Walking Through My Father's Fields, Home

Walking through My Father’s Fields, Home

The windows creaked from the heat
the day we bundled my mother up
and hauled her off like an old Christmas tree,
taking only a couple of suitcases
and her sickness with her—this dying stranger
who hadn’t left the house
since before I could remember,
and whom I’d sat watch over
for more than my 15 years—
watched her wither
like a lake bed, until I was sure
there was nothing left
of her but dust.

Dad said,
“We’re taking her to the hospital.”
I pulled on pants good enough for town, and shoes,
as my father and brother led her out the door,
half the time carrying her and her confused moans
to the old International truck. I climbed in the back.

My father drove faster than usual,
which still wasn’t very fast,
past the barn, the sheds and tractors, the fields.
My brother said the silage looked sparse,
and my father, that it’d gotten scorched by the drought
and we’d be lucky if it lasted the cows through winter.
I scanned the yellow blighted field as we rattled

down the long gravel road
peopled by cows that’d jumped the fence
which we didn’t stop for. They
grew small and quiet behind us
as the trees gave out, and the gravel
turned into asphalt with a bump.
The fields became houses.

The edge of our land bordered the county hospital.
We pulled into the cracked and ugly
asphalt parking lot and waited
while Dad went to get an orderly.
Behind us stretched corn—
I could barely make out the cows
grazing in the field—and beyond that
the road, then the pasture,
and hills. Somewhere back there was the house,
just a mile or so away.

I turned back to the truck as they came for her.
My brother walked over to me
and pointed off to the south to the nursing home
they’d just built on a corner of layout ground
that used to be ours. That’s where they’d take her
when she was all checked in, he meant.

We’d brought her into town so she could die proper.
If she made it through the year, she’d be able to see
our winter wheat outside her window
and maybe think of home.
“Dad’s finishing it all up,” my brother said,
“we can go.”
I nodded and glanced at the truck.

Instead, we walked to the barbed wire fence,
which was overgrown
with a wall of trees and weeds.
We scaled it and plodded
through the still young corn,
not speaking, growing slowly separate
as we spread out to drive the cows
back to pasture.

C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on The Dead Mule
From his Chapbook--MY MOTHER MAKING DONUTS