“Do two walk together, unless they have
agreed to do so?”
His name was Amos and he was
the blackest man I’d ever seen.
My parents hired him to resurrect
the wild tangle of our backyard into a garden.
Every day he wore the same
clothes: floppy hat, patterned shirt, stained overalls, brown boots cracked
like the skin of his fingers.
He had knobby hands and bowed
knees and he walked bent.
He never made a sound when he
knelt or stood, though I could tell it hurt.
My mother sent me out to help
Amos, warning me that I should not bother him, which I did not understand.
It was the summer of 1962 in
St. Louis, Missouri and the molten air sat heavily on everything and everyone.
I asked my mother for
overalls like Amos had and she said no.
Every day, Amos sweated
through his clothing and I breathed his work in and out of my lungs as I toiled
next to him, my five-year-old hands barely able to hold the tools.
His sweat had notes of okra,
lard, and pork, like nothing in our home.
While we dug in the garden we
shared a luxury: a mason jar of ice water sitting in the shade.
All the things we did not
know: that my family would lose everything—the house, the shiny sedan in the
driveway, the gardens we tilled for whoever would live here next.
The shedding, the loss to
come.
All the things we did not
know.
Amos said little to me and I said
less to him.
We just worked.
*
At sixty, I come in from a
morning running the big saw in our orchard yard in Northern Michigan, cutting
hollowed branches from a birch tree to see if I can save it, tilting at the
inevitability of its imminent death.
Tonight it will rain and
break the terrible heat that drenched my labors.
I fill a mason jar with water
and ice and take a long, slow draw from it.
And here I am, half a century
later—
memory made flesh,
phantom limb,
my nostrils filling again with
his strong, sweet scent.
