A Hardy Species

Cloaked in the whirling stems of rye we’d watch him for hours. After school we’d hop off the bus, Marla and I, and drift through the crops out past the house and bury ourselves cheek-high in those feathery acres of grain. From the asylum of the fields we’d spend those sundown evenings monitoring him by the fence, in and out, as he would vanish into that old barn.

“You leave that poor man alone,” Ma used to say to us, delicately draping the serviette over her knees at the dinner table, “If he’d a wanted children, he’d a had some a his own.”

Leaving cookie crumbs of oatmeal trailing behind us on the back porch, we’d dash back out to the fields and reclaim our clandestine stakeout of that stooping figure roaming about the trodden yellow grass outside the barn.

From his thin arms with spotted flesh corrugated by age, he’d lug around with him all sorts of unusual tools and instruments. Sometimes groups of ball-capped men would back up to the barn in trucks without walls, and shake hands with the old man who never really said much more than “Hillo." They would unlatch the frayed straps and unload for him great elongated tubes and metal bars of all angles and designs, much of which they hauled in tandem for the old man at the behest of his crooked finger. In they would walk, setting the pieces down somewhere in the cavities of that great colorless barn. Somewhere behind the tall chestnut planks eroded by ceaseless decades of unyielding sun, and splintered by years of hail-surfing winds.

Marla and I, on our stakeouts clinking juice boxes in the tickling camouflage of the rye, debated at length what the old man was constructing.

“Geez… Pa already told us…,” Marla would remind me often, “he builds pantaloons and cataracts for people.”

Neither of us were really sure what those were, though we had heard before from Pa that Gramma Elsa also had cataracts, and so naturally we'd often wondered if she’d purchased them from him. Once in a while the same men in the backed-up trucks would drag a boat out of that barn.

Often times after dinner, when the evening winds ebbed, and the sun became hidden and mild, we’d begin to hear the shrieks burst forth from their kitchen screen window. I don’t think his hearing was all that good though anymore, cause we could see him near the steps sometimes when she called, and he seemed to shuffle instead back into the barn without noticing. I know he heard us on the other side of the fence though sometimes. Marla could snicker pretty loudly, especially when she’d let caterpillars crawl onto her toes. He definitely heard us the one time last summer Marla got stung by the wasp, Ma even heard her yelling all the way back from the house. “Eva thing alright ova ther?”, he’d ask us. We would never respond.

She was like a ghost to us though, only her voice could we hear sometimes cutting through the chirps of the sundown crickets, or staccato and shrill between the grinding engine cycles of our small combine during the harvest months. “He musta done something real bad,” Marla concerned herself, but I never saw him do much other than tinker around that barn, sometimes hacking down the weeds so the big doors could swing closed over the grass proper.

Ain’t nobody that we ever saw, would go up into that house except the old man. When Marla got old enough to read, she could finally make out the bright and bold “BEWARE OF DOG” sign laminated into the shards of glass above the screen door. I couldn’t tell her enough that “I ain’t never seen so much as a puppy there,” and that it was “probably just a fib to keep the pesky Jehovah’s away.”

We drove by him on the school bus once in a while, the bald spot on his sweaty head always cooking up red and blistering in the sun as he sauntered the 2 miles back from town dangling bags of groceries on the roadside.

"I missed him,” Marla beamed to me, also a little saddened one evening just before supper. “He was in the garage with Pa and me, and he wanted to buy my cookies. He buyed four whole boxes, not the mint kind, but the gram ones.”

“What else did he say?” I interrogated, “was he all mean to Pa? Did he try to steal em?”

“Nah,” she replied, “he just smelled like the petrol station and he didn’t have enough money for the boxes… Pa just let him have two for free... he also said he couldn’t eat em cuz it hurt his teeth some.”

“Two for free? What a chump!”

“I’m tellin Pa you said that…”

“You better not…”

“He used to go to our church when you were real little,” Pa would mention as I grew a bit taller and handed him the wrong sized wrenches under his tractor, “when Marla was still a baby.” But I don’t remember him there at all, maybe that was before he had the beard. “The steps became too much for him I think,” Pa added, “and when she was there, she never really helped him all that much.” They stopped going years ago.

As time rolled by, and the once-grey hair could no longer conceal the drying skin atop his crown, he began to spend more time in the barn. His strides across the yellowing grass became sluggish, and the men didn’t back their trucks up anymore. Marla preferred now to sit back by the deck and converse with the dolls she would dress up, but I had never given up my focus on the old man in his old barn. I’d sit by myself in the soil and let the ants climb up my shins in speculation behind the towering fortress of Rye.

