J. Clark Hansbarger

      In the victory garden, the vegetables were submarines and the weeds, rots, and bugs were depth charges the Japanese poured down on them in their search for the pigboat that held Shim Reeves' only brother, Nevitte. The Japs were closer now than ever, and so, with more hours of furious attention, Shim plucked and weeded his way through the garden, hoping with each counter attack to hold off what was seeming more and more inevitable and in turn more unbearable. Shim trudged out to the garden every morning in search of ways to slip past this day and into the next, where, because that day had not yet come, his hope could live without being such a laughable notion in the presence of such large and unreasonable circumstances.
      Things had not been well. Three families who had lived in Guyandotte for years, who had raised children, were part of the community, had lost sons in the Pacific. The word "Pacific" had come to mean more than it had before the war, when it seemed more abstract, representing only the largest body of water on the planet and with it a proportional share of the earth's history. The live and dangerous Pacific Shim saw now held his brother's submarine in its broad, lined palm. Shim pictured the submarine as though it were an extension of the house, a place where Nevitte stayed, the wall above his bunk plastered with pictures of ball players and movie stars like his wall at home had been and still was in the room across the hall from Shim's. These were two Nevitte places; Nevitte's place here and Nevitte's place there, though the distance between the two was so great that the numbers ceased to matter, the greater distance measured not in miles anyway, but in accessibility. His brother was at war and there would be no coming home until all of this was over.
      Potato bugs had gotten on the plants early this morning. Bent over the leaves now, Shim tore the bugs loose and dropped them into a Mason jar to drown in the half inch of kerosene at the bottom. If one would climb up the side a bit, able to wrench free from the kerosene and cling to the glass, then Shim tipped the jar and caught the bug again in a brief flood that would coat him completely this time and render his claw magic impotent. When the bottom was filled with a thick nest of beetles, some still squirming beneath the striped carcasses of the rest, Shim tossed a match into them, sending a pillar of flame up above the mouth of the jar. It burned for a good while, long enough for Shim's legs to tire from crouching as he held his knees tightly and watched with a boy's joy the burning insects.
      They had last heard from Nevitte a month ago in a letter written quite a while before that. Its vagueness made Shim's mother cry, as though by hearing only that he was well and that his tour of duty was rather boring, she was actually hearing that he was not well at all and that life was dangerous and frightening. He had sent Shim a cartoon sketch of himself peering out a porthole at a grandfatherly Neptune on his throne, a scepter in his beefy hand, a school of playful nymphs floating above and around him. The words "Wish You Were Here" were written across the bottom of the page, in a script that, though jovial, could not disguise some darker message Shim could not decipher.
      When the kerosene finished burning, Shim walked to the side of the garden and poured the thick mess out, pounding the glass with his palm. He did not want to join his brother, as other boys his age claimed they wished to do, but wanted only that he come home again. For the past three years, Shim had known his brother only through letters and brief visits, the visits now stopped since the war began. Before Pearl Harbor and the fall of the Philippines, Nevitte had returned home twice from Olongapo where he was stationed with the Asiatic Fleet. In the kitchen while his mother washed dishes, Nevitte told stories about Manila, and the heat and creaking darkness in the submarine. Winking at his father and glancing over his shoulder at his mother, a Pall Mall hanging from his lip and an ashtray full of butts on the table, Nevitte would laugh about fistfights and Philippine girls as if this were a life all young men should live. Shim sat quiety through these after dinner sessions, caught not only by the change in his brother's voice but by the sound of the words themselves, the peculiar and distant rhythms of Asian and Spanish place names woven together in exotic counterpoint, drawn from a place Shim could picture as both frightening and magical by the sounds of the words alone. His palms wrapped around his chin, he would listen to the words -- Mariveles, Cagayan, Luzon, Mindoro-- mix and turn together, until his father would send him to bed, banishing him back to his own life and away from this familiar stranger in his mother's kitchen.

      Between the rows of runner beans, Shim worked the ground with a hoe, churning up the tufts of couch grass that seemed to crawl into the garden each night from somewhere in the lot beyond their yard. Though he and his father had taken much care to clear and turn the ground well before planting, the weeds returned. So now, Shim severed the leaves from their roots, lifting the soil back upon itself in craggy little hillocks with each quick chop.
