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Fallen Trees
1
The green
sign announcing the county line had been turned into a target. Slugs dented the
sign above an “a” and again near a “y,” stripping the paint down to gray metal.
The county
line seemed to flip a switch inside me. I gripped the steering wheel tighter
and felt the same kind of dread knotting my stomach as when I was ordered to
the principal’s office for tugging on Mary Lou Pfannenstiel’s pony tail in the
third grade.
I wasn’t going to see the principal
today. I was going home. But the feelings were nearly the same. Almost every
trip brought a cross-examination, as if I had to justify leaving in the first
place. I had built a successful writing career after leaving for college and
life in the big city. A spacious house in a wooded Kansas City subdivision was
testimony to that. But Dad always seemed to find something wrong: he questioned
my career choice when I lived in old houses for years, frugally saving my money
for the home I’d finally had built a few years ago. He challenged my choices
when one relationship after another had failed. He belittled my common sense
when farming tasks he could do in his sleep didn’t come naturally to me.
In the past
several months, the freelance assignments that came my way so easily for years
had slowed to a trickle. If I didn’t find several writing jobs soon, I’d be
forced to sell the house I’d worked so hard to have.
A relationship I hoped would lead to
the altar withered to nothing. I made mental lists of jobs I’d have to accept
that I would never have considered before, just to pay bills – and the
mortgage. Somewhere inside me, I wondered if Dad had been right all along.
Still, when he had called and asked if I could come out to the farm and help
him for a few days, I accepted.
“I’ve got some wood that needs to be
chopped up,” he’d said. “I know you have a fireplace to feed in that monster of
a house, and winter’s on the way.”
One chore always turned into a
half-dozen, and the drudgery of farm work was one of the main reasons I left in
the first place. The offer of free firewood was tempting, because I loved the
warmth and sound of a fire on a winter’s night. But the real reason I agreed to
come to the farm was that I needed to figure out whether I’d be able to revive
my flagging freelance business or it was time to plot a new career course.
Walking through the trees that lined our creek had always been therapeutic for
me – and this was a great time of year to do it.
I drove past a house and a stand of
trees on the right side of the road. The trees grew in clumps and lines out
here, cottonwoods and spruces and pines and elms, massed defensively against
the relentless wind. The leaves had begun to turn, giving the cottonwoods a
golden crown freckled with green. Along both sides of the highway were ripening
milo fields, the plant heads turning from a soft green to a burnt copper.
Harvest was not far off, I could tell.
My tires hit a set of rumble strips,
and I noticed I was closing in on the intersection of Highway 156. Fresh paint
marked a single lane leading up to the stop sign, and I frowned. It used to be
two lanes, and I wondered why they had made the change. Half a mile ahead was
Sanford, a town so small it had been taken off the official state map decades
ago. All that remained was a grain elevator, a railroad line passing through,
four or five houses and a grade school that closed years before I was born. I
thought of those errands to the Sanford Co-op that Dad would send me as a teen.
Typically, he offered no instructions – only sharp words if I somehow didn’t
come back with the right part or the right feed.
“You should have figured it out on your
own,” he’d bark.
I wasn’t going through Sanford,
though. I turned right at the intersection, averting my eyes from the sun
sliding toward the horizon. I pulled the
sun visor down to shield my eyes, drove over a concrete bridge fording a draw
and then crossed a longer bridge spanning the Pawnee River. I found myself
looking for the spot south of the highway where the Pawnee met up with the
Sawmill Creek, the tributary that bisected our farm. When I was young, my
brothers, sister and I spent many a Sunday trying to catch fish in the Sawmill.
Most of the time, we wouldn’t come home with more than a carp or two. By the
time I was a teenager, however, the Sawmill was dry most of the time. Years of irrigation had
sucked the underground aquifer so low that most rivers and creeks in western
Kansas didn’t run at all unless there had been a hard rain.
My tires hit the Atchison, Topeka and
Santa Fe spur line that angles across Highway 156 between Sanford and Rozel.
Tha-thump.
Wait a minute, I thought. That was too
soon.
For decades, the Richten family farm
had been distinguished by cottonwood trees lining both sides of the Sawmill
next to the state highway that paralleled the creek for perhaps a quarter of a
mile. Many had grown at least fifty feet tall and could be seen for miles on
the flat prairie that stretched out around them. They had been my refuge. But
now they were missing.
Then I saw them lying along the banks
of the creek. Branches and roots pointed toward the heavens, as if they were
drowning men grasping desperately at life before disappearing beneath the waves
forever. I nearly drove off the road in surprise, my eyes locked on a sight I
could not comprehend.
Gravel crunched under the tires as I
turned left past the mailbox and onto the driveway. A barking dog greeted my
arrival. That would be Cadet, who had been patrolling the Richten farm for the
past ten years or so. I drove through a row of trees that separated the
homestead from the highway. Rudy Richten had planted the trees the same year he
settled onto the place with Elana Kadlec, the bride he brought home from World
War II. Stretches of the creek had become so heavily wooded over the decades
that I sometimes felt like I had stepped into the Ozarks when I went for a
walk.
