Chapter Six #3
His first thought was, He is dead. On the feet of the legs were a pair of muddy work boots; the body was facedown, and definitively not moving. Should he holler? Should he run down and get Paloma, pull her from her Zoom call?
“Andrei?” he said again.
No answer.
“Andrei?” But the man, or the body that was once a man, did not respond, the body was completely still, his head was so completely obscured by the soft, wide leaves of a plant that Miles would later learn was comfrey that it occurred to Miles he might not have a head, maybe animals had taken it.
Miles touched a shoe, gently, with his own.
Nothing. Again: “Andrei?” And the man, with giant headphones, and a penknife in his hand, leapt up with such a lurch and shout that the scattering crows couldn’t have told you which of the men was more alarmed, the prodder or the prodded.
—
Andrei Abramov, Ph.D., very much alive, had at that very moment been engaged in extracting from the bark of an apple sapling the larva of an apple borer, or, more precisely, following the borehole that would lead him to the creature, itself best extracted with a paper clip straightened and bent into a kind of crook, as one might yank a bad actor from a vaudeville stage.
And bad actors they were, the borers, and this year particularly so, each little fucker capable of girdling a sapling and killing it.
He’d spent the past five days belly-down in the dirt. But such was the life.
Did Miles want to help?
And before Miles knew it, he was also down there, in the grass, helping his new friend by holding open the deer fencing, and the vole fencing, and borer mesh—which clearly hadn’t done its job that summer—hearing about pests, first the borer, then cedar-apple rust, and fire blight, and powdery mildew, scab, codling moth, woolly apple aphids, apple maggot, mealybugs, sawfly, bitter rot, black rot, white rot, sooty blotch, birds, rabbit, meadow vole, porcupine, and deer.
The work was endless, Andrei told him; of course, there was always the possibility of spraying, except his kids ate the fruit, and bees and butterflies visited his meadows.
It was only with his daily labor, his seaweed mulches and fermented nettle, and beneficial wildflowers planted in the aisles, that he’d been victorious.
And he went on to describe, with great specificity, the form that these victories had taken.
It was a lot of information, all at once, and it kept going even as Andrei rose from the tree and moved on to another, though not without wandering around and looking for his misplaced penknife, and if Miles didn’t find this information immediately applicable to his dissertation, he did come quickly to two general observations of rural life, which were that farmers rarely stop working when they are talking to you, and that much of rural existence consists of moving tools from one place to another, and, in the process, losing them.
Well, this was useful, wasn’t it? thought Miles, aware then, as they were walking, of how much he had come there hoping, if only just a little, to meet a friend he could relate to, who could understand the Slight Disappointment.
And once, when they stopped for water, Andrei asked Miles how he was finding Greensbury.
Paloma seemed to have prepped him about Miles’s research, and he genuinely seemed to want to help him.
But he was embarrassed—and here Andrei paused to take a breath, and Miles thought, hopefully, that he was going to say, “Unfortunately, I haven’t figured life out, either”—to admit that he couldn’t even think of a single folktale.
He understood how ignorant this sounded.
But his parents, upon their immigration, first to Boston, and then to take dual faculty positions in the Physics Department at Georgia Tech, had embraced America so wholeheartedly that the only Russian he knew was the very particular vocabulary of his parents’ fights.
But apples, said Andrei…apples he could help with.
Well, Miles acknowledged, apples were often mentioned in the texts he studied, though usually they were enchanted.
And Andrei was off again, which was not surprising, given Miranda’s famous thesis.
Even Miles, who had almost boundless interest in arcana, found himself recalling a favorite story, about a magic sparrow, who, despite being magic, despite saving the family from an earthquake, was made into a stew because it wouldn’t shut up.
Indeed, it was only after a couple hours, and a familiarity enhanced when Andrei discovered a tick on Miles’s neck and a second on his shoulder and the two men had stripped down to their boxers, having apparently lain down in some kind of breeding ground, some kind of tick fiesta—it was only then, with this incipient intimacy strengthened from rooting around each other’s armpits, that Miles took it upon himself to ask Andrei how a biochemist had ended up spending his days facedown in the dirt.
