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This is the story of the Dead.
We took them out to the fields at night. Our mothers and our fathers, our babies, our brothers and sisters, and eventually, we knew, ourselves: once we succumbed to age, to disease, accident, or if we left this life by our own hand, we too would be wrapped in a burlap sheet and taken from our casket by the hands of the strongest men and buried deep within the fields around our town. It all started when the old burying grounds began to grow lush with all manner of things. Flowers, vegetables, herbs. Whatever seed happened to find its way to this soil prospered like nowhere else, and we looked around us at our barren fields that were supposed to support us with their bounty but didn’t, and we had an idea. With the bodies we grew corn, and tobacco, and cotton, but most of all watermelon, the crop that fared best. They say that’s why watermelon meat turns red: it’s colored by blood, which the fine and mossy tendrils wrapping around our bodies would suck out and bring to the surface. And so within each watermelon was a little bit of who we are, or were, and some said back then you could actually taste it, at the end of a long hot summer’s day, slicing through the thick green crust and bringing a slice of it up to your parched mouth and eating, they said sometimes it might remind you of someone you once knew, or loved, or lived with, even, and lost. “Daddy,” you might say. Or “Sweet Sally.” Or, tears streaming down your face, tasting and remembering, “This is my baby, Lee.”
As with many things in our town, what is often known is forgotten, or stored in the part of the brain that resists remembering. How else to explain our actions? Everybody knew we removed the bodies from their caskets, and that the box they buried on the morrow was empty.
We still prayed and cried over the nothing inside.
David Wallace, The Watermelon King
We took them out to the fields at night. Our mothers and our fathers, our babies, our brothers and sisters, and eventually, we knew, ourselves: once we succumbed to age, to disease, accident, or if we left this life by our own hand, we too would be wrapped in a burlap sheet and taken from our casket by the hands of the strongest men and buried deep within the fields around our town. It all started when the old burying grounds began to grow lush with all manner of things. Flowers, vegetables, herbs. Whatever seed happened to find its way to this soil prospered like nowhere else, and we looked around us at our barren fields that were supposed to support us with their bounty but didn’t, and we had an idea. With the bodies we grew corn, and tobacco, and cotton, but most of all watermelon, the crop that fared best. They say that’s why watermelon meat turns red: it’s colored by blood, which the fine and mossy tendrils wrapping around our bodies would suck out and bring to the surface. And so within each watermelon was a little bit of who we are, or were, and some said back then you could actually taste it, at the end of a long hot summer’s day, slicing through the thick green crust and bringing a slice of it up to your parched mouth and eating, they said sometimes it might remind you of someone you once knew, or loved, or lived with, even, and lost. “Daddy,” you might say. Or “Sweet Sally.” Or, tears streaming down your face, tasting and remembering, “This is my baby, Lee.”
As with many things in our town, what is often known is forgotten, or stored in the part of the brain that resists remembering. How else to explain our actions? Everybody knew we removed the bodies from their caskets, and that the box they buried on the morrow was empty.
We still prayed and cried over the nothing inside.
David Wallace, The Watermelon King