      The hoe handle was smooth. Because the ground was dry, the dirt slid off the blade without sticking. Shim could have worked more quickly, but he enjoyed this and took his time. He thought of his brother's work as the same -- long hot shifts spent combing the straits and gulfs in search of Japanese warships. On his first visit home from the Philippines, Nevitte had worn his sleeves rolled high up on his shoulders, and on his right arm was a dragon drawn in three colors by an Australian in Manila. The dragon had green wings that wrapped three quarters of the way around his arm, and its tail, forked and tipped with red triangles, reached nearly to his elbow. His mother grumbled about the tattoo through most of his visit, until finally on the fourth night, across the dinner table, he said, "If I could change things for you, I would. But I can't, so it's too late to worry about now."
      When Shim finished his gardening, he returned to the house where he grabbed the morning paper from a wooden table in the hallway and walked back to his room as he did every morning since summer had begun. Lying on his bed, he read the latest news of the war, rising up ocassionally to check the maps that covered his wall, marking with colored stick pins the locations of the battles mentioned. He recorded of all of these in a notebook he kept on his nightstand, logging the Japanese and American hits, calculating the distances between them, always seeking to discover a pattern that might help him predict when this would all be over and his brother could return home. He memorized the names of the islands and straits, the little seas and gulfs that littered that great distance on the map between Australia and Japan. At the dinner table, he would reconstruct what he knew of the battles for his father and mother, as they sat quietly, painfully unable to follow with the same accuracy what was happening out there, but listening patiently just the same to their young son, as if by hearing the words, together they might indeed conjure a way for their other son to return home sooner.

      One Saturday, the brassicas were ready to be picked. The kale sat in dark green rows, solemn, processional, like hearses in some long funeral. In belligerent contrast, the cabbage were riotous, lime green and billowing out of the earth, bushy heads coming up through the ground from the other side. Shim's mother had come out earlier to pick beans, and now she sat resting at the edge of the garden. Her large hat lay beside her on the grass, and she looked very tired, but pleased to see her son. Shim c arried a paring knife in one hand and in the other a wooden apple crate that bounced against his leg as he walked.
      "How many beans did you get yet?" he said.
      "I'd have more if sitting here didn't feel so good. Did you eat anything?"
      Shim walked into the garden and began a slow sweep up and down each row, checking for any damage that might have come in the night. "I had a cheese sandwich with Daddy."
      "What's he doing?"
      "He said soon as he's done he'll be out.'
      He stopped at the peas and bent down to pull a handful of vine closer to him. Though he had dusted the plants, pea thrips had gotten on the pods, ruining a good many of them. He plucked a pod and examined it for the little holes, splitting it open like a tiny book. A few insects lined the inside edge. He pushed a pea loose and rolled it around in his palm.
      "What did you find?"
      "Bugs still in these peas. I powdered them about as much as they can stand."
      "That's all you can do," his mother said.
      Shim rolled another ball in his hand. He watched the tiny white thrips move across his palm and then dropped the pod and continued down the row. He stopped at the end of the garden where the melon vines spread all about, covering the ground in a riot of growth that seemed out of place next to the weeded rows. Orange flowers speckled the tangle of vines, and the cantalopes were still only bumps somewhere on the stems. Shim squatted and stared into the mess as though he were about to cross some flooded river. He made a move forward, but then turned and walked up the last row.
      "You're a good boy, Shim," his mother said.
      He went to work on the cabbages while his mother sat taking in the sun like a young woman would at the beach, her eyes closed and head back. He cut each thick cabbage stalk with a quick pull of the knife, placing the heads carefully in the crate. On his knees, he moved from one to the next until the box was full. This week his mother would make kraut, canning the rank salad in Mason jars his father put in the cellar along with the beans and tomatos that were already there, turning the rows of plants into rows of jars. All winter long the jars would disappear; their contents on to plates, the empty jars back into their boxes to be stored until next summer when they would be hauled out and refilled, only to be emptied again as they had always be en in Shim's memory and would continue to be as far into the future as Shim could imagine this morning. The war would end, Nevitte would come home, Shim would go back to school, and his parents would share their house with him, behaving in the same distant but comfortable way as always. He could hear the tap-tap of his father's hammer from somewhere near the front of the house. The sound punctuated something that Shim could not name, something that made him feel at ease, his place in time assured by the metronome of both his father's pounding and the shifting back and forth of the jars.

