Father as Astronaut

 My first assignment was an infestation: albino deer flocking in townspeople’s yards, grazing away what little greenery was left. I concocted a spray, biodegradable and harmless to plants but noxious to animals. The herd scattered like skeleton teeth in the foothills and starved.

More recently, I was assigned to a village that had seen the face of God, every villager among them, which was why they were losing teeth and hair, why their bones had turned to meringue. His Divine Light had cut their time in this world short so they might sooner join Him in the next. Of course, it was radiation poisoning. I filtered the water supply, distributed Prussian Blue, and prescribed a diet based on what vegetables that village could still coax from its soil.

Just last month I was digging in our own garden. Though we have apprentices, I don’t leave all the grunt work to them—it’s important for morale that I be seen on my knees in the dirt. It’s important for me, too, to keep communion with the soil, to remember its flavor and feel. Our dirt is moist, rich, the healthiest in the region. .

But as I pried out a dandelion root, what looked to be a clenched bird foot rolled into my palm. The single back toe was bruised and the front two had orange claws, with ragged skin hanging down. I examined the foot in the sunlight. The front toes suddenly unclenched, twin heads biting into the thick leather of my glove.

Shit, I said. A mutant grub. Sickness had reached our valley at last.

—

Take nothing on faith, my father advised, then rolled over on his cot and died.

Radio reporters struggle to describe the death-stench that’s made so many towns unlivable, but I’ve smelled it before. As my father neared the beginning of his end, his odor changed. At first it was pleasantly sweet, like marzipan, then it grew cloying. It got tough to sit with him for too long. You could taste his illness.

Dad’s scent was the first physical tether to snap and then his muscle dropped away almost overnight. His wiry hair thinned to down. His pupils smeared into his irises. The disease smudged all his body’s clean lines before erasing my father completely.

I smelled my pillow the other night and realized that I’ve begun to carry Dad’s odor; not his death smell, but his life one. A smell like mulch and leather and ghee.

You look like him more every day, I swear to God, my mother says. Who’d have thought he’d make such an attractive woman.

I wonder whether it’s just the famine, my jutting jaw and smoky sockets, or whether I maybe am morphing into my father—filling the niche he left behind, so to say. Preserving the ecological balance. I have female parts, but what does that matter anymore?

Mom weathered his death well. She threw herself into raising chickens for eggs and manure, which have become our most profitable products. She names each bird for something my father once loved: Coffee. Ocean. Scrapple. Backscratch.

Dad ran so deep in this land that most days it doesn’t feel like he’s gone. He haunts our livelihood in every seed and sprout and blossom.

—

A teenager showed up on our porch some weeks ago demanding herbs that would help her get pregnant. The girl was dry and bony as an ocotillo. Narrow hips, washboard chest. Bringing a baby to term would kill her for sure. So I ground a preparation for weight gain—gentian and fenugreek and blessed thistle—labeled it “Fertili-Sure,” and left the rest up to fate.

When I brought it outside, I found the girl lingering at the edge of our orchard, marveling at the life that still thrives in our coddled patch of earth.

How do you keep people from stealing your plants? she asked.

Sharpshooters, I replied. Hiding all around the property.

I don’t see any sharpshooters.

Exactly, I said.

—

Though I’ve managed any number of senile villages, I struggled to treat the town that was aging backwards. Pretty hard to administer injections to grown-ass men squalling and squirming like infants.

It’s for your own good, I said. Hold still.

But they thought I was only hurting them for the fun of it, so they smacked the needles to the ground, howling with anticipated pain. I called home for advice. Mom arrived the next day with an old suitcase full of sugar cookies, bribes for good behavior.

Another town, out at the edge of the desert, had succumbed to collective megalomania. The citizens had rigged lenses and mirrors to focus and direct the sun’s deadly rays, which they turned on friends and neighbors at the slightest provocation. From ten miles’ distance the town shimmered like the sea. I parked my rental and approached the mayor’s house, catching sight of myself in the mirror she was shining in vain at my radiation suit and shaded visor, and I had a vision: my father as astronaut, returned from his journey through the deep space of Death.

—

The first white wolf we saw was lifeless, heaped like a sandbag at the end of our driveway. Torn apart by its pack mates. Our apprentices took it as a warning and voted to depart the next morning for the nearest town. They begged Mom and me to come with them. No, we said. We’d rather die on this land than leave it. Which they understood. They accepted the guns and food we offered, wished us luck, and marched at sunrise.

We didn’t see how it happened: our apprentices met their four-legged executioners beyond the visible treeline. But we heard it all.

Mom drove her hens into the house. We bolted the doors.

—

Since chicken shit can be deadly—histoplasmotic—we’re forced to keep the hens in the windowless basement. Cramped, wings caked with their own dirt, the birds have turned unnaturally vicious. I wear my gloves to retrieve their eggs each morning. The shells are soft, the albumen lumpy from undernutrition and lack of sunlight. When the wolves howl close to the house, the hens fight, scratching and pecking the weakest birds to death.

We’ve taken to roasting the losers for dinner. The richness of meat should be delicious after all these years of vegetarianism, but the fragrance from our kitchen chimney makes the wolves outside sing with hunger. As we eat our meal, we’re reminded of what waits to eat us.

We call for help every hour on the hour, though the radio has maintained its silence. No telling who’s still out there. In the daytime, we watch for signs of miraculous rescue through binoculars, spend our evenings in conversation about the decisions that must be made if and when our stores run low.

Maybe the white wolves are those albino deer reincarnate, I say. Vengeance for a job well done.

Maybe so, Mom replies.

If I had known, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger, I say.

—

I remember Hauptville. A mountain hamlet with clean water, loamy soil. Hauptville was famous for its old-fashioned brewery, and Hauptvillians guzzled beer at every meal. They bathed sick babies in it, used it as an antiseptic and shampoo and cologne. The very trees smelled of hops. But the antique equipment had begun to quietly corrode, leaching near-lethal levels of heavy metals into the vats. And over time, the poisoned Hauptvillians grew inhumanely aggressive. Fist fights and car crashes at first. Then they turned on their defenseless. Dogs. The infirm elderly. Their own children. In every home and yard, scenes of damnation.

I came with hired guns. We first tranquilized the metal-mad adults with darts. I then instructed that the contaminated vats be dumped down the mountainside and the antique equipment destroyed while I tended to the victims. I lost many more than I saved. A three-year-old died in my lap.

You never saw such cruelty, I told my father when I arrived home, eight days later. I knelt by his armchair and he rested a soil-stained palm on my head.

Where does biology stop, anyway, and the soul begin? I asked.

Death, probably. He laughed.

—

We spy two human forms moving westerly along the treeline. It’s that girl again, the scrawny one, pulling along a slack-jawed boy not much older than she is. The would-be father. The girl’s found out that I gave her the wrong medicine.

We’ve got no way to warn the two of them about the hungry predators sleeping in our front yard. I lower the binoculars and close my eyes to imagine what they’ll see. From the treeline, the white wolves must look like a crop of sandstones in a Zen garden. Death will rise up out of the earth on elegant legs, float toward them like a fog.

Come away, my mother says. Let’s put on one of your father’s records.

In the basement, the hens squawk and skirmish.