Dead Hands by Jay Prefontaine

The hand pointed to everything that I have accomplished this week, a metal hand the local blacksmith welded onto the weather vane that stands askew on top of my gazebo, a flat, shiny palm and fingers that invite you to check out my garden where I have spent countless hours, most of them wearing Marty’s work gloves I borrowed from his apartment after he was dead, pulling crisp not-so-stubborn plants—tomato, pepper, marigold—from the earth and tossing them onto the leaves I raked there in a pile, a pile I very much enjoy burning, a little bit at a time so as not to alarm any neighbors, some of whom have been a bit jumpy about smoke since that house on Madison burned to a blackened shell, a pile that changes every day as I rake and burn every last leaf in my yard, crispy ones and soggy ones, newly fallen ones, even the black ones that had already started becoming part of the earth, and all the leaves in my next door neighbor’s yard where I have a flashback about sticking my head up over the top of the fence this summer and announcing to three or four of my friends who were sitting on the back porch over there that JB—a friend of ours—flipped his corvette and is dead, and all the leaves in the Louds’ yard across the street, even though they have moved out—long story about infidelity, child support, and trucking that ends with the dad gone and the mom on welfare living in a trailer park on the north side of town, a story that also ends with a mound of trash taller than I am and wider than their carport, which is none of my business and which I actually appreciate because I like neighborhood spectacles for the same reason I like death, for their purity; but none of this really matters to me (and all of it does) because I’m busy in my backyard, in my garden, which I’ve discovered I like just as much now that it is inert as I did then when it was bustling with first birds and rabbits, both of which the plastic owl from Rural King scared away, and then the marigolds whose smell also deters rabbits, and the ubiquitous morning glories that for a couple of months I labored to kill twice a week by scraping the earth with a hoe until I finally gave up and watched them strangle everything in a twenty-five-foot radius, followed by the squash and cucumbers, and then by the tomatoes and peppers, lots of peppers: orange, yellow, and green bells, cayenne, red chili, jalapeno, and of course habanera, this last of which I share with the only two people in town who I know applaud the shiny orange monsters, and then after a few months all the brown and tan skeletons that stand withered and bent and waiting, perhaps wondering (not aloud like my grandfather often did before he died this past Sunday, the day before his eighty-ninth birthday) if they’ll have to stand there stiff and useless throughout the winter until they crinkle and fall and become dust only to be mulched in the spring—better to get it over with now—and after I burn them, their ashes, quiet and powdery, waiting for the tiller that will churn the drowsy earth before it can fall asleep, liven it to a dark vibrant brown again, one last intercourse before I cover it with a warm blanket of compost, after which I will not know what to do with myself, petrified as I am of the dark months, a time when I get so depressed that I continually—at least once or twice a week—imagine my friends surrounding my open casket, their heads bowed, snickering about my new suit and whispering to each other about whether the undertaker had to expand my spoon ring to keep it on my middle finger.