The Redemption

By: Rick Beck

Editor: Gardner Rust

            Robert Sorenson has aged, finding joy on the land he farmed.  It wasn’t the life he’d planned but it was the life he learned to love.  There is one last obstacle and Robert faces it when he asks his son to come home after a twenty-five years estrangement.  Once the son is home, he comes to understand his father in a way he never did as a boy.  In the end the son sees to it that his father is reunited with his greatest love, Sven, after dealing with the fact that love wasn’t his mother.   

The Redemption

Chapter 1

Is Home Still Home?

We sat on the runway with the engines roaring until there was a hole in the fog. The pilot quickly launched us up through the breach. At first, the plane’s climb seemed steeper than typical of takeoffs; the super structure responded with rattles and shivers from the full thrust of the engines.

Once the turn was complete to take us east across country, we leveled off and I was on my way home as the flight attendants happily hawked nuts and drinks for  passengers with cast iron stomachs.

I had no fear of flying, but I was ill at ease at the idea of going back home. There hadn’t been enough time to devote any time to thinking of a way to make a quiet entrance and quick getaway. Certainly there would be little to say after all these years.  

 The flight into Chicago was uneventful. There was a summer thunderstorm that kept us from landing for an extra fifteen minutes. I had two hours before the puddle jumper took me into Des Moines. I’d taken enough commuter flights to know it would leave late and arrive late. Having a few more minutes to circle O’Hare wasn’t important. The red eye flight I was on assured a quiet terminal once we landed.

I stopped for a sandwich in the airport and blew ten bucks when I decided to have it with a soda. They didn’t make airport food like that in many other places and the world was better off for it. I’d had supper with friends before they took me to the airport and the sandwich assured I’d not be starving once we hit the ground in Des Moines at dawn.

I felt the clouds closing in on me even with the relatively clear morning sky. We’d flown low enough to pick corn on our final approach to Des Moines. The only corn I’d eaten in years came from a can or a pouch by careful planning. I was back in corn country, ho, ho, ho.

There had been a shower and the runway asphalt shined as the morning sun started to peek above the horizon as we taxied to the terminal.  The car rental place was about a hundred feet from where I deplaned carrying my only bag. 

I signed my name and showed them my line of credit, deciding on American Express Platinum Card. I’d write it off as a business expense. It was little consolation for the inconvenient trip that took me away from work, but this was enough like work to qualify as business.

When I left the counter, my car was already on the way to the door when I stepped outside into the already warm day. I watched the car leaving the parking lot. It was a middle-size green sedan.

The radio blared some music I couldn’t place as the delivery man tested the brakes. A freckle-faced Iowa boy jumped out, holding the door for me to get in. He didn't look old enough to drive and reminded me of a dozen boys I grew up with.

I handed him a five dollar bill from my good service tip pocket, always rewarding promptness and rewarding him as the expeditor that saw me from plane stairs to car seat in less than ten minutes. It was hopefully a harbinger of things to come. 

He smiled even larger at good old honest Abe.

“Have a nice day,” he said, waving as I drove toward the sign that led me from the airport. I stopped before turning into traffic, opened the Iowa map in my kit, and located the route home about three quarters of an inch from the spot on the map marked ‘you are here.’ One right turn and I’d be closing in on my childhood home.

            The route I took out of Des Moines was at first full of traffic but in short order the cars were gone and I was alone on the secondary road, except for the occasional truck that whizzed past going toward town. I rolled down my window to get some fresh air.

            The road took me east. This section of Iowa was level and the roads were straight. I turned off the state road and onto the smaller road that would take me through our town. The fields surrounded me and now moved even closer to the road. It was the heart of corn country.

Once the window was down I noticed the smell hadn’t changed in all the years I'd been gone. How could I recognize a smell after so long? The sweet aroma of corn rose above the smell of rich Iowa soil.

