Recalling Butterflies over a Hayfield
Sam Cady
Travis always swaggers out of the Co-Op office through the break room door, picking his teeth with his thumbnail. Like I’m not sitting here in the Dodge waiting for his lazy ass or like we don’t mind that the number two sprayer is out in Darrell Robinson’s bean field with one beam wrapped around a telephone pole.
He’ll even take a moment to pull his dirty Cubs cap a bit lower so he don’t have to look at me. Then he’ll fish his chew out of his Wranglers and put in a dip before getting in the truck. He’s a scrawny, pigeon-toed little cuss and if it weren’t for his blue eyes he wouldn’t have half of those stories he tells in the break room about all those girls he gets. What he needs is a haircut. My wife, Carol, has given me the same buzz cut for the past forty years and it works out fine. “Makes it less obvious you’re bald” she says. “Don’t matter anyway,” I say, and jam on my old Dekalb hat, the summer one with the mesh back.
As Travis walks up he’s got his head turned to the side watching a slow piggy-back freight train rumble by on the Union Pacific tracks just north of the fertilizer sheds. Sometimes I catch him watching the trains when he’s supposed to be working. He settles in the passenger side, slouches and throws his arm over the back of the seat like he’s got some blonde next to him, then he stares at me, waiting.
I pull off my glasses and polish the lenses and the little gold frames, taking my time and making him wait. Then I put them back and say “Well.”
I’m driving the Co-Op’s truck and it’s a three-quarter ton piece of shit because the wrong people been driving it. There’s two kinds of people that work here. There’s retired farmers like me who know what they’re doing and show up early, and there’s the young guys who only know how to destroy shit and show up hung over. Travis ain’t too bad—at least he don’t run his mouth like most of those smart asses.
I pull out of the gravel lot and start down 6th Street which is just two rows of buildings, all of them empty except the post office where the dust is so thick that you’d think it’d been closed for a decade.
Someone smashed the big front window out of the old Jacob’s Grocery last week. Kids done it, or so Tom Wright the postmaster says. They used a chunk of concrete right out of the cracked foundation of the Sampson’s Conoco next door.
“This town’s going to hell!” I say to Travis who just stares back at me. Kids.
Sometimes I look down the street and see the shops open again, like they were sixty years ago when I was a kid. Maddox Hardware always had its front door propped open with a paint can full of cement, and a dozen new garden hoes in a line, all spaced just right, leaning against the front window. And surly old Mabel Maddox perched in the back corner on a wooden stool, glaring through her thick glasses out the window to make sure no kids come along and mess up the display. Or maybe she was waiting for her husband Gerald, who was always out of the store and down the street at Conroy’s auto shop. He’d come back and man the register, to save her fat self from having to shove off that stool and waddle behind the counter ever time a customer wanted a couple pounds of finishing nails.
The Maddoxes had been there since Gerald got back from the Great War. Over in France he was wounded and so he walked with a limp. All the kids around town used to say that he had a fake leg below the knee, but no one ever saw it. Gerald was always a social guy and had a way of making you feel comfortable talking to him. Sometimes kids would forget what their parents had told them about manners and ask him about the war, to see if they could get a story out of him. But he’d just sniff and say “It’s all in your history books.” I never did like that answer.
The Maddoxes sold out in ‘65 to some hippie couple from Colorado or some place out west. They held on till ‘73 and then closed shop and disappeared.
But the front windows of Maddox’s hardware all covered in thirty year old newspaper ain’t as bad as the mess next to it. It used to be Hansen’s Repair shop, a one-story joint with two sides covered in tin sheets and the others patched with planks salvaged from his grandpa‘s old barn. Jim Hansen was crazy. He stuck with a forge and an anvil when everyone else had gone to acetylene torches and stick welders. The whole town was convinced that little firetrap would blaze up around him and take half the block with it and so they tried to pass some ordinance and drive him out. Wouldn’t matter though because that winter he drove his Buick off the bridge over Indian Creek in a white out and laid in a culvert for three days till they found him.
Now the shop is falling in on itself. One corner is about all that’s standing but even that’s leaning. Mostly the place is a pile of rotten boards with patches of moss and weeds—mare’s tail in the early summer and black nightshade later when the beans start to turn. Somebody needs to burn that heap. Those kids should stop breaking windows and start playing with matches. I should burn it myself. Burn it down then go back and grab his old anvil—I bet that’s worth something. Might as well take it, no one seems to remember that place as ever being anything more than a dilapidated mess.
