Paul’s Kids

By Justine Talbot

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His phone got up to six missed calls right before it died. All from Mom and none from Paul.

The whole time he had been sitting at McDonald’s dipping fries in his McFlurry it could have been charging. He didn’t want to wait now. He didn’t think he needed to. He just had to get back on the highway and drive in an hour-long straight line and then he’d see his brother. If he got a little lost it would be a relief.

But he didn’t get lost. He put his new shoe against the gas pedal of his old car, Paul’s old car, and barely moved it until the corn turned to trees. He should have taken it slower. The empty roads were just so tempting.

“Marty, ya made it!”

“I made it.” He got out of his car and allowed the bear to hug him.

“Aw shit, are those new shoes? They’re nice.”

“They were nice, yeah.”

“Sorry man, it’s always pretty muddy around here after it rains. It’s been raining a lot lately too. Has it been all gray and cold like this down at school?”

“Stupid. I’m stupid. I literally just bought these yesterday.”

“I can help you clean those up though, or else Darlene can—yeah, I think Darlene has a special cleaner she got on Amazon.”

“You get stuff on Amazon?”

“Well yeah. I mean, we can’t grow everything, right?”
“Right. Of course not.” Martin knew his brother wished he could.

“Anyway, you need the full tour!” He bounded up the front steps of his three-room house. “Darlene! He’s here!”

Darlene was Martin’s age. She seemed even younger with her hair cut short. She looked tired, but teenager tired, high school track meet tired, with strong tan limbs and a thin pale face.

“Hi Martin,” she said. “Let me take your bags.”

“Thanks.” He wondered if he should have hugged her. Martin had met Darlene only once before, when Paul had brought her home for his Winter Vacation. Paul refused to celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter now, although he couldn’t really articulate why, so he had decided to come back to Long Island one random week in February. Martin had taken a late night flight home from school and skipped seven classes just to catch a glimpse of his six-foot-four bearded hippie brother.

Now he was on a mission from God, via his mother. In the front room of the house there was very little besides a couch, a table, and a Buddha statue. As they “toured” the remaining rooms he searched the walls for his mother’s cross.

“Paul, are you still—you’re still Catholic, right?”

“Oh, I don’t know about all that. I guess these days I prefer to call myself Christian Buddhist.”

“But don’t you think you’re overthinking it a little?”

“Whaddya mean?”

“Well, you were raised Catholic. That means something, right? And you’re not a total atheist.”

“I’m not an atheist at all.”

“So … you’re Catholic. Am I right? More or less?”

Darlene was coming down the swaying attic stairs. “We prefer to think of Jesus and Buddha as enlightened teachers, but we experience divine energy in nature. In everything, really.” While she talked Paul nodded in enthusiastic relief.

“Right. So instead of going to Mass, or not going to Mass but talking about how you should really go to Mass, you guys worship … trees.”

Paul’s eyes darted out the back window. “And what do you mean by that?”

“We don’t worship anything, really,” Darlene said. “We just try to stay in touch with spirit. And for me it’s a lot stronger up here than in some dusty old church back home.”

“Come on Paul.” Martin’s God-fearing mother was possessing him. He kept trying to smile and shrug off her religion and instead he just kept talking. “You’re really telling me you don’t worship those trees behind your house?”

“I don’t worship them. I take care of them.”

“Okay. But why?”

“I’ve told you why. More than once!”

“Just tell me again. Let’s get it out of the way now.”

“Hey Darlene,” Paul said. “Could you help my brother with his shoes?”

#

Dinner smelled oily and green.

“How’s school going, Martin?” Darlene spooned some roasted vegetables onto his plate. “You’re a sophomore, right?”

“Junior—well, now I guess I’m technically a senior.” Martin found a piece of potato and put it in his mouth. It tasted like salad.

“I barely made it through my junior year of high school. What are you studying again? Business?”

“Economics,” Paul said as he stomped through the back door with his filthy boots. “Marty’s gonna be a professor.”

“Oh really? You want to teach?”

“I don’t know,” Martin said, his tongue shriveling under something unfamiliar and bitter. “I don’t know if I want to be in school much longer.”