Every Wednesday in the summer now, I'd see the preacher in his big black hat traipsing along the gravel up to the house. He would walk right by, toting in his grasp the worn pages of a small black Bible, and head directly into the barn when he couldn’t find the old man lingering about in front. The brim of the hat would exit a while later, and he would mention back through the doorway, things like “you think about what we’ve talked about” or, “we’ll read more about Uriah and David next time.” The preacher never bothered to go up the concrete steps and speak to the lady behind the screen.

When Marla got bored dressing up her dolls, we sometimes got braver and threw a baseball around in the matted lane of dried mud between the field and the fence line. Her lobs would never entice a Yankee scout, but Pa was always busy now painting something in the garage or scratching his head at the new combine.

“It’s too hard,” I remember Marla squealing once, as I whizzed a fastball at her, “I don’t wanna play no more”.

“Hell…” I said, “just a couple more…” Even with the helmet and the sofa cushion, I never blamed her for fleeing the path of that last one. I still hear that dull thud in my dreams, as it jostled what little paint left, lay flaking on the side of that barn, and disappeared into the thick weeds across the fence.

“You’re really in for it now…”

“Hush up! I’ll go fetch it…”

Marla scurried worrisomely into the rye as I walked over to the fence and pinched myself between the upper two wires. Tepidly I scoured along the side of the barn, parting small copses of ragworts with my toes and cautiously disrupting dandelions. As I knelt down to grasp the ball a crooked shadow crept up the height of the barn.

“Ye find er alright,” the shadow spoke, before I sprung back to my feet.

“Eh.. yah..” I responded nervously, turning to the old man.

“Barney,” he spoke, with a small curve that had formed at the edge of his toothless mouth, “got an arm like Barney Johnson…”

“Err… Barney,” I parroted, “well… I better get goin…”

That had been the last, and probably only time I’d ever spoken to the man. But the final evening I ever saw him must have been some time in the fall I think. Ma and Pa had taken Marla to her recital in town, and I had put up a pretty good fuss about not wanting to go.

“I don’t want you stayin all night out there neither," Ma had harped, "you get inside and make sure you have those problems done when we get home… no boy a mine is gonna be flunky!”

It was cool that evening as I burrowed into my usual spot in the crops, sitting cross-legged in the soil siphoning the remaining rays of sun toward my Flash Gordon comics. Flash had barely gotten into the underground of Ming City when I heard those feral shrieks stab through the broken screen window next door. As I peered through the stems, I saw the old man hobble down the steps, slowly, but one sure foot after the other.

“Useless... son uf a betch” she belted out from the darkness of the porch, as he crept off the bottom step and onto the gravel, “ain’t no wonder nose woman’ll have yah”.

I doubt he saw me in the murky twilight, looming fresh above the fields. He jostled the door a bit, but he was too weak to scrape it over the clover that had crept into the jamb. He walked pensively into that old barn for the last time.

Hours later, it was dark when I left, the vast side of the barn now cold, with moths fluttering at the dim light spilling out into the gravel lane. He had not come out, nor did I see him in the evenings that followed.

Days onward, I watched the preacher stroll up the driveway, just as he had every Wednesday carrying that old black novel, the thread probably still dividing the regal sagas of David in Samuel. The barn door was still open as he sauntered inward searching for the old man. He spent no more than a minute in the old barn, and with a swift pace crossed back out across the gravel and to the first step up to the house. Then he quietly sought the gravel once again, and disappeared back onto the road.

The sheriff phoned our house later that afternoon, and Pa gathered me and Marla down into the parlor, where Ma shushed us politely as she spoke in hushed tones on the telephone. When she hung up, she asked us to help with dinner. The look on Pa’s face stopped me from objecting.

In the darkness of my bedroom upstairs, I heard Ma’s voice a week later murmuring through the floorboards down below. I avoided the creaks, and pressed my toes upon the cold boards down the hallway, beckoned by the orange glow of the lamps in the hallway downstairs. Through the banister I peeped halfway down, and saw the shadow of the telephone pressed against Ma’s ear.

“To think that he never told no one about it though… just awful…” she spoke, “And there were three of them little angels, all buried behind an old rowboat, with little crosses made up with their names'n all".

The unimportant voice at the other end mutated to an inaudible chipmunk.

"oh gosh I can't figure... probably long before me and Tom ever bought the house... decades we figure... just curled up back there in the ground"

Again, the invisible voice squeaked another volley of unknown syllables.

"ain't perfectly right in the head..." Ma spoke, "neither of em..."

It was all her I thought. It was always her...