The Redemption

Chapter 5

The Farm Hand

I sat back beside the trunk, placing the letters on top of the loose papers I’d found. I reached into the trunk and took out the journal on the top. Some regular letters fell out of the pages along with more of the envelope letters.

There were some from Uncle Junior and Uncle Ralph but mostly from Uncle Junior. I placed them to one side so I could put them back inside the journal. There were facts and figures written down on the pages. It seemed to be the books for the farm.

I’d seen my mother keep such a journal but this wasn’t her handwriting. With the war letters being inside, it was easy to see that Grandma saved them in the journal she kept, which documented the approximate date they had been received. Once I got the letters back inside, I set it all off to one side.

Reaching in for the next journal, I opened the cover to see the words, Farm Hand. It was neatly written in an easily readable condition. The first page was wrinkled just enough to show it had been read more than once.

 I leaned my back up against a pile of boxes. I started to read and I was almost immediately introduced to Sven. Knowing that he died in the war made me uneasy. Not because he died but because my father was apparently writing about the man from the time he first laid eyes on him. This did nothing to sooth my bruised feelings and the righteous indignation that went with them.

I hadn’t gotten far into the manuscript when my anger overrode my good sense. I got up from the floor, brushed off my pants, and went down stairs holding my finger in the journal where I’d stopped reading.

The parlor doors were slid apart in the middle and looking inside, I could see my father wasn’t there.

“I just made a pot of coffee. You may as well come have some. You’ll never get back tonight.”

Looking outside I could see dusk was close at hand. I looked for my watch again.

“Shit, what time is it.”

“Can’t say for sure but I’d guess it’s getting close to seven. The clouds are thickening up again, so might be five thirty, maybe near seven.”

“Why in hell don’t you have clock,” I fussed as if it was his fault I let myself become distracted enough to lose track of time.

“I got a watch somewhere. Haven’t wound it in ages. I ain’t in no hurry to get nowhere.”

“Did you get any sleep?”

“Yeah, plenty, until you decided to get your Uncles all stirred up.”

“What is this?” I asked, as he stirred cream into my coffee like I was a boy.

“Sit down.”

“What is this?” I said, taking to waving the journal in the air.

“Sit down, Robert,” he said in his I’m-your-father voice.

“I can’t. I need to make a call. I’ve missed my plane.”

“Go ahead and make your call. I’ll promise not to kick off before you get back. There’s some meals in the freezer your Aunt Lulu fixed up for me. I don’t have an appetite for them. She put a microwave in the pantry. They defrost and heat up in no time. You won’t starve.”

“I don’t want your food,” I said, thinking of his condition.

“I don’t eat them. I push down some oatmeal comes a morning and toast or such as that in the afternoon. Don’t have much of a hankering for food.”

“You ate the meatloaf and mashed potatoes.”

“Yes, wasn’t bad either, but that was only because you’re here. I don’t get hungry enough for meals. Besides, I fill up on those damn pills the doctor’s poisoning me with. If they don’t kill me nothing will.

“Make your call and we’ll have the talk you’ve been waiting to have. You’d do yourself a big favor if you’d leave well enough alone, son, but I can see you aren’t one to let the past rest in peace.”

I went to the phone and dialed.

“Hey, it’s me. Don’t meet my plane tonight. I’m still here. I’ll call you when I make arrangements. Shouldn’t be long.”

As I got back to the kitchen I held the journal up so my father couldn’t miss it.

“Who’s Sven?”

“Sit down, Robert.”

“I want an answer, Dad. Who is he.”

“I’ll give you an answer, but I can’t keep looking up at you.  It hurts my neck and doesn’t do a damn thing for my disposition. I figured that’s what this was about. I haven’t seen that in years. I thought it was lost or it went out in the trash. I should have known it was put away safe and sound,” he said, softly, feeling the outside of his cup with both hands.

“Did my mother know about this? Did you let her know who it was she was marrying?”

“Son, I don’t give a damn what you think about me. You gave up that right a quarter of a century ago. I’ve been polite and I’ve let you have your head, but don’t you ever disrespect your mother in front of me. She was the kindest, most gentle woman I ever knew. She loved me more than I had any right to be loved.”

“Did she know?” I demanded.

“Where’d you find that book, boy?”

“In the bottom of the trunk.”

“Use your noodle, boy. That weren’t none of my stuff. It was in there for a reason. Your mother cherished me and what’s written in that book was all about where I’d been before your mother and I took up together. I gave her the journal and the letters when she told me she intended to marry me, after I told her she couldn’t.”

“She knew?’ I said in a question.

“The man in the book you’re waving around was my great love. I thought that meant I couldn’t love anyone else and so I let your momma read it to explain my reasons for saying no. She said, so. He’s dead; you can’t give the rest of your life to him. He   wouldn’t have wanted you to. He said as much in his letters. Made no difference to her. She loved me that much.”

“Did you love her?”

“Son, I’ll forgive you that, because you are my son, but you gave up your right to know anything about me when you walked away and never looked back. I may have been a lot of things, but I took care of you. When your momma died, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to be father and mother to you. I asked your grandmother to come to care for you.

