Carry Your Own Corn: Writing For Atonement By Brett Ann Stanciu

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Carry Your Own Corn: Writing For Atonement

     One of the first things Meg Goulet told me is that her head has thirteen titanium screws and three plates to repair injuries from a car accident. On a summer morning, this curly-haired forty-ish woman in trim gold trousers sat with me in a sunlit room with a closed door in the recovery center where she works. As she told me about eating Friday night dinners as a kid at a dive bar with her drunken dad, about doing heroin and handing over (literally) her first infant to an adoptive couple in a parking lot, I searched for traces of scars on her temple and forehead from that accident. In those two hours, all I saw were occasional twitches of weakness in her upper eyelid. 
     The large diamond on her hand cast a scattering of rainbow-shot sunlight sprinkles through the room. She had hammered her life from heroin user to healer. Listening in this quiet, sunny space, I wondered about the shape of those titanium plates and screws and how those pieces must have gleamed with sterility and promise when the surgeon deftly affixed them to her skull. When he finished, I wondered if he stepped back and studied his unconscious patient. Would her body scar over this metal and make it hers? Which way would her life unfold?
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     I found my way to Meg and her story and that sunlit room after word of a stranger’s suicide. In the one-room library where I was the director, a whiff of cigarette smoke tipped me off on Monday mornings that someone was breaking in after-hours. Recently divorced, hard up for cash as a single mother, I had taken this second job in a tiny Vermont village that backed up to so much unbroken wetlands and dense forest that, on slow afternoons, I imagined human civilization had packed up and disappeared south, abandoning me to the woody wilderness. 
     Small-town gossip spun tales about the intruder. He worked sporadically for a concrete contractor, didn’t have a driver’s license, and had overdosed in the local grocery store parking lot while his mother was shopping. He lived a little more than a stone’s throw away from the library in his childhood home, with his parents. 
A few months into the job, one morning the smoke hung visibly and toxic, and I could no longer pretend this wasn’t happening. I called the state police and installed game cameras in and outside of the library. The intruder was arrested. Charges were bungled and dropped. I hoped what I considered a problem wouldn’t reoccur.  
     Then, one frigid January afternoon when I was home folding laundry and staring out the living room window, thinking of nothing of relevance at all, a library trustee called me and said she had unlocked the closed library and discovered the intruder. By the time I had sped the seven minutes up the road to the library, the man had fled by foot to his parents’ nearby house and died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. 
     I stood in the library with the trustee — my friend — turning my knitted hat around and around in my hand. Our boots had tracked in clumps of fresh snow around the door that hadn’t melted yet.
     Later that night, I drove home in the well-below zero temperatures and then stood in my driveway, crying a little beneath the Milky Way, a great gauzy arch sprawled over the winter night. No one had drawn the curtains in our house, and my teenage daughters sat at our dining room table, eating with knives and forks. That afternoon, I had put a chicken and chili-pepper-sprinkled potato rounds in the oven to roast. It was a rare moment in my lifetime. I was out-of-time; the world stopped. I had had that experience once before. When the surgeon held up my first baby in his gloved hands smeared with creamy vernix and my own crimson blood, my daughter opened her almond eyes and stared at me across the operating room. I knew, surely as I was breathing, she was mine.
     But this was utterly different. I stared up at the constellations as if the world around me was a smoky mirror poorly illuminated only by diffuse and stray streetlight. I had cast out a man I never knew from a town library. I could have offered him aid. Instead, I pilloried him. I had no immediate plan save this: I needed to understand what I had done. The only way I had ever understood the world was through literature. 
I read voluminously about addiction. I wrote essays that each featured a local person involved, in one way or another, with addiction. I interviewed staff at the local health clinic and the village police chief. A man raised as a Buddhist explained how he ran drugs from New York City to rural Vermont. I sat on the couch of a woman whose daughter had died from an overdose in the family’s den. She told me a gang had murdered her daughter by swapping pure fentanyl for heroin. I received two small state grants. I sold a book proposal for an advance pittance and (temporarily) left the library to spend long days writing. As I wrote, I put more and more of my struggles with drinking into the book. How could I share that my children had endured years with an addicted mother while their father unraveled into mental illness? I had been entrusted with stories of despair and loss, and stories of people who had bested opioid abuse and wanted others to know that sobriety and recovery are possible. I saw that recovery is often pigeon-holed as an experience for Others, for the unfortunate addicted among us. But I was beginning to suspect that brokenness is waft and warp in contemporary American life.  
I despaired I would ever complete the book.
                                                                                                                                     *
When the pandemic shut down the world in 2020, I rewrote and rewrote, brewing coffee at four in the morning to work before my teenage daughter woke unhappily into her locked-down day. The advance and grant money had months ago been swallowed up by mortgage payments and the grocery bills. Desperate to finish the book — and to finish well — I began to understand the physical duress of writing, how hard it was to keep my mind focused as the world around me splintered. In that summer of loneliness, my 15-year-old made friends with a nuthatch in our backyard. 
