Redundancy.
On home and the Afghan mountains, livestock and literature, and memories of nature and the nature of memory.
It smelled like cowshit. I’m not going to romanticize it. Although sometimes the sun would set the sky into a frenzy of color, and the bluespring lake that backed up against the grazing land was full of cool, clean water; it smelled like cowshit. I wasn’t a Marlboro man either. I was a string-bean kid in a bleached out Hollister t-shirt, slinging an axe against the cypress knees to get the ground level.
The old rancher I worked for was kind. He wore penny loafers instead of cowboy boots but he drove the stereotypical pickup truck with one worn spot on top of the steering wheel. He’d yell “here cows, here cows” over and over when it was feeding time and they’d come crowding up like puppy dogs to the bales I was laying down with a tractor. He’d yell “here sheep, here sheep” over and over and they’d stupidly follow him to the troughs where I dumped hardened corn.
Sometimes I’d spend hours outside the work shed, cutting planks into eight foot beams for fenceposts. Sometimes I’d clear out underbrush that had been blown across the grazing land by Nature’s coughing, wheezing, humid breath. I’d drive my little four cylinder pickup truck down to a corner and fill it with broken branches and stumps I’d dug from the sinking black mud.
Sometimes he’d come pick me up from the far reaches at lunchtime and take me out for catfish nuggets and hambone collards at the only buffet in town, and he’d talk to all the other old ranchers about corn prices and beef prices and weather predictions, and I’d sit there bored out of my mind because the last thing I wanted to think about was cows. Although sometimes I miss the way they’d nuzzle your hands when they were babies, and the way they’d squeal for their mama’s milk before their knees worked right.
He turned me onto Faulkner. Told me how he was a postman and a novelist. Told me how anybody could be anything behind closed doors. He’d loan me paperbacks from his giant library; stuff most people read in high school. He had neat, cursive handwriting and the margins of those books were full of it. I’d copy the margin notes down and ask him questions about them during our lunch breaks.
I asked him about the war too. He was in Korea, but he didn’t like to talk about it except to say that his mama thought he looked real smart.
If I’d have known then, shit, I’d have known. Mama said the same thing about me when her and daddy and all the kids drove out to South Carolina to see me graduate; I looked real smart, I looked real strong, I looked real good in my brand new uniform. She cried like a newborn calf. She cried like a mama seeing her newborn calf all decked out in dress blues and big muscles and a soldier’s tan.
I don’t know who I’m writing this for. I guess I’m writing this to remember; the way the wind would blow at just the right time on a dog-hot humid day, the magnolias that bloomed for like three days or a week or a month then fell down and rotted their sweet smell into the air all up and down the highway, anything but fucking rockets and fucking convoys driving my friends into the dark night that sometimes never gives them back.
I still read paperbacks; Dostoevsky and Stephen Crane and William fucking Wordsworth and his dandelions. Mama mails them to me in a flat-rate box, ten or fifteen at a time. I built a bookshelf from pallet wood and when I’m finished with them I mail them back to her and she keeps them in storage for when I get home. If I get home.
I wish I could talk to that old rancher. I’d ask him why James Joyce loved Dublin so much if it was such a shithole town. I’d talk to him about the beef prices. I read the Agricultural Review sometimes on the computers in the USO. I’d tell him I know what it’s like to see a dead man. I’d tell him that I know burning human flesh smells like meat and makes your mouth water, and how it fucks you up when you get hungry as people are burning up around you.
I have a friend that got shrapnel all in his face. I have a friend that got third degree burns up and down his legs when his truck caught fire. I have a friend that got shot at in a helicopter ride to Bagram Airfield and got pieces of helicopter metal inside of her thigh. I have a friend that got shot under his vest and the bullet just ricocheted back and forth off the insides of his armor plates and turned his whole torso into shredded bbq pork before he died, before they packed him in an aluminum box with a red, white, and blue flag, before they sent him on a plane to a funeral that none of us could attend, before I realized I can’t borrow his hard drive to watch movies on because it’s home with his mama and she wouldn’t want me asking to watch his movies.
My margin notes for a book on the Romantic poets says that God is in nature. My margin notes on Dubliners says that there’s beauty in the grime. My margin notes on To Kill a Mockingbird says justice doesn’t always win but it’s worth fighting for.
All I know is this ain’t home, and this ain’t a place for reasoning, and this ain’t a place for “here cow,” and this ain’t a place for mama’s pride. Although, there’s something about the way those Afghan mountains cut the sky like razorblades, or a broken beer bottle, or a crack in the space-time continuum, or heaven coming down.
Steve Comstock is originally from South Alabama. He served in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army. He currently works as a mechanic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Kat Bawden is a photographer and visual artist in Chicago.
