The Air in the Beans

The dead bean plants came up easier than Soren expected. One pull and the whole brown tangle lifted, dirt raining off the roots in soft clumps, the smell of it rising cold and dark into his face. His grandmother had asked him to clear the bed before the first hard frost. She was three rows over, snapping spent tomato stems, not really watching him.

He shook a plant clean and stopped.

The roots were covered in beads. Little pink-and-grey lumps, swollen, clustered along the thin white threads like someone had threaded beads onto string and tied knots to hold them. He touched one. It was firm. He pinched it, and it broke open, and the inside was the wrong color entirely. Pink. Not pale pink. The pink of the inside of a lip, wet and bright, almost glowing against the dirt.

"Grandma," he said. "The roots are bleeding."

She came over wiping her hands on her jeans. She glanced down, unbothered. "Those are the nodules. Beans always have them. Good year for them, looks like." She turned back to her tomatoes.

"But why are they pink inside?"

"They just are, love. That's the bean doing its bean thing."

That was not an answer and they both knew it. Soren crouched lower, holding the broken nodule up close. The pink stained his thumb faintly, like a berry would. It was a living color. He had cut open enough things to know that nothing in a plant should be that color unless something was working very hard inside it.

He pulled another plant. More nodules. He pulled a row of dead grass from the path beside the bed, shook the roots out. No nodules. Onions from the corner, half-rotted. No nodules. He went back down the line of beans. Every single bean plant wore the beads. Only the beans.

Something was choosing the beans.

He sat back on his heels. The cold had gotten into his knees through the dirt and he didn't move. He was thinking about the smell again, that opened-earth smell, and how air has no smell, and how you can't see air doing anything. Air just sat over the garden, over everything, doing nothing at all. You breathed it in and out and it left you exactly the same.

Except the pink inside the nodule was not doing nothing.

He split open three more, lining the halves on the back of his hand. The brightest pink came from the fattest ones. The grey shriveled ones had no color left. So the color came and went. It was tied to whether the thing was alive and working or finished and dead.

"Grandma. What do beans need that other plants don't get?"

"Beans are easy," she said. "You barely have to feed them. Now the tomatoes, the tomatoes are greedy. You have to give them everything." She held up a fistful of fertilizer pellets from the bag by the fence and scattered them around a tomato stalk. "Beans you can plant in poor dirt and they come up fine. Then the next year whatever you plant after them does better."

Soren looked at the fertilizer bag. Then at the bean roots in his hand. Then at the tomatoes, which got fed from a bag, and the beans, which did not, and somehow improved the dirt for next year instead of using it up.

The beans were getting fed by something. Not from the dirt. Not from a bag.

From the air.

The thought was so strange he said it out loud. "They're eating the air." Plants needed nitrogen, he knew that much, it was the thing in the bag, the thing that made green. And air was almost all nitrogen, his teacher had said that, the air was four-fifths nitrogen, an ocean of it pressing down on everything all the time, and not one plant could touch it. It went in and out of his lungs unchanged. It blew across the whole dead garden and fed nothing.

But the pink things could touch it. Something living inside those beads was reaching up into all that useless air and pulling the nitrogen down out of it and turning it into food. The bean grew the house. The thing in the beads paid the rent in nitrogen pulled from the sky.

He held the broken nodule under his nose. It smelled of dirt and faintly of metal. He could not feel the air being eaten. It happened too small, too quiet, with no smell and no sound, billions of times, under every bean in every garden, under the wild beans, under the clover, all of it slowly stitching the empty air into living things. He was made of this. His own arms, the muscle in them right now holding the root. Muscle was protein and protein was nitrogen and the nitrogen had to have come from somewhere. From food, from plants, from animals that ate plants, and the plants got it from the dirt, and the dirt got it from these pink beads reaching into the sky. The air had become him. Some atom in his thumb had been loose in the wind once, untouchable, and a thing too small to see had reached up and caught it and handed it down the long chain until it arrived, here, as Soren.

And not all of it. He thought of the bag by the fence, the pellets his grandmother threw at the greedy tomatoes. People made that. In factories, with heat and pressure, doing on purpose and enormously what the beads did quietly. His teacher had said it once and he hadn't believed it, had written it in his notebook to check later: that close to half the nitrogen in a person now, in their actual living body, was caught out of the air by machines instead of by bacteria. Half of him from the beads. Half of him from a factory.

He could not tell which half was which. There was no line. The atoms from the machine and the atoms from the pink beads were mixed all through him, indistinguishable, the wild way and the made way woven into the same arm.

Soren held the open nodule in his palm. The pink was already starting to dull as it dried, the color leaving the way it would leave anything that stopped working.

He set it carefully on the soil, pink side up, and pulled the next plant to look again.