The Sunflower Dance

They say Ma broke when Pa left.  I don’t remember.  I was four and Jacob was only two.  We didn’t know she was broken, and I guess she wasn’t much broken as a mother.  She fed us and kept the house clean.  It was only when she sent me off to school when I was thirteen that I could tell she wasn’t like the other mothers.  There was no school until I was thirteen, I guess that’s hard for you to think about, but we moved to Council Grove before Kansas was even a state.   It wasn’t completely civilized yet.

So Ma could do all the mom stuff but, she didn’t talk.  Then there was what Jacob and I called her sunflower dance.  Every summer, once the tall sunflowers she planted opened their yellow faces, she would stand in the field for hours praying and moving her face toward the sun along with theirs.  It wasn’t every day but it was often enough for everyone to know she was broken.

The Graysons were our closest neighbors.  It was just a thirty-minute buggy ride for them.  They passed by our house on the way to town and would check in on us just to make sure mom hadn’t gotten too broken.  It was their son Joe who taught me how to read and write even though he was the same age as Jacob.

I never told anyone about the last part of the sunflower dance.  Even as a little kid I knew it was messed up.    When the sunflowers were heavy with seed, Ma would go out in the field at dusk.  Just when the sun gave up trying to light the world, you would hear Ma’s machete swing and “Thwack”.  Four times.  If there was a full moon, you might catch a glint of the steel, and it would illuminate her crazy face.   Then she brought the sunflower heads inside, set the table, and put one head on each plate.  It was the only time each year that she would set a plate for Pa.  She would signal for us to eat up and she’d start cutting up that sunflower with a fork and knife just like it was mutton.

Pa wasn’t ever going to sit down at the table again.   He was from a wealthy family.  We still have the sheep herd he brought with him when we settled here in Council Grove.  It’s how we make our money spinning yarn mostly that Mrs. Grayson sells for us in town.      

My Pa was an enterprising young man they say, but he was greedy.  He heard about the gold rush in California in 1948 when I was four and Jacob was two.   He didn’t come back with any.  He didn’t come back at all. 

Except for that bizarre annual sunflower head dinner and Ma not talking, life was good until Jacob turned sixteen.   He had some friends who were all gun-ho about joining up to fight for the North.   I knew there was a war going on, but no one was fighting on our doorstep and girls don’t kill people, so I ignored it mostly.  I did work hard at knitting socks with our yarn that Mr. Grayson took to the church to donate.

Jacob though wanted to fight for freedom.   He got as far as a little place called Olathe and was shot by a man who doesn’t even deserve to be mentioned.  A coward of a man shooting townsmen and then robbing everyone.    

Ma begged Mr. Grayson to go get Jacob’s body.  She paid him in sheep I remember.   He didn’t even bother to argue when she wouldn’t let him stay and help us bury him.  She was broken after all and he was probably tired of Jacob’s rather odorous company by then.

Ma wouldn’t let me start digging until the sun disappeared.    I guess I remember why now.  It was strange how I didn’t remember anything about my Pa until I saw the glint of those white bones in the sunflower field.

It all came rushing back.  That night.  The reason I have the scars on my back.   The big ugly scars that Pa whipped into me the night I spilled his whisky on accident.   I was four.   He took me out to the barn where he kept his whip.  I ran to hide in the sunflower field but he found me.   I remember pain and I remember Ma coming and screaming.   Pa was choking her until he broke something in her neck and the screams stopped.   I found a shovel and hit him, just enough to make him mad.    He grabbed it from me and I suppose was about to hit me with it when I heard a “Thwack” sound.  

Ma must have buried him on her own after she tended my wounds and put me to bed.  She held onto that machete though.

We never planted any more sunflowers after that, although wild ones still grow there and provide some shade over Jacob’s tombstone.  Ma finished breaking apart after that, but I was eighteen then, so it was okay.

I married Joe Grayson.  He’s a good man.  Not much to look at but he’s a hard worker and he is kind.  He doesn’t mind at all that Ma just sits on a rocker on the front porch mumbling prayers.  I called our first little boy Jacob.  I think Ma thinks he is her Jacob as a baby again.  I hope that brings her some happiness.

When she passes, I’m going to get Joe to help me bury her next to my brother.   I’ll tell Joe the story then and we’ll dig up all of Pa’s bones and I’ll get rid of them far away from here.

I’m going to bury the head of a sunflower with him when I do.  I feel I should because I’m not really sure what Ma did with his original head.   It wasn’t with his bones.