“Does she look like she’s learning?”
When they’d exhausted themselves arguing, they decided to drive down to Lincolnton for dinner. My mother didn’t want to leave me in the house alone but she thought I was asleep and decided to chance it for a couple of hours. When I heard her coming up the stairs to check on me, I jumped up and ran back into bed and closed my eyes.
I waited until the taillights faded beyond the iron gate. I got out of bed and turned on the lights.
I left my room. I walked down the hall and down the stairs, past a row of hopelessly faded photographs on the wall. The photographs were of my grandparents, and the woman my parents told me was my other aunt.
One of the photographs depicted my grandfather, the man after whom I’d been named. It was washed out; only the faint outline of a man was visible, his face a cloud. He cradled something in each arm, but these things too were indecipherable. For a long time I thought it was a picture taken after his death, a picture of his ghost. I started to believe that there existed another class of age, older even than the oldest of the living—a class whose citizens lost the ability to speak even to themselves, and were confined to perfect, impenetrable stillness.
I walked downstairs, intent on solving a mystery that had tugged on my mind for months. A mystery hidden within one of our greenhouses.
I went outside. In the garden the air was warm and wet on the skin. The lights that hung on the side of the house lit up as they sensed my movement, and then went dark after I walked away.
I walked south to where our greenhouses stood in rows. The greenhouses were made of a translucent glass. Inside each pane were fine copper veins, part of the circuitry that pulled energy from the sun. At the time, translucent panels were still new and largely unavailable south of the Tennessee line; it took my mother many months of wrangling and many called favors before she managed to move them across the border. In the day they hummed and glittered, at night they were silent. And at all times, even while they worked, it was possible to look through them and see the things growing inside the greenhouses.
Near the southeast edge of the property, House Thirty-six stood unused. Instead of glass, it had plywood boards for skin. After Hurricane Zenith came through and damaged many of the greenhouses, my mother once again tried to have new panels brought in from the North. But she was only able to secure enough for eleven of the twelve damaged greenhouses. House Thirty-six was boarded up.
At night, I sometimes saw our visitor come here. Whenever she did, she carried one or two of her old paper diaries with her. But when she emerged from the greenhouse, the books were gone.
I arrived at House Thirty-six to find its door boarded shut and held with a small padlock. But along the roof there was a square of missing plywood, through which I thought I could peer inside.
The roof was too high for me to reach. I saw a ladder leaning against the side of House Thirty-five, where my mother grew fuzz-skinned okra and eggplants big as limbs. With a full-body heave, I managed to tip the ladder off the side of the greenhouse. For a moment it stood weightless in the air, and then fell back onto the side of House Thirty-six with a loud crack. I looked back toward the house and the woodshed to see if she heard, but there were no signs of movement.
I climbed the ladder. With every step it leaned slightly this way and that. But I had seen the laborers use it many times, and they were much bigger than me; I kept climbing.
When I reached the top rung I felt exhilarated. Beyond the boarded roof, the whole of our land lay visible. Not only our land, but the land surrounding it: the place where the river curved, where trees with braided hair grew straight out of the water. I looked to the south and saw the lights of distant towns.
But inside the greenhouse, I saw almost nothing. Under the silver cast of the moon, there was only the faint outlines of footsteps in the barren soil. I craned to see beyond the square of dirt lit by the moon, but there were no signs of whatever it was she came here to do.
As I readied to give up, a burst of red light caught my eye. It came from far to the north, from a place beyond the river. I turned to search for it but in an instant it was gone.
I stood perfectly still on the ladder, observing the boundary of our property. Past the levee, the river emitted a soft hushing sound as it moved. But there was something else, a break in the darkness on the far bank. It was almost impossible to see, but there was a demarcating line along the horizon—below it, the blackness was uniform and unnatural; above it was the imperfect darkness of sky, streaked with clouds and spotted with stars.
I stared at the line in the horizon, trying to make sense of it. Suddenly, the same red flash of light shone directly at me, sharp and blinding.
As I fell, I thought I saw the outline of a guard tower.
Then came the sky. I watched it as the ladder tilted. In the darkness I reached out with my left hand to break my fall.
A spear of fire unlike anything I’d ever felt before ran up my arm. I lay in the dirt and screamed. I looked away from my arm and toward the gate at the end of the driveway. I yelled for my mother, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear. I was alone.
Then I heard footsteps coming from the direction of the woodshed. For a moment I didn’t believe it was her, but when I saw that towering frame looming above me, I knew.
I was still crying in pain. I asked her to help me, but I had no idea what I wanted her to do. I only wanted the fire in my arm to end. She knelt down beside me.
“You broke your arm,” she said.
The words terrified me. I had no idea then that broken things can be repaired. Whenever something broke on the farm—a vase or a lightbulb or a greenhouse panel—my parents did not repair it; they tossed it away and bought a new one.
“Look at it,” she said.
I refused.
“Look at it.”
I turned to look at the place from where the fire came. When I saw the unnatural way in which my right arm was bent, I passed out.
WHEN I CAME TO, I was in my own bed. She was sitting beside me.
“Take this,” she said, handing me a couple of white pills. “It’ll make the pain stop.”
I swallowed the pills and within a few minutes I felt a strange, body-wide bliss, a warmth radiating outward from my stomach to the end of every limb.
“Still hurts?” she asked.
I shook my head. The world around me was hazy and unfocused, but the fire in my arm was gone.
“What were you doing out there?”
“I was trying to look inside the greenhouse,” I said.
“Why?”
“I saw you going there sometimes, and I wanted to find out what you were doing.”
I knew she’d be angry at me, but I thought she’d be angrier if I lied. And I was certain she’d be able to tell if I lied.
But she didn’t look angry, and she didn’t say anything in response. Instead I thought I saw a passing flicker of admiration in the way she observed me. And then it was gone.
“You fell off that ladder?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She chuckled. “You really are your father’s son.”
I turned to my ruined arm. I saw it had been straightened against the spine of a wooden plank. The plank and the limb were tied together with strips of torn cloth.
It seemed such a crude prosthetic. I began to wonder if I’d ever be able to use my arm again. In all the times my parents had taken me to swim and play basketball with the other kids in Lincolnton, I had never seen a boy with a wooden limb.
“Have you ever broken a bone before?” she asked me. I bristled at the silliness of the question—obviously I hadn’t; there were no other wooden planks tied around me.
“No,” I said. I tried to lift my arm, but it was as though the lines from the brain to the limb had been severed.
“I can’t move it,” I said.