- Osage Orange
1
Still, it is not the grass that fastens the eye, but (what is that?) the green-glimmering, green-warted roundness of an Osage orange— Maclura pomifera. Hedge apple. Horse apple. Bois d’arc. Bodark. Geelhout. Rootwood. Yellow-wood.Kansas orange. Irish snowball. Hedge ball. Monkey ball. Brain fruit. American breadfruit— the tree favored by Osage Indians for bow wood. (Can you eat it?) It is only squirrel fodder, the trash tree used before barbed wire—horse-high, bull-strong, pig-tight—to make the poor man’s fence, its hedges planted to tether restless soil, the testament of hands never clean of dirt or drought, or the doubtful chance men labor for.
2
They planted seed, a chance to stake land and thwart foreclosure: the Great Plains Shelterbelt: 220 million trees, 30,233 shelterbelts: 18,600 miles. Osage oranges sprawl under thorny limbs, like green coals, like lanterns in an upstairs room lit to temper darkness or bid the traveler home. Like memory, an Osage Orange tree has its uses—ward, weapon, wall—its hedge can halt or turn the eye, always someone to sow its modest seed, to boil its sapwood, woodchip, and bark for a lemony-yellow dye, not gold but good enough. [End Page 792]
3
Not gold—brownish-yellow—good enough (for how many boys?) for dye, to color tunic, britches, puttees, the khaki-colored wools and cottons worn Over there! Over there! Boys fall, sprawled in heaps like dirty rags, miles of cloth. Decades after the war, from fields worn by plow or weather, mud-sotted scraps—a cuff, an insignia, a sleeve—snag into light bearing their dull stains, forgotten remnants, their color taken from the pith of an Osage orange, a brownish-green dye sealed with smoke, with gas, with fire, with bloodied wire, with the breath of boys writing their last letters home. The stains (how many boys?) are insoluble. They will never wash out, permanent as grief. [End Page 793]
Janice N. Harrington is author of Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone, her first collection that won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize from BOA Editions and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the winner of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Poetry and a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award for emerging women writers. Harrington, who grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, is also the author of children’s books, including The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County and Going North, which have won many awards and citations, including a listing among TIME magazine’s top ten children’s books of 2007, and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library in 2005. This former librarian and professional storyteller now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.