A Farmer’s Goodbye
By Ron Smith
Smashwords edition
Copyright 2011 Ron Smith
Discover other titles by Ron Smith at Smashwords.com
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The old farmer rose from his bed, his bones reminding him of his age, in case he’d forgotten during his fitful sleep. He was tempted to put on his overalls from the day before. They were the closest thing to a clean pair that he had, though he had dirtied them a little when he patched a board on the hay barn. His wife had always done the wash, and he’d never bothered to learn how to use the machine. It wasn’t worth the trouble now. He settled on the trousers and dress shirt that he usually only wore to church and to the nursing home. He needed to look halfway respectable that day.
After getting dressed, he limped downstairs, his old knees creaking with each step. As he shuffled into the kitchen, he looked out of habit the empty table, hungering for the hot breakfast that should have been waiting for him. He would have gladly settled for just a few greasy strips of bacon and black coffee.
He had cooked bacon one morning when his wife first went into the hospital, but he didn’t care much for cleaning the skillet afterwards. It still sat in the sink, coated in congealed grease. This morning, he would again make do with a bowl of corn flakes and milk.
Before he sat down to eat, the old man opened the back door to see if the dog was around. He had never much liked the animal. It had shown up one day when it was little more than a puppy and decided to stay without invitation. The farmer had once thought about shooting the hound, but his wife wouldn’t have it. She had named it Blue early on, on the suspicion that it had a little blue tick blood in it. Now, after 12 years of having the damn mutt around, the old man had grown soft. He started letting the dog in the house because he wanted company during breakfast. Blue had taken to the new custom quickly and now waited patiently by the door, his old tail wagging. “C’mon in, you mangy SOB,” the farmer said. “Maybe you’ll get lucky and gets some milk this morning.”
He grabbed the previous morning’s breakfast bowl from the sink and poured in some milk. “You don’t mind if the bowl’s a little messy, do you, Blue?” It was the first time the old man had ever called the dog by its name. The dog noticed, but the man didn’t. The old man set the bowl down in front of his dog and watched him noisily lap up the milk while furiously wagging his tail.
The farmer missed his wife’s cooking, and he could learn to cook well enough to get by if it came to that. But he didn’t want to. It wasn’t right that he had to go it alone. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way.
He had never much said nice things to her. It wasn’t his way, or hers either. What he missed more was how she filled the space. At the breakfast table. Busying herself with the cleaning. Reciting what she planned to cook for dinner. And what she intended to plant that spring in the flowerbeds on the south side of the house.
She knew he would be lost without her. Had always known it. “I hope you go first,” she would tease him, “You don’t know how to do anything without me.” She was right. They had no children, so he had always run the farm by himself. Until his knees had gotten worse, he could take a tractor apart and put it back together with no one’s help. He could shoo a herd of cattle from one pasture to another single-handedly. And he could plant a corn crop as fast as any two men. But his wife was really the one in charge. She knew when to sell the steers and when to wait. She knew which year was best to plant more soybeans and which was best to stick with corn. She was his friend and his boss.
The dog now waited patiently by the empty bowl, using his sad eyes to plead for more milk. “Maybe later,” the farmer said. “Let’s go out to the field and see how the corn’s getting along this morning.”
Man and dog were well away from the house when the farmer remembered his cap. His wife always worried that the unrelenting sun would toast his bald head and make him sick, but she wasn’t there to fret about it this time. “Can you keep a secret, Blue?” he asked. The dog wagged his tail even harder. They both continued in the direction of the cornfield.
Fifty-three straight springs he had looked out over this same field, watching and coaxing the tiny seeds to push their way through the black soil. That many years? He couldn’t believe it had passed so fast. It had been a good life for the most part. Pretty much the same from one year to the next, the rhythm of the seasons interrupted only occasionally by too much rain or too little. He had never given much thought to things changing. They were just supposed to stay the same until he and his wife were gone.
Gone, but not separated. As much as he had ever thought about the future, that was what he expected. Not one gone and then the other, but gone together somehow. Not by one suffering alone in a nursing home, while the other carried on at home.
