The Arrowhead

I have been walking in cornfields. It is spring and the earth is full of brown: corn stubble, stalks, husks, dirt clods, and gray shoulders of stones parched and pockmarked. This is what the earth looked like to my grandfather when his plow struck a stone, splitting it in two to reveal a fossilized fern on each half. He gave them to my mother, a young girl who kept the raised fern half and gave the recessed fern half to a friend, or a lover, or to someone she is too sad to name. As an old woman she gave the fossil to my daughter, and I saw what might have been the other half in the Milwaukee museum, so I know it is Seed Fern Pecopteris, 345 million years old, though I will never know if it was a hand plow or a tractor plow or why my grandfather chose to give the stone to that daughter, my mother.

I have been walking in cornfields looking for an arrowhead unearthed by a plow, exposed to the sun but unseen, passed over by the farmer plowing. It is waiting for me to find it, the way my grandfather found a fern fossil one day when he least expected, but that is not my stone. I am walking in cornfields knowing there is an arrowhead just turned out of the earth so that no one but me has seen it. It waits in this field and I walk on, over clumps of dried earth, broken cobs, old yellow withered corn, and beige soybeans newly planted.

I will not see the arrowhead by looking down. Not see it by looking. It will be there when I stop because of an itch on my inner calf, or when a pebble in my shoe has moved under the tender arch and I can no longer ignore it so I stop and reach down and there by my right little toe is something so white and so round I dig it out of the earth – a tooth! This is not what I wanted to find, but I take it, because it came from another creature’s mouth where its voice cried and sang, where it took in nourishment, where it nuzzled its young. It is the tooth of a creature I cannot yet name, left for me to find, and when I return from the field without the arrowhead it is not because it isn’t there. It is because I turn back before I’ve crossed the last hill, so I can walk here again tomorrow.

I am walking in cornfields and there will be an arrowhead. It is not found by looking down. That is where you see the red running ladybug, the marbled rose seed corn, the plump-bellied soybeans waiting to break into the hard ground, and the enormous chunk of earth atop the tender forehead of a small sprout. When you look down you see the copulating black beetles just before you would step on them, and you step aside so today they are not annihilated.

And when you look up you see you have lost the world to this brown, your only horizon. You could paint this field but need a thousand hues. So simple your life has become: the brown crowning earth and white sky, the wind holding you there in place. And you walk on, knowing you will find the arrowhead, half hidden and half exposed in the deep center of all this world.