J.D. Onely lost his left leg in 1956. He remembered where and when, but not how. It was in the violent, sadistic heat of a Georgia summer day, and he was riding his daddy’s tractor down the main road. J.D. was a tad drunk, not much, really. His daddy kept the real liquor hidden, and J.D. could only find his mother’s bottle of rum, hidden behind the cleaning things, under the kitchen sink. He took a swig, then a second, and then a gullet-full of third, and then he hopped on the tractor to head to the fields. The burn in his gut and the sun on his head made him feel like a fever.

J.D. never knew what hit him or what he hit, and he woke up in the hospital, bandaged to the eyeballs, with one leg in traction and the other one growing greener and greener.

“He’s gonna die, you want I should cut that off?” the doctor asked J.D.’s daddy.

J.D.’s daddy sighed. His firstborn boy was rotting to pieces, and there was a farm to inherit, but goodness knows Lester weren’t good for nothing, Jesus save his soul. J.D.’s daddy looked again at his doped-up boy and knew that his God wanted that messed-up child to live.

“Cut it off,” he said and spun around on his boot heels. He clomped away, and when he strode back into J.D.’s white, white hospital room four days later, J.D. was a bit less bruised and a bit less J.D.

“What you want we should do with the leg?” The doctor appeared in the doorway, like a spectre smelling of vinegar.

J.D.’s daddy took the question home to his wife. “What should we do with it?”

“The leg?” said J.D.’s mother. “We bury it. Next to our place in the churchyard. You want him to be without a leg when the Resurrection comes?”

They had J.D.’s leg buried and placed a stone atop the tiny mound, which read, “Leg Of J.D. Onely, 1956.”

When J.D., still bound up like an Egyptian mummy, heard his leg was in the churchyard, he breathed out heavily. So, it still existed, his left leg, it was still his, a part of him. They’d be joined together again, someday. The thick red dirt would keep his leg safe.

A month later, stitched up and still slightly yellow, the hospital sent J.D. home, with a wheelchair his daddy wouldn’t let him use and a pair of crutches that blistered his armpits. The first day J.D. dragged himself to the breakfast table, his sister Marnie giggled.

“Guess you only need half that breakfast now, brothermine,” she said.

“Shut that mouth, or I’ll slap the bacon right out of it, little girl,” said J.D.’s daddy, not unkindly. He scraped his chair back, stood up, and patted the shaved head of his firstborn boy. J.D.’s brothers stayed silent, tense, holding their words and their energy inside themselves.

“You’ll do alright,” J.D.’s daddy said to him. “You’ll do alright, sonny.”

At first, J.D. helped in the kitchen. He snapped beans, peeled potatoes, and cored apples for his mother. She was awkward around him, occasionally touching his face with feathery fingers. They simmered and stewed and fried, and J.D. pretended to not see when his mother bent over the low cabinet too long, rattling bottles and coming up with a face slightly flushed.

“Sixteen years old and already done for,” his mother would whisper to the Bible on the windowsill. “What are we gonna to do, my sweet Lord.” J.D. pretended he didn’t hear her and snapped his beans with a vigour he’d never shown in the fields.

When J.D. was stronger, his daddy gave him the books. “You did your lot of schooling. You do the figures. Lester and the rest will do the fields.”

Finally allowed to use his wheelchair, J.D. sat at his great-granddaddy’s desk, pencilling in numbers, profits and losses, sales, and purchases. He’d gone further in school than the rest, and adding came easy to him. Subtracting was harder because it made J.D.’s daddy push back his hat and scratch at the scant fringe of hair he had left. But it was all okay, everything was good, the sweet Georgia clay kissed the Onely family when most of their neighbors pulled up and headed north.

Lester and Randall and Curtis did the fields and took care of the livestock. Some nights, when one of his brothers came into the shared bedroom, bone-tired, J.D. could feel a fiery, bitter look that burned through his chest and into his guilty heart. He was keeping track, but they were keeping score, working the land until they were bent and aching. Every Onely was tired out and angry and loving and sick in the soul. Even Marnie didn’t sing in the vegetable garden anymore. The house did not revolve around J.D., but it hung heavy about all of them, like a wet sheet.

The fields yielded as well as Georgia would allow, and the livestock flourished; J.D. ordered books and read up on how to breed and nourish the best animals in the country. Slowly, the bitterness bled out of his brothers and sister, and they took to slapping him on the back again, and his brothers cursed casually in front of J.D., and his sister made him pies, and everyone was happy, if uneasy. It’s always uneasy on a farm; the earth can be ugly to those who live from it.

J.D. kept doing the figures and got stronger. He began hiring a van to drive him to the grocery store for his mother and then to the gentleman’s shop, where they would hem up the left leg of his trousers. He grew braver, and with more of his daddy’s money in his pocket, he’d make the driver ferry him out to the churchyard, where his leg was buried. Hobbling over granite slabs and swinging over brass vases filled with wilting carnations, J.D. would look at the stone that guarded his missing piece.

“Leg Of J.D. Onely, 1956”.

Someday, he’d be at rest over that leg, and then his coffin would disintegrate, and he’d melt into his lost limb, and they’d be one again. Once a week, J.D. would direct the van to the churchyard, and there, he would think of 16, of running down the track, of running to school, of running to the houses of girls long since married and gone.

J.D. often dreamed of his leg. Sometimes they were together, joined, and sometimes it was jogging next to him, in a friendly fashion, like a stupid Labrador that grinned and followed its master. When J.D. woke, he’d reach down for his lost knee and wondered how long it could all go on.

J.D.’s father went first. Striding down the road, he started to call out to Randall, who was deep in the fields, and then he bent over the fence, spat up a pint of blood, and died. “He was all wore out,” the doctor said.

They buried him next to J.D.’s leg.

