Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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old and had stood once at the edge of the barnyard. Near the top of the south gable was his bedroom window and above that a small hole into the attic, broken open from the years. The house sagged like an aged face and had bald patches of veneer and leprous paint that bulged, cracked, and fell. Sunburnt aluminum shutters hung beside the windows, one tilting, one gone. Low juniper shrubs claimed ground from the ragged lawn in a low and steady surge from the front and back sides of the house. The whole structure looked blown out at its bottom, as if a jack had given way at the lowering onto this, its second foundation, and the house had fallen.
He was surprised to see the old woman sitting outside in a lawn chair as he rolled by the house and toward the pens out back. When he was finished with the calves he walked up. It was easier to approach her in the out of doors in true light than in her room or as she wandered the house like she haunted it, spectral in her nightgown, feeling her way through familiar doorways and touching walls with outstretched arms that hung and swayed with loose flesh. She turned her wrinkled face toward him and he squatted next to her chair. She asked if it were him and he said it was. Her voice was slow and measured, witnessing her years.
—How do you like being home? he said.
—It’s good to be back, she said. Have you been taking your grandfather to church?
—We go to church.
—The church is true, she said solemnly.
He took in her creased hands, splotched and purple-veined, where they lay in her lap. He let his eyes move slowly over her as he would spotting deer on a hillside. Blair had dressed her in a shirt of red gingham and maroon pants. Done up in fresh clothes she nearly looked as she had years ago in his boyhood when she sat at the kitchen table with him and they played Go Fish.
—I been meaning to talk to you about my wages, he said. I wanted to wait till you felt better. Grandpa won’t give me a straight answer. Keeps saying he needs to talk to you when you get feeling better.
—These rare days are a blessing, she said. They nearly give me hope.
—Are you afraid of what’s coming?
—Not afraid.
A robin chirped in the near tree and she tilted her head toward it. Her suffering seemed to have brought her wisdom, perspective. She suddenly seemed regal to him.
—So what do you think about the wages? he said.
—Since your parents passed on, we’ve taken care of you, and we always will, she said.
—I don’t know what that means.
—I was there the day you were born. Seven pounds, nine ounces. A full head of dark hair. You were a beautiful baby.
—What can you tell me about my wages? he said.
—Lay not up for yourself treasures on earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, where thieves break through and steal, she said.
He thought a moment and said, An idle soul shall suffer hunger.
She said, Before ye seek riches, seek ye the kingdom of God.
—I’ve sought the one already, now I’m seeking the other, he said. And I will come near to you with judgment, and I will be a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages.
—That’s enough, she said mildly. The farm is a fickle thing. It doesn’t make much money. Riches is the last word to describe it. I would think that by now you’d have learned that this is no way to make a living. Haven’t you learned that?
—It’s all I know.
—Go to town. Get an education.
—Town and college ain’t for everybody.
—Aren’t.
Her breath had grown heavy.
—This is no way to make a living, she said.
He picked up an old leaf from the grass, curiously intact from the ravages of seasons past. It was worn thin, threadbare, the veins brittle and the skin transparent. He held it up to the lowering sun and squinted.
—What does the sky look like right now? she said.
He looked around. The land spread out in all directions except farther behind the house where the river took it down into itself, and beyond that the Sisters range built upward like a mammoth fortress of stone and dirt, the massive cliff bands no longer than a little finger from where he viewed them. Crown-lifted cottonwoods grew in stands on the landscape farther down, along small creeks, some of them already dry, and big pines stood as windbreaks around homesteads. From the panorama he tilted his head skyward and looked into its depths. Dusk was still an hour away, that time when the scratching in the south gable would begin and the nimble bats that caved there would drop one by one into the night. The house had been placed on the edge of the hillside above the river but had no view of the river because of the pens and sheds behind it. The old woman, young then, had requested only a clear view to the east and west when fifty years before they dragged the house there from the barnyard. She believed the Savior would appear in the east when he came, and she loved the smoldering sunsets over the sage plain to the west. A farmer’s wife, she’d had an obsessive habit of watching the sky before she lost her sight, anticipating weather patterns sometimes better than the Doppler radar, and like everyone in that dry region she welcomed rain when she could get it. She forecast now by her bones, her eyes like boiled eggs turned to the wind.
—It’s blue, he said. It’s the deep blue that comes after the solstice. There’s jet trails crossing the sky. One’s being made, and the others are fading. All of um’ve caught the sun.
—A jet plane?
—That’s it.
—Where is it going?
—Too high for Salt Lake. Looks like it’s going straight up, say to the moon.
—My what man has done.
Her voice trembled with age. Gravity had pulled her head low and she spoke these last words into her lap. Her shoulders strained at the weight. She was born before the Great Depression and he guessed she’d seen some things since then, had marked both progress and regression. She was dwindling, but not in unbelief. He remembered her steel will well enough, this righteous fearless matriarch, heard without clamor and powerful without menace, upright before her god but wavering now in the flesh, and this weakness made him ambivalent toward her, a mixture of embarrassment and pity, as if such degeneracy should be hidden away rather than seen, displayed even as she was in her own back yard. What loathing did he possess toward the weak and dying. What latent dread. Yet this woman, even now on her deathbed, old and venerable and immovable, wielded a power that was hard to understand. She was an oracle, a quiet might to be reckoned with, and he was unsure how to approach the battle. She was as good as slain by the diseases that troubled her, yet her control was in place and would outlast her.
He looked back up at the sky, finding the jet again and watching it bloom a dual contrail behind it, watching closer as the vapor shot out the back of the engines, slowed, held, and expanded. Some of the contrails that crossed overhead were sheer wisps like fragmented cirrus clouds. He imagined the tall cities like clustered stands of trees around the curve of the earth in all directions, the places he had never been and would perhaps never see, the places these jets were going. Blair came out of the house and approached them.
—Come on dear, he said. Let’s get you back inside.
Adelaide, her head bowed lower now and shaking with bared nerves, the fixed smile of the aged on her lips, tried feebly to raise her arms like a child would as her husband of fifty-two years approached.
He spent the morning of the next day and part of the afternoon with the dog, shirtless, sweating in the sun and repairing the long fence line that edged the hillside above the river bottoms. It was their largest field, sprawled out like a lake, lapping up to the barnyard on one end and the farmhouse on the other. It was from this field that they harvested the bulk of their alfalfa crop each year. He rolled alongside