The Grass Was Well Kept
“Both were broken, weren’t they?” These words fumbled from my lips, numbing my feet as I tripped across the flat grass. “Both. Yes, both.” My hands, like old schoolyard swings off my shoulders, hung over the freshly cut lawn. The ground below, now somehow colorless, felt brittle, bone dry, and smooth – yet butchered. “One more shell. I need one more shell?” Someone kept mumbling to myself as the old farmhouse door recorded my approach.
The 410 shotgun was light in my hand; or did I leave it on the ground, back there, in the pasture? “Did… I miss?” Softball tonight, right? “Why was I carrying only one shell?” Behind me the old farm site choir stayed silent for too long. Those angelic blackbirds, they saw it. I didn’t miss. I never miss. Life was straight as an arrow back then, and my vision as clear as my future. But blackbirds never stay quiet this long. And they were both broken, weren’t they? I couldn’t even tell which swing the gun was resting in, the left one or the right.
Funny thing about farm life, the smallest event can turn pages of history upside down. I mean, look at me. A boy of fifteen years, my grandfather’s hope for a sixth generation farmer for this central Minnesota slough ground; and at this point the ground’s all but done being tilled by another member of the Gustafson clan. How could grandpa know that when he walked away from this marsh land twenty years earlier, when farming started to go south, he also buried all those hopes he had of me driving that old Oliver 880 across these 280 acres of black mud? Thinking I was lazy anyway, how could he ever picture a time when renting the land out would be more profitable, letting the Jones’ run the land?
But he never understood his son. So why should he understand his grandson? How could he understand my allergies didn’t let me help with bailing and chopping? As for farming, nope, can’t get enough dollars per bushel to match what the neighbors are offering in rent. Besides, they’re corporate now. And the family farm, well, long live the King.
Still, I was my father’s son. I know he thought that of me. Today I’m proud as hell about that. Every time one of the old women from church would tell me so, tell me I am my father’s son, I could see sincere respect in their eyes. My dad, the gentleman farmer, willing to lose his shirt if it meant helping out a neighbor, these were the type of people I grew up around. Grandpa, was he around during those years?
But how could I be him, be like them, if all I get to do is tend to a sheep herd. Sure, I have thirty wooly friends to care for; and when they decide to get into something, I get to act tough. But these aren’t cattle. Cattle make you tough. They can crush you; and the milk cows went away with banking’s commitment to family farming – just like the cattle. The hogs wouldn’t ever be back, not with those money vultures seeing better profits arriving through foreclosure. Sound financial practice through the farm crisis. Willie tried to sing the farms back to life. To this day I’ll turn it up some when one of his songs comes across the AM dial. Willie, he’s family.
But unlike Willie, some others aren’t – like Ronnie Reagan. I will never forgive Ronnie for his Reagan-economics principles, principles proven not to work, yet emulated by George W. not too long later. No, Ronnie was from the same generation as my grandfather. Both of them were wrong about so many things. I guess that’s why I never understood any reasons how come either of them was given so much respect. After all, grandpa almost killed our family farm his way, and Reagan killed the family farm in his.
But we still pretend, don’t we. As a nation and as people, we still pretend that nothing changes. Pretend that the powers that be have an agenda greater than their personal greed; and to some point they do. But at another point, they’re just firing shots into the purity of the American countryside. They never forget to carry extra shells, be they in Washington or rural Minnesota. And I did leave the gun in the pasture. Anyone walking by that day would have felt it too. So many things were left back then, to waste in the pasture. After that the prairie grass returned throughout the Midwest, pasture lands empty of anything but whitetail deer, waiting for the corporate farmer to plow through and rape the soil.
Back then my shoulders still seemed to touch the ground. I was no man yet. But that was the last shot I’d take as a child, my woolly pets transforming into a business with every remaining breath. No, the bank wasn’t coming to take my flock, though I did have some high quality stock in the pasture that they had taken interest in.
I awoke from my daze that day. Those onlookers, they knew that Betsy had been part of the flock since the beginning. Dad was still farming the land himself when we bartered for this all white sheep from the neighbors. Laverne and Shirley, the two Suffolk ewes, had pranced around Betsy on the day she arrived. They had a follower now. Shirley was an Alpha female, and like everything that’s business, Betsy fell in line.
After that the numbers started to grow. What with Betsy normally having triplets and the Suffolk twins almost always having twins themselves, the flock could expand by nearly fourteen sheep every year just from these three ewes. Old Abe was a pretty active buck back then. In fact, the one year Betsy gave birth to three sets of triplets in one calendar year. Actually, she made this feat by one calendar day. Three sets! She was a lambing machine. I still think that’s why her body gave out.
The birds still weren’t singing yet when I returned to her body. The 410 asleep on the ground next to her like an overworked hunting dog, was empty. Betsy’s head came up. Her body was gone though. With those two broken front legs underneath her, she just stared at me. Her body had literally collapsed. Grandpa’s dream was collapsing too. The marks from the first shot were clearly visible. I didn’t miss. I never missed back then, to the dismay of every unlucky squirrel or rabbit. And that sleeping dog hadn’t failed to find its target either. But somehow that first shot hadn’t killed her. It just lodged itself in my memory.
The grass, it became even a little less vibrant as the emptied shell ejected without so much a noise. The red plastic didn’t even smell like I’d fired the gun five minutes earlier. But I had. I’d tripped across the flat grass while Betsy stared at me, unable to move, unwilling to show pain. With the gun reloaded I lowered that dog’s nose one more time. After all, this was just a business. Grandpa was right. I would never be a farmer.
Karl Klint
