack, just under an inch thick, of crisp bills in its hollow. However, a note was left behind the gutted pages, a familiar scrawl.

“Ross, I know what you’re thinking. You’re wrong. -JDR”

Esther wasn’t sure about her uncle, but she had no idea what to think.