Beneath the Skin

by Melissa Jones

In the last year of my psoriasis, my last year at Antelope Basin High, horticulture was a haven. The other kids in the class were all cowboys. Even if there was nothing wrong with them as individuals, they were rejects as a group. They were the kids who kept Future Farmers of America alive. The girls wore pleated Lee jeans, like balloons; the boys, Wranglers and cowboy boots. Nine times out of ten they started the schoolyard brawls with the Mexicans. They brought carpenter’s sawhorses with nailed-on steer horns and practiced roping in the parking lot. They brought greased-pig wrestling to the spirit rallies. Other people didn’t like their enthusiasm. It had a way of making people wince, like someone flashing a mirror in the sunlight.

We had class in the art building, a converted equipment shed with no windows. Three long tables made a horseshoe around the blackboard. Charcoal drawings and color wheels were scotchtaped to the walls. I sat in the front of one arm of the horseshoe, closest to where Ms. Allen drew her diagrams and fertilization flowcharts. Fifteen cowboys crowded around the rear table. They set their hats in a row on the table and sucked on their chewing tobacco. At the end of the year, each of us was given a small plot at the county fair to design an exhibition

Actually, the reason I took hort was to learn about the trees that Mom used to care for, and at home I started to resurrect the overgrown, weed-ridden remains of her orchard. I stripped the trunks of the water sprouts that supported colonies of little green psylla. I analyzed soil samples in the lab at school. I used massive amounts of coffee grounds I salvaged from Store 24 to correct the pH in the tree beds. I pruned overgrowth and made the jasmine bloom again for the first time in seven years. Still, the trees would not bear anything but dry, wrinkled brown fruits that no one could eat with pleasure.

When Dad left, the pears and the jasmine had both been in bloom. It was a rare two-week overlap. The bees had been swarming on the vines that latticed over the front porch, and, as the orchard put out its hairy white flowers, they migrated to the trees. Then the flowers fell, the bees left, and Dad was still gone.

How could he have left all this? How could there have been something more beautiful to go to?

He’d been gone for two months when the fruit started to come on, and each day I expected to see him sitting on the porch with a cigarette, peering down the rows through the smoke. On warm nights, he would leave all the doors open and smoke on the porch for hours into the night. I could see the light from his cigarette, but he would be invisible in the dark.

Back before Dad left, Mom was a beautiful woman, with smooth white calves that never turned brown, even with all her hours outside. When I tried to help her in her orchard, she’d shoo me away with a muddy glove. She liked to be alone with the trees.

She lived in the empty spaces between the trees, thinning out the alleyways with a hoe and her own hands. She didn’t believe in pesticides or chemical weed-killers. The whole property around our house was devoted to supporting those few rows of trees—jasmine to attract the bees in early summer, manzanita for the ladybugs who ate the aphids, nesting boxes for birds and bats to eat the caterpillars who rolled themselves up in the leaves. Every August, Mom hired a few pickers and sent off a truckload of pears to be packed at Martin’s....

Melissa Jones works at Acorn Books in San Francisco. This is her first time in print. E-mail: lissa_jones47@hotmail.com.