But the signature trees of the
Richten farm now lay in haphazard clumps along the edges of a dead creek. The
sight shattered a corner of my heart as if a crystal wineglass had dropped to
the floor. The driveway curled left around the house before ending at the
garage. As soon as I parked, I walked into the back yard to get another look at
what my eyes couldn't believe from the highway. The stumps left behind gave the
impression the Sawmill had grown teeth – molars so large that two grown men
could sit on them and not touch each other.
That was where my firewood was
coming from.
Mom came out of the house and
wrapped me in a big hug. Her hair had turned colors in the autumn of her life,
from the soft blonde captured in the sepia-toned photographs of the post-war
years to a pale gray. But there was still sparkle in her hazel eyes and
strength in the hug she gave me.
"Oh, it's so good to see
you," she said, holding me tight and rising slightly on her heels so she
could rest her head on my shoulder.
She hadn’t really needed to do that,
considering she was five-feet-eight-inches tall, but Mom always did back her
words with enthusiastic body language. I wanted to say something, but the
feeling of being in my mother's arms again felt so good I stayed silent.
A few moments later, I asked,
"What happened to the trees?"
"The state came in and cut them
down," she said as if she were announcing the death of a relative.
"They told us the trees had become a danger after that hard freeze we had
a couple Halloweens ago. It killed a lot of them.”
“I didn’t realize that,” I said. “I
guess when I was here last year I didn’t notice that a lot of those trees
weren’t leafing out the way they used to do.”
“They told us those trees could fall
down on the highway and hit a car, so they came out last month and cut them
down. And then they told us it was up
to us to clear them out, because they were blocking a major drainage
system."
"Our creek is a major drainage
system?" I asked sarcastically.
"So they say," she said
with a shrug.
“The only time it seems to have
water in it any more is when it’s trying to flood,” I replied, the sarcasm
still firmly in place.
I stared out toward the highway, my
mind trying to reconstruct how the creek looked when the trees blotted out the
sky. I kicked at the sand in the yard, my eyes shifting from my feet to the
creek and back like a person wrestling with whether to look at the aftermath of
a violent automobile accident.
"How's Dad taking it?"
"What could we do? We didn't
have a choice."
She looked out at an empty
semi-trailer truck rolling past, lurching with a metallic clank as it crossed
the railroad tracks.
"It sure looks different,
doesn't it?" she admitted.
"It feels different."
"I hope that, as long as we're
here, it still feels like home," she said.
“Of course,” I said quickly.
"Where's Dad?"
"Out in the field baling. He
wants to get the hay up before it rains.”
I looked to the south, between the
brick equipment shed and the old livestock barn west of the house. Trees lining
the creek blocked the view, but I knew Dad was out there somewhere.
"How's the hay doing this
year?"
"It was so dry this winter our
first cutting was a month late, but the last two have been pretty good, and
this could be our best one yet - if rain doesn't spoil it. Have you eaten? I've
got supper in the oven."
"Good thing I didn't eat much
on the drive home. When will Dad come in?”
"When he's done, or done in, I
guess. You know him."
I smiled knowingly. Dad was stern
and stoic as we were growing up, and time hadn't mellowed him much.
"Oh, he's getting better about
coming in at a decent hour,” Mom said, picking up on the tone in my laugh. “If
it weren't for the hay, he'd have already called it a day."
The setting sun painted the western
sky pink as it neared the horizon. I walked over to my pickup, opened the
passenger door and pulled my suitcase and garment bag from the bench seat in
the extended cab.
"Am I staying in my old room?
Or do you have a major project going on in there?"
"No, it's all yours. I even put
an extra blanket at the foot of the bed in case you need it."
I made my way through the front
door, across the foyer and toward the wooden staircase Dad built by hand. The
place hadn’t changed in decades, it seemed. There was that photo of Mom, taken
back in the ‘50s, her face alight with laughter. Something in the picture
caught my eye and made me stop. That photo had been there so long we barely
noticed it most of the time. But this time, in the distance behind Mom, I
noticed the trees. They weren’t very tall then. Like Mom and Dad, they were
young and strong and full of potential. I studied each tree as if it were a
young relative whose face I was trying to recognize.
Mom walked in from the kitchen and
saw me looking at her photo.
“I was young and pretty once, wasn’t
I?” she said, a lilt in her voice as she smiled.
“You’re still pretty,” I said. “Time
hasn’t changed that.”
Her face glowed at the compliment.
“I was noticing the trees in the
background, too,” I said.
Mom came over and looked at the
picture with me.
“We were so much younger then,
weren’t we?” she asked. “I wonder how much longer it’ll be before they cut us
down and dump us in the ground?”
Her directness caught me off guard.
“Hopefully, not for quite a while
yet,” I said, turning to head up the stairs.
I glanced back and saw Mom studying the
picture. I took a left at the top of the stairs and headed toward the bedroom
at the end of the hallway. My bedroom. A rush of cool air greeted me when I
opened the door, courtesy of an air conditioner grumbling from the window. It
sounded like a bearing was going out somewhere, but it sounded like that when I
was a kid, too. I shut it off, pausing to look out the window at the garden on
the other side of the driveway. Pale yellow stalks of sweet corn stood weary
sentry over a patch of ground that had fed our family since before I was
born. Somewhere in there, I suspected,
lay pumpkins and squash and late-arriving tomatoes. The garden had always been
Mom’s personal piece of magic: she could go out there and come back with
something good to eat no matter what time of year it was.
