Work Up

I dropped out of the truck in one of my typical, awkward, spiderman-esque dismounts; it's a sort of game I play with myself in the moments between relaxing in the passenger seat, cruising down Old Natchez Trace in Tennessee, and firing up the weedeater and getting back to the mind numbing tedium that is my living wage.

We're out in the luxury farmlands, on the sort of property where people raise horses not as a livelihood but as an indication of status. The property we're on is sweet, not too ostentatous, a big main house and few smaller guest houses, none of them bigger than any upper middle class home. The acreage is modest, most of the land is rolling grasses thinly wooded and there is plenty of grazing lands for the animals. I kind of like it here, it's not so bad, at least it's got character. It sure beats the endless plats of Mcmansions in Brentwood. Houses so foreign and ill conceived they look like children's drawings from Playskool's my first architecture fun kit.

As I'm walking back to the bed of the truck I stop to stare at the horses. The corral is next to the driveway so the big filly is staring at me over the fence. I smile, I like horses, I like the idea that an animal of it's size and power will entertain my humanity. I bet if I hung around for a few days and fed her some carrots, told her some stories, and brushed her, she would take me for a ride. I've never ridden a horse, I used to climb on my dad's back when I was kid and demand "a horsey ride" and remember thinking that was pretty great, I can only imagine what an real horse could be like. While I'm making eyes at the pretty girl, a sad eyed burro saunters up to the split beam fence and sticks it's nose through. For some reason I speak to him in Spanish.

"Hola, Senor Burro, Me llamo Jaunito. Yo es tu Amigo, si? Come mas llierba porfavor."

I tear some of the longer wildgrass out of the ground and offer it to Sr. Burro, he backs away at first but then creeps closer, first sniffing my hand then taking a tentative bite. I reach down and pull up another handful of wildgrass, I feed the burro several times, all the while speaking a poor broken spanish in what is an undoubtedly offensive spanish accent. While I'm busy making friends with the only live action Eyeore I've ever met, my hat goes missing off to my left. I turn around to see if Chris, my employer, has noticed that i am wasting his time by hanging out with farm animals, but he doesn't, he's on the phone, as usual. I do however come face to face with a Shetland Pony, or a caballo peqeuno, as i call them in my head. There are two of them actually, and they are eager to taste that greener grass just out of their reach on the alien side of the corral. I hang out with the horse, two tiny ewok horses, and the burro until I hear Chris wrap up his conversation. So far this has been the best day ever.

He begins by bringing me around the property, showing me where I should put my attention, what I should ignore, the various in's and out's of the task at hand. While walking across the back yard, in between the barn and the pool, i notice the high voltage lines bisecting the property. " You'd figure people this rich would pay to have their lines buried." I wonder aloud.

Mistake.

"Oh yeah man, they tried..." Chris begins " But when they started digging in the yard here, the shovel on the back-hoe came up with a couple of skulls on it's teeth."

"What??!!" I exclaim, my mind racing with nefarious possibilities.

"Yeah, man" He continues " This whole yard is big Indian burial ground, the Smithsonian had to come down here and examine all the remains. I think some of them are on display up in D.C."

"Holy shit man, that is fucking intense!" I let my enlightened mind shine prominently.

"Yeah, this is Old Natchez Trace man, the Trail of Tears ran right through here." Chris reveals.

"Wait...THE Trail of Tears?" I ask

" Yeah, man, Andrew Jackson, the whole bit."

I stand there for a minute, and as is common in a cloudy head like mine, I begin to see things. Old things. Not the way they were, but the way i can best understand them. I see the long line of reddish brown skinned refugees slowly plodding through the well manicured lawn, some fall, cannot get up again and are thrown by their ankles into an unmarked hole in the ground. Some of the bodies in the pit are still, some are still moving. Blue coated soldiers begin throwing dirt in on top of them, and some courageous brown skinned men and women try to keep them from burying their loved ones alive, thunder cracks and they fall, the line of broken hearts marches on.

Chris is talking about the lawn again, he wraps it up and gives me the thumbs up "Okay?" he asks, seeking confirmation. I collect myself, shake the dreams away and ask him very dryly with the hint of disgust " We're going to mow the Trail of Tears?"

"Yeah, man, it's nuts ain't it?"

Somehow the morning cools and darkens, yet the sun remains shining and the temperature the same. I come from a different part of this country, a part whose blood soaked history has been very consciously and systematically erased, paved over, denied, forgotten and rewritten. A place that makes the past a different nation of different people who have left us no inherent debt to the ones we tortured and displaced, the ones we erased. Here in the south, things have been left raw and untouched. They don't lie about who they are and what they've done. I like the horses but i can do without the history lesson, but i guess even those two things are completely intertwined, brown skinned women and men never knew a horse till we brought them here. Just another token of supposed cultural superiority.

Before I'm half way through my job, Chris comes back to see how I'm doing. I'm just about out of gas and about to refuel, so he decided to ice the cake for me, so to speak.

" You haven't seen any spirits out here have you John?"

I think he's messing with me.

" Man I swear I saw a little girl up in that front balcony over there one day. I mean, it was getting late you know? So it could have been my eyes playin' tricks on me, but I know these folks ain't got no kids.

I have that "You've got to be kidding me" expression on my face. But he continued undeterred...

"And you know what I found out? Back when this house was built, like a hundred sumthin years ago, they all had a little girl who fell off that balcony and broke her neck. Yeah, and it was one of those winters that was too cold to dig in the ground, so they had to keep her in the cellar for three months till the ground thawed."

I stare at him blankly. I don't need this shit.

" Yeah, so that's why I like to do this place in the morning. It gets real creepy out here at night, man."

I make a mental note that this day is disqualified from the running for best day ever, I would say that this could be a really creepy friggin day, but all of my jobs seem to turn out like this, maybe it's just me, maybe I just look to close, fixate too much on my imagined stories of places, maybe I'm just really bored. Eitherway, at least i got to hang out with those mini horses, and in a month I can leave the heavy south and go to a part of California where people are too self absorbed to know the story of their town. All blessings and curses, these days.