I Tried to Think About Rows of Corn (Essay)

I sat, a sixteen-year-old waif facing my upright piano. Images of half-naked boys playing basketball on the playground next door imprinted on the back of my eye, blocking the thicket of white, black, white, black, white, white, black piano keys before me that had contoured my life since the age of seven.

I tried to think about rows of corn; their green and golden stalks crisp, half dying while fruit ripened in their hairy husks. Or of ballet slippers thumping dry wooden floors at some magical concert where their wearer leapt and became carried through misty light, into the battons.

But the dusk lit leopard lines of those boys enthusiastically shooting hoops. Four feet within eyeshot of me now. Clouding my vision. Robbing my imagination of whatever thing, but skin, arches, and luminous arms. Huddling beneath the chain circle they worshipped, they burst, unknowing that a tiny, bony being lay fifty feet away coveting the earthy position of their sneakers.

The latch on the door – the ball bearings of which had long since masticated to the point of causing a loud snap every time they were engaged – crunched, and my father stepped in to inquire about the silence coming from the study.

My visions disappeared like sweetener in coffee, remaining in hot flavor and noticeable to the taste, but invisible altogether from the outside.

Like a habit, the loom of damnation that gamely swallowed me at times like this turned off my readiness, and the fragrance of predestination became, as always, equally possible and at once out of the question. Could a sinner like me enter heaven? Or would the wickedness I knew I was becoming exhaust my future in the physical and spiritual world?

Father said dinner was ready as he tugged at the drapes, an act that hurried night too soon into our home each evening, like a child hurries the opening of his presents.

I wanted to say that I wasn’t very much hungry, but instead belched out a munificent statement about unfinished scales and, please, just a few more exercises before closing the lid.

Wet with anticipation I directed my eyes, which to this point had been pointed forward into the scratched wood of the piano, toward my father’s silence as he stood there. Aside from my mother and sister, he and I were the only ones alive at this moment. The traces of playing next door vanished, and except for our family and my father’s obdurate flock, I knew the only thing that mattered was that we were bound for heaven. And I knew it not only because of father’s rich study of and empathy for the scriptures, but from the feeling I got when we stepped outside the boundary of our home.

In the grocery store, sinners lined the aisles, scouting scandal papers to read while loading their carts with spirits; then hurrying home to turn on their television sets. To curse loudly and laugh louder.

I wasn’t hungry, but I lied and said food was what I needed after all.

We parted, and the blackened room gulped up the distant, repetitive smack of inflated pigskin against asphalt.

That night I visited my demons. Vice entered my bunk and I rebuked it in vain as I had since I was eleven. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he. I was getting older and this was who I was becoming. My slow revealing of that which I had known since I was six. As foreseeable as the sunrise, I knew that the inevitable would swallow me. And I begged God for death before bravery or cowardice made me step over the line of righteousness.