By now we’re out of town speeding north up Highway 65, past Lantz’s pasture, the last one in the area, past Brown’s farm. That idiot’s last adventure in exotic livestock ended with an old sway-back zebra and a donkey that was so loud he got Brown into a feud with the neighbors.
From the other side of the cab there’s little beeping noises that sound something like “Take Me Out To The Ball Game.” Travis whips out his cell phone and looks at it and stuffs it back in his pocket.
“Who’s that?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the road. When I glance over he’s staring out the window really hard, like he’s trying to count the corn rows whizzing by. “I was just wondering if it was Larry.”
He don’t even turn his head. “Wasn’t” is all he says. That’s what’s wrong with Travis—he gets in a mood and won’t give you more than a syllable. If I ever had a son I sure as hell would have raised him better than that.
Robinson’s bean field where Roddy wrecked the sprayer is up to the left, about two miles down a gravel road. As I turn onto it I take the time to roll up my window because we haven’t had a good rain to settle the dust in at least three weeks. Travis doesn’t touch his window—he leaves it down and leans inside, out of the dust. A face full of dirt might be just what that asshole needs. We’re only a few miles away from my place and I’m wondering if I should go check on Carol. But I’m on the company’s time, and Travis probably wouldn’t like it either.
Every time we come over a rise I get a glimpse of the sprayer. It’s stranded in an end row, up near the northwest corner of the field. To get out to it I have to drive through the field with one tire up on the berm of dirt around the fence while the other is in the field just missing the little bean plants by inches.
Roddy’s sitting up at the top of the ladder, just in the cab, with his feet dangling out the door. He’s another fine figure, freckled and pudgy, always wearing t-shirts with the sleeves cut off and a big belt buckle, the kind those hicks wear out west. When he sees us coming he perks up some but doesn’t bother to climb down.
I park the Dodge a few feet away and Travis and I walk over to assess the damage. When Roddy called in he said he’d hit a telephone pole and now I’m looking at a four foot section on the end of one of the spray booms. The tubing is kinked in a few places and the lines have pulled loose, though it looks like that dipshit had enough sense to turn off the pump quick because he didn’t spill too much herbicide. I’m staring at this thing and thinking it can be fixed. “What’d you do, Roddy?” Roddy just sits up on the rig and won’t come down. Too ashamed I guess. He just shrugs. All we’ll need is a few new lines, connectors and nozzles. But I won’t tell Roddy that—let the little bastard stew. He shouldn’t have been driving that close to the power lines anyway. Now I’ll have to go into town and round up the parts—Weitz’s Implement might have them. I turn around and head for the truck and Travis starts walking that way too. “Fine fuckin’ mess you got here, Roddy. Fine fuckin’ mess.”
We head back down the gravel road and the air is so still that the dust hasn’t had time to settle. It’s almost noon with the sun beating down on us and the miles of stubby corn and bean fields that surround us are shimmering in the heat. Turning onto Highway 65 we let an old school bus go past. It’s all white, and I remember hearing that it’s one used by the railroads to shuttle crews around when their shifts end.
I turn out onto 65 and start following the bus towards town. I’m an old farmer and I can’t help but look at everyone’s crops and then I get to thinking about how all anyone ever grows anymore is corn and beans—no oats or timothy. On my left we pass a narrow field that runs parallel to the road and used to be farmed by Tommy Kruger. Fifty years ago he used to keep a nice stand of alfalfa but now it’s corn.
Dad and I drove out there once in the proud little Model T that we used as a farm truck. We were looking to buy some of the alfalfa that Tommy’d cut the day before, and so we all walked out in the middle of the field through the ankle deep hay. Dad and Tommy talked about how this nice breeze would dry it out the next day. I stood there and watched the birds on the strand of barbed wire that crowned the fence surrounding the field. There were redwing blackbirds and a few meadow larks that just sat there swaying every so slightly with each little gust. Then one would fly over the field and drop down onto the hay and peck around for its old nest, but they were all cut up and smashed by the hay bine yesterday. The birds would peck for a few minutes then fly off because there were always snakes slithering about under the matted hay.
I always loved the sweet smell of hay and watching the little yellow butterflies of early summer flitter over the field. I’d get caught up in all this and miss Dad badgering Tommy about the alfalfa and how he cut it too late—indicating how much the little purple flowers on the alfalfa had blossomed. Tommy’d say he was going for tonnage and Dad would complain about the nutritional value. But he’d settle down because what’s done is done and then he’d volunteer my services for baling and then haggle for another 15 cents an hour over the 50 Tommy offered. I’d just stand there watching the butterflies.
