By Zack Strait
The skies behind the orchard were splashed with red. “Van Gogh would make ink from boiled walnut husks,” Granddaddy told me. He hacked into his gnarled fist and continued: “He painted Starry Night.” Van Gogh used iron gall ink, chrome logwood ink—but not walnut. “You hearing me, boy?” he asked, his voice threatening, and I looked up then from studying my hands: they were getting bigger. I was seated cross-legged at his feet, there on the weathered back porch. The unsealed planks were the color of dirty bone, warped from years of hard rain. He kept his brown eyes on me as he reached into the small, cloth pouch of black walnuts on his thigh. The walnuts were from the orchard, and I watched how he squeezed two of them in his fist like a pair of bull testicles until a shell burst open. He had beaten me again with his leather razor strop. The welts on my back—from the metal ring that looped over the bathroom faucet—were shaped like mealworms. He pumped his legs, the planks screeching beneath the rocking chair, as I stared at the long scar that ran down one side of his wrinkled face.
Walnuts are a kind of stone fruit: like peaches. But you can only eat the seed. The seed is shaped like a brain. The flesh grows dark and hard around the seed.