The sign NODAWAY told me I was close to home and going in the right direction. That’s when I first recognized familiar terrain. I made one turn onto the road that would carry me through the middle of our town. This was like stepping back in time. Little had changed. The full fields of corn towered above the road, blocking the view of everything beyond. Even the sun hadn’t gotten high enough to cut into the shaded road. 

In no time at all the town appeared, approaching fast in the distance. Little had changed here, either. This was the town of my youth. I slowed to a crawl, recognizing landmarks as the town rose up.

There was Crosby’s Feed and Grain, now Crosby’s Implements. The glass and brick showroom was new to me and the silos I remembered being behind it were gone. No more feed and grain, I wondered?

I eased across the railroad tracks and let the car crawl past the buildings that I recognized. No one had painted in ages and as many places were boarded up as weren’t. My journalistic reflex recalled the destitution in stories about tiny towns everywhere. It was the age of multiplex and megamalls.

Stories about small failing towns were one thing; seeing my own town gave them another meaning. I’d never equated those stories to being about where I was from. I felt sadness over discovering they were. It was another reason to dislike the idea of returning home.

It was a surreal glance back into my own past. The town seemed smaller, almost deserted. I was in front of the General Store & Mercantile before I recognized the structure and the single gas pump where my father once filled his pickup truck each Saturday morning. It was a well-rusted and faded red. There was no hose to pump the gas and the meter inside the cracked glass was forever frozen at 9.99 without registering any gallons.

The screen door hung on one hinge, moving forward a foot and then back in the morning breeze. The chairs where the men sat Saturday mornings to chat were gone. There was no one there to speak of what had happened here.

            I hesitated there for a moment to reflect on coming and going from the store that furnished everything we needed, getting anything we wanted if it wasn’t in stock. It was the only game in town. All the farmers had accounts there and charged everything when there was no money, paying off after the harvest. Everyone knew everyone’s first name, even the kids from each new generation.

Now it stood mute, having lost its memory and looking its age. The only thing missing was tumbleweed and gusts of wind blowing dirt and dust up around me. I hadn’t planned on stopping or even slowing down, but something had happened here and I couldn’t be sure what. 

Turning on the only street that crossed through the town, I drove to the school. It was no longer the largest building I knew. It was old and abandoned. The panes of glass were all broken. The final swing, held by one rusted chain, moved back and forth disregarding no one was left to swing. There were big crevices carved into the dirt below where each of five swings once hung at the ready. The monkey bars had fallen or been pushed on its side. It too was rusted with gapping space where once kids climbed in the morning before the school bell rang.

I almost passed the lane, stopping to back up without much caution needed. I’d passed two cars on the state route, but none since I made the stop in town. Most of the fields had been planted and were well on the way to harvest time, but not my father’s field. The gray soil stood fallow; not an ear of corn was growing, even though the sweet smell of corn filled the air.

Turning onto the lane that would carry me the final half mile to the driveway, I saw the house for the first time before parking across from the driveway I’d walked away from years before. I wasn’t ready to face my father yet. I didn’t know what to say or how to keep it brief so I could get back to my life.

Sitting there, memories of sights and sounds out of my past overwhelmed me in a way I wasn’t expecting. It would take a few minutes to get back to my easy in easy out plans. I waited for the past to settle back into the convenient slot where I’d kept it all these years.

I was a journalist who reported on events with cool objectivity. This homecoming wasn’t an event I could report upon with my usual coolness. In some ways it was disappointing that I couldn’t come home and then leave without it becoming a sentimental journey into my childhood. I wasn’t sentimental. There was no love lost between my father and me.

I’d seen my father last at my graduation from high school. There were eleven of us who graduated that day and the bleachers were filled with mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters of the graduate. It was one of the events the entire community turned out to see. Graduating high school was seen as that one step above what most fathers and mothers had achieved.

My father did not sit for the ceremony. He stood in his work clothes, the gray hat with the black hatband just above the brim that shielded his eyes from the ever-present June sunshine. He couldn’t sit down like the rest of the folks. As I walked across the stage, ten tables from the cafeteria covered in black crape, I saw him standing away and above everyone else as my name, Robert Sorenson, was announced.