We’re past the field now, still driving south towards town and Travis is drumming his fingers on the window sill. He can’t look out over these fields and think what I’m thinking; he doesn’t have those kinds of memories. He’s just like every other kid in the area who grew up on an acreage where his daddy didn’t farm anything larger than a few hills of potatoes and a sweet corn patch. What would he know about walking out over eighty acres of beans in May and digging around with a pocket knife trying to find a seed, trying to see if it had germinated.
The highway passes the edge of Colo and there’s a Casey’s next to an empty gravel lot owned by the Manning Brothers Grain Elevator. Everyone going to the gas station drives through the lot and the traffic has left some deep pot holes which the Mannings refuse to fill unless Casey’s kicks in half the costs. Of course that was five years ago and since neither side will give, the holes have just gotten deeper. But that doesn’t stop people from parking there and because it’s almost noon the lot is filling up fast. The lunch crowd is coming through and there’s a line of cars and trucks. Out on highway the local boys who drive semi have illegally parked on both shoulders. Driving between them feels like running a gauntlet. As we approach I slow down and spot my boss’s truck in the lot, and as I pull in Larry comes out of the store with a greasy slice of pizza and his coffee mug which he keeps full of Pepsi at all times of the day.
I catch him on the sidewalk and say, “Roddy busted up the left boom. She’ll get by for a few days if we replace a few sections of hose and some nozzles.”
It always bugs Larry that I never say “Hello” or “Hi” and just get right down to it. He’s more of a business man, wanting to fill your ear with bullshit which makes me think of him as a politician. The young guys love when he bullshits with them because no one will accuse them of wasting company time if the boss is yakking to you.
“I’m on my way to Weitz’s to pick up some replacements.” I tell him. “We’ll have her running by two or two-thirty.”
“All right,” he says. And that’s that—I’ve got him trained not to waste my time.
Weitz’s is just a few blocks over and I’m sure the whole crew working there will be in the tin shed that serves as their office. It’s hard to find them anywhere else until one-thirty.
I park the truck at the end of a line of broken down combines, mostly John Deere 4420s except for the faded and stripped-down Case on the end. The back panels are off and its guts are on display. The sifter screens are all rusted and there’s piles of rotting oak leaves from last fall down in the low places.
We cross the lot through our own dust cloud, and it settles on the wooden reels of the junked bean head and on our hats and everything else in the yard. On the little square of concrete that serves as the front step to the office I take the time to dust myself while Travis just clears his mouth and spits to the side. In the office there’s four guys sitting around an old Formica kitchen table with rusty chromed legs. Weitz is somehow the head—sitting there with his fat gut butted up against it, ham sandwich in one hand and a few greasy playing cards in the other. The two of us went to school together—almost all the way through but he dropped out one semester shy of graduating and went into the Army. People couldn’t understand why he did it, but I’m glad he left because then he stopped bugging Carol with all those damn letters.
He done his time for Uncle Sam, got back and started up the implement business. Now, he’s gotten fatter and only has a scraggly patch of gray hair running from ear to ear behind his head but his hairy arms still look strong.
To his right sits Weitz Jr., doomed to inherit the business because of his apathy. He’s so damn lazy he only did the two years of high school required by the state. He looks like his slob of a father, making me think he’s too lazy to look different.
Sitting directly across from Weitz Sr. is a skinny little guy pale as milk with a stocking cap on his head covering his blond hair. People say he’s an albino and I think he’s a little ashamed and that’s why he covers it. He never says anything, but always has a weird way of staring at you with those eyes which are darker than hell. It makes people uncomfortable and so no one really likes him. Weitz prefers to keep him directly across the table because he’s convinced that he’s cheating in cards somehow. Whenever Weitz gets his hackles up he bumps the table towards him with his stomach and all the albino ever does is stare back.
The game quieted down when Travis and I came in. They all looked up at us except that albino.
“Need some sprayer hose and a few nozzles.” I say to Weitz.
“What’s wrong now?” he asks.
“Damn kids got a spray boom caught on a telephone pole.”
Weitz huffs and chuckles making the table bounce. He lays his cards face down on the table. “And I suppose you gave him hell about it too.”
His son snickers and my neck tenses up a bit. “Well shit, Weitz, these damn kids break something every week.”
“And I suppose you never broke nothin’ when you was young.”
“Well no, I remember when I was. . .”
