Early Harvest
by Sylvia Sukop
AUGUST 14, 2010 TAGS:
Winner's Week: The final winner of the Remember That You Will Die writing contest, co-sponsored by The Rubin Museum of Art and Killing the Buddha.
1.
On the day that Alex could no longer walk, his friends, by mid-afternoon, had come up with a solution. They prepared a chariot to convey him down Coni’s long driveway to the main canyon road, covered that early December in gray ice and black cinder. Wes was in charge. A father figure to Alex, Wes used to work for a cement company, and was strong and practical when it came to moving loads, getting things done.
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The broad, low-slung cart, riding on two slender tires, was normally used for hauling vegetables or firewood, but was cushioned now with pillows and sleeping bags. Wes and Tim carried Alex outside, and he sank into it like a king — “our winter-born king!” Nadine shouted — and he smiled weakly, barely able to follow the affectionate chatter. He was quiet, his frail limbs hidden beneath multiple layers of clothing, but his gaze was intent, savoring what would be his last tour of the farm.
A precocious idealist, my brother Alex had found his calling early as a farmer, vegetarian, and environmental activist. Right out of high school, he joined a community of kindred spirits living without electricity or plumbing on an organic farm in eastern Washington. Just two years into his new life, this poster boy for healthy living was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer — extremely rare, and always terminal, in teenagers.
A festive entourage of 10 people accompanied Alex’s chariot, branching off on the snow-covered road to Ken’s house, where the plows don’t come, to wish him a happy 76th birthday.
The most senior member of the Tolstoy Farm community, an old-time pacifist, gardener, and quilter who cherished his wild solitude, Ken had recently taken a fall and injured his ribs. Wearing a faded flannel shirt, he emerged from his house, built half underground, glad to see us but also unaccustomed to the spotlight of so much attention. Hands in his pockets, shoulders rounding against the cold, and wisps of gray hair standing straight up in the wind, he joked that we should all be singing “76 Trombones.” So we did.
Alex yearned to be close to the ground. Wes and Tim hoisted him up, out of the cart, and set him down in the snow. Surrounded by his friends telling jokes and throwing snowballs, Alex sat, serene and oblivious to the cold. Whenever he needed to vomit, one of us was standing by with the deep white bucket.
Our humble king had slipped into this world in its least fruitful season. If he lived till January he would turn 20. Anticipator of seasons, of cycles of hardening and softening, Alex had perennially coaxed new life into being. From him I learned that farmers are like good lovers — their timing is everything, and a strong body doesn’t hurt either — and that without them, the earth is nothing more than a mess that sticks to your feet.
As a child in Pennsylvania Alex practically lived outdoors. He loved the woods, the dirt, our mother’s vegetable garden, and the wild berries that grew alongside the road. Even before he could walk, he started picking them from his stroller.
Back on his chariot, Alex’s last stop was his own kitchen garden, now frozen over, covered in old blankets under a dusting of fresh snow. He had built the tall fence around it that summer, had told me back then how he hated digging the post-holes, backbreaking labor with a pick and shovel. But he was disciplined and kept at it, following the detailed sketch he had drawn in his notebook.
We hauled Alex toward home, and the sun, setting through the canopy of pine trees, flickered orange across our faces. We all stopped. No one spoke. Our breath hung in the icy air. And I thought how strange it is that the nearness of death should bring such beautiful gifts — not the fiery light from this winter sky, but the grateful acknowledgment of its arrival and of its passing, together.
2.
The work of dying is hard. It takes effort — to begin, to continue, to finish.
For Alex the effort began in earnest one Wednesday night after Wes showed up. I’d already had several conversations with Wes about dying — how it was when our mothers died, and his sister, and how it might be for Alex. Coming together now, we didn’t need to address the subject further. The task itself was before us.
The four of us sat with Alex into the night, Erich and I on the mattress where our brother lay, Wes and Coni in chairs beside us. No silent vigil this. Though Alex had nearly lost his ability to speak, we kept up a conversation, asking him questions that might help him reflect back on his life, on what was most important. His answers came slowly, his speech slurred.