The bed I slept on as a teenager was
freshly made, with two pillows tucked carefully under the covers. I opened the
sliding door in the wall and hung my garment bag on the wooden pole that served
as a clothes rack. I ducked my head as I did it, because the upstairs had once
been the attic and the walls sloped sharply toward the top of the roof.
Handmade wooden drawers were one sliding door over. I wiped away dust thick
enough to write my name and unpacked my suitcase.
"Supper!"
When I got down to the dinner table,
I saw there were only two place settings. Dad was obviously still in the field.
I washed, combed my hair and checked to make sure my shirt was tucked in -
echoes of the table rules we had all been raised with. After Mom and I prayed,
we ate for a few minutes in silence. That made it easy to hear the rumble of an
approaching tractor.
"There he is," Mom said,
jumping up to set a place for him.
I could feel a flinch of trepidation
within me as the tractor came closer. I wondered what kind of mood he would be
in. I was already finished eating when he made it to the table.
He changed a room just by walking
into it. He stood 6-foot-5 and had a voice that could strip hide when he raised
it. Every Veterans Day he put on his old Lieutenant's uniform, polished the
shoes and the brass until they gleamed and marched in Larned's annual parade
with his head held high.
"Get it finished?" I asked
as he sat at his customary spot at the head of the table.
"No, but I will tomorrow,"
he said, adding "after Mass" when Mom gave him a look.
"I thought we could go visit
the grave tomorrow," Mom interjected.
Randy, my younger brother, was
killed in a car wreck seven weeks after graduating from high school. He was the
baby of the family, born less than two years after I was. He grew up with a
knack for things mechanical, had a way of getting things to grow, and loved to
make things out of nothing. In other words, he was a natural farmer.
In retrospect, I realized, my
biggest flaw was simply that I wasn't Randy. But I didn't want to be like
Randy. I wanted to write, to challenge my mind, to explore the world. I saw the
farm as a massive chain that kept me from being who I wanted to be. Randy saw the
farm as a garden for the world, and he would be its caretaker when his time
came.
"Are you sure the rain's going
to hold off long enough?" I asked.
"We'll see," he said.
"I can't believe what happened
to the trees," I told him.
"That's where your wood's
coming from,” he said as he chewed a bite of baked steak.
"So I gathered. But do you have
a chainsaw stout enough to handle trees of that size?”
"Oh, we'll figure something
out. I need to get that wood out of the channel, and I knew you needed firewood
for that big house of yours.”
"How long is it going to
take?"
"How long do you have?” he
asked with a gleam in his eye. “Unless you stay here until spring, we won’t get
it finished before you leave.”
“How long are you staying?” Mom asked hopefully, sitting across from me.
"Until I fill up the back of my
pickup, I guess," I said with a laugh.
"That's fair enough," Mom
said quickly, looking at Dad as she said it.
Dad was chewing, his face betraying
little. His eyes refused to look at me, and I realized he had hoped for more.
“Actually, I’ll probably be here for
about a week,” I said. “That should help at least a little.”
“Good,” Dad said. “I could use the
hand.”
I helped clear the table after Dad
finished eating. Cadet barked in the darkness, and I wondered if coyotes were
prowling around the creek. I walked into the living room, where Dad was settled
into his recliner, reading a magazine. I found a stack of the local weekly
newspapers and began browsing through them to get a sense of what had been
happening in the area recently.
Without looking up, I asked Dad, “So
how’s the hay?”
“Won’t know ‘til we get it up,” he
said. “Sure wish that rain wasn’t in the forecast just now.”
“Will it be enough rain to really mess
up the cutting?”
“Could be.”
“Figures. Never seems to rain when
you want it to, and always seems to rain when you don’t want it to.”
We settled back into silence, and my
eyelids grew heavy. Glancing at my watch, I realized it was later than I thought.
The news was about to come on, but I didn’t feel like waiting up for it.
“I’m calling it a night,” I said,
walking past Dad’s chair and tapping the arm rest. “’Night.”
“Night,” he said without looking up.
I saw Mom puttering in the kitchen,
so I poked my head in there.
“I’m off to bed. Wake me about
7."
"Are you going to want
breakfast before we leave? I made cinnamon rolls..."
“Then my answer is ‘yes,’” I told
her.
The metallic taste of the farm's
mineral-laden well water assaulted my tongue as I brushed my teeth. When I was
young, I thought it was the best-tasting water in the world. Now it just tasted
"old." Returning to the bedroom, I turned out the light and crawled
into bed. I thought about all those nights I stared at the same ceiling while I
was growing up, wondering what life had in store for me.
The next sound I heard was someone
thumping the ceiling of the kitchen below me with a broom handle. It was Sunday
morning. Time to get up.
I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading. Again, if you'd like to purchase the book, you can order it here.
