New Fiction
This week’s guest contributor offers us a short story about a summer storm and a disappearance.
A Visit Home
by Bruce Pickens
When I was growing up, my father was the strongest person I knew. People used to say his grip felt like it could crush rocks, but we knew the heart that guided those hands was as gentle as a light snow. He had four sons—I was the second—and it was this heart that molded us, taught us who we should be. Once, when I was a small child and some hunters stopped to ask if they could hunt pheasants on one of our pastures, my father politely said No. After they left, he looked at me and said, “Every animal has the same right to be alive as we do.” He believed in raising animals to feed the world, but he did not believe in killing animals for sport.
It’s been 48 years since I last visited the old farmstead, and now, I sit on top of the hill where our farmhouse once stood. I look west over the land that used to be our backyard—it stretches for miles and looks like a quilt patched together with fence posts and barbed wire. Some sections are rolling hills colored prairie grass green; cattle and horses graze on these hills. Other sections are deep brown where the soil has been turned in preparation for the winter wheat that will be planted in the fall. The remaining land is covered with golden wheat, ready for harvest. It sways in the breeze, each stalk doing a synchronized dance with the wheat around it. Eight miles away, looking like a small sugar cube dropped on the quilt, sits the farmhouse that was our closest neighbor when this place was our home. I look out over the land and see the beauty of it, and I also remember how it destroyed a proud man.
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It was 1973 and I was 16 years old. Our family stood on the back deck of our house and looked west. The sky was dark, except for the approaching storm. We watched as lightning flashed from one end of a cloud to the other. Massive thunderheads rose high into the night, and even though we knew it was a precursor to destruction, it was a beautiful sight.
Every farmer knows the calm before the storm—when the wind stops blowing—when the night smells of ozone and the temperature drops to freezing. That night we shivered as lightning flashed through the clouds and struck the earth. The wheat fields erupted into huge balls of fire that spread in every direction. The clouds were alive with flashes of lightning and the crops danced with flames. Then, as suddenly as the fires started, hail fell from the clouds; it doused the fire and beat the wheat into the ground. Wheat that was a week away from being ready to harvest.
The next morning we drove to the fields. It looked like a large mortar and pestle had been taken to the crops, crushing the wheat and grain into the soil. It was our third year of being hailed out, our third year of not having an income.
A month later, my parents were called to the bank, and soon after, the land was repossessed. But it wasn’t until the farm auction that the finality of this life became clear.
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Our family stood by the trucks, tractors, and farm equipment that were lined up neatly in the field behind our house. Farmers wearing worn jeans and greasy baseball caps came from miles around. They gathered in bunches and milled around the machinery, deciding which ones they would bid on. The farmers who knew my father well came and spoke to him and wished him the best; the rest gave him a quick glance and moved on. There was a nervousness in the crowd; everyone knew this could be their future.
The auctioneer walked to the first implement and started the bid. “Who’ll give me 300, 300 dollars?” he shouted, and someone raised their hand. I stood by my dad and looked past the auctioneer at the grasslands, at the plowed fields I’d woken up to every morning. What had once felt like a safe home was now a stranger’s land. I turned back toward my dad just as the auctioneer pointed to the highest bidder and said, “Sold to—.” A small grimace crossed the stoic face my father had put on for the day.
For the rest of the morning, every time the auctioneer pointed his finger, it became a magic wand. “Sold to,” he said, and another piece of our equipment disappeared. “Sold to,” he said, and another piece of my father disappeared, too.
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Bruce Pickens grew up on a farm and ranch in Eastern Colorado and lives in Denver with his wife. He dreams of the day when he can again visit his daughter in New Zealand.