I was greeted by the other graduates who’d come before me and by the time I looked again, the man in the gray hat with the black band was no longer there.  Remembering my graduation for the first time since I left home was not a good sign. It wasn’t a good memory.

I’d packed the night before graduation. My room was at the end of the hall and my father’s room was at the head of the stairs, with a room between mine and his. I knew he came to the door, even with my back turned. There was a board that creaked in the hallway no matter how delicately you stepped on it. Of course he knew the board and could have avoided it if he wanted to sneak up on me.

Like at my graduation, and like most of my life, he wasn’t there when I looked. I hadn’t told him I was leaving, but he didn’t ask about the suitcase. He simply walked away without speaking to me.

Once I reached the bus station in Des Moines the next afternoon, I went through the pockets of the suitcase in search of my ink pen. There in an envelope marked RSS were five crisp hundred-dollar bills. Inside the envelope he had slipped a note written on a piece of paper torn from a notebook. It simply said, “Good Luck.”

I couldn’t control my mind, and I could not go to the house with memories flashing back on me. I breathed deep and pretended I could control my hearts rapid discord.

‘Great!’ I thought. ‘I’ve come home to have a heart attack in front of my mailbox, and the postman was going to find me dead on delivery.’ 

My father had never done anything to make me feel useful on his farm. My mother died when I was nine and after the day of her death, when we both cried together, he’d gone back to work and never included me in the running of the farm again.

My grandmother Sorenson came to live so there was a woman in the house, and my father left my raising to her. He built a wall between me and the farm he loved more than me. The farm was a living thing to him. He walked the fields, smelled the dirt, spending hours out there, even after the harvest was done. He’d walk the furrows like he might find something of value he’d lost.

The farm was very much like the town, in disrepair with empty fields all around the faded house. He hadn’t planted in years. The machinery sat back behind the house near the barn. It had been left to rust in the harsh Iowa weather. I remember how he pampered it. He kept a rag in his back pocket to wipe each machine down once he’d let it cool before shutting it off for the night. This didn’t even resemble my father’s farm. It was old and ready to fall down around him.

The fence that started at the beginning of the driveway leaned partially into the field. Grandma and I painted the posts each spring, because my father refused to replace the aging posts. We could ill afford to buy fence posts. As much as he loved the farm there were things he would not do and it made no sense to me then or now.

It no longer mattered, certainly not to my father. It was difficult to conceive of him allowing the farm that was his pride and joy to sit idle. I could see it but understanding why wasn’t as obvious. All I knew about my father said he would no more let his farm sit fallow than he would walk bare foot over hot coals. It was proof of something but what I couldn’t say.    

As if an omen of what was to come, the sunny day turned gray by the time I regained control over my overactive mind. I did not know what to expect. I felt more like the boy who lived here than the man who was returning home a successful television journalist who didn’t need the distraction of dealing with his unsettled past.

The day before, I’d arrived at the TV station before 3:00 p.m. to start reading all the updates on the news and stories of interest. I hadn’t made it to the newsroom before Connie, the receptionist, turned my day upside down.

“Bob, there’s an important message for you,” she said, waving the message slip at me.

“I’ve got to get my nose powdered, my dear, not to mention develop my script for the show.”

“Yeah, well, it sounds important and I don’t want to get yelled at later for having waited to give you the message. Besides, just think of it as my job.”

I expected a news tip, a breaking story, or a crank yanking my chain. What I got startled me.

“Call father. Important.”

“Did you talk to him?” I asked.

“Sure did, honey. Yours truly.”

“What did he say?”

“Asked for Robert Sorenson. I says, cause you ain’t here, he ain’t here. He says to have you call him and gave his name as ‘his father’. It’s all there. Did I mention he said it was important?”

“Would you get me this number?” I asked.

“The lighted button. It’s ringing right now,” she said, always being one step ahead of me.

