The Accident

On the night of the accident, I wanted to be a chooser. On the night of any accident, even the most willful of souls are swiftly reduced to beggars. As a beggar, I knew that the assistance of an over talkative old farmer was equal to the assistance of any duchess or kingpin. I knew, also, that the tentative warmth of her musty barn and the ease of the hand-me-down quilt she laid out for me were luxuries of rare fortune. What I did not know was who I was or what I had been trying to accomplish in that desolate and hollow hinterland to begin with. I knew I had come from the city, a place of glinting distractions and volatile ambitions, and I had never before been submerged in such a deep and unavoidable silence.

That first night in the barn the pain of my injuries delayed sleep at first, but what kept me staring into the darkness was all of the new sounds and lack thereof. In the city you are forced to listen to whatever noise holds the most urgency to you personally. Sirens that seem to be taking too many turns toward you, or voices raised too loud to be hailing a taxi. There in the quiet, the sounds of the earth were playinging first string in the orchestra. Listening to the crickets and frogs adding their harmonies to the trickle of the nearby creek and the steady bass of the rustling wind, the thought occurred to me of how strange it is that we can recognize sounds we have never heard before. As foreign as all of it should have seemed for someone who had never left city limits, I knew them in a part of me that could never be forgotten. A part that would endure even when my own sense of self was vaporized. The startled magpie, the seeking fox, the indifferent bullfrog, the lustful cicada; not only could I recognize the source of most calls but I could also decipher the meanings in their unfiltered resolve.

The first few mornings my travel was limited to the stump right outside of the barn doors, where I would sit and watch the old farmer go about her daily errands. She spoke to me as she worked, telling me about her life or simply mumbling aloud as she went about her tasks in a manner confusingly intentional and absent-minded. Her name was Ralph, short for Ralphine, and when I couldn’t remember mine she took to calling me Sable in reference to my large dark eyes.

“Well, those big beautiful eyes of yours look like they could gaze into the abyss and be bored by its shallowness,” Ralph had said when she first saw me in the daytime. I protested to the name at first, having never found my eyes to be anything but practical, but I quickly learned that Ralph spoke to speak and asked questions to ask them, not often troubling herself to wait for a response. Initially I held it against her, frustrated to be ignored the way all broken things are, until I became aware that I was being spoken to in the habit of someone who is unaccustomed to having a listener.

Ralph would bring me spare pieces of bread and even tendrils of pork that I knew were meant to feed just one, and I would watch her slowly and methodologically tend her garden. She pruned and watered, jovially celebrated each reddened tomato or basket of beans, and often announced things like “With enough sunshine this guy might be ripe by tomorrow!”, or “If you’re still around when the potatoes blossom, dear, we can have a feast worthy of a proper send off”, even though we both knew if I wasn’t in traveling condition by harvest, I never again would be. Still, her enthusiasm for the little things was contagious, until even I would regard the tomatoes and melons as if they were rubies and peridots.

Despite knowing that my name couldn’t have been Sable before the accident, my mind didn’t reject it or even suggest that it might be wrong. After the first few days I adjusted to the name and the new life easily, fixating on the simplicity of the daily tasks and patterns. Being an uninvited guest does not feel dissimilar to being a prisoner when you are only a strain on the hosts generosity, but the urge to unburden Ralph and hurry off to wherever I had come from lessened as I found ways to make myself useful. My introductory days observing from the stump showed me the obvious; that apart from Ralph’s vigor for her tasks, her body was not as capable as it once must have been. She never complained, but a slight tensing of her brow or a particularly dramatic sigh before she resumed whatever tale she had been weaving made it easy to tell which things gave her trouble. For example, Ralph was impressively strong and managed lifting and carrying well, but wasn’t quite limber enough to get low to the ground and deal with the pests and insects that might cause damage to the crops. I, on the other hand, was comparatively weak and my injuries made me slow, but getting low to the ground was actually an easier way of moving about. Ralph’s exclamations of joy and the surprising satisfaction I got from clearing the garden of its invaders made me feel much better about the help I was accepting.

“Well look at that, you’re quite useful to have around girlie!” Ralph would say. “You know you’re welcome to stay here as long as you’d like, mostly because I enjoy the company, but especially if you’re willing to do a little work for it”. The garden had low stone walls, and was connected to the small cottage where Ralph lived. I grew fond of the subtle home, and the sound that the rain made on the old terracotta roof when the summer storms began to roll in. Afterwards the air always smelled of silt and herbs, and Ralph would break out her vibrant rainboots to clamber about in the mud. Ralph never forbade me from entering the cottage, and sometimes she would leave the door open while she cooked or cleaned. I knew I could have gone in, but the house was her space just as the barn had become mine. Instead I would sit by the step and watch her in a sleepy haze, or follow a line of ants with my eyes and imagine a scene of urban traffic. There were a lot of parallels between nature and the city, but the longer I studied them the more it seemed that the city was merely a mockery of overwhelming proportions.

