“You’re looking for someone who is more like an idea than a person. Someone you can’t just pick out of the blue. And it can’t be a politician. If you could pick a president, say, you’d just choose someone like Lincoln. This takes a little more thought.”
I slowed at a stop sign, then rolled through it.
“You sure you’re only twelve?”
“That’s what they tell me,” she said, leaning back, folding her legs underneath herself. “But how would I know, really?”
We passed a clearing filled with busted and rusting automobiles. Buicks and Hondas and Chryslers and Plymouths, each smashed haphazardly upon the next until only a smear of blue green orange. You could almost feel the vines and tall grasses stretching up through the floorboards, before they came up under and through the hoods, running out through broken windows and crooked frames. The clearing bordered a nearly completed strip mall, newly tarred and painted parking lot, crisp and glistening in the sun. Then another mall. Then a gas station. The pace of the construction was frantic, eating up the open spaces and the plots of wild growth. Stores were going up and out of business faster than people could shop.
Saddled between a fast food joint and the foundation of some new building, I spied a farmer’s field, rows of shaggy crops and a wooden shack with a sign erected by the curbside. I pulled the Toyota off the road in front of it, coming to a sudden stop.
“Why’re we parking?”
“I always used to do this with my family. It’s a sort of tradition round here.”
“So was slavery,” she said.
“It’s my heritage.”
“That doesn’t make it mine, you know.”
Placards announced U-PICK corn strawberries peas tomatoes whatever’s-in-season. Dollar-a-pound. The man inside the shack handed us two wooden baskets without uttering a word. His face was creased and leathered, caught in a perpetual grimace.
“You want anything in particular?” I asked, handing her a basket.
“How about cotton.”
“I’m partial to corn.”
“Didn’t we just buy food? It’ll probably go bad in the hot car, you know?”
“This is good,” I said. “This’ll be good for us.”
“I don’t have to like everything, you know,” she said. “It’s okay if I’m bored.”
The summertimes of my own childhood had been filled with now-cherished episodes of bloody knees, runny noses, sweat-plastered hair, and the gathering of vegetables. On simmering Saturday mornings we’d load up the baby blue Impala, the three of us piling in each upon the other across the felt foam interior, the well of a trunk jam-packed with coolers, end-to-end—and we’d comb the fields, following row upon row upon row of corn stalks and tomato and strawberry plants and sprawling melon vines.
“You haven’t answered yet,” she said. “The study.”
“Let me think. What’s the rush?”
“No rush. Just no cheating.”
“Seriously, who am I going to ask?”
We wandered out into the field, my daughter and I, buckets under our arms and each in our own direction. I struck a path down the rows of corn stalks, which had grown brown in the drier-than-usual summer. The ears were stunted and coarse. Nothing much looked good, to be honest, but I picked anyway, walking around for half an hour, up and down the rows, rummaging through the dead and the sun-dried vegetation.
When I finally came across Hero, she was squatting beside a patch of once-hoped-for watermelon. Most had succumbed to blossom-end rot, half-grown and rounded like softballs.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen melons growing,” she said.
“This hardly qualifies.”
“Still. Call me impressed.”
She stood, unwinding herself upward and stretching. I handed her a shriveled strawberry from my basket. She ate it whole. An elderly gentleman in broad suspenders ambled by us through the rows with a nod of his head.
“Mark Twain,” I said, to which Hero cocked a sly eyebrow. “Your question.”
She frowned. “He’s the only one you can think of, right?”
“What are you implying?”
“Try again.”
“He was a writer, right?”
“I’m reluctant to offer any assistance,” she said, turning away.
I balanced my basket on my hip. “This is hard, you know.”
“No, you’re right. It’s fine. Next time I’ll give you something easier.”
We carried our laden containers back to the shack. Hero had filled hers with beans, and only beans, a couple pounds worth, at least. I went for variety: tomatoes, carrots, and as much corn as I could lift. We’d never eat it all, even if it hadn’t been dried out. This was my experience. Most of it would end up rotting in the fridge or given away to friends. It was really just for comfort and for show.
“There’s Robert E. Lee,” I said, suddenly inspired, setting the bags in the truck bed.
“That’s your answer?”
“He wasn’t a politician. Right?”
Hero shrugged. “That could go either way.”
I started up the engine and rolled back out onto the highway toward home. Hero reclined her seat and curled up away from me with a yawn.
“To tell the truth,” she said, “it didn’t matter who you picked. I was just testing myself. To see who I thought you would pick.”
“Who did you expect, then?”
She smiled. “That I don’t have to tell you.”
two
Magnolia Grove, the neighborhood in which I live, is a transitional community, marching slowly but certainly toward complete self-sufficiency in my lifetime. The neighborhood was not designed this way; it was actually not designed at all, at least not as a unified community. The plots are irregular, as if haphazardly drawn and placed, as are the roads, which wind creek-like through the clusters of dense foliage. Structures sprawl, outwards, upwards, asymmetric and geometric dreams of genius and hazardous whimsy. No serious limitations guide their constructions but for gravity, and even that appears in some cases to have been an afterthought. Many of the homes here predate the War, while some date only to the suburban boom of the fifties, though even most of these owners have modeled their homes to the antebellum period. There’s no room here for anything new. Frank Lloyd Wright designed a house here somewhere, I’m told, buried deep behind a thicket or glade, off some overgrown drive. The owners want its location kept secret. We understand, the other homeowners—that overarching
