Aspirations IV

Yet another apprentice story, also eventually published in that littlest of "little" magazines The Archer. Another early example of my writing, as a rank beginner, about the things I knew.

REBIRTH

Everywhere there was dust. It hung in the air like gray fog, under a hot sun that was like a gray plate in the sky. Ma could not hang her wash outside on the line stretched between the trees on our lawn because of the dust raised by cars passing by on the gravel road. The trees all along the road were gray, and the corn was dry and brittle in the field in front of the house and the grass in the cow pasture below the barn was brown. There were growing cracks in the ground. Standing on the porch, looking out over our fields and pasture to the height of land a quarter mile away, what you saw was a landscape like in a black-and-white movie. Pa and I looked out from the porch every day. Dinner eaten, we would step onto the porch and see the land dying before our eyes, every day a little more.

Today was even hotter than usual, and windy, the air filled with dust. A car roared by and the heavy cloud swirling up behind it caught the wind and raced across the fields. It seemed the world was ending.

"Two months," Pa said. "Almost two months without a sprinkle."

We stood on the porch, hating the wind and the dust and the heat.

"We’ll have to buy hay this winter," he told me. "Our second-crop alfalfa is burned up."

"Two whole months," I said. "Jeese."

"Aren’t you going to Martinsville this afternoon?" Ma called from the kitchen.

"Yeah, I suppose so," Pa answered.

"Well, get two loaves of white bread, and—oh, I might as well write it down. You’ll forget."

She came out on the porch with a slip of paper. She handed it to Pa, and he stuck it inside his shirt pocket. He turned to me. His voice was low and toneless.

"Get the mower hitched up and cut the alfalfa on the flat. Cut it close. Try to get some hay out of it."

I nodded.

Pa walked across the brown and dying lawn, got into our almost-new, ‘49 Chev, and drove out of the yard and down the road, dust rising and sweeping away across the fields.

I walked across the yard to the machine shed, hating the wind that pushed against me and tore at my eardrums. I ground my teeth and felt the tiny hard particles in my mouth.

Inside there was shelter from the wind, but it buffeted the walls and caused the sliding door to bang in a steady rhythm. I greased the mower. Finished, I drove the tractor around from the other shed and hitched the mower to the drawbar. Then I eased the tractor and mower slowly outside and around to our bulk gas tank, where I filled the tractor and checked the oil and water. When I walked to the barn for a pair of pliers, I noticed the wind had subsided. The cows were in the yard, as they had been all day for many days now, lying there and staring patiently out at the brown pasture, not eating, looking gaunt and tired, their udders small and shriveled. No milk again tonight, I thought.

I took a long drink at the pump house, swishing the water around in my mouth till it grew warm, then spitting it out and taking another, this time gulping it down. The metal seat was hard and gritty as I put the tractor in road gear, opened the throttle, and drove fast out of the yard. The dust rose all around me, and I stood up, squinting through the haze.

Where the height of land leveled off, I turned into the hayfield. It lay on the flat top of the height of land, along the eastern edge of our farm.

The wind had almost died. The sun went behind clouds, but there was no relief from the heat. Sweating, I lowered the sickle blade and checked it. The sky took on a yellowish tinge. The earth seemed to hold its breath.

For almost an hour I cut alfalfa. The tractor hummed monotonously, the mower’s sickle blade clacked back and forth, and I went round and round the field, each circle smaller than the last. Suddenly the blade hit something and jammed. I stopped the tractor, backed up a little, then stepped down to clear the bar. I had run into a tuft of dirt jutting up too far for the bar to clear it, and one of the sickle blades was bent, a rivet snapped. I went to the tool box on the drawbar for a hammer and chisel, and I was pounding and swearing quietly, trying to snap the remaining rivet so I could remove the damaged blade and replace it, when I looked up and saw what was coming.

It was a huge black thunderhead, roiling in from the southwest. A wild excitement took hold of me.

That cloud could hold a tornado, I knew, but I laughed and heaved the mower blade into the raised position and secured it. Then I jumped up to the tractor seat and looked back and saw that the church steeple in Martinsville, three miles away, was blotted out. The storm was sweeping toward me, a driving column moving fast. You saw a stand of trees with that dark column approaching from behind, then the trees disappeared and the thing was coming—a wall as high as the sky.

I drove out of the field in road gear, standing to keep from bouncing off the seat. On the road I kept weaving the tractor back and forth, from one shoulder to the other. I yelled and laughed at the same time. There was a delightful thickening in my throat and I could not keep still. I kept looking back at the oncoming darkness, glancing at the road in snatches, watching the column pursue me with a crazy, almost unbearable tightness. It looked as though it would strike before I reached home.

I was turning into the driveway when it hit. There was a rush of cold, damp wind, then sudden, blinding rain. Sudden, blinding, beautiful rain.

I skidded around to the left and burst inside the shed, almost going through the wall and out the other side. I switched the engine off and started for the house, yelling and laughing. When I reached the porch my clothes were heavy and clinging. Still laughing crazily, I pulled off my shoes, then ran back into the rain. The first sudden rush had ceased, and now there remained a steady downpour. I held my face to the sky, feeling the sting and laughing.

Pa drove into the yard, grinning through the side window of the car. He stopped before the house and got out and in a moment was soaked. He came up on the lawn, still grinning. He walked across the lawn, stopping often to gaze out over the fields, keeping that grin on his face. I could hear Ma yelling at us to come in before we caught cold. Then I heard her laugh and she came out and joined us.

We stood there in the rain a long time. It stopped, finally, and everything seemed to come to life. The lawn turned green before our eyes. The sparrows in the trees back of the house were chattering in a shrill volume.

"You can forget about cutting the rest of that hay for a couple days," Pa told me.

"Yuh," I said, smiling. I could not stop smiling.

"We’ll get some hay yet, Missus Miller." He grinned again and gave Ma a pinch.

"Feeling your oats already, huh?" Ma said.

"You bet." Pa laughed and pinched her again. He turned to me.

"C'mon, Carl. Let’s get those chores done early for a change." Then, to Ma again, "We’re going out tonight, Missus Miller."

"Where?"

"I donno. Out to eat, to a show maybe. Just be ready when I come up from the milking." He motioned to me and we started down toward the barn.

That night it rained once more. The folks went out and I stayed home, allowing them, without realizing it then, that time together. I fixed my own supper, then went to bed early and lay awake, the covers pulled up to my chin, listening to the drops of rain hit the roof and roll down the incline to splatter softly on the ground beside the house. I’d forgotten how nice that sounded. I guess it put me to sleep finally.

1955