“What was you favorite thing to do, even as a child?”
Digging in the dirt.
“How many great loves have you had?”
Three.
“Where do you feel safest and happiest?”
A garden.
Hour after hour, we summoned dwindling reserves of energy. At some point Alex fell unconscious, and addressing him directly felt awkward. So I spoke of him for the first time in the third person, hoping he could still hear me.
“Alex has become quite a good writer — an essayist,” I said, not as a point of information but of affirmation. “He’s just starting to share his writing with other people.”
And suddenly Alex himself spoke, with effort repeating what would be his last word: essayist.
Until he got sick Alex had slept on the floor in the house he shared with fellow students during his one and only college semester in Olympia. One thing I insisted on after his diagnosis was a bed, and within days we found one at a local garage sale; when he moved from Olympia back here to the farm near Spokane, the bed came with him.
The dark-wood headboard had broad shoulders like his own. It rose to an arch in the center, a classic bell curve. It’s the shape of a life, or some lives at least, with a gradual ascent and descent on either side of the peak. Alex peaked early — 19 going on 40, we’d often joked, but now it felt more like 19 going on 90.
After returning from Erich’s wedding in June, Alex had tied to the top of the headboard the silver tie he’d worn with his rented tuxedo. Six months later, the tie was still there, a literal tie to Erich and our family, to its past and its futurity. But Alex himself had reached the end. He had somehow gone from being my baby to becoming my ancestor. And this room — lined with Alex’s harvest, jars of fruits and grains, and herbs hung from the ceiling to dry — had become his tomb packed with supplies for the journey to come.
Alex’s legs began moving under the blanket, one foot lifting at a time, almost imperceptibly, off the mattress. That rhythm, we realized, was a walk.
I marvel at the body’s insistent capacity for expression, the piercing eloquence of the simplest gestures. When Henry James fell into a coma at the end of his life, witnesses reported that his hands continued to move across the bed sheet as if he were writing.
My pulse quickened.
Beyond words now, Alex, from where he lay, raised one hand and, scissoring his index and middle fingers, made a motion like legs walking. He seemed to be telling us, “Let’s walk, I’m walking, here I go.”
Wes and I rotated his body so that his legs dropped to the floor and he sat at the edge of the bed, facing the large window out to the snow. For weeks we had sat here together, side by side, night after night. But this time I took a seat behind him, pressing my chest against his back, wrapping my arms and legs around his. A full-body hug, holding him up since he could no longer hold himself.
Erich had fallen asleep on the bed, and I reached over to gently shake his shoulder.
“Hey, Erich, c’mon, get up, I think this is it.”
Alex’s eyes were closed, his inhalations slow and far apart, but to me his energy felt fully awake and focused. Resting hard against my torso, his body was heavy and stiff. But his feet were still moving slightly and he seemed to want to stand up. Occasionally, and with great effort, he rocked, trying to rise.
We’d been sitting like this so long that my own legs were numb, but I didn’t dare change position. Alex and I were now fused like a single two-headed body, and barely turning my head I could speak directly into his ear.
“Alex,” I whispered, surprised to find the words, “I know you want to go and how frustrating it is not to be able to get up and walk out of here. But you can go. You can get up and leave now, without your body. You can just leave it behind.”
Alex made a couple more futile attempts to stand. After one of these rocking upward motions, his body collapsed back into my arms with a strange low grunt of exhalation.
“He’s gone,” I said — and was left holding nothing but the heavy coat that had been his body.
“Yeah,” said Coni, never one for drama, “he’s out there runnin’.”
And I imagined him running along the treetops, a boy again, spirit unbound, wildly happy and free. Which is suddenly how I felt too.
Photograph: "Alex Leaping," © Sylvia Sukop 2004
Sylvia Sukop is a writer, photographer and first-person journalist based in Los Angeles. This essay is an excerpt from her memoir, Difficult Light. In 2009 Sukop received the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellowship and co-founded MMIX Los Angeles Writers. A portion of “Early Harvest” originally appeared in Strange Cargo: A PEN Emerging Voices Anthology (2010).
