Can You Hear

The air was stifling as the golden sun dipped towards the horizon, leaving me lying beneath my grandmother’s pear tree, my fantasies slowly dissolving. My summer reading novel lay beside me, seeming to mock my inability to properly stretch out beneath the pear tree, waiting for the ‘inaudible voice of it all’ to come to me. Instead of the ‘alto chant’ of bees, I heard the annoying buzz of flies and the occasional cluck from a chicken. I didn’t soak in the golden sun so much as melt beneath its rage, and the breeze seemed to be holding its breath. All in all, I thought that Janie Crawford must’ve had a much more inspiring experience while lying beneath the pear tree than I.

Sighing, I sat up, swatting away a pesky fly that tried to perch on my stomach. It gave an almost hurt buzz, as if completely bewildered by my rejection.

I stood and made a perfunctory effort to brush the dirt and grass from my t-shirt and jeans. My grandfather would’ve laughed at the effort. “Jessie,” he’d say, “there ain’t no point in doin’ somethin’ that will just be undone in a few seconds. This here is a farm, and if you don’t find the dirt, it’ll sure find you.”

I smiled briefly at the thought, but the smile slipped. I looked over my shoulder at the small, wooden house. I liked to imagine it looked like the kind of homemade, old time home that I read about in stories. My grandfather had built it with his own hands as a young man, and my mother had grown up inside. I always wondered what it would have been like to grow up as she did, in a handcrafted home made of rough-hewn planks, the hard wood floor worn smooth with time. My mother once told me of the days when the floor was newly laid, when you didn’t dare to walk on the floor without shoes for fear of getting splinters. Perhaps if I had grown up as she did, I could more properly lay stretched beneath a pear tree and hear the inaudible voice of it all.

“Jessie,” my grandmother’s slightly shaky voice called to me from inside.

“Coming,” I replied, snatching my book off the ground and scurrying inside.

Grandmother shook her head at me as I entered, apparently noting my bare feet and uncombed hair. “You can’t even see with all that hair in your face!” she scolded. She was a small woman, built in the era of the Great Depression and raised on spit and willpower. When she spoke, her aged voice didn’t sound frail, but like the rumblings of an ancient river, moving through its designated course with inevitability.

I brushed a lock of dirty blond hair out of my eyes almost unconsciously. “You called me?”

She nodded, bustling around me towards the door. “Today is Tuesday,” she said, proclaiming her age and origin by pronouncing it ‘Tues-dee’. I found myself turning the word over in my mind. Tues-dee. Was that how the people from my stories would have said the word? And if I tried, would it make me an imposter, or act as some sort of initiation to this sect of people who seemed to understand how to hear the inaudible voice of it all?

I realized my grandmother was still speaking, her ponderous words flowing on like the eternal river. I nodded, pretending that I had been listening.

“Good,” she said, then stepped outside and shut the door behind her. It took me a moment to realize she was wearing her bonnet, meaning she intended to walk over to neighbor Kate and hitch a ride into town. I grimaced, hoping I hadn’t unknowingly agreed to do anything in her absence.

I turned a full circle, examining the interior of the house for perhaps the thousandth time. The walls were made of beautiful oak, decorated with handmade shelves adorned with pictures and whittled figurines. My eyes stopped on the black and white photograph of a young man with a bright smile, holding an ax over his shoulder and standing with one leg on a felled tree.

My grandfather, a mighty frontiersman who had braved the wilderness and tamed the land. He was a man of legend and story, the only one in the world I respected more than anyone from a book. Braver than Atticus Finch, more gentlemanly than Gatsby, handsomer than Mr. Darcy, stronger than Odysseus, and more fun than Tom Sawyer.

I supposed he must have heard the inaudible voice of it all, because he had followed it away where I couldn’t find him anymore. Grandmother said it was simply old age, but my grandfather would not have succumbed to something so mundane. He had strode away into the sunset, carried into eternity by the voices of ages and the winds of time. He learned to speak the inaudible tongue, and he became a part of it all.

Maybe if I could learn to hear it, I could find him again.

I drifted to the rocking chair my grandfather had made, the one that my grandmother had rocked my mother to sleep in. I began to read again, the words filling me with a sense of familiar longing for something I could never define.

Soft plinking on the roof became a background chorus for my deep immersion as the day waned. The rain was a distant heartbeat, the wind a breath, and the soft, rumbling thunder the moans of the world as it sought to hear the inaudible voice.

Grandmother finally returned, and scolded me for not getting supper on as I had promised. My abashment soon gave way to daydreaming as I peeled potatoes and chopped carrots, imagining, and even allowing myself to believe, that I had been born to this. In my mind’s eye, hard work had given my hands callouses, a bonnet over my head left my forehead white and my face tanned. Skirts rippled about my feet as I gathered eggs for breakfast so Grandpa could eat as soon as he finished the farm chores.

In my mind, he emerged from the barn carrying a large bucket of fresh milk to go with breakfast I had prepared. With a gleam in his eye, his whispered, “Can you hear it?”

I thought maybe I could.