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By the summer of 2021, the pandemic’s cessation nowhere on the horizon, I had finished the book’s final edits, and the manuscript was headed irretrievably towards publication. My teenage daughter, her two best friends, and I went camping on an island in Lake Champlain. While the girls bunked together in a yellow tent, I spread my sleeping bag along the open side of a lean-to. The last night, I woke beneath a moonless, starry sky, thinking of Unstitched. Since I divorced, I often lie awake in the night, remembering the house where my daughters and I once lived. I sometimes wonder what if I had found a good marriage counselor or allowed our separation to merely linger? Would my former husband and I have made a loving way back to each other? 
Starlight rippled over the immense lake. So much deep water, flowing north to the Atlantic. A towering oak tree spread over the lean-to and the grassy flat where the girls had pitched their tent. Against its trunk, the girls had leaned their bicycles. The wheels’ silver rims and skinny spokes shimmered. Sleepless, I knew in the most secret, unspoken folds of my heart, I had wished for forgiveness. I had hoped that writing about addiction and revealing my struggles and pushing my own small weight against a blade to scrape off stigma — my theme of “don’t see The Addiction, see The Person” — would be reparation for closing the door to a stranger in need. I had believed Unstitched would be the way to make myself whole again, to assuage my remorse for turning my back to a stranger in sore need.
A warm wind knocked small waves against the rocky shoreline. As an undergraduate, I had bought a remaindered copy of Nicolas Mosley’s novel Impossible Object. In the novel’s final pages, there’s a line from a female character whose baby drowned in the sea. There are some things in life, she realized, for which you can never be forgiven. By my forties, I believed Mosley’s line would define my relationship to my beloved children. But I was mistaken about that, as I have been mistaken about so many things in my life. My children have largely forgiven me. 
Instead, lines that defined my life were from a poem I read on that three-day camping trip from Tony Hoagland’s Twenty Poems That Could Save America. Osage poet Speaks-Fluently wrote:
            You have to carry your own corn far.
            You have to follow the black bear.
            You have to hunt to no profit.
            If not, what will you tell the little ones? What will you speak of?
Lying in my sleeping bag that night, listening to the wind fluttering through the oak leaves, I saw what I had really wanted all along, I had never lost: atonement. Alone and bereft, I had wandered into the fearsome wilderness, searching out the pieces of my book as I had asked questions in diner booths, on strangers’ living room couches, in a cement-block police station. Through the thickets of language and memory and my own soul-parsing, I asked, What is this beast of addiction? What are demons of my past? I believed atonement requirement an entry fee — my finished book — but I had been part of the universe all along, even when my eyes were flooded with darkness. 
Atonement isn’t a static place, a rarefied zone, but the very act of living in this ever-shifting time and space. Under that starry, moonless sky, my weary body knew I had hefted my own corn and carried my own words. I had hunted that demon of my addiction. My trek, footsore and exhausted at times, had led to me Meg, a woman with titanium sealed in her skull, proof of the magic of mixing metal and flesh. By the morning I met her, that titanium had been buried for years, her skin healed over with the faintest of scars. What caught my eye, instead, was a radiant diamond mined from the earth’s mantle and given as a marriage gift, illustration that the universe is neither merely coarse matter nor spirit.
The girls sighed as they shifted in sleep on the ground beneath that oak tree, dreaming, on the cusp of emerging each into their own unique womanhood. Ursa Major hung over the glimmering lake, the immense She-Bear silently padding among the constellations. We were each stars — the three sleeping girls, Meg, the stranger who had died, myself, the seven billion souls on this spinning orb. All the time I envisioned myself as a lonely writer and woman, the calcium in my teeth and bones had been forged in the hearts of stars. I had mistaken the night for the whole. I had sought a realm of forgiveness, an ending point, the impossible object. I was wrong. I had misunderstood that the journey itself was the gem — bearing my daughters, writing a book, lying contemplatively beneath the heavens. I was not a passive bystander, nor a recipient of an object. 
My book wove together Meg’s metal plates and screws, the bullet that killed a stranger, the needle that ended a young woman’s life, and the granite-filled mountains of the town where I live, as I labored to make sense of the world for myself and my readers in these particular moments. Surely that’s the journey for all of us?
Heft your corn or wheat or turnips. Do your work.

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Brett Ann Stanciu is the author of Unstitched: My Journey to Understand Opioid Addiction and How People and Communities Can Heal (Steerforth Press, 2021). A recipient of a 2020 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant, her essays and fiction have appeared in The Rumpus, Memoir Monday, Taproot, Vermont Literary Review, The Long Story, Parent Co., and Green Mountains Review, among other publications. Her novel Hidden View (Green Writers Press, 2015) portrays the challenges of a hardscrabble family farm. She lives in a small village in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont with her family and blogs at stonysoilvermont.com.

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