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We are talking now of summer evenings...in that time when I was so successfully disguised to myself as a child.
James Agee, A Death in the Family
1949
When I was a boy, only seven or eight years old, I had a hard time keeping up with my grandfather's long strides across the rows of recently planted corn. My grandfather was a very tall man who wore a suit, tie, wingtip shoes and a fedora hat even as he walked his fields. He was so tall he could keep an even pace by walking at a diagonal, each step going from row to row at just the right length. At that age my legs weren’t long enough to walk that way. To follow Papaw I had to walk along a row for a step or two and then hop across to the next.
This was Arkansas River bottomland on the north side of the river not far from Van Buren. One side of the field was bounded by a grass-covered levee. The other boundary of the 300 acre plot was a sinuous ox-bow lake, a dark and forbidding slough where I could hear strange birds shouting, see squirrels dancing through the trees and other, more mysterious, shapes moving in the shadows.
In the fields the sun was high and there was no shade. From time to time Papaw reached down to pick up a clump of the land. He crumbled it as he talked to his hired man, his field boss. He sniffed the dirt and rolled it into dust between his fingers. They talked of rain and seasons, of plans for turning the earth and harvesting the crops.
I copied my grandfather’s gesture. I took a clump of dirt from the top of the row. It pulled off like the crust of a pie and was flat in my hand, tan on the top and dark brown underneath. Picking up the clump exposed darker soil and I saw a tiny, pale green spike of corn just peeking out. I imagined the seedling squinting at the sudden light because I’d pulled his cover off. Still holding the clod in my hand I crouched down and looked along the row. I saw an irregular shifting of the surface — other spikes were pushing the ground upwards. Down that low I smelled the damp coolness.
As Papaw had done, I crushed the slab of dirt in my hands and let the grains flow out between my fingers. Then, just like Papaw, I brushed my hands together. Unlike him, I then wiped them on the seat of my jeans.
That was the same summer I learned the world was round and that China was on the other side. Like many a child before me, and since, I was puzzled at how all those Chinese could walk around upside down. I decided to go through the earth to see them. I used Mamaw’s gardening spade. I chose a spot in the back of her garden and went down into the earth. I was going to go all the way to China.
I learned in that afternoon something about sculpting holes in the ground. It was grainy, well-packed soil. A few kicks on the edge of the spade drove it easily into the earth. The dirt lifted out and fell from the spade without protest. The shovelfuls, tossed on the side of the hole, made a mound that grew tall as I went down. I learned that starting with a small hole meant I could not get very deep before I couldn’t get the shovel out. To go deep I had to also go wide. Eventually I even had to move some of the dirt I’d already taken out of the ground. To go deep, the hole had to be at least as wide as my body and as long as the handle of the spade.
My hands began to hurt. I spit on them and they felt better.
This was summertime in Van Buren, Arkansas. When I was waist deep I realized that it was cool down there. It was damp and dark. I took the spade and cleaned up the edges of my little earth-bound box. I sliced away the earlier marks of the spade until the sides were smooth and dark brown. I decided I wouldn’t go all the way to China. It was a nice place just where I was. When I crouched down all I saw was the earth around me and the sky above. It smelled cool and safe.
My grandfather called it a “foxhole,” a word I’d never heard before. I later learned that foxhole was an Army word. But my grandfather had been too young for World War One and too old for World War Two, so even if he had been willing, he had no personal stories of war to tell me.
But he did tell me stories of a wandering man, a returning soldier, who tricked one-eyed giants and tied himself to a mast so he could listen to women sing seductive songs. My grandfather rode a palomino in the rodeo parade. He hunted quail in the Fall. He taught me how to shoot a shotgun.
At the time I still assumed a foxhole was a place where foxes lived. I had never seen a fox in the wild, but if Papaw said foxes dug holes like mine, then they must. I wondered how they did it without hands and shovels.
Note for new readers:
This is a re-posting of the first entry in this blog from November of 2011. I've learned a bit more about blogging since then. I'm about to do some cleaning up of earlier posts and images and thought that new readers (you lucky few) might like to start at the beginning. A weakness of blogs is that they flow from back to front and you can lose the narrative thread. If you'd like to view Dirt, Blood, and Grace in a linear fashion, then click here to go to the second post of the series, "Becoming an Infantryman."
13 March 2014/2 Dec 2017:
Or to see the entire Dirt, Blood, and Grace as a single file, I have a .pdf of the entire file (a bit of a work in progress) here. Please note the copyright protection on the file.