* * *

      In late July, when the first beets were ready to pull and the garden was at its fullest, the family was notified that Nevitte's submarine had been lost off the coast of Sumatra in the Bangka Strait. They held a service for him on the next Sunday evening, but there was no burial, only the placing of a headstone to identify one section of empty earth from the others in the family plot Shim's father had bought when it was offered to him cheap. Nevitte was gone, and in the weeks following, Shim worked daily in the garden until August passed to September and school started, sending him back into the world of notebooks and other children.
      Through all of August, Shim believed that he would not return to school in the fall, but would stay at home instead, his education and the need for it ended with Nevitte's life. It was not that he didn't like school, for school had always been a pleasant place for him. He was a good student, and his teachers found his reticence endearing, as though it were a sign of how good a boy he was. He simply felt now that he and his parents should stay at home together, forever withdrawing from the world, not so much in mourning as in a natural response to a world that had fulfilled its unspoken but evidently clear promise to be deaf to human desires and cruel to those who assumed its benevolence. That his father did return to the metal shop at the railroad and that shops and markets in the neighborhood did not close nor even pause for an hour, only set Shim even further apart from all of the life around him, entrenching him in a silent grief so deeply that neither his mother nor father could reach through it to pull him out.
      On the first day of school, he stayed close to the wall when he entered the building, walking with his head down. The voices around him were harsh and shrill, cackling sounds more than words. He had lost the language of children somewhere in the garden and could find no connection with it now. He wanted to say, "Speak softly. I don't understand." but could not form the words nor could find the signs to transmit his message. His teacher was a plain and stocky red-headed woman named Miss Bundy, who met him at the door and asked his name. He stood for a long time seeking the consonants and vowels. When he finally said, "Leonard Reeves," she nodded and smiled as though she knew him and pointed him to his desk. His seat was in the middle of a row against the wall, and he sat down without another word, watching the floor while the other students came in and found their seats.
      After Miss Bundy introduced herself to the class, she asked that each student stand and tell a bit about their summer vacation. Shim sat without hearing any of the others until it was his turn. When Miss Bundy called his name, he hesitated a moment and then stood beside his desk, looking across the rows of children, some of whom he had never seen before and others whom he had known but could now no sooner recognize than the new students in the class. He scanned the rows until he found a boy who seemed familiar and then began to talk, slowly and methodically as though he was recalling something he had rehearsed but was having difficulty remembering.
      "Bean beds got to be dug in the fall. You hoe out about three inches down and set the dirt off to the side. Then you take and put down a layer of manure and work it into the hole. When you get it mixed in good, you pull the soil back on top and mix this in good, too."
      The children sat quietly at first, but then some began to giggle here and there, sure that he was making a joke. Miss Bundy listened, her face serious while Shim continued.
      "You've got to have ground that drains good for beans or they'll get a grey mold that'll ruin the bunch of them. If your bush beans get a mold, you have to pull the plants that get it..." Miss Bundy moved from the front of the room and walked toward his row. The other students stared at him as though he were telling them something children should never hear.
      "If they get a dark spot on the leaves, those are the ones to pull. If you keep any in there with spots, they'll all get them."
      Miss Bundy was beside him now, her bovine face gentle. She touched him on the shoulder, and Shim stopped talking and sat down. At the end of the day, Miss Bundy touched Shim's shoulder again, this time to keep him from leaving with the other children. He waited beside the door until she came back from the hall where she had said goodbye to each of her students.
      "I wanted to tell you something, Shim," she said. He studied her face to see whether she meant him harm or good.
      "I wanted to tell you that I knew your brother Nevitte." She paused and stared down at him. Her head was too large for her body, which made her look very peculiar and sad. "We went to school together. He was younger than I, but I knew who he was. He was always a very nice person." Shim noticed the way her print dress was wrinkled across the front, making her look tired and older now, where it had made her seem much young er earlier in the day. He couldn't concentrate on her words, but the tone was soothing and he wanted her to continue talking for this reason alone.
