Thorns by Dan A. Cardoza

There are known dates that resist conjuring, resurrection; buried as stubbornly as thorns. And there are days you wish were endless, but will never get back.

Mothers, Rosie the Riveter’s, stuff us kids into station wagons, and trucks, tight like Milltown mercantile potatoes in a netted sack. Fathers, just five years out of World War II work double shifts at the lumber yard. We are off before dawn. We sleep and dream; the mothers drive to the river and catch up on gossip.

~~~

The Klamath River is a summer river, clear and haunting. She doesn’t portend sophistication, she’s casual and wears costume jewelry, mostly green. Her banks grow insatiable gardens of riches, brim full with wild rhubarb, blackberry briars, and crab apple trees. It’s early September when rhubarb bitters its taste until fall. Crab apples pulse plasma, in late summer shades of orange, salmon, and apricot. Some too early lay dead on the ground from the northern invasion of Canadian March winds. As we walk among the perfectly rounded fruit, they pop like knuckles under our Huckleberry shoes. Most of the apples that cling to the branches miraculously save themselves for the sweet tooth of late autumn’s equinox.

But today, it’s all about blackberries, and their dark temptation.  The most vulnerable of bruises hang drunk in clusters, as vulnerable as baby birds. Throughout the morning, we fill our bellies as tight as a snare drum. The others, we save for lusting after too much sugar, and dollops of vanilla bean ice cream, and pinches of cinnamon talc. We agree next week to adorn Fat Tuesday’s Masks, the ones with the exaggerated smiles if by chance we can convince our mothers to bake berry pie. 

Each crepe paper sound is a three-foot rattlesnake until we discover that the dry brown leaves tangle and twist near the wrist-thick blackberry stocks.  We hear them Guiro and rattle, imagine their fork tongues flicking, sniffing the colder air near the ground. Nothing will stop us from picking today, not even death. We dare to conquer our deepest fears and continue to lust for the drupes hidden among unsheathed daggers that stem in the thatch.

After we pick the day into near sundown, we lug our ripe buckets up damp banks, up slow hills distracted from making straw into gold.  We lug our barriers all the way up to the side of the sizzle paved road. Then we become six-foot tall longshoreman and muscle our lugs and buckets into the backs of pick-up trucks and wood-paneled station wagons. On our way home, my best friend and neighbor Bobby and I sing into the stiff wind, flag hands and compare the size of our black-eyed fingertips. We even compare our graveyards of palms, full of buried thorns. As for the slivers more lazy than dead, we choose to leave them alone. Once they figure things out for themselves, they can wriggle out the other side of October.

Our dirty forearms bear rusty Lilliputian furrows that still dry from the greed of the always darker berries.  We wear our cuts and scratches proudly. We call them our Army sergeant stripes.

~~~

Since that late September, there have been many lazy summer days. As well, there have been many a cold winter. What we have come to know of time, was not required, or an elective.  Nor was it taught on the banks of rivers.

~~~

We bury you as the sky is convulsing white spice. It’s late December. You are barely seventeen, dressed to the 9’s in a Giorgio Armani gravedigger’s suit. We watch as they lower you in a casket fattened with fractured bones, thorns, and splinters. Then a whole lot of dirt swallows you up. But that never stops us from seeing you.

Beauthton Creek borders the cemetery as you know. It’s the tributary that leads to the Shasta River. In kind, the Shasta is consumed by the lazy-ass Sacramento that ribbons its waters some 400 miles in measuring tape to brown banks near the statehouse. Returning salmon help us to stay connected. They sniff for just the right molecules of loss.

After mother passes much too soon, I begin to dream in berries again. Most of those we pluck more quickly, too green. I dream of darker berries.

~~~

As days roll by like the clouds in the sky and the weather, so the years fold and crease, stack. 

On one of those days, in one of those years, I find myself picking oranges with my two children, in our urban backyard. I caution them to let me reach deep inside the dark green, where of course the sweetest oranges remain hidden.

In life, some things never change, like the price of treasure or bounty. In the excitement of sharing, I forget to wear my long sleeve shirt. As I tug the ripest of oranges lose from in-between the green-veined leaves that worry bead their branches, limb spikes take their toll in blood.

Then all the sudden, it’s yesterday. My forearms are furrowed, raked in exquisite thin columns of rust. I am reminded of the cost of reaching too far and remembering. All my thoughts are tongues that dare to speak in complicated linguistics. In a sophisticated sweetness, an indescribable jargon not easily enunciated to the very young. So at the end of the day, I have no lesson to teach my children. They are on their own.

How can I tell them why I am not ashamed at being adorned in scratches, maybe scars? What kind of parent would that make me? How can I teach them, without exception, that dreams and memories exact their own exclusive, entangled tariff?

When the end comes, it will be oceans that swallow all our rivers. It will be oceans that consume our souls.

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Dan Cardoza has a MS Degree in Education from UC, Sacramento, Calif. He is the author of four poetry Chapbooks, and a new book of flash fiction, Second Stories. Read more here:  http://danacardozawriter.com/

Photo: William Felker

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