Tea for Three

Hell ain’t some supernatural fire pit, a preacher once told me, where dancing nasties with pitchfork tails and razor nails taunt drowning souls in a magma swimming hole. No, he said, hell, for the dead, is the absence of God and his love and his light. And on this Carolina highway I might well and truly be in such a forsaken state of damnation, with only the headlights dispelling frightful shadows — the ectoplasmic grasp of untamed Southern woodland encroaching on our flanks.

He doesn’t seem to mind, though, as he zombie drives down Rural 17, through wildly varying shades of green, yet shades of black in the vapid, umbral night. His voice the only noise as we’re careening through the void. 

“You know it’s the only plantation in the whole U.S. of A. that grows tea.”

His latest obsession is prattling off lessons on Carolina-grown tea. A facility tour with Mom, one spin through the dirt — meet Pops the expert on all things tea. 

“Ya see, all tea — black tea, green tea… hell some other color tea — it all comes from one plant, or tree, well bush that becomes a tree if you don’t trim it I guess. It’s all in how the leaves get processed, see.”

Harvesting techniques, precipitation needs.

“You know they don’t plant tea seeds to make new tea trees.”

Such a detailed report from a tour he abhorred, from a day spent with Mom that was more of a chore than the gifted retreat it was meant to be for her sixty-fourth birthday.

It’s a narrow lane amidst towering candle stick pines, and if he ceases his schtick the silence from outside invades the cab, pervades the space between our seats. No cloven-foot demons to be seen in this hell, no phosphorous smell, but the scent of deceit — stench of lies by omission, of sin carried out without thought of contrition —creates well enough a hell of its own.

“Once those trees get planted, see, they never leave. The roots, they get all intertwined. So you can’t pull up one, like vines, without killing a bunch of ‘em.”

Oh sweet tea irony! Glorious metaphor. Can’t take any more. Feeling the urge to fling open the door. Feeling the urge to disappear. Wishing the truck would veer off the road into the drainage ditch, thick with vegetation, and I’d put my hands up to stop the steady onslaught of weeds against the windshield. As if in a dream voicelessly screaming, fully believing I could control what’s next, but instead of transporting to a school desk in my briefs, naturally, as if truly in a dream, the truck would in reality come to a violent, solitary stop and I’d be mystically carted off to a field of gilded wheat and Christ himself would ask bewildered me why so sullen over the ringing in my ears.

But I’m still here, (dumb luck), in this fucking truck, wheezing transmission, its handler hell-bent on tea and perdition. It’s becoming tradition this weekly expedition to help a friend in need, (a friend, indeed). A client illicit, exchanges explicit, and I am complicit in my implicit consent and deserved of this torment, of this nauseating hollow lament, of Nature’s relentless, imposing contempt. 

Just above the street, in the V between overhanging oblique trees — in the crease between obscurity — a star, far above my terrestrial woes appears, a singularity. But the light is smeared by phantasmal autumnal atmosphere, by tattered shrouds of spectral clouds preventing heavenly light from breaking through my self-wrought night. 

We finally arrive and I’ve had more tea than I can handle; I’m steeping in my father’s scandal. 

She flies down the porch, gives Pops a hug while I lug — in pre-dawn gloom — the tools, myself a tool, a fool. Eyes to the ground — grays, blacks, and browns — in my circle eighth. Missed an honorable roadkill fate. The sun won’t rise today.