An Excerpt from Even as We Breathe
Rent from DeepDyve- An Excerpt from Even as We Breathe
About the place—when I take you there or when you find it on your own, just know that what the old folks say is true. This land is ours because of what is buried in the ground, not what words appear on a paper. But also know this: what is buried in the ground isn't always what you think. It's just the beginning. It's the beginning of the story—the beginning of all of us who call ourselves [End Page 54] Homo sapiens. Fitting, I guess, that what I found buried, just as I was trying to figure out how to become a man and still be human, was the very thing that threatened to take it all away. Just when I began to see what taking control of my own life might look like, I realized I was not who I thought. And neither was this place.
That summer in 1942 when I met her, really met her—before I found myself in a white man's cage and entangled in the barbwire that destroyed my father, I left the cage of my home in Cherokee, North Carolina. I left these mountains that both hold and suffocate, and went to work at the pinnacle of luxury and privilege—Asheville's Grove Park Inn and Resort. I guess I had convinced myself that I could become fortunate by proximity—escape Uncle Bud's tirades and my grandmother Lishie's empty kitchen cabinets just by driving a couple of hours up the road. It sounded good to tell folks I was raising money for college; but the truth was, I didn't know what I was doing. I just didn't want to do it there anymore. And if I stayed any longer, I would become rooted so deeply I might as well have been buried.
My plan didn't quite work the way I thought it would. When I got to the resort, I mostly stayed outside, cut the trees, mowed the grass, and helped to dig the holes that would sink signs and posts for barbed wire fences. Music occasionally seeped from the Ballroom, but was muted by thick, lead-paned windows before one note ever reached the perimeter of the property.
That's where I first found the bone. I was on my hands and knees, pitching rocks and digging holes. It was just as the inn, like its music, was becoming dulled by wartime restrictions and hushed by lead bullets. The prisoners—who were actually diplomats and foreign nationals treated more like guests—weren't really known to me yet. That little girl, God bless her [End Page 55] soul, had barely even stepped foot on the property and I was still as free as I would ever be.
I squatted there by the fence along the boundary of the Grove Park property and grasped the bone by its middle, pointing both ends upward, studying its curvature. A bent bauble for my idle adolescent hands to fidget with in absence of a ball stick or soldier's rifle. I can't recall playing with many toys as a child. That's probably why it spoke poetry to me as a young man.
The bone was smooth and porous, its slight c-curve angled in motion, calling to be grasped, used—a weapon, at least in some primitive function of strength—like a sub-human scythe, though innately human. Maybe even the very core of humanity. And, now, as I recall the moment out loud, it was an embarrassing indulgence of make-believe for a nineteen-year-old. It's all right to laugh. I don't blame you.
Such an extraordinary object to be inside any amount of flesh, it was wholly earthen. Not sterile or cellular. It was natural in a way we pray our body is not.
Momentary. Seasonal. Destined for expiration.
The bone had lost its story. Petrified into a mere alkaline deposit, transient and nameless.
I was immediately spellbound by this calcified opportunity to embrace a remnant of a life's existence in one hand. Dry it. Dust...
