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The flesh crept in about a year before my diagnosis. At first it was just a mound of muscle tendons on the other side of a fallen silver maple that had been uprooted during a vicious thunderstorm. And to be honest, I didn’t give it “much never mind”, as my grandfather says. Flesh coming here was inevitable. And there was no cure.
In fact, I talked to Granddaddy about it a week after it took root.
“I’ve got the flesh,” I said.
“Bound to happen,” he said.
“Not too bad yet. Some muscle. Other stuff.”
“Is it turning gray or black?”
“Doesn’t seem to be.”
“Call me if it gets worse, but I wouldn’t pay it much never mind.”
The tendons were pink cylinders that had rings around them. I’d seen similar cuts of meat in the butcher shop when I’d been shopping for pork, the other white meat. I remember strolling around the backyard that first day, hands in the pockets of my overalls, wondering how bad it would get. I remember poking a toe at the frog hair of the old putting green that a former owner had had landscaped back there and feeling baby teeth nibble at my feet.
The day after I first saw the muscles, we had a week of nonstop rain. Such is early October in the Tennessee Valley. The weather alternates between autumn, summer and deadly, sometimes in the span of a single weekend.
Once things dried out, I went back outside and discovered that the fallen tree had grown five eyeballs, a honeysuckle vine was sprouting fingers (complete with fingernails), and the putting green was now covered with lumpy flesh that looked like the inside of your cheeks.
All of it was oozing.
Camper was still with me at that point, and I had to rein him in. The smell of fresh raw flesh was simply too much for him, even for an old Lab who had devoted his life to napping and growling at rabbits.
I lost Camper about a month into the flesh, and that’s when I decided to take action. While I was more than willing to let mucous, muscle tissue, lungs, tongues, toes, and testicles overrun my backyard, having it take my dog was simply a bridge too far.
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The weed killer didn’t do shit. Neither did hydrogen peroxide, formaldehyde, rat poison, boric acid, Kosher salt (I’m a foodie), DDT, hydrochloric acid, gasoline, bleach, grease fires or blow torches. And motor oil actually seemed to invigorate the flesh. The morning after I tried that, there were easily a dozen new vulvas and armpits, and ear wax completely covered the dead maple tree.
I bought so many harsh chemicals from the hardware store that the manager told me he was going to have to report my purchases to the Fed. Evidently you can only purchase so many deadly compounds before people sit up, take notice, start thinking about things like truck bombs, and wondering how they can avoid becoming the next eyewitness on cable news.
But I didn’t give up, spraying chemicals day after day, week after week.
Nothing, as I said, worked.
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And so, I quit. Instead, I would sit in my back porch rocker, a cup of coffee in hand, miniatures of Jack Daniels and Jim Beam bulging from my coveralls, and watch the scabs grow and the blood ooze while I got drunk. Every once in a while, I would use my old pellet gun to shoot an eyeball, but that was just for sport. The boys and I had done the same to rats at the city dump when I was a kid.
And it was one of those evenings — a cool, crisp autumn day, comfortably buzzed — that I got the call from the doctor. My bloodwork had come back and there were blood test results that she “didn’t care for.”
It only took one specialist to tell me what I knew by the tone of her voice. It only took one follow-up for the second opinion to confirm it. And it only took a few months before the chemo and radiation quit being effective.
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Before the pain and agony completely overwhelmed me, I called in a soil specialist from Auburn University that Granddaddy recommended. Through gritting teeth, I asked him (the soil guy, not my grandfather) to give me some feedback on the flesh in the yard.
What he told me was the last good news I would ever hear.
As my body reached the end stage, I called in that favor to my grandfather. He was in his late 70s, and I hated to do it to him, but after he got the lump out of his throat and gained some composure, he told me that if he were in my position, he would do exactly the same thing.
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Granddaddy placed me in the middle of a patch of intestines out near the honeysuckle. The sound of the bees buzzing was relaxing, like sitting on the beach… only different.
As the cancer’s tendrils dug into my brain and began to shut things down — organ by organ — I took comfort in the fact that while the chemicals and poisons of modern society were not the right cure, I was. Little ol’ me.
While cancer normally dies when the host does, there are situations where the cancerous cells can be placed in a nutrient-rich environment so they can persevere. Nutrients that can be identified by a specialist from a college.
This will work. I know that I said earlier that the flesh didn’t bother me much. No-never-mind, all that. And I honestly would not give a shit if it were just me. But what I do give a shit about is that the flesh took my dog from me, and that’s beyond the pale.
