|
Bitterweed
By Melanie Devore
The parable
of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32) is one of the most popular biblical
themes writers have incorporated into their works. A brash young man
takes his birthright and sets out to achieve the greatness he knows he
will never reach at home. A series of bad decisions result in a humbling
spiral of failure forcing the son to gain humility and return home. It is
not surprising that Flannery O’Connor added her own twist to the prodigal
son theme in “The Enduring Chill.”
O’Connor’s
prodigal son is Asbury Fox. Fox drips with conceit over his self-identified
literary brilliance and with contempt for his rural upbringing. When Fox
becomes too ill to work and keep his starving artist apartment in the Big
Apple, he returns home in hopes of dying as a genius robbed of the
opportunity to reach his stellar potential. Fox’s defining, humbling moment
is delivered by O’Connor in the end, and we hope as readers, Fox’s mom milks
it for all its worth.
Like
O’Connor’s own mother, Mrs. Fox is a businesswoman with a dairy farm. A
wise woman with a dairy farm knows that smoking in the milking barn gives
milk an unsavory odor, and drinking milk before it is pasteurized is not the
best for one’s health. Asbury Fox, during one of his past trips home,
decided to collect background information for a play he was writing by
interacting with the farmhands handling the milking duties. At first, to
spite his mother, Fox persuaded the workers to smoke with him in the barn.
The next day the milk factory rejected two cans of milk from the farm. For
his next act, Asbury tried to convince the farmhands to drink milk fresh
from the cow. The workers wisely declined, leaving Fox to defy his mother
all by himself and commit the act that would later result in his tailspin
into humility and forced return home. Now, if the right plant would have
tainted the milk Asbury consumed, his delusional death wish would have been
partially granted.
Milk and
mothers have been tragically linked before. Abraham Lincoln lost his own
mother to milk sickness. In Mrs. Lincoln’s case, the cows providing the
family’s milk grazed on white snakeroot (Eupatorium rugosum), a
member of the sunflower family (Asteraceae), loaded with two lethal
compounds. The names of these two toxins, tremetol and tremetone, refer to
the muscle tremors experienced by victims of milk sickness. A number of
plant toxins have made their way from the field to the family dinner table.
Texans love their bluebonnet springs, but they don’t take a liking to the
milk coming from the cow or goat feasting on bluebonnets (Lupinus
texensis). Women, goats, and dogs consuming milk tainted by
bluebonnets, and other species of lupines, have given birth to offspring
with skeletal deformities. We rarely hear of anyone suffering from
illnesses linked with dairy products contaminated by plants these days.
During the late 1950s, when Regina O’Connor was the matriarch of Andalusia
Farm, dairies were intensely managed. A good stewardess of the pasture is
aware of what plants their cattle are foraging upon. Ironically, one plant
responsible for producing distasteful, but not deadly milk provides a
colorful backdrop in “The Enduring Chill.”
When Asbury
opens his eyes in the car to gaze upon Timberboro, he finds the vehicle
engulfed between two fields carpeted in brilliant, yellow bitterweed (Helenium
amarum). If you visit Andalusia in late summer, you too can see carpets
of bitterweed. Be sure to take moment, pluck a few leaves, and crush them
in your hand. Your fingers will bear the fragrance of the sweet smelling
sesquiterpene lactones. It is this compound, after being digested by the
cow, which yields the bitter tasting compounds that taint milk. You may
even wonder what advantage a plant may gain by investing so much of its
resources to produce these complex molecules.
Bitterweed,
like snakeroot, is a member of the sunflower family. When you look at a
sunflower, you are not looking at one huge flower. Instead, you see a
couple hundred flowers congregated to form a head. Arranging dozens of
flowers in a head to mimic a single, very large flower, gives the plant an
advantage in attracting pollinators. After all, a big flower means a big,
sweet nectar reward for the pollinator. But, there is also a major
disadvantage to having all your flowers arranged in heads. When flowers
transition to fruits, the head presents a robust feast for insects and other
pests. To combat herbivory, many members of the sunflower family produce
compounds like sesquiterpene lactones and deadlier toxins.
Being bitter,
in conjunction with having specialized heads of flowers, has enabled the
sunflower to take its place as one of the largest families of flowering
plants. Being bitter, along with drinking raw milk, delivered the fall to
humility and a lifetime of enduring chills to Asbury Fox; however, a plant
was not necessarily responsible for his downfall. Forgetting your rural
roots and the lessons learned on dairy farms can be hazardous to your health
and grace you with a lifetime of bacterial infection.
|