The farm was split evenly between the brothers, with a life interest going to J.D’s mother and a few thousand dollars in the bank for Marnie, who still pattered about the farm aimlessly, single and unsought. Randall married a town lady, and Lester married the lady’s sister. Curtis remained a casual bachelor, more interested in cows and chickens than in women or whisky.

J.D.’s awkward, flushed mother followed her husband a year later and was placed beside him in the plot they’d held for 40 years. After the graveside service, J.D. stayed behind, gazing at the earthy lockbox of his leg. It was still there, waiting for him, but too small a ghost to haunt him. He loved it, that piece of ground that was of him, but not him. When his brothers and sisters called from the clapboard church, he turned around on his crutches, went back to the farm, and opened the books again.

J.D. kept on with the accounting. Lester got some sense, had some children, and moved them all to the top floor of the house. Curtis quietly took his bed into the spare room off the parlour, and Randall built his own house on the land. Marnie stayed home to cook for J.D. and over-water the garden and mind Lester’s children. Things, and people, got older and greyer, and the land was sold off bit by bit. Lester’s and Randall’s children grew up, went to the city college, and did whatever it is that the young and fresh do.

J.D. was elected Chairman of the Farmer’s Guild and gave short, snappy speeches. The applause was, always, sharp and brief and soothing. The townspeople called him “Young Roosevelt” because of his wheelchair, and because of the pressed shirts and elegant ties, Marnie ordered for him from a catalogue. After evenings of politics and farm talk, J.D. had his taxi drivers stop at the churchyard. In the golden glow of a Georgia moon, underneath sparse streetlights, J.D.’s habit was to hoist himself over to the grave of his leg and look at it with satisfaction. That was his, and it was a spot waiting for him in a world that had always felt flimsy and uneven. There was a final home for him, with his left leg, with his daddy, and his mother.

J.D. grew old, stooped, and began smelling of last night’s supper. His brothers did the same, and their sister Marnie hung on like a habit, dusting the leaves of her houseplants and reading the Bible without understanding it. Lester and his wife moved to an apartment in the city, and when Randall followed, he gave up his house to his youngest son. Curtis spent his days in the parlour, watching the ancient television and dozing. They leased the land to a new generation of farmers and lived off the scanty proceeds. Everyone stopped going to the churchyard with their Easter lilies and their vague, fading sorrow, except for J.D. A new cemetery, bright with polished stone and landscaping, was built closer to town, and J.D.’s brothers bought plots there. J.D. didn’t mind. He had a space bookmarked with his sixteen-year-old leg. Let the others lie where they wanted.

Someone had to die first, so J.D. figured he might as well be the one to do it. In a rusty old suit that stank of Marnie’s meatloaf, he lay himself down on his narrow bed, adjusted the pillow, and died. He knew where he was going, he thought, and when Curtis found him at dawn, J.D. had a crooked smile on his face.

The next afternoon, everyone gathered. Marnie stood anxiously, ready to wipe stray crumbs off of her mother’s plastic tablecloth. The brothers huddled together, with an assortment of J.D.’s nieces and nephews crowding in, leaning over shoulders.

“Of damn course he didn’t leave a will,” said Lester. “J.D. never thought ahead. He just thought about what was under his damn busted nose.”

“Now Lester,” said Marnie, mildly.

“Pardon my language, little girl. But really. There’s money to bury him, and I suppose we split the place three ways?”

“Four ways, daddy,” said Randall’s daughter Lizzy. Marnie brightened.

“That’s a fair girl,” said Curtis. Lizzy, with her long curls, was his favourite.

“Four ways, then. I got a lawyer in town. He’ll fix us up,” said Randall.

“That’s fine, brothermine, but what about…I mean J.D….” said Marnie.

“Plenty of room in the new-town ground. Daddy and Mother got just the two plots for them. I ain’t been there in, must be years. I’ll go by sometime soon,” said Lester.

“Cremation’d be cheaper,” said Randall. “Money’s for the living.”

J.D. Onely’s brothers all nodded. Marnie looked troubled, but buried her mouth in a dish towel, and wondered if Curtis would sell the house.

“Poor Uncle Jay,” said Lizzy. “He was always kind to me.”

“He was a good ‘un,” agreed one of Lester’s sons.

They hashed out the details, divided up the family silver, and drank what was left in the liquor cabinet as the day melted into moonlight.

The next morning, J.D.’s brothers drove up to town and signed papers at the funeral home. When they got J.D. back, he was in a small wooden box, ashes, feeling more physically substantial than they’d remembered him in life; he had a weight and an importance they’d never afforded him before. A small crypt in a marble wall was purchased in the new cemetery. After a short service, what was left of J.D., now eternally divorced from his leg, was placed inside.

“That was nice,” said Curtis.

“He’d have liked that,” agreed Randall, glad to have J.D.’s remains off of his hands and mind.

Lester grunted.

“What a lovely service,” said Marnie, desperately.

“Poor Uncle J,” said Lizzy.

With that, Onelys returned to the business of life, and J.D. soon faded from their conversations, their anecdotes, and their minds.

And so, what really remained of J.D. Onely was one unremembered leg, for decades in the darkness under a blanket of country clay.

On the Earth’s final day, when the dead who are whole rise up to greet eternity, J.D.’s leg will break free. His solitary, shrivelled limb, nearly weightless, will hop furiously down the road, determinedly, looking for its master. Kicking its way through the crowds of the Chosen, J.D. Onely’s leg will wander, seeking its first and only companion. It will bounce over land it has nearly forgotten, searching for a way to complete the uncompleted puzzle of its resurrection. Unaware of the silent, useless box of J.D.’s ashes, his superfluous leg, aged sixteen, will crash to the ground and wait pitifully for the burning sky to melt it into oblivion.

– Erica Viola