“Oh shut up. No one wants to hear any of your damn stories.” He turns to the albino and tells him to run outside and help us find what we’re looking for. Then he picks up his cards and I know the conversation is over.
The albino gets up and walks out and we follow him through the dust, down the narrow alleys between pallets stacked with rusty sickle teeth, grain augers, and stripped-down big block engines. Somewhere in this mess there must be an old sprayer we can scavenge. Travis trips on the end of an old harrow that’s half buried in the ground and falls down in a cloud of dust. The albino has stopped next to a sprayer bar that’s missing its wheels and is sinking in the dirt.
“You got a half-inch wrench?” I ask.
He only stares at me.
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The sun is setting over the bean field next to my house. It’s so low on the horizon that I have to pull down the brim of my hat to shade my eyes as I walk down the rows. There isn’t any real need to walk from one end of the field to the other if you’re just checking beans for mares-tail or water-hemp, but I do it anyway. I don’t even own these beans anymore—not since I retired. Charlie Benton rents it along with my old pasture where he’s got some stupid sheep that get their heads stuck in the woven wire fence.
The fence-line is thick with that damn Reed-Canary grass that chokes out everything else. During the summer it grows up through the wire and come winter when the snow piles up this just pulls the fence down. I haven’t been out to fix this part in a few years and all that’s left is a rusted mess grown over with that damn grass.
Beyond the fence is Bob Cline’s field and already he’s got little patches of lambsquarter popping up. That idiot never sprays on time and it makes his fields look bad. Back when we had to cultivate, that was long work, but he’s got no excuse for not spraying. It’s not that he doesn’t have the time. It’s not his wife who’s got cancer.
I get to thinking about Carol a lot more nowadays and that’s almost as painful as sitting in the living room with her while she stares at the yellowed pages of her bible. All she does is sit in her chair with her eyes glazed over.
She’s in bed now. I have to lug her up the narrow stairs and put her there and every morning I haul her down again and set her in her chair. She can’t even cook anymore so I get a lot of carry out, barbeque or pizza, which doesn’t help my cholesterol but it gives me a chance to get away. I offered to stay home and read her damn Watchtower to her, but she knows I can’t stand hanging around the house all day. I probably could have just stayed—called Larry and told him I won’t be in for a while, but I didn’t.
Coming back towards the house I walk down an end row, kicking my toes down with each step and sending little showers of dirt ahead of me like I did when I was a kid. Mom would yell at me to take off my boots whenever I came in dirty and Carol used to too but she doesn’t seem to notice anymore—but I still take them off anyway.
As soon as I step into the yard, my black lab comes tearing around the corner of the house with his old knotted sock dangling out of his mouth. It’s nice to have someone who’s still young and playful, so I’ll throw around Jackson’s sock and watch as he chases after it then comes tearing back with six inch of drool hanging out his mouth. I’ve often thought it would be fun to let him come to work with me—his head hanging out the window would look better than Travis’s.
Jackson and I wander the yard, me throwing his sock and him hauling it back nasty with slobber and grass clippings. Finally we work our way to the shop and head inside. Jackson’s bed is a bench seat I hauled out of our old ’76 Mercury before I sold it to Chaney’s in Ames for junk. He hops up and lies down and lets the sock fall out of his mouth, like he suddenly forgot about it. On the back wall there are wooden cubbies full of bolts, nuts, washers, pins, cotter keys and other small stuff. I start picking through them, just to look at them. Sometimes I do the same with the pile of tools on the work bench. There are nails on the back wall that they used to hang on. Dad used to keep everything organized, but I can’t seem to do that.
I put Jackson to bed and lock up the shop. Over the field the sun looks like it’s melting into Cline’s weedy beans. I don’t want to go in, but it’ll be dark in about twenty minutes. There’s stuff to get done out here—a few planks have rotted out of the fence around the pig pens, the roof on the chicken coop caved in under the snow last winter, and every northwest wind sends a few more shingles fluttering off the barn onto the concrete below, but I don’t have the ambition to fix any of it.
I feel old sometimes—like I should be sitting in my chair in the living room, reading my Ames Tribune. But I remember my Grandpa and how he could never sit still when there was work to be done—and there‘s always work to be done on a farm. I remember when I was five or so, and he and Dad were sorting hogs. I watched through the slats in the fence as he waded through the ugly black pigs, swinging at them with his cane and making me afraid that he might do that to me someday. Grandma said that he needed the cane because he had a stroke, but he always said it was for herding livestock though I never saw him without it, even when he was in church or walking his corn. Dad said he was too proud to admit that he needed it and Grandma told him that “Pride is a sin!”