“There was nothing I could do about your momma dying. I tried to get her to move into town with you so she wasn’t breathing in the dirt and the dust each day, but she wouldn’t go. She said her place was here with us, but I did what I could for you and I let you grow up like you wanted and your grandmother knew why and accepted it.”

“You never gave me any man’s chores. I fed the chickens with Momma and helped her tend her gardens, picked stuff for the evening meal and I did the same for Grandma, but the only thing you let me do was trail along behind the machines and throw loose ears of corn into the corn wagon.”

“That’s right. That’s all I asked. I had men to tend what I couldn’t do. It wasn’t your job.”

“I was a farmer’s son. All the farmers’ sons worked their fathers’ farms, except for me.”

“Yes, they usually do. I was a farmer’s son. I wanted to get off here. I wanted to see the world, write about my experiences. I was always good in English and history in school. I know it’s hard to believe. Haven’t had much cause to use my education.”

“I watched you walk the fields when I was a boy. I never understood what it was you were looking for. Now, you tell me you were looking to leave here. Come on, Dad. I find that hard to believe.”

“Yes, you would. You got off. You got off because I wasn’t going to do to you what my father did to me. I might not of been too clever about letting you leave when it was time, but it weighed heavy on my mind. I did what most fathers do. I made sure you ate well and had a roof over your head. I worked every day and once your grandma came to live here, she was a far better teacher than me.”

“So, you want me to believe you loved my mother but you loved a man before her?”

“Robert, I don’t want you to believe anything. I’m not in the believing business. I’m telling you what my life was about. You want to accept that, that’s fine. If you don’t believe it, that’s fine. I wasn’t here to justify myself to you. If you wanted these kind of answers you should have come by once or twice, but you didn’t, and I’m ready to leave here for good. I don’t owe you peace of mind or anything else. That was your decision and you need to accept the consequences.”

“I want to know something about this Sven. That’s where my name came from. My mother lied to me. She said Sven was an Uncle who died in the war.”

“You are going to keep pushing me, until I throw you out of here, aren’t you. When you were in her belly, she asked me what I wanted to name my son. I asked her, how do you know it will be a boy. She told me it was a boy, she could tell by the way he kicked. She said I want him to have your name, Robert. I said that I didn’t think so. She said, ‘I want him to be named Robert Sven and he’ll grow up to be the kind of man you two were.’ What do we tell him about Sven, I asked? She said, ‘you loved like any man would love his brother and so in a way he became your fourth brother while he was alive. That’s what I’ll tell him.”

“It was my mother’s idea?”

“I’d never have named you after me, but naming you after me and Sven sounded like a wonderful idea and that’s what we named you.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, more confused than ever.

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand. Actually, you don’t need to understand. We understood and it made sense to us at the time. I’m sorry if you’re insulted now. In my way of thinking it’s you that should be honored to be named after the best man I knew.”

“I used to stand at the fence, while Grandma was in the garden. I’d watch you walk the fields. I never understood that either. Was he the reason you spent so much time out there alone?”

My father swallowed hard and seemed to see something I couldn’t see. For the first time his anger with me subsided. His eyes were damp as he seemed to come back to the conversation.

“You were looking for him.”

“I was with him,” he said softly.

“You were what? He was dead then.”

“Read it, Robert. It tells it all. You can make of it what you will.”

“If you wanted to get off this place so bad when you were a kid, why’d you stay? When you met Momma, you knew she shouldn’t be out here. Why didn’t you sell the farm and move?”

“I couldn’t leave,” he said, giving me that distant stare again, but this time his eyes were moist as he approached his past for me.

“Why the hell not. There was nothing here to keep you. You said you wanted off here,” I reasoned with cool contempt.

“My heart was here. I could no more leave my heart than I could leave your mother. It’s how it was and I couldn’t leave because this was the only place where I knew Sven. If I could have gone with him and died with him, I’d have been happier, but you’d be put out if I did that too. This was where he was and this is where I lived my life and this is where I’ll die, and maybe, somehow, we’ll find our way back to each other once I’m dead.”

“Not with my mother?”

“I had two loves in my life. One love was stronger than the other but neither was diminished by the other. I belong with him. He’ll be in my final conscious thought. He was my first love and he’ll be my last. Your mother understood that and didn’t ask to replace him or become more important to me than he was. Because we loved each other then, the past didn’t matter as far as our relationship was concerned.

“We needed to be together. You needed to get born, and unfortunately your mother did not have longevity in her favor. She was a delicate flower that bloomed brightly during the spring of her life, but she withered and died in the summer heat and dust.

“When I cried at her bedside, she comforted me. She told me the years we spent together were her happiest years and she would never trade a moment for a hundred years of life away from me. It helped. She was stronger than me, but I was the one that had to go on without her.

“My mother came out one day from town. She cleaned the house, had soup on the stove, and was hanging clothes by lunch time. I was tending the corn as I did each day back then. When I came in for lunch, she had your mother sitting in the parlor eating soup, while she told her stories of raising me and your brothers.