1.
On the day that Alex could no longer walk, his friends, by mid-afternoon, had come up with a solution. They prepared a chariot to convey him down Coni’s long driveway to the main canyon road, covered that early December in gray ice and black cinder. Wes was in charge. A father figure to Alex, Wes used to work for a cement company, and was strong and practical when it came to moving loads, getting things done.
The broad, low-slung cart, riding on two slender tires, was normally used for hauling vegetables or firewood, but was cushioned now with pillows and sleeping bags. Wes and Tim carried Alex outside, and he sank into it like a king — “our winter-born king!” Nadine shouted — and he smiled weakly, barely able to follow the affectionate chatter. He was quiet, his frail limbs hidden beneath multiple layers of clothing, but his gaze was intent, savoring what would be his last tour of the farm. A precocious idealist, my brother Alex had found his calling early as a farmer, vegetarian, and environmental activist. Right out of high school, he joined a community of kindred spirits living without electricity or plumbing on an organic farm in eastern Washington. Just two years into his new life, this poster boy for healthy living was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer — extremely rare, and always terminal, in teenagers.
A festive entourage of 10 people accompanied Alex’s chariot, branching off on the snow-covered road to Ken’s house, where the plows don’t come, to wish him a happy 76th birthday.
The most senior member of the Tolstoy Farm community, an old-time pacifist, gardener, and quilter who cherished his wild solitude, Ken had recently taken a fall and injured his ribs. Wearing a faded flannel shirt, he emerged from his house, built half underground, glad to see us but also unaccustomed to the spotlight of so much attention. Hands in his pockets, shoulders rounding against the cold, and wisps of gray hair standing straight up in the wind, he joked that we should all be singing “76 Trombones.” So we did.
Alex yearned to be close to the ground. Wes and Tim hoisted him up, out of the cart, and set him down in the snow. Surrounded by his friends telling jokes and throwing snowballs, Alex sat, serene and oblivious to the cold. Whenever he needed to vomit, one of us was standing by with the deep white bucket.
Our humble king had slipped into this world in its least fruitful season. If he lived till January he would turn 20. Anticipator of seasons, of cycles of hardening and softening, Alex had perennially coaxed new life into being. From him I learned that farmers are like good lovers — their timing is everything, and a strong body doesn’t hurt either — and that without them, the earth is nothing more than a mess that sticks to your feet.
As a child in Pennsylvania Alex practically lived outdoors. He loved the woods, the dirt, our mother’s vegetable garden, and the wild berries that grew alongside the road. Even before he could walk, he started picking them from his stroller.
Back on his chariot, Alex’s last stop was his own kitchen garden, now frozen over, covered in old blankets under a dusting of fresh snow. He had built the tall fence around it that summer, had told me back then how he hated digging the post-holes, backbreaking labor with a pick and shovel. But he was disciplined and kept at it, following the detailed sketch he had drawn in his notebook.
We hauled Alex toward home, and the sun, setting through the canopy of pine trees, flickered orange across our faces. We all stopped. No one spoke. Our breath hung in the icy air. And I thought how strange it is that the nearness of death should bring such beautiful gifts — not the fiery light from this winter sky, but the grateful acknowledgment of its arrival and of its passing, together.
2.
The work of dying is hard. It takes effort — to begin, to continue, to finish.
For Alex the effort began in earnest one Wednesday night after Wes showed up. I’d already had several conversations with Wes about dying — how it was when our mothers died, and his sister, and how it might be for Alex. Coming together now, we didn’t need to address the subject further. The task itself was before us.
The four of us sat with Alex into the night, Erich and I on the mattress where our brother lay, Wes and Coni in chairs beside us. No silent vigil this. Though Alex had nearly lost his ability to speak, we kept up a conversation, asking him questions that might help him reflect back on his life, on what was most important. His answers came slowly, his speech slurred.
“What was you favorite thing to do, even as a child?”
Digging in the dirt.
“How many great loves have you had?”
Three.
“Where do you feel safest and happiest?”