One day in September he set off into the pasture to look at one of our cows that Dad thought might have brucellosis. Dinner time came around and he wasn’t back so they sent me to get him. I found him face down in the grass next to some scraggly willows. I’d seen dead animals before, but never a dead person and I remember not being sad or upset, but wanting to see his face, to know if death scared him.
When I didn’t come back Dad came looking and found us both just as the sun was going down. Grandpa was still face down in the blue grass and I was crouched a few feet away staring at him like a calf that’s curious about a toad.
The sun’s been down awhile now and even the twilight is fading. In the kitchen I stand on the little mat in front of the sink—the one that Carol stood on every night for forty years. I’m staring out the window because I can’t sleep—because I don’t want to go up to that bed. Out the window over the sink I watch the lightning bugs as they drift over the lawn. There’s ruts in the grass from last November when we had the sale. We sold off all of the farm equipment because I was “retiring”, but everyone knew the reason was that we needed money to pay for Carol’s treatments. All of the neighbors showed up and the wives threw together a big meal. The yard was full of people, some from as far away as Appanoose County. One younger fella from Ames bought my Grandpa’s old horse-drawn mower. He wasn’t the farming type and I could tell because he wore one of those swooshy sport coats and a gold bracelet like the one Carol’s doctor has. Out of curiosity I asked him what he wanted the mower for and he said that his wife was wanting to put some old piece of farm machinery in her garden. I didn’t really like it that Grandpa’s old mower was just going to rust away in someone’s yard but he was gonna give me a couple hundred dollars for it. I started to tell him all I knew about it, figuring it might be interesting to him, but he didn’t care.
A lot of my family’s stuff got sold like that and now Grandpa’s mower is rusting in some suburbanite’s yard because, somehow, the look of rusty machinery satisfies them. They don’t care about how much horse sweat has soaked into the tongue or how many acres of wheat were cut down by the sickle bar. We needed the money sure enough, but I still feel guilty—like I shouldn’t have sold it to people who don’t give a damn about the stories. Now I’m left with the stories and no objects to put them to, and so they don’t seem real anymore.
The dust is collecting in the house. It comes up through the grates in the floor and settles on everything from Grandma’s oak table to the picture hanging next to the bay windows in the living room. Every morning I wipe it clean with my handkerchief figuring maybe Carol looks at it while I’m at work.
The photo is faded and a little out of focus—all we had forty years ago was an old Kodak box camera. Carol took the picture the first summer were married, the summer of the big flood when the bottom land along Dye Creek looked like a monstrous lake with brush and dead animals floating by.
Sometimes I stare at the picture—trying to find whatever it is that Carol sees in it. I’m in the picture, walking with the morning sun on my back through ankle deep water with only one rubber boot on—the other that filled up with water had come off in the mud, while I was carrying a newborn calf to the barn. Carol snapped the picture as I was hugging this sopping wet animal to my chest. She said she’d never forget that day and was always glad she got that picture. Though I wonder if that’s still true. With her new medication all she does is sit and stare. I don’t want to be like that and spend the last days of my life not able to think.
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much about things. I spend half my days dredging up childhood memories—memories of spring when the snow melted and I’d go sloshing through the pasture looking for newborn calves. Or of my days at the tiny Sherman schoolhouse, watching the dust sparkle in the shafts of light that came in the window as the winter sun sank low on a January afternoon.
I’m afraid that someday soon I won’t be all there. I drive around all day, seeing places like the little schoolhouse and Maddox’s Hardware and thinking back on them and I feel like something’s lost if I don’t keep recalling them. All of Carol’s time is spent sitting in that chair, and she’s losing it. I don’t want to lose what Carol’s lost because if you can’t remember your life you have nothing left. When I die I want to see myself standing in Tommy Kruger’s hayfield watching the butterflies flutter by. I want to smell the lemon oil that coated the floors of Maddox’s hardware store and the damp smell of spring. I want to find newborn calves and carry them to the barn and tuck them into a soft pile of straw while Carol looks on.
Maybe it’ll all come in one big flash—Gerald’s frown, Weitz’s insults, Travis’s silence and Carol’s empty stare—my whole life, condensed into an instant. There’ll be a rush of water, the sound of Hansen’s hammer striking the anvil, and everything else I’ve ever known or experienced—all in one terrifying moment. Finally a hush, and a cloud of dust covering everything. Then I’ll be the little boy, crouching in the twilight staring curiously at my own dead body lying face down in the soft dirt.