I reached for the receiver and hit the button.

“Hold for Mr. Sorenson, please,” she said, looking at me. “Father is on the phone. I’ve done all I can do for you.”

I’d been at the station for five years and I mostly did features, news bulletins, and newscasts, when, when the regular anchors took their vacation. It was work that I enjoyed doing. I traveled frequently on national stories and enjoyed a good relationship with almost everyone at work. It wasn’t a high-powered journalistic post, but I had become a popular fixture on the news broadcasts in a medium size town.

I looked into the message with the news man’s dedication I might reserve for an ancient artifact in which I expected to find some hidden meaning.

            Gone was my carefree persona, replaced with increasing concern about what the note said.

            “Thanks,” I said, pushing the button and leaning against her desk.

            “Mr. Sorenson,” I said, waiting for him to identify himself, but I wasn’t prepared for the reply.

            “I wanted you to know I’m leaving the farm to your Uncle Junior. Your mother’s things are in the attic. Junior won’t know what to do with them. You should come home as soon as is convenient.  

            “Dad!” I said like there might be some other mother or Uncle Junior somewhere in my past.

            “Sorry I bothered you at work. I can’t bare the thought your mother’s things will…. You need to come home to see if there’s anything you want.”

            The voice was softer and less stern, but it was instantly recognizable and sent a chill through me. Was it the nature of the call, or was it the specter of my past?  I didn’t know.

            “You’re sick?”

            “They say so.”

            “Is it serious?”

            “They say so.”

            “I’ll be home as soon as I can get a flight.”

            “I’ll be alright for a while. If it isn’t convenient right now, you probably have a few weeks. I just don’t want your mother’s things thrown out like the trash.”

            “Yes, sir,” I said, losing my train of thought.

            I fumbled to get the phone back in its proper place, and Connie reached across the desk to hang up properly.

            “You going to be okay, Bob? Bad news?”

            “I’ve got Southwest Air on the phone. Red eye tonight into O’Hare, Chicago. A bit of a wait before the earliest commuter flight into Des Moines. Will that work for you? If so I’ll reserve a rental car.”

            “How’d you know Iowa?” I asked, never saying where my father was.

            “Area code. I’m from Kansas. I could smell the corn through the phone,” she said with a smile. “You going to be okay?”

            “I don’t know. He’s going to die,” I said without him ever saying it. “I’m going to need Jan to do tonight’s feature. She should check the newsroom to be sure. I’ll write the script.”

            “Here’s Alan. Better you explain,” she said, handing me the boss.

            “Alan, Bob. I’ve got to fly home. My father’s sick. I’ll only need a couple of days. No, I don’t a week. Thank you.”

            “Jan’s on her way up. I told her to clear her schedule for the rest of the week.”

            “I won’t be gone that long. I can fly in first thing tomorrow morning if I leave tonight?”

            “Yep, minus the two hours you lose, you’ll be in Des Moines at first light.”

            “Book me a return flight tomorrow night,” I said, pondering how long I wanted to be in Iowa.

            “Not gonna do it, sweet pea. Your father is dying. I won’t book you back a flight tomorrow night. If you want to fly back tomorrow night, you book the flight.”

            “Okay, I will,” I said.

            “You want me to book the station van to take you to the airport? You should be there between eight and nine. I’ve used your name and the station’s code for a good price and they should pass you around security and take you right to the gate. I’d still be early.”

            “Thanks, no on the van. I’m having dinner at seven, right around the corner. We were going to take in a show. I’ll get them to drive me instead.”

            My feet felt light or my head got heavier as I couldn’t focus on what I needed to do before leaving the show up to Jan. She’d been training for several months and filled in where needed. She could do my show with her eyes closed if I could write a damn script for her. My mind was not paying attention. 

                                                *****

…Later that evening

It was a brisk night in Portland. A gentle rain had moved in off the Pacific; it made everyone hurry to keep it from dampening their spirit. I held my black umbrella up against the gusts of wind that blew unpredictably around the in-town buildings.

