Fiction: Secrets Under the Acorn's Cap

The length of Carly’s May-mud color hair, her double chin, the breadth of her shoulders, the curve of her breasts and her hips quickened John’s pulse. The bulb of her pregnant belly was a ripe summer cherry in the bleach-faded, red cotton t-shirt she squeezed into when she dressed in the bathroom that morning. She had only been living with him for two months, and he noticed that every morning she gathered her clothes and carried them to the powder blue bathroom, with the two sinks in the fake marble vanity, that connected to his bedroom. They weren’t married so he figured it wasn’t so strange that she didn’t want to be naked in front of him in the daylight. He told himself she was only embarrassed of her stretch marks, and not actually regretting the “love-at-first-sight” night in Jackson, Wisconsin.

Carly stood on the hill that sloped southward off the peeling front porch of the farm house and out toward the corn fields. It was still early in the spring and the new grass was short and hard, but deep green like the rind of the fresh lime wedge in her double-Jose margarita the night they met at that karaoke bar. John stood at the edge of the yard just west of the house, watching her back from the bottom of the hill. He had one foot planted in the new spring grass, one foot in the dormant black dirt of his unplanted fields. His grandpa had shown him how to use an almanac; he counted down the days until he could till his fields and get his corn planted. Over the summer the fresh stalks would inch their way out of the soil and sprout their juicy yellow cobs of corn. He would be watching with his shoulders squared back and his chest stretching his t-shirt.

She looked like a goddess standing there; he had never seen one, but when she looked back at him, the golden early morning sky lit her face and reflected in her wide-set green eyes. Her stringy arms, pale from winter, wrapped under her round tummy, long fingers entwined, cradling their unborn baby. I bet she’ll be a good mom, he thought. She gazed eastward, out over the hills like pond ripples, low and steady.

Everything was drip-drying in the morning sunshine from last night’s warm shower. John’s corn fields were patched with brushy stands of pines. One giant oak tree stood where the field met the yard on the south end; it was old as the dirt that birthed it, proud but alone. The boxy white farm house would need a new roof soon. Shutters that were once navy-blue hung half-off the leaky six-pane windows. The farm was small; a simple barbed-wire fence bordered the fields on the east and west, and were cut off by railroad tracks to the south, corralling memories that stretched from property line to property line over four generations of Nelson’s. His grandpa Charlie had once expanded the farm from eighty-six acres to one-hundred and six, with intentions to go larger still, but then had his hands full with corn and growing children and didn’t have time to expand further. Thank God, John thought, I couldn’t handle more than this.

Carly was no longer watching the sun rise. She faced south toward the fields. Her head was bent low, watching her belly. Her left hand steadily, slowly circled and circled its circumference. She was seven months pregnant now and she looked like a little girl trying to hide a beach ball under her shirt. Her long, straight hair veiled her face, John imagined her eyes were closed, and he could swear her shoulders shook like she was crying. She rocked slightly side to side and he noticed there was no breeze blowing this morning. It was sometimes hard to tell this early in the spring when the leaves weren’t even buds on the ends of the branches yet.

John turned away from her, embarrassed to have seen her crying. He didn’t attempt to decipher female hormones. The sun, climbing persistently, was alone in the deep, cloudless expanse of blue-white sky. He was looking forward to summer and he wondered what it might mean for his crops if spring was already this wet and hot. I’m going to have my hands full, John thought with a sigh, his shoulders sagging with the anticipated weight of a newborn child and ripe crops. A pair of blackbirds chased each other through the gnarled branches of the oak tree.

* * *​

There were only two branches of the oak tree John and his brother Derrick could reach when they were young; they used to hoist themselves up on the first branch, and swing down from the second. “Look out beloooow,” Derrick bellowed before letting go of the second branch to crash down on top of John. “Good catch, stupid!” Derrick taunted as they scrambled to untangle and get out of the dirt in time to avoid a scolding from mother.


"Don’t do that!” John had forced from behind clenched teeth, trying to sound agitated and aggressive, hoping to intimidate his older brother. Derrick only grinned, showing all his teeth to mock John’s anger, then punched John square on the shoulder and sprinted off toward the house, laughing over the gold, hairy tops of corn. John was distracted from the pursuit of his brother by the loud fweeeeeeeeyoohf whistle from the acorn cap pressed firmly between their father’s thumbs and forefingers. Their father stood on the porch and called them in for dinner. The sound, clear and lonely as the six-o’clock train’s whistle, echoed across the hills, and brought them bounding up to the house.