He now surveyed the black field that was accented to the horizon by curving rows of sprouting corn. The crop was still very young, but he knew it would do okay. Someone would have a pretty good harvest when fall came.
The hound dog busily sniffed hoof prints in the dirt beside the first row of corn. A deer had passed through an hour or two before, just before dawn, waiting as anxiously for the corn to grow as did the farmer. “The deer won’t get it all,” he assured the dog.
The old man next headed in the direction of the cow pasture. He tried to quicken his pace as best he could. He still had a lot to do. About half the cattle had already given birth to their spring calves. All were enjoying the coolness of morning as they chewed on fresh grass. In about a month, they would have to be moved to the other pasture so this one would have a chance to recover. He counted the stock twice. They were all there: 14 Angus cows and eight calves. It didn’t appear that any of the six remaining pregnant cows would give birth for at least a few weeks. He would make sure to note that on the list.
On the way back to the house, walking down the lane between the cow pasture and the hay field, Blue began barking at something in the weeds. “Leave her alone, Blue,” the farmer growled. Amid the weeds, a mother killdeer had created a nest where she sat on three gray speckled eggs. Each morning, when the old man walked by, the bird gave warning not to come close. Blue knew she was there and liked to pester her.
“Don’t worry, girl,” he said as he walked past the nest. “It’s just us and we ain’t going near your eggs.” Satisfied that he had bothered the bird enough, Blue fell in behind his friend. “If you could’ve rustled up pheasant like you do that killdeer,” the man teased his dog, “we would’ve had some good eating all these winters.”
The farmer and his wife had walked down this same lane together more times than he could imagine. He never tired of showing her the crops just as they were starting to poke through the ground. Even when they had been married 50 years, he was proud to show off his farming skills. She would always smile; poke him in the ribs and say, “you’re the best farmer I’ve ever been married to.”
How many times had he told her that he loved her anyway? Maybe just a handful, he figured, but that was enough. They didn’t believe in saying “I love you’s” every other breath like some people did. He always felt that when you said it only once in awhile, it meant more somehow.
When he returned to the house, the old man sat down at the old oak desk in the living room. The surface was covered with various records of past harvests, calculations on the price of feed, tax figures, and he wasn’t sure what else. His wife had always handled all the paperwork. He found two clean pieces of paper and cleared a spot so that he could write. On one paper, he scrawled a list of details about the farm: when the corn had been planted, when to expect the rest of the cows to deliver their calves, the name and phone number of the veterinarian he preferred, where to find Blue’s dog food, and so on. He then dug in a drawer of the desk and pulled out an old life insurance policy he had bought twenty or thirty years earlier. Next, he located the passbook for his savings account. He placed both with the list.
On the second piece of paper, the old farmer began to write a note to his wife. He quickly realized it was unnecessary. She would understand, he said to himself. She had always been right—he needed to go first. She was the strong one. He wadded up the paper and threw it away.
The old man went to the back porch and filled Blue’s water and food bowls and set them outside in the shade next to the back door. Next, he retrieved his old hunting rifle from its vinyl case on a shelf in the dining room. After loading the gun with one shell, he walked out the back door where Blue was waiting for him. The dog looked at the gun as if trying to remember what it meant. “If you’d been worth a darn as a hound dog,” the old man said, “I might have gotten this out a sight more often.”
With Blue close behind, wagging his tail as always, the farmer went around the side of the house to the front yard. He sat in one of two old metal lawn chairs situated in the shade of a large weeping willow. Blue circled the chair three times, and then plopped down in the soft grass beside the man. The dog seemed to know that he had time to take a nap.
This was the old man’s favorite spot. It was hers, too. On summer evenings, too many to count, they sat under the cool canopy of the tree and enjoyed the stillness. Occasionally, a car or pickup raced by, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust. If they recognized the vehicle, they waved. Otherwise, they soaked in the quiet.
The old man would miss those evenings. She would miss them, too. But she would understand. “He didn’t know how to do anything without me,” she would say.
The mail truck would come by soon. He wouldn’t be out there long.