      "I wanted you to know. He was a nice person. He would always help people."
      He could find no words tell her whatever she expected or wanted him to say. Still, the way she moved her head lightly back and forth when she talked made him comfortable. He stood beside the door, his hands opening and closing at his side in a slow rhythm, an involuntary response that though it could not replace words, filled the space with communication enough for her to say again, "I just wanted you to know." Then she smiled as if a conversation had gone on between them and said, "You can go now."
      Shim turned and left, carrying no books, though he had been assigned homework, his hands still opening and closing over and over again as he walked down the hall away from her. That evening when Shim went to work in the garden, he brought a paper sack which he filled with more kale than a family could eat in a week. Later, he cleaned and dried the leaves at the kitchen sink, and in the morning carried the sack of kale to school, placing it on Miss Bundy's desk while she was at the back of the room talking to a small group of girls before the bell. When class began, Miss Bundy found the sack.
      "What a very nice surprise." she said, pulling a small handful of leaves out above the top of the bag. "And it's cleaned already. Who did this for me?" After no one answered, she glanced up and down each row, looking for clues, stopping at Shim and then looking back at the class. "Well, it's nice just the same," she said, and put the sack on the floor beside her desk and began the day.
      The last of the tomatoes were ready when Shim went out to his garden that evening. He took another sack with him and filled it with the best tomatoes, placing the others, the cracked and pitted ones, in a little basket for him and his parents. At school the next day, he surprised her again, and again sat silently while she teased the students up and down the rows, trying to discover who had brought the vegetables, again stopping on Shim, who sat without smiling in his seat by the wall.
      The next day Shim brought her cauliflower. She caught him on his way into the class, carrying the bag hidden behind his back.
      "I have certainly enjoyed the tomatoes and kale. What do you have today?" When Shim didn't answer, she opened the sack and saw the three pale heads. "I like cauliflower, Shim. Thank your parents for me, too."
      On Friday, Shim brought her onions; seven large yellow bulbs that she held up for the class to see and then passed around for each child to examine. She peeled the brittle skin off of one and then pulled away its layers, showing her students how the growth comes in rings as in trees. She slipped her nails beneath each layer and pulled gently until it separated from the whole, revealing another layer.
      With each layer, Shim sunk his head lower towards his desk until his cheek lay on the surface. Her voice and motion soothed him, and he watched her and listened to her voice and the soft crackle each layer made as she peeled it away. Finally, she came to the little teardrop-shaped core, which she held above her head, pinching it between her forefinger and thumb as though it were a saphire she had just found washed up on the beach. She passed the core around the room, and each child held the white drop to his or her nose and made a face, some declaring that it wouldn't make them cry, others passing it quickly and quietly to the next in line. After school, Miss Bundy thanked Shim again and then asked him not to bring her any more vegetables, telling him that though she ate as much as she could, he had given her more than enough already.

      On Monday, Shim brought a sack of new apples from the trees at the edge of the yard. Miss Bundy thanked him and told him he was trying to ruin her figure. Then, smiling but stern, she reminded him not to bring any more gifts tomorrow.
      On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, he brought three jars of beans, a mix of autumn cabbage and brocolli, and a half dozen more onions he took from the box in the cellar where his father had stored them in straw for the winter. The bags sat beside Miss Bundy's desk each day like sore reminders of some argument that was not yet finished. The children had begun to tease him. Though she had stopped them the first day they began, Miss Bundy now acted like she didn't hear when they called him the Vegetable Boy. The children took this as a sign that in some way she wanted them to continue, and they did.
      That evening when Shim went to the garden, he carried a knife and a duffle bag Nevitte had given him on one of his visits home. In the corner where the melon vines covered an area now half the size of the entire garden, a few dozen cantalopes sat as though they had been captured by the twisting green mass. Setting the bag down on a bed of vines to keep it from touching the dirt, he found and cut loose seven melons. He placed them in the bag and drew the string tight. Because the bag weighed more than he could carry, he went to the shed and returned with a red wagon he had outgrown the year before but had kept, not able nor willing to throw it out or give it away. He hoisted the bag onto the wagon and pulled it into the shed for the night.