Their father began teaching them lessons on how to be men when they were young. Their father once told them, “real men know more than growing corn and fixing cars, and real men can keep their family’s secrets from the rest of the world.” The older John and his brother got, the more “secrets” they were told.

John could remember being jealous that Derrick knew all the secrets first, like the secret of the acorns. Their father would kick the leaves around under the oak, circling and rooting, picking up caps and testing them, until he found the one that made just the right “come-on-home” sound. Their father told them that the oak tree saw everything; told them that the oak told their secrets to the acorns, and the acorns tucked those secrets under their hats for safe-keeping. When the acorn lost his hat, the secret escaped, and their dad told them if they whistled just right the secret would be scared into hiding. Derrick was the oldest and was taught how to whistle first.

John had watched from the cool, dark entryway, hiding in the shadows behind the screen door as his father and brother sat on the porch steps. John’s father molded his brother’s hands around the acorn cap and showed Derrick how to squeeze the lips into a toothless “O;” to blow on his knuckles. John crept as close to the door as he dared, careful to crawl around the floorboards that creaked and the square of light from the porch’s fluorescent bulb. The clap-clap-clap of the June bugs on the plastic light cover masked the shush of his cotton pajama shorts and the squeak of his bare knees on the bare floor.

John had watched the fireflies flickering on and off in the twilight. The fog settling at the edges of the yard smelled of fresh-cut grass and reminded him of the steam from the green beans on his dinner plate earlier. His mother had picked the beans from her garden, John picked the weeds. Eavesdropping on ancient acorn secrets made him sleepy. John curled up on the hand-woven rug covering the cool hardwood floors, and let the rhythms of the lightning bugs lull him to sleep.

* * *​

After Carly went back into the house John puttered around his shed for a while. He turned the dial on the dust covered twenty-dollar Wal-Mart stereo and sang along when the dirt-clogged speakers blared Kenny Chesney, “she thinks my tractor’s sexy, it really turns her on.” He was grateful to Kenny for attempting to make farming sexy. He took the mower deck off the “good-ol’ John Deere,” as his dad used to call it, and sharpened the blades. I’ll probably need this soon, he thought. He put the blades and the mower deck back on the tractor and changed the oil, scraped crusted mud and grass from last year out of the wheel wells.

As John worked a thin line of sweat beaded on his forehead like the condensation on cold beer cans on hot summer nights. Drops of sweat darkened his sandy hair. He only stood five-feet seven inches and it bothered him more than he admitted, so he flaunted the muscles that stretched and bulged across his chest and arms with tight white tee’s when he left the farm. He concentrated on the John Deere, his lower lip caught between his chew-stained teeth. When the tractor was primed for another season of lawn mowing, he wandered up to the house for lunch.

John entered through the back into the kitchen wallpapered with sun-faded red checkers. Carly was standing at the counter near the stainless-steel sink on the other side of the kitchen. He let the heavy wood screen door clatter to the frame behind him. Her shoulders hunched and her head swiveled like a startled blackbird’s does. Her eyes made him uncomfortable. They bobbed in their sockets like someone had filled her head half-full of water. He saw the bottle of tequila before she had a chance to bustle it into the walk-in pantry with the bread and bag of chips.

"What do you think you’re doing?” John demanded, “Why are you drinking?” He swallowed hard to keep his rising anger from surging over his vocal chords. She said nothing. Her swimming gaze lowered to the floor and she turned around, refusing to face him. John’s dirt-rimmed fingernails dug into the palms of his clenched fists. He studied her back: the way her bra cut into her, pressing rolls of fat out around it, reminded him of a rotisserie roast bound in twine, red and fleshy. Her sagging rear-end jiggled with her misstep. He felt molten anger bubbling in his chest. “You bitch.” The words oozed out and crept across the room like lava and their hot metallic taste made his stomach churn.

Ffffuck you,” she slurred from inside the pantry, “maybe I don’t want your ffffuckin’ kid.”

"That’s not what you said in the bathroom of that bar,” he drawled. Carly waddled out of the pantry. She bobbled to a stop, feet shoulder width apart, arms crossed over her pregnant tummy. She stretched to her full five-foot-five and stood grounded, fixed her glazed emerald eyes on his. John could feel his skin prickle and crawl under the intensity of her alcohol-addled stare.

"You’re an asshole,” she said, her voice blunt as the hammer end of his wood-splitting maul. “We were both drunk and I wasn’t the only one taking my pants off. I’ve fucking tried making the best of this. I don’t give a shit about you or your goddamned corn. All I hear about is fucking corn. I can’t do this anymore.”