“Since when?” Paul was sprawled out on the floor, struggling with his second boot. “I thought you loved school.”

“I’m starting to get pretty tired of it.”

Paul got up and got himself a plate without saying anything. Without turning his head Martin watched him make a mountain of vegetables with his fork.

Martin knew if he looked his brother in the eye he would start ranting about suits and ties. “So. Darlene. Where did you escape from? Kentucky? Tennessee?”

“Close. I’m from Georgia.” She smiled. “Escape. Yeah, that’s definitely the word for it.”

“And remind me how you guys met again?”

“We were WWOOFing at neighboring farms outside of Rochester.”

“What? Woofing? What is that?”

“You don’t remember?” Paul sliced into the meatloaf Martin and Darlene had both been avoiding. “I WWOOFed for years.”

“I guess I just didn’t remember the, um, term for it,” Martin said, eyes on his plate. “But you were working for free, basically, I remember that. Kinda like now except you lived with a lot of old people.”

“No, now it’s different,” Paul said. “Now I have more responsibilities. Anyway, I learned everything I know about organic farming working those fields. Thank God I didn’t have to go to school for it.”

Darlene was busy sawing all her asparagus in half. “It really is a free education in exchange for a little help,” she said, waving her knife in Martin’s direction. “Plus they give you a place to live. I needed that.”

“I needed you,” Paul said.

She put down the knife and squeezed his hand on top of the table. “I needed you too,” she said.

Martin couldn’t wait to lie down on his air mattress in the attic.

#

Morning meant more vegetables and more mud. Martin tried to remember the difference between organic and non-GMO. Was there one? He looked from his ruined shoes to his brother’s braided arm muscles and decided to look it up later.

He didn’t think of himself as unhealthy, exactly. He got whole grain bread when possible but preferred white rice to brown. He took a multivitamin every morning but didn’t know what probiotics were.

Seeing his brother awash in roots and leaves and bliss made him wonder though. It made him wonder whether blueberries could cure rheumatoid arthritis the way a guest speaker he had once endured for Introductory Biology extra credit had claimed. It made him wonder if a genuine love of plants was the main thing separating his brother from the rest of his family.

Growing up, their main source of fruit had been tomato sauce. Their main source of vegetables had probably been basil, or something.

“Here, try this.” Paul ripped something green out of the ground. “Oh, and this! This one’s not ready yet but you should try it anyway.”

“What is it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why can’t I know?”

“Just eat it. You’ll thank me when you don’t get cancer.”

Martin kept thinking about making tea with all the things Paul was giving him. He didn’t even drink tea.

“You know, I knew you grew a lot here,” he said with his mouth full. He was chewing two different kinds of lettuce that Paul said complemented each other (“I thought lettuce was just lettuce?”). “But all the different varieties, and the rules about what goes where—well, I guess I’m surprised at how complicated it all is.”

“You thought farming was for dummies?”

“No! No, I just—I guess I didn’t know anything about farming, really.”

“It’s a lot more creative than people realize. And fun.”

“Seems like a lot of work to me.”

“Well, work can be fun, can’t it? I guess I should have shown you around out here yesterday—you know, as part of the tour—but I didn’t think you’d be too interested.”

“I am interested! It’s interesting.”

“Maybe for a few minutes,” Paul said. He was smiling. He had broccoli stuck in his teeth.

“Or forever, depending on the person.”

“Yeah, depending.” Paul straightened up and wiped some dirt off his pants. “I know the service out here is shit. If you get on the highway and get off in a couple exits back the way you came it’s a lot better.”

“Oh, okay. Good to know.”

“So if you wanted to call Mom, you know, and let her know how everything’s going … obviously I’m not going to come with you, but I would suggest getting in the car.”

“I don’t think I’m gonna call her today. Maybe tomorrow.”

“Really? Did you text her to let her know you got here in one piece? Sometimes texts go through.”

Martin’s phone was still dead in his pocket.

“I will. Just not right now.”

“You guys still getting along okay?”

“I guess, yeah.” Martin thought about it for a second. He didn’t want to think about it any more than that. “It’s not the same though.”