“Your mother laughed and almost looked well again. I didn’t know what Mama was up to, but I sat an extra hour with them in the parlor and blushed as your grandmother embarrassed the hell out of me.”

“Where was I?” I asked, trying to remember the picture he drew.

“Mama had you doing errands on your bike. You used to sit on the stairs leading up to your mother’s bedroom, because I would tell you to let your mother rest, but Mama just put you to work.

“I should have known to do that but I already had it in mind that I wouldn’t try to do to you what Pa did to me. So, I left you in the house when I went to work.”

“What happened after that?” I asked, almost able to span the years back to the days he described.

“Your momma had a few more of those days, drinking mother’s special teas and eating soup and toast a couple of times a day. She passed about a week later,” he said, looking suddenly somber as he reflected on the words.

He steadied his cup of coffee, taking a long slow sip, hiding the dampness in his eyes.

Once again my mother’s death reached into me and twisted my insides. Seeing my father’s reaction answered my question about his devotion to her. I was sure he’d done the best he could. My father was never at fault for my anger and inability to love a woman the way he had loved my mother.

I was afraid to love someone who would only end up leaving me. My career had come first and romance was a fleeting fancy for me, never staying long enough to take the risk. My father’s career, the corn, was as important to him for the same reason the microphone was important to me; without that I had nothing to hold onto.

My cup had somehow become empty and my father stood next to my chair pouring from the big orange pot. He filled his own cup and the air in the room was fresher and easier to breath. He moved slow, not taxing himself. Once the pot was back on the stove he sat back in front of his cup.

“Now, you’ve got questions, Robert, and I don’t mind. I’ve told you the facts as they were. You got the journal and you sit there and read it since you’ve managed to miss your plane. I’m not going anywhere at the moment, so read it and if it leaves questions, I’ll do my best to set you straight before you go.”

“Yes, sir,” I was back to being told what to do by my father and agreeing to it automatically as I might have done as a child.

“Do you want me to read aloud? If you haven’t seen it for so long maybe if I read it out loud, you’d get something out of it.”

“That would be nice of you. My eyes tire so fast I’d never get through it in the time I have left. Yes, I’d love to hear it again, but I never read it after I wrote it. It was meant to be a record, because I wanted someone to know about our love. Having that die seemed a crime to me. I wrote parts of it before we became involved. Like I said, I wrote fairly often back then. I still had hopes of leaving the farm.”

”Sven.” I said, reading the first word on the first page inside the journal. “A year out of high school I wanted to be far from my family’s farm. The circumstances of the time denied me my dream of seeing the world and writing about it. The dream wasn’t dead, only postponed,” I said, thinking differently once I saw the words in print.

“You did want to be a writer. I’m still afraid to call myself a writer. Most of what I do is writing but I worried about jinxing myself if I called myself a writer.”

“I was young, Son. I had no such fears, because my plans were so clear to me. I knew what I wanted to do and saw no reason why not.”

“It’s funny how seeing it in writing makes it real. I think of you back then. If you’d have told me this, I would probably have laughed. My father? A writer? You were a writer, Daddy.”

“That’s all I got to show for it, Robert.”

“No, it’s not just seeing it written down. The way you talk. The pictures you paint with your words. You write when you talk about the passions of your life.”

“Yeah, well, you were going to read that as I recall,” he said, squirming in discomfort at my observation.

“…But time moved agonizingly slow, and farm work was a drudgery for which I no longer had a taste.” I let the journal tilt away from my eyes. “Your description of it isn’t anything I’d recognized. You always worked so steadily. Your pace rarely varied. You knew what to do and you did it. I understand, though.”

“Read,” he said, looking up out of his coffee cup as if he was pulling himself back from the memory of it.

“Yes, sir. I was working on the new fence Mama had been promised for two years, when Sven walked up the driveway and into our lives,” I hesitated, looking to see my father’s blank stare once more.

“He was big by any standards and he walked in powerful strides, looking like he knew where he was going. He paid me no mind as he passed. I stopped digging and watched him stop at the bottom of the three stairs that led to the back porch and the backdoor. He paused as if to gather his thoughts before he’d ask for work,” I said, pondering the scene in my own mind.

“How did you know he’d ask for work, Daddy?”

“Read,” he snapped without looking up.

“He paused as if to gather his thoughts before he’d ask for work. It wasn’t unusual to see hands walk up our driveway in a search for work. Times were tough,” I let the book tilt away from me again. “I see. You answered my question in the very next line. It’s like you knew the question would come up,” I further explained my curiosity about his writing style.

My father looked up at me with fire in his eyes. I kept stopping when he wanted to hear the story. I knew I shouldn’t anger him with my endless questions about things I’d never considered before.

“Give me the damn book,” he growled, wrestling it out of my hands and into his own.

Clearing his voice he began to read, “The latest arrival interested me far more than the dull job Pa had assigned me. By this time everyone was of interest to me. I wondered where he had been and what he knew that I might find interesting. It turned out with Sven there were no simple answers.