"Maybe you should have thought of that seven months ago,” he heard himself say. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes and she covered her face with her hands. Her sobs came out in hiccups as tears trickled between her fingers, rolled down the back of her hands and down her forearms, dripping off her wrinkled elbows onto the mantle of her belly.

The anger bubbling in him cooled to a shriveled lump of shame that sunk to the bottom of his stomach and threatened to pull all of his innards into his shoes. He brushed past her and left the kitchen. He walked blindly through his childhood home like he was navigating in the dark, autopilot around recliners and coffee tables, and escaped to the front porch. He kicked the banister post with his steel-toed work boot and scuffed the peeling white paint. He sunk down to the top step. With his elbows on his knees for leverage, John caught his head in the calloused heels of his hands and squeezed like he was trying to pop a giant zit.

The pressure on his temples made his vision go black. He pressed harder until the darkness gave out to a brilliant, blinding white, then dissolved into trillions of distorted spectrums that danced on his retinas. I can’t fucking look at her anymore, he thought, what the hell am I supposed to do?

* * *​

John had only been seventeen when his dad died of a heart attack sitting on a baler one stuffy August afternoon. John, Derrick, and their father went to their uncle’s to help him bale hay a few times each summer. John could remember how that day the air had stuck to him like wet denim. Dust and chaff from the hay pricked his nose and throat, made his eyes water. John’s uncle had been yelling something about a gear sticking and the fucking heat when his dad slumped over the tractor’s steering wheel.

Derrick took off shortly after and hadn’t been in contact much since. John always wondered why but never had the guts to ask. Derrick learned more secrets than he did, and John wasn’t sure if he wanted to know them all. Since he was too young to leave at the time and Derrick wasn’t around, John got stuck with farm work. Their mother eventually moved into a retirement home, she said the farm held too many memories. John always thought that he would be the one leaving, the one who wouldn’t be governed by seasons and market prices. John used to have big dreams of bull-riding in Texas, marlin fishing in Florida, working the pipeline in Alaska.

Derrick had called five years after their dad died to say he was in Jackson on business. Jackson was only a forty-minute drive and John wondered what not growing corn did for his brother’s lean frame and dirt-streaked face. John showered and dressed in jeans and a white t-shirt. He pulled the belt with the sterling silver buckle engraved with a longhorn out of his sock drawer. He tucked a bottle of Boone’s Farm in his armpit for the ride.

Carly had been ordering a drink at the bar when he walked in. John saw her before he saw his brother and for a few seconds he could only stare. He studied the way her slinky black halter hugged her curves, and the way she flipped her hair, long and straight, and shiny as new robin feathers. He made his way to the bar and hovered slightly behind her. John inhaled the sweet earthy smell of her skin, damp from dancing. The bartender brought her margarita and John held out the money to pay for it.

“I got that,” he had said. She turned to him. The oak-leaf green of her eyes startled him and when she smiled and said “thank you,” John could only stare at her like a snot-nosed grade school kid who had a crush on the high school student aide. Mouth gaping, he stammered something that sounded close enough to “you’re welcome.” He had been unprepared for the currents in her eyes, deep and swift, pulling him under and closing over him.

* * *​

John pulled his head out of his vice-grip and blinked the bluish haze into focus. He heard Carly in the kitchen, clattering dishes and beeping microwave buttons. Remembering the night they met always made his stomach flutter and flop like it was caging birds. They had made plans to meet again, then got too drunk and decided they couldn’t wait to get their hands on each other. She brought a home-pregnancy-test wand on their second date. She explained to him that the blue plus sign meant they were having a baby. Her mother eventually kicked her out of the house so she moved to the farm from Jackson. John knew she was miserable. He could see it in the way her hair hung limp and stringy, the slack in her posture, the water in her eyes that meant tears were close.

In the sharp glare of the mid-afternoon sun John wandered down to the oak tree. He circled its base, ducked under the two low branches, dragged his fingers over the ancient bark wrinkled and grey as old men’s skin. He shuffled his feet in the brown slimy leaves, still matted from winter. He kicked up a loose acorn cap. He picked it up and held it, the way his dad had eventually taught him: tightly between his thumbs and forefingers, making sure to leave a gap between his thumbnails to blow through. John didn’t blow. His father had never told him how to be a father, never shared with him the secrets of raising anything other than corn. The blackbird circling above the field watched as John turned toward the house and headed back up the yard.