“What happened? Where’s Dad?” Mary Ellen had asked when I got back from the barn. I’m her big brother and all I could do was stutter that Vince was with Dad now and stare at her shoes. Had anyone told Mary Ellen what had happened? Had mother? Of course she knew but it pained me that I could not bring out the words. Our relatives and neighbours came, made coffee, consoled mother, phoned our older siblings while Mary Ellen sat by herself playing with her barbie on the sofa. I had to get out. I showed Bob my ten-speed.
“Go easy on the clutch now Mike, easy now,” Dad had coaxed. Though weeks ago, his voice rang clearly now in my head and again I was in the truck as it lurched forward and stalled. The warmth of Dad’s hand on mine as he gently helped me learn how to shift burned in my memory.
And so too did the thought that he’d been lying dead in cow shit while we had piled into the car and gone to church this morning.
I wiped my glasses again on my shirttail and then sifted wet gravel through my fingers as I stared across the empty pit. It was quiet. I was shivering. The days were hot now, but the night was cold. The spring melt was still seeping through the ground and the gravel damp and cold. I rubbed my forehead on Tammy’s back. I rubbed it hard and squeezed her. She squirmed around and licked my face, and I let her. My clothes were covered with Tammy’s blond and red hair. The sun was setting when we scrambled out of the gravel pit and started back to the house. Tammy wanted her supper.
Uncle Roy and Aunt Bette’s station wagon was still in the yard. Deep golden-red clouds seemed to sit on the surface of the dugout. It was still. Two mallards slipped off the shore. They glided silently through the water sending ripples out across the glassy surface. I watched as the clouds disintegrated into ripples. On the other side of the dugout, Uncle Roy was tossing hay bales over the fence for the cows. Bob was among the cows cutting the twines, gathering them up and giving the bales a kick to break them apart. The frogs stopped their refrains as I walked by the dugout. I climbed through the fence and went into the chicken coop to see if anyone gathered the eggs. There were lots. The egg-basket was in the house, so I got an old feedbag from outside and collected them. When I got to the house, Aunt Bette heard me at the door and opened it.
Peter Scotchmer3 years ago
This is a moving and heartfelt evocation of a time of sorrow and dislocation, but with the compensation, however small at the time, of the discovery that life can and must go on despite bereavement, and that the natural world can still surprise us all when we re-establish connection with it, as happens in the final paragraph. What is especially powerful is the vivid use of descriptive detail– the piety of the family’s faith, the devotion of son for his father, the workaday world on a prairie farm, all as seen through a boy’s eyes– to make the story especially memorable. Great stuff!