For What It's Worth

For What It’s Worth

One swift kick from a spiteful mule was about to propel Jonathan and his father toward the new century and change the trajectory of everything. In less than a second, Jonathan was no longer standing on his own feet. He was shot through the air and careening, with a stream of water arcing high overhead. He never let go of the bucket as he was thrown ten feet back and into a heap. In five breaths he asserted that he was in fact breathing, was now someplace else, on the ground, and the pain began to run through him. Trickling like water, and searing hot, spreading, through his whole body. A body that was still too young to understand that this injury would leave him changed. His leg twisted in an unfamiliar way toward the house and then he was screaming.

Mr. Terry came running from the north end of the property, bounding over rocks and treefall like he never knew himself capable of. He dropped to his knees and hovered his hands over his crumpled child, trying to make sense of the scene. Morning sun illuminated the dust billowing around the two of them, scrambling and squirming. For a moment Johnathan registered the fear on his father’s face and then he lost consciousness.

Only two and a half years earlier the two Terry men had begun their campaign for peace, and opportunity in the west. Their recent past was somehow out of focus, like the two of them couldn’t bear to look back except through slitted fingers or squinted eyes. The last memories of Johnathan’s mother were haunted by an unfamiliar woman who wore his mother’s clothes, but was too thin and gray skinned. She coughed so incessantly that eventually every word sounded like retching. His widowed father broke into pieces so small. Johnathan was only nine years old.

Father and son moved into Mr. Terry’s parents’ house on Mount Vernon Street. Classically Victorian, Grandma Terry had filled every room brimming and busy with things to look at. There were towering leafy plants, patterned wallpaper, ornate breakable things placed on every side table and pedestal. Johnathan moved through the house like a stealthy cat avoiding the dust and the cobwebs on things that weren’t to be touched.

After many days and nights in self confinement Mr. Terry started to leave his bedroom to eat with the family. He found the will to dress for the day. Small feats, but a hopeful sign for Johnathan that his father was beginning to put his pieces back together. Not long after, he and Johnathan were preparing to head west. Part pilgrimage, part protest, the planning of it all brought lightness to his father as he optimistically started everything he said with, “When we get there..”. Johnathan remembered the change in his father and the way it felt to be starting something new. There were now preparations and studying to do. They were looking forward, together, and what could be. Johnathan had no opinion of moving west. There was no difference between Kansas or Massachusetts. For him the world was small.

They had done better than most with the homesteading. Getting one decent crop, surviving a couple winters, and not starving was commendable. It was infinitely easier to manage the fear of hunger or bad weather; things that had a name and a face. There was a real sense of control that both the men needed. That if they were prepared and worked hard, they wouldn’t be destroyed again. They never wanted to feel destroyed that way. There were times when Mr. Terry watched his son mucking stalls and doing farm chores and thought, ‘This is it. This is the life we were meant for.’ But on that horrible day. The sight of his only child writhing, losing the color in his face. The warm sepia tone of idyllic life in the west was gone.

For weeks Johnathan and his father endured in that sick feeling place where no one knew what was coming next. Only that they were being pushed forward, forward toward what? Would Johnathan live or would he die? The doctor hurried. Told Mr. Terry the leg had to go. Now! But Mr. Terry would not concede. He did everything in his power to stay on his feet while the experience blurred all around him. Only ever saying, ‘When he recovers’. When a full month had passed, the doctor finally started to agree that Johnathan would, indeed, survive. It would be some time before he’d walk again, but he’d live.

By the time Johnathan was well enough to travel, Mr.Terry had almost finished with the business of dismantling their life in Kansas. The land and the animals went (including that cursed mule who he might have dispatched out of spite, but instead got a good price for). The tools and equipment went the same time as the furniture and the stove. They drove their empty wagon as far as the nearest railroad town and when they got there they sold it too.

Father and son traveled by sleeper cars all the way back to Boston. They were taken in by Grandma and Papa Terry who had barely forgiven their son for taking off in the first place. Daily, the conversation would turn to berating comments on his foolishness and short sightedness. In their eyes, the entire venture summed up as a cataclysmic failure. Their son would not argue. He couldn’t make them believe how good the good days were. That there were sunrises and snowfalls more beautiful than the stained glass windows in The Basilica. Mr. Terry had found his religion out west, but he was no apostle.

The leg healed, but Johnathan would always have a humming ache to remind him. It begged for his attention like an unambitious friend he hoped he’d outgrow one day. It went with him to school and college.

When Mr. Terry found work with the railroad as a bookkeeper it felt, at first, like a regression. He was returning to a previous life he’d sworn off forever. The days he spent making money for other men, men he envied, he daydreamt of turning in his notice. How he would graciously thank them for the experience and not look back.

The house in Boston was sold with its contents after both Grandma and Papa Terry had passed, and the profits bought Mr.Terry a storefront in town with a living space on the second floor. He sold paper goods and office supplies. Reams and rolls in “clean cotton” and “whale bone” occupied Mr. Terry in the years after his son was old enough to leave home.

Mr. Terry’s mind benefited running the paper business. The daily schedule, predictable, and straightforward it comforted him. He focused on profits and inventory; meticulously recording figures in a thick black notebook. In it were the sums that proved what was profitable, what left him owing, the truth of everything he was working toward. He tapped his fingers on the soft leather cover when he was lost in thought. Mr. Terry kept his financials in that notebook as private as a diary. When he held it in his hands, close to his chest, he felt the secret inside. He knew he was inarguably a success.

After college, Johnathan only went as far as the other end of the city. He rested his leg on the train he took to work everyday. He wore a suit, ingratiated himself to superiors, and proved to be an indispensable accountant with the municipal water department. Mr. Terry relished telling friends how clever his son was with figures, “The real businessman of the family”, he’d say. In time Mr. Terry would see Johnathan start his own family. His life was tinted sepia and idyllic again as he watched his son and daughter-in-law playing with the baby after family dinners. He’d found his satisfaction in life: things he attempted, even the failures, the successes, and the tragedy. He found himself ultimately ahead with the way it had unfolded.

When it was all said and done (the life of Mr. Terry that is) he left his son nearly 20,000 dollars inheritance. Mr. Terry’s letter to his only child, so uncharacteristically sentimental, reflected on those two beautiful years they spent together on the homestead. He wrote that those were the years he saw Johnathan growing into the young man that made him so proud. That only the two of them knew how strong they had been to attempt such a thing. Mr. Terry wrote, “I leave you this; everything I was able to save in a lifetime. My only wish is that you never shirk away from an adventure for the fear of failure. Go and try something incredible and know you and your family can always come home.”