      In the night he woke from a deep sleep and found the room darker than when he had gone to bed. He heard no noises in the house, and only the brushing sound of the wind in the leaves. Shim lay there in the dark. His grief, which had covered him softly like some diaphanous tissue, had now grown oppressive, smothering him in the black shapelessness of the room. He rose up on his elbows and tried to look out the window, but someone had drawn the blind and the black room was endless and finite. He stood up and fumbled his way to the wall, found it, pressed his hands to it and inched across the surface in search of the window. Because he had misjudged the location of the window, he walked into his dresser, bumping his leg so violently that he yelped and began to whimper, whispering his brother's name as though he were in a bed beside him, instead of across half the world and somewhere, no one knew quite where, in the dark at the bottom of the sea. This was it. This was the dark Nevitte was in now.
      Shim found the blind and in terror snapped it too hard, sending it spinning back up to reveal a predawn night nearly as dark as his room. He dressed by touch, slowly, afraid to make any noise that might wake his parents. He carried his shoes down the stairs and to the back door, where he pulled them on and crept across the yard to the shed.
      He pulled the wagon out front and stayed on the grass so that the wheels would not clatter on the pavement. He walked three blocks and then crossed the Third Avenue Bridge into Huntington. Though he could not see clearly down to the water, Shim knew the Guyan River was muddy and viscous, not wide enough for boats of any real size, but with a current too deep and quick for swimming. He followed Third Avenue for twelve blocks, past the C & O railroad yards where his father worked, past the Armory and the Celanese plant. He walked along the sidewalk now, out of the neighborhoods and unconcerned about the noise of the wheels clicking, smooth, clicking, smooth on the concrete. A few cars went by him, and the sky turned from black to grey as he watched the last stars fade and then disappear above the building tops. The dawn came, and the street lamps looked strangely sad and alone, isolated by the dawn, each lamp now holding only a bit of light that seemed to stop impotently at the edge of the glass.
      He turned right when he reached Sixth Street and walked the four blocks to where the road began its incline onto the bridge rising high above the Ohio River. Shim pulled his wagon up the steep sidewalk which narrowed to a few feet as the road funneled into the steel framework. A few cars now filled the lanes, the drivers looking at him as they passed on their way to work. When Shim reached the middle of the bridge, he stopped and rested his arms on the railing that ran for its entire length. The railing came up to his chest, so he had to stand on his toes to peek down at the water a hundred feet below. A string of coal barges moved slowly away from him to the north, sending out a long wake in a V behind them. Shim opened the duffle bag and took out the cantalopes, placing each one on the railing until they sat in a row like heads. Somewhere in the city a car horn blared.
      Shim climbed up on the frame until he could lean well over the railing and see the river moving below. He watched a large limb swirl slowly as it passed beneath him, and then he nudged the first melon off the railing. It fell more slowly than he had imagined, hitting the surface with a soft, dull thump, and then disappearing under the water for a few seconds before it popped back up and floated away from him. He nudged another and it turned in the air, spiralling slowly in its descent. A car slowed on the bridge behind him and he pushed another off. None of this should have ever happened, he thought, watching the melon drop to the water. He nudged another into the air. And then a fourth, each of them landing with the same dull noise, each disappearing and then reappearing as though pushed back up by something large and hidden beneath the surface. A car slowed and then stopped a few yards beyond him. None of this should have happened. He touched another melon softly, almost casually, and it fell without rotating. He could see its pitted skin and the dark specks at the bottom of the pits. None of this should have happened. A door slammed somewhere. Shim swung his arm violently and sent the last melon sailing in an arc away from the bridge. None of this. The melon twirled and spun. Dust drifted off its surface in a small cloud, and the brown globe struck the water with a soft noise that Shim could hear above the traffic. The melon disappeared for a long time and then resurfaced to join the others that rode the water in a dotted line, unravelling out toward the coal barges like children following each other in some strange, lost game. Somewhere to Shim's left, in back of him from what seemed like a long distance away, someone was yelling words he could not quite understand.

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