When Xander and I put down our instruments and agreed to meet again the next day to jam, I left relaxed and ready to finally go home. It was early afternoon, hours after my intended arrival, when I made my way well outside of town and turned off the pavement onto the old familiar gravel road.
The Caldwell farm sat on the right. The McDougal land was to the left. Rows of corn stretched in either direction until they reached the foot of the mountains. Dust rose behind my vehicle, blocking the last remnants of modern civilization from view.
The few gravel roads I had been on in the last several years were rough and rutted, but not this one. It was smooth and maintained. Every other spring, we would drag this road to eliminate the washboard that formed over the winter and to add gravel to thin spots. In the opposite years, the Caldwells handled the task. The few families that lived farther up in the mountains never helped. We had the equipment, and they didn’t. Simple enough.
Is it the Caldwells’ year? If Dad was so sick, he couldn’t have been able to operate a box blade on a tractor. But he couldn’t have planted the acres of corn either. Did they hire someone to help? Hiring seasonal help was one thing. We’d done it out of necessity at certain times of year, but someone had to be out in the fields every day.
The tires crossed from the gravel to the old wooden bridge over the creek Dean and I had played in as kids. The hum of the tires over the boards changed back to the crunch of gravel, the sign to look for the mailbox marking the entrance to our home. With sweaty palms and a churning in my stomach, I turned the SUV into the narrow passage through the corn that was our driveway. The roof of the house peeked over the stalks.
With a suddenness that took my breath away—the same as it had when I was a child—the corn opened to reveal the small yard surrounding our house. The massive maple tree in the front yard stood sentry as it had for a century. The old barn rose behind the house.
The house itself sat in the center of the clearing. Its covered front porch stretched from one corner of the house to the other. It looked the same as it always had. I suspected the interior was also the same.
Three windows on the second floor above the porch marked my bedroom on one side, Dean’s on the other, and the small bathroom we shared in between. Our great-grandfather had added it a hundred years earlier when indoor plumbing became a reality.
If we snuck in or out of the house at night, we didn’t dare use the steps in the house’s interior. Our parents’ bedroom was in the rear of the second floor, and they would always hear us coming or going. Instead, we would use our windows, cross the porch roof, and drop to the ground. To return, we climbed the porch supports.
Downstairs, the front parlor was under Dean’s room. The dining room was below mine. The front door in between stood open to let the mountain breezes slip through the screen. The rear parlor, which had been converted to the farm office, and kitchen were toward the back of the house.
I could see every inch clearly in my mind—every piece of furniture, the scuff marks we had left on the floor, and even the colors in each room. I suspected they looked the same as they had the day I’d left.
Somewhere inside, my father lay dying. My mother, I had no doubt, stood in those shadows and watched me through one of the open windows. She would have heard me coming down the gravel from a mile away. We’d always known when a visitor was arriving.
I took a deep breath. After all these years, I was home.
After parking in the shade of the sprawling maple tree, I waited to see if she would emerge. When she didn’t, I got out and looked around, not wanting to rush inside.
My original impression that nothing had changed was wrong. The longer I stared, the more I noticed. The barn, always neat and orderly in my youth, sagged to one side. No interior lights blazed, so the propped-open door revealed only gloomy shadows. From what little I could see, no bales of hay were stacked inside.
A tractor was parked just in front of the barn in its usual spot beside a row of implements. Rather than looking oiled and fit, the equipment was faded, and rust spots were apparent. Tall grass grew through the openings, a sure sign nothing had moved this spring. One front tire was half-deflated, a sin that would never have been allowed in my youth.
The garden between the house and barn was half-planted. Overgrown weeds strangled what young plants had emerged. Broken branches lay scattered under the tree. One of my daily chores had been to pick up and dispose of any debris on the lawn.
Only a scar in the bark of the thick branch above my head remained to mark where the tire swing had once hung. I’d loved sitting in that tire with a book in my hand, reading away my summer days. Dean had preferred seeing how high he could swing then leaping from the tire at its peak.
The flower beds surrounding the front steps contained early-spring blooms, but weeds had erupted around them. Mom loved those beds and wanted them perfect. While Dean toiled away in the fields, I’d spent many a day on hands and knees, pulling unwanted growth until my sneezing drove me indoors.
The house needed a fresh coat of paint. A shutter hung from a second-floor window. A gutter had pulled loose from one corner.
All the maintenance work of the house, in addition to running the farm, would have fallen on Dad’s shoulders with both Dean and me gone. In my haste to escape, I’d never thought much about how he would manage alone. He had done it before we came, but he was younger then.
That made me wonder again how the fields surrounding the house were so well maintained. Had they hired someone to run the farm? But wouldn’t they use the barn and tractor? Maybe a neighboring farmer was leasing the land.
The squeak of the screen door interrupted my thoughts. My mother stepped onto the broad porch and let the door slam closed behind her. She wiped her hands on her apron and stood staring at me.
Her hair was grayer. Wrinkles crisscrossed her face. Age spots dotted the backs of her hands. She looked older than her years, but farming life was hard.
Our sporadic phone calls may have let us hear voices, but we hadn’t seen each other since I’d left. She was sizing me up the same way I was her. The years had changed me too.
My hair might have been too shaggy when I left—a constant battle with the old man about the need to keep it cut—but now it reached well past my shoulders.
The sweatshirt mercifully hid most of my tattoos, but the ink was visible on the backs of my hands. The tattoos Dean and I got on our eighteenth birthdays—a day apart, of course—had caused a massive fight in the house. Why would we want to deface our bodies? My transgression had since gone far beyond that first innocent treble clef inked on my calf.
While we were growing up, Mom hated to see us wear black T-shirts with our jeans. “You look like hoodlums,” she would scold. Now I stood in front of her with a black sweatshirt, jeans, and boots, wearing her hated color from head to toe.
With a deep breath, I crossed the yard and climbed the steps like a little boy going to Mommy for his punishment. I braced for a scolding. A tense conversation. Even just a soft tsking.
But she did the last thing I expected. She wrapped her arms around me, pulled me close in a bear hug, and cried.