“You mean you want to hear about my crisis?” Andrei asked.
—
The crisis, he said, rising, and leading Miles to yet another tree beset by borers, was one of intellect—though, given the direction of his life, his years toiling in laboratories, his devotion to science, perhaps one might call it one of faith.
Back in graduate school, he had settled on immunology; in his dreams, illness fell to his magic, children rose from their sickbeds, old men and women felt their swollen joints grow supple once again.
His work was strong, his publications regular, but somehow a Grand Discovery eluded him, and, slowly, he found himself abandoning his aspirations.
He had been blessed, however, with a lovely wife, and three lovely children; and when Paloma published her dissertation, and the offer came from Greensbury, he knew he was in no position to stop her.
There was a telescope, a small telescope in the scheme of the world’s telescopes, but perfect for her research, and the college had alluded to the possibility of some kind of work for him in the Biochemistry Department.
It was then the crisis happened, age thirty-five, mezzo del cammin.
It wasn’t clear what set it off, whether it was when the lab space fell through after months of increasingly evasive promises, or the college’s offer that he could teach a writing seminar.
Not that he had anything against writing, he assured his newfound humanist companion, but once he had dreamed he would cure rheumatoid arthritis.
Also, autumn was deepening, and the days were growing darker, and a pineal gland raised in the Atlantan sunlight, even if it is a Russian pineal gland by birth, can only take so many clouds, and so much nighttime.
He took to walking, long walks, slightly crazy walks, as if he could outpace his melancholy, and it was on one of these days that he found himself looking down upon a field and, in the field, a man holding a scythe, cutting a perfect swath in hypnotizing rhythm.
So vivid was the image, so far from a road, so devoid of anything modern, that Andrei wondered if he’d finally gone mad, if this were a vision of some long-lost Russian wheat field, passed down to him through his blood.
Actually, it was Bob Smith, who had a kid in school with Andrei’s daughter Sasha.
For a long time, Andrei had looked down upon the damp field, at the perfect strip through the grass, the way the color changed as the stalks fell, depending on the angle of grass and sunlight.
A sweet smell rose from the cut, and a soft swishing sound came when the wind relented, and he went down, and Bob, whom he didn’t know then, knew only as the scytheman, did not seem surprised at all to see the hiker make his way across the meadow.
He, too, understood the hypnotic potential of the instrument; he, too, had been bewitched one afternoon by another man at work, a man himself seduced at a State Fair demonstration. A line of scythemen all the way back.
Andrei and Paloma’s home had fourteen acres of meadow that had been traditionally cut by a local mowing company.
But that week, Andrei drove up to Rutland to meet a man who specialized in traditional tools.
In the man’s barn, its walls hung with root hoes and billhooks and digging forks, he selected a scythe with a three-foot blade, marked with a serpent, the symbol of the forge, so thin, so sharp, that it could cut through his receipt.
To this he added a whetstone, and a Slovak peening jig to sharpen the blade.
For the next three weeks, Andrei proceeded to cure himself of melancholy.
In the field, in the damp warmth of autumn, with each swing of the scythe, he began to feel the lifting of the darkness.
He felt it with each step, with each swing, with each scrape of the whetting stone.
Each night, sitting before the peening jig, or filing the nicks out of the blade, coaxing the steel into an ever-finer edge.
I slay Sadness, I slay Vanity, I slay Pride of Reputation. The serpent circling the meadow behind his home.
“Do you want to try?” asked Andrei, sitting with Miles on a bench in the orchard, after hours extracting apple borers had done a number on their backs.
Which was how Miles took up scything.
—
For the next two weeks, whenever he had free time, which was every day, Miles returned to Andrei’s house to help him. Perhaps it was a touch too much, he thought, perhaps he should have given his new friend some space, but now was the harvest, now was the time to scythe, winter was coming.