Blood & Garlic

The garlic bulb slipped out from between my thumb and forefinger and my mom’s paring knife sliced nicely into my skin. I cursed as a line of blood quickly rose up from the cut. Just as quickly, I turned to my mom, feeling somewhat chagrined for cussing in front of her. “Cut myself,” I explained, waving the injured finger in the air, hoping to distract her from my potty mouth with the sight of her son’s blood. She shook her head.

“I’ll get a band-aid, and you watch the water.” Her ingrained ability to task assignments when needed was something of a marvel. She nodded toward the pot on the stove. Bubbles were dotting the bottom of the pan like constellations and the water was starting to sputter and churn with the anticipation that always preceded great change. “Watch the water,” she repeated with more urgency, as if that would solve everything. I stuck my finger in my mouth, now sticky with blood and garlic juice.

I love cooking with garlic. The garlic bulb inside hibernates, snugly ensconced under the thin, fragile, crinkly skin, until you cut it and release its perfume. It’s a dizzying smell, overpowering not only with the sense of itself, but with hints of other things playing hide and seek: a thick circle of yellow onion with salt, a suggestion of vinegar wafting somewhere in the air, olive oil cracking in a frying pan. I am all this, it says, and so much more. So much life to taste, if only you’d allow yourself something this good.

I wouldn’t dream of canning dill pickles without having 3 or 4 good-sized cloves on hand to submerge under the dill strands and the baby cucumbers. There’s something reassuring about seeing those buried white bulbs shining through the bottom of the Mason jar, promising their flavor for the greatest good of everyone, diligent martyrs all. The purpose of garlic is to see the potential of the onion, the tomato, and the dill weed. That idea is the one thing my father gave me that I take unreservedly, without bitterness. I guess when I smell and taste garlic (and to smell garlic is to taste garlic, the water forming in the recesses of your mouth), I see him. My dad.

In 1988, my dad began dialysis treatment. I didn’t fully understand what was happening, and I still don’t understand all the medical terminology, all the wires and tubes and blinking pong monitors that, according to people who went to school for 12 years to understand such things, helped keep my dad alive past that arbitrary expiration date. My mom tried her best to give me the shorthand version. Dialysis involved hooking dad up to a machine three times a week to clean up all the crap in his blood that his failing liver couldn’t deal with. It seemed like something out of a futuristic Kubrick movie. I mean, they have a machine for that? So mom would drive him over to Boise. At the beginning I would tag along sometimes, hoping to score an X-Men comic book or a Mad magazine from the hospital gift shop. The process fascinated me. And you could always tell when he’d been eating garlic the day before. The nurses would laugh and cluck their tongues as they removed his blood, pungent with the thick aroma that had been coursing through his veins. He would always deny it, a little game of his.

I remember looking at that machine with a sense of awe and wonder. Three times a week my dad was laid low—an impossibility, I thought. How could this fearsome icon, the most intimidating presence in my life, submit himself to this ignominy? How could he admit to a weakness? Maybe he wasn’t my dad, after all. Where was the big man, the war hero, the sharpshooter who had killed Koreans and Vietnamese and now only slept in fits and starts as a punishment? Here he was. Here he sat, being waited on by children, mere children next to him, nurses like little girls in dresses scampering around him with their needles and I.V.s.

You owed these girls your life, soldier.

I would watch the blood drain out of him, making its way through the tube, not fully believing it. In about three hours, his blood would be returned to him, clean of toxins. You couldn’t get rid of the garlic smell, though, which was reassuring in a way. It gave me a vague feeling of hope knowing that the dialysis process removed what was bad and left what was good. Garlic was good.

He spent the next six years being hooked up to that machine before his body gave out on him. That’s a long time to fight God. That’s a lot of time to think. I wonder what he thought about. Dying, perhaps? Machine-gun fire in a sweltering, strange jungle? The people that were no longer walking, living, or eating rice because of his accuracy with a gun? Those trophies and medals that mom dug out and put on display in the living room? I wonder if he thought about me and just how fucked up everything got between us.

My mom came back with a band-aid. She had already removed it from the wrapper and I instinctively put my finger out as if I were five years old again. As soon as the bandage was around my cut, she turned sharply toward the stove.

“Oh shoot,” she muttered. “You let the water boil away.”