“The same?”

“As being a family.”

“Yeah.” Paul shrugged. “Well, I’ve learned a couple of things about that up here.”

“So are you going to introduce us? Me and my nieces and nephews?”

“Not if you joke about it like that.”

“Sorry. Me and the trees, I mean. I want to see them.”

The trees had the greenest leaves on the property. They seemed unusually tall, and looking up at where their branches met the white-gray sky made Martin feel dizzy. Beyond that, they were trees. Martin looked back down at his shoes and then up again at his twenty-nine-year-old runaway farmer brother, his indentured servant brother, who was quietly crying into his beard.

“I know you don’t understand,” Paul said. “I know Mom will never understand, but I really do feel like … like their dad, you know?”

“Why, Paul? Why do they need you?”

“If it wasn’t for me they’d be gone like the others. They’d just be vegetables too. That’s okay for some trees, I guess, but my—these trees, they don’t deserve that.”

These trees were the reason Paul was saving up to buy the farm. They were the reason for all this settling down and coming apart and the holy water their mother had hypnotized Martin into bringing just in case.

“How’s the savings situation?” Martin asked.

Paul let out two low sobs and clapped his hand over his mouth. He shook his head.

“What are their names?”

“No. No, you’ll just make fun of me.”

“I won’t.”

“You’ll tell Mom and the two of you will laugh at me together. You’ll laugh and she’ll pray.”

“I won’t, Paul.” Martin focused all his energy on the tree in front of him, taking in the fullness of its cloudy green light. His head, hands, dead phone all buzzed. “What’s this one’s name?”

“Veronica.” Paul smiled and wiped his eyes. “She’s the big sister.”

Of the six trees between the house and the vegetable rows, Veronica was definitely the biggest. Standing next to the huge old tree made Paul look small. Martin watched as his brother took off his gloves and stroked the bark with a ropy hand. A twig snapped nearby and the hand formed a fist.

“What the fuck was that?”

“A squirrel, I think. There.”

“Ah. All good then.” He laughed without relaxing his hand. “Those guys think they own the place.”

Martin’s eyes strayed to the bits of broken leaves on Paul’s shoulders. They had been there before, in the fields.

“Hey Paul?”

“Hey Marty.” He laughed again. “What’s up?”

“I want you to know I’m sorry. I’m sorry I don’t really get a lot of what you’ve got going on lately. It’s just different from what I’m used to.”

“’S’all good, man.” He grinned and the fist finally came apart. “It’s a lot different. I know that.”

“And Mom, she’s sorry too. I know she made you upset when you visited.”

Paul just nodded. “Well,” he said, straightening up after a minute of stained green silence. “It’s back to work for me.” He gave Veronica a final pat before turning away.

“What are the other trees’ names?” Martin asked.

“You’re not a bad brother, Marty,” Paul said. “But I think you’ve humored me enough for one day.”

#

Martin was reading in the attic before dinner when he heard his brother bark. It sounded worse than a dog, like a wounded caveman. It sounded like Winter Vacation.

First the barking, then a crash, a louder crash, and a door slam. Martin had to check. He knew his brother wouldn’t hurt Darlene but he had to check. He went down the shaky wooden stairs one at a time, eyes on his socked feet, until they hit kitchen tile. Then he felt a green vibration and turned to face the back window.

Paul held a giant stick. It was a tree branch, and he was beating Veronica with it, his face orangey and contorted. Green leaves rained down on him in clumps as he stomped and screamed.

The whole thing was obscene. Martin felt wrong watching it.

He turned away and caught Darlene’s eye. She was sitting at the table, staring out the window. In front of her were an empty mug, a puddle of coffee, and a tray full of roasted beets and broken glass.

“He wants me to get an abortion,” she said. “He says his family is already big enough.”

“I’m … sorry?” Martin was sweating. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.” She sighed. “Yeah, it sucks.”

“Has he done this before? With his—with the trees?”

But Darlene wasn’t listening. Paul had started on another tree, further from the house. “I just wonder,” she said. “I wonder what your mom would say?”

Justine Talbot