Barn Lament

Now in the hot skies that beat against the coulter blades, he began heading almost unconsciously toward the barn. In his wake, fell stalks and husks, but the green Deere heaved on. It overtook the waterways, swiped across the sown wheat and deepened the ruts in the set asides, lumbering forward. In its path thousands of cornstalks covered the ground. It was once the work of fifty men to bring in the crops while his mother served up hearty meals of chicken and dumplings sopped up with loaves of coarse homemade bread.

She would have wrung the chickens’ necks earlier in the day and put the stewing hens in a large cast iron pot over a roiling fire. Last she would put in the root vegetables from the cold cellar. The food was served high and plentiful on teeming plates. When eating, the men would smack their lips between servings, wiping them with one sleeve. The hearty repast was the reward for the work of a day’s hard labor. And the community of farmhands was grateful intent on standing up for each other, pitching in because it was god’s work to share the fruits of one’s labor. The natural order of things was to come together to raise barns, bring in the crops and birth livestock. Those days were left deep in the past.

As he headed down the narrow pathways, he caught sight of the barn. It was hidden. Yet, with one sweep of the combine, a stand of corn fell like toy soldiers. Through the clouds of dust, the barn reappeared as it did each October propped against an azure sky. The fields stretched out with quiet reassurance. The promise of another year’s crop with its life giving sustenance had fulfilled his family’s needs for more than a century. The rows of green pushed upward, drawing and renewing strength year after year from the sun, soil and rain. The land and the hands that tended it were as one, inextricably joined together in hope and often in despair.

He caught sight of the tin roof glinting in the sun. He heard the refrain of swallows in the rafters, and the frantic scurry of mice and yet, his gaze steadied on the bullet holes. All along the south end of the barn, bullets scoured the surface. He meant to have them repaired. The impact of those bullets had pierced the metal with such velocity that now the dents were encircled in a wreath of prongs.

These were the familiar “fence-post” targets of his youth. The memory stung like the spray of gunfire that once glazed the brow of his left eye. When the bullet struck from the misfire of his own dad’s rifle, he’d been so blinded that he ran dead straight right into the side of the barn.He gave way to the unrelenting pain and the prospect of losing sight. He felt the unfairness, the profound loss and even unrelenting anger toward his own dad. It was a misfire of love and hope. It was a loss of faith and trust. It was the day everything changed.

Looking vainly for that very spot, he noticed the side of the barn hollowed from last spring’s twister. The tornado ripped across the farm threatening to destroy everything in its path, its furling column tearing through the crops in a chaotic spiral. But suddenly its force dissipated trailing off as quickly as it came. And the community was spared a devastating outcome. Another year of survival. The prospect of bad weather threatened all their existences, their lives inextricably woven together. It was the force of nature that could upend their lives in a single breath.

There was no longer any sign where he, as a 15 year old boy, hit the barn, and where his father ran frantically to find his son nearly unconscious. His father had lain beside him listless, devastated at the prospect that he caused injury to his only son. He could see the wound had torn through his child’s skull, recasting his child-like brow into a cragged ridge leaving his eye half-shut. He heard his own wife tell a neighbor, “He got the boy shot right out of him.”

Now clearing the hedgerows, he saw the barn door wide open with one rotted board torn off. He thrust himself out of the cab, jumping to the ground. His great bowed limbs strode toward the door. Shoving the rusted latch aside, he shielded his eyes from the streaks of filtering sunlight. He breathed in a deep breath of the musky fumes from the drying corn. For a moment, he felt his father’s shoulder guiding his on the husking wheel, while his mother’s quick hand broke the corn away with the peg. They worked in unison, a chorus of small movements designed to share the burden. The memory fell over him, a blanket of warmth.

When he could no longer stand the rush of memories and mournful sounds: the creaking of the floor boards, the relentless rasping of the hinges, and the banter of birds in the weathered beams, he sobbed cradling his head between both hands, sinking in the mattress of hay beneath him. His body yielded, his one good eye trying to source the light that once sheathed his dreams as a young boy. But the clouds of musty fumes and filmy dust forced both eyelids to close as he writhed in agony recalling that in this very space his father shot himself, no longer able to abide the guilt of having blinded his own child. Others said it was the moonshine from his own still or maybe his own outsized anger, but everyone understood it was the loss of innocence, two men, both a force of their own nature trying to come to grips with a tortured moment. And he laid there for several hours trying to heal his very soul while keeping his father’s memory alive in a place that felt too much like home.