As I healed I was able to cover more distance bit by bit, and I would accompany Ralph to the orchard at the end of the lane or down the skipping stone path to the creek. Trips to the brook were always my favorite days. Ralph would collect wild berries and kindling, then bathe in the creek and lay out under the bankside willows with a book or some sewing. I would take a quicker bath in the water, sometimes stopping to pan for silver-bellied minnows, and then I would make my way to the small grove of lavender that grew on the other side of the stream. I had never seen wild lavender before, or anything of such a beautiful and hypnotizing color. I loved the smell of it, and when Ralph noticed my affinity she brought her wheelbarrow and some tools with her on our next creek day and dug up a small bush to plant in front of the barn door.

I didn’t feel lonely during the days I spent with Ralph. I felt more important there, on that small farm, where even the minute tasks I accomplished had greater significance than big ones that would have gone overlooked in the city. The garden had always been just a garden, but Ralph told me of a time when the surrounding fields were bountiful vineyards. Ralph and her wife had tended the farm together, and the barn had once housed several goats, cows, and horses. At first I thought it was just me and some old farm equipment, but soon I discovered that I wasn’t Ralph’s only guest. In the rafters above my temporary bed, a nest perched empty at first, until midsummer when a single swallow appeared to reclaim it. I watched him often, first with curiosity, then out of annoyance over having to share my new home. Mostly, I was jealous of the swallow. He was delicate and beautiful, not clumsy and stocky like me. I watched him flit and dance about with such easy grace, and even failed more than once when trying to imitate the light song he sang. He was colorful and bright where I was drab and plain, and most of all, each day he soared off with ease and confidence while I sat on the stump and watched.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the life I had taken up, I think I might have even preferred it, but with time’s passing I felt a wrongness creep in. The notion that I had been delayed too long, that I had failed to do what I had set out for, and if I waited much longer I would miss my chance. Without even knowing if I wanted to leave, the bitterness that I still couldn’t weighed on me more heavily with each day. I began to push and test my body more and more, trying to strengthen it or break it so that at least a decision would be reached. Ralph noticed, watching me from the corners of her eyes from time to time, but she didn’t say anything. I imagined it was because she didn’t want to influence me to stay, but she didn’t want to encourage me to leave either. I felt something slowly shifting in me, felt that soon I would be able to go. At first I watched the clouds pass by overhead from the garden hedge, and then I watched them shapeshift and shimmer in the reflection of the creek, until finally I was reaching for them from the longest branch of the tallest red oak.

Eager as I was, when the morning came that I was ready to be on my way, I delayed for the particular luster of the morning dew on the laneside poppies. The next day, for the thrill of an abundant gleaning of sugar beets. Then because the air held humidity suggestive of a storm, because of the hypnotic sway of linens on drying day, to calculate the sequence of the bumblebees. Later but not yet too late, I gathered my things, those new memories and understandings I had filled my empty chambers with, and left in the direction of the city I recalled but did not remember. Ralph watched from the small window over her kitchen sink, turning away with her hands in her apron as I went.

I passed the creek and the willows, and wiggling vineyards whose wives were still attending. I startled a shrew dallying between the brush, and a marmot transfixed on his burrow. I marveled at the chamois finding footing where there was none, and stopped beyond a honeysuckle thicket to survey the surrounding slopes. As I went, I found that I no longer envied the swallow in all of his brisk elegance, for his fetching wings would not bring him so far as this; to finally carry myself without fear of splinter was to realize beauty devoid of fragility. To be startled in turn by a defensive mother boar was to remember fragility was a recent affliction.

As the sun began to set and lend her amber brilliance to the land for a breath, I passed between olive groves and over a hill, coming to an abrupt halt to bask in the sea of purple rolling beneath me. The shades of the lavender field swayed between deeply cosmic to glaringly visceral, moving and undulating in an occult rhythm over an entire valley. Watching from where I was perched, I knew that the blackness of my eyes was intended to be a mirror for these hues. The beauty of the field was enhanced by the nostalgia it invoked of a smaller parcel of magic, planted next to a barn door just for me. To see that field was what I had come for, but the notion of home washing over me is what I had left the city seeking. The accident barely deserved that name, as I had not forgotten myself in its aftermath; I hadn't known who I was before. Turning from the violet pools I flew back the way I had come, a short distance but a long journey for a barn owl.