Relieved upon reaching the canopy at the entrance of the restaurant, I disengaged the umbrella, hanging it on my arm.  Stepping inside I found the place was jammed with patrons.  Some were drinking at the bar, escaping the weather, while others waited to dine.  A waitress made a list as people waited.  I stood on my toes, ignoring the noise, until I located my friends.

“Name?  How many in your party?” she asked as I brushed past the inquiry.

“My friends are already seated, thank you.”

“Hi, Bobby.” David said, noticing me first.

“Bob,” Steve said, standing to shake my hand.

“Hey, Bob,” Charlie added as I moved the umbrella from my arm to the back of the chair.

"Hey, Charlie. I need a ride to the airport after dinner."

"You're leaving the City and don't have a limo poised to take you to your awaiting jet?" Fran observed. “Missed you on the news tonight.”

“I love you too, dear,” I said, kissing my former wife.

We’d been married two years and divorced for three and made far better friends than mates. We were both new to Portland and starting our careers and marriage was more time consuming than either of us had time to perfect. Once we quit fitting long enough to figure out the problem, we divorced so we could be friends again. There were no children and we’d merely moved from the center of the ring to neutral corners, laughing about some of the things we argued about.

“Your absence has something to do with your trip? You didn’t tell me there was a trip in your future,” Fran said.

“You aren’t married any more,” Nora said. “He doesn’t report to you any longer.”

“My father’s… sick. It’s only for a couple of days.”

"I thought you never left the city if it wasn't business carrying you off?" David quizzed.

"Yeah, best laid plans of mice and only children," I said. "I've taken a few days off. There's nothing poised to upend the balance in the world. Actually it's been relatively quiet."

"So, you're finally going back? Why?" Charlie wanted to know. “I thought you and your old man were on the outs?”

"He called. He says he's sick. He’s concerned about things that belong to me. I can’t imagine it will take long after twenty five years."

`           “Well, it’s not like he has a history of lying to you if you haven’t spoken in all these years,” Nora mused.

"He's your father, Bob. Cut the man a break for God’s sake, especially if he's sick. You said he was old. You'd do well settling it before it's too late. One day you'll wish you had," Fran said with concern.

"Right! Right! Can the lecture. I’m going home and you guys don’t need to have an argument about the details. I’m a big boy now. I can even fly on my own."

I had spaghetti with marinara sauce and a side of sautéed mushrooms with Chianti. The garlic bread was exceptional and the chatter moved so fast I didn’t feel a need to interject my feeble ideas.

There were thoughts of my mother and of picnics with the three of us in a spot Dad called the meadows. There was a pond I wasn’t allowed near alone while my mother was alive but my grandmother took me on picnics there and told me to wear my suit. She taught me to swim. Mama didn’t care for water.

I thought about my father’s lonely walks in the field once my mother died. I knew he hurt. I hurt too, but he was the father, not I. My grandmother couldn’t explain why I wasn’t working on the farm. Every kid I knew worked the family farm. Why not me?

It was the question that was never answered and a sore on my memory that always brought me back to the ill-will I felt for my father. I was going to what I once called home, but as soon as we sorted out whatever it was he wanted done, I would be on my way back to Portland.

Almost before the laughter and chatter died away, I was alone in the terminal, receiving royal treatment by the airlines we used extensively for station business. I sat in the VIP lounge and drank from the silver urn filled with premium coffee.  I wouldn’t sleep on the plane and I was accustomed to being up all day. I’d take a room at the airport for the night and fly back the next day.

It was a solid plan with no room for becoming sidetracked. I had to be back at work and that was that, nothing personal.

“Mr. Sorenson,”  the flight attended smiled sweetly, recognizing the special envelope that the woman at the counter had put around my ticket before calling to have me escorted to the lounge. “We have some seats in first class. Please follow me.”

No problem at all. This trip was at least starting off well.