A garden.
Hour after hour, we summoned dwindling reserves of energy. At some point Alex fell unconscious, and addressing him directly felt awkward. So I spoke of him for the first time in the third person, hoping he could still hear me.
“Alex has become quite a good writer — an essayist,” I said, not as a point of information but of affirmation. “He’s just starting to share his writing with other people.”
And suddenly Alex himself spoke, with effort repeating what would be his last word: essayist.
Until he got sick Alex had slept on the floor in the house he shared with fellow students during his one and only college semester in Olympia. One thing I insisted on after his diagnosis was a bed, and within days we found one at a local garage sale; when he moved from Olympia back here to the farm near Spokane, the bed came with him.
The dark-wood headboard had broad shoulders like his own. It rose to an arch in the center, a classic bell curve. It’s the shape of a life, or some lives at least, with a gradual ascent and descent on either side of the peak. Alex peaked early — 19 going on 40, we’d often joked, but now it felt more like 19 going on 90.
After returning from Erich’s wedding in June, Alex had tied to the top of the headboard the silver tie he’d worn with his rented tuxedo. Six months later, the tie was still there, a literal tie to Erich and our family, to its past and its futurity. But Alex himself had reached the end. He had somehow gone from being my baby to becoming my ancestor. And this room — lined with Alex’s harvest, jars of fruits and grains, and herbs hung from the ceiling to dry — had become his tomb packed with supplies for the journey to come.
Alex’s legs began moving under the blanket, one foot lifting at a time, almost imperceptibly, off the mattress. That rhythm, we realized, was a walk.
I marvel at the body’s insistent capacity for expression, the piercing eloquence of the simplest gestures. When Henry James fell into a coma at the end of his life, witnesses reported that his hands continued to move across the bed sheet as if he were writing.
My pulse quickened.
Beyond words now, Alex, from where he lay, raised one hand and, scissoring his index and middle fingers, made a motion like legs walking. He seemed to be telling us, “Let’s walk, I’m walking, here I go.”
Wes and I rotated his body so that his legs dropped to the floor and he sat at the edge of the bed, facing the large window out to the snow. For weeks we had sat here together, side by side, night after night. But this time I took a seat behind him, pressing my chest against his back, wrapping my arms and legs around his. A full-body hug, holding him up since he could no longer hold himself.
Erich had fallen asleep on the bed, and I reached over to gently shake his shoulder.
“Hey, Erich, c’mon, get up, I think this is it.”
Alex’s eyes were closed, his inhalations slow and far apart, but to me his energy felt fully awake and focused. Resting hard against my torso, his body was heavy and stiff. But his feet were still moving slightly and he seemed to want to stand up. Occasionally, and with great effort, he rocked, trying to rise.
We’d been sitting like this so long that my own legs were numb, but I didn’t dare change position. Alex and I were now fused like a single two-headed body, and barely turning my head I could speak directly into his ear.
“Alex,” I whispered, surprised to find the words, “I know you want to go and how frustrating it is not to be able to get up and walk out of here. But you can go. You can get up and leave now, without your body. You can just leave it behind.”
Alex made a couple more futile attempts to stand. After one of these rocking upward motions, his body collapsed back into my arms with a strange low grunt of exhalation.
“He’s gone,” I said — and was left holding nothing but the heavy coat that had been his body.
“Yeah,” said Coni, never one for drama, “he’s out there runnin’.”
And I imagined him running along the treetops, a boy again, spirit unbound, wildly happy and free. Which is suddenly how I felt too.
Photograph: "Alex Leaping," © Sylvia Sukop 2004
Sylvia Sukop is a writer, photographer and first-person journalist based in Los Angeles. This essay is an excerpt from her memoir, Difficult Light. In 2009 Sukop received the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Rosenthal Fellowship and co-founded MMIX Los Angeles Writers. A portion of “Early Harvest” originally appeared in Strange Cargo: A PEN Emerging Voices Anthology (2010).
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Anonymous wrote on August 14, 2010 8:14am
nice work. [Report Comment]
