PROSPECT, OHIO

My mother told this story about her grandparents:

Moore kept his farm a showplace by working himself and his family hard, even on Sundays. His white barn towered above the surrounding fields, the tin-roofed farmhouse, and his wife’s neat peony-edged garden. Inside the barn, everything had its place. Hoes and rakes hung by leather thongs, and the joints of the trailer were supple with grease. Even in the chicken house not a shingle was loose, and the cleats of its ramp were nailed down tight. Every morning his wife gathered the eggs she would use that day from beneath the hens’ warm rumps.

He must have been near the farmhouse when the stroke hit, because she found him right away. Maybe he was eating lunch at the long table, listening to the radio news; a strange light came into his eyes and he stiffened, then fell out of his chair, knife and fork clattering to the ground. The radio announcer murmured on, relating the morning’s farm market report.

So it became her job to care for him. She bent over the bed and lifted the body grown frail from disuse, tipped mush into his mouth and wiped his chin. She heated water on the stove for shaving, pulled his skin taut with her thumb, and drew the blade over the day’s rasping growth. She bent his arms and guided them into sleeves, cut his nails, stroked his once-calloused palms. She pushed his squeaking hospital bed from room to room to give him change of scene. (She had ordered the doors widened especially for this purpose, had had a picture window cut in a wall.) So passed three years.

After he died she wrote my mother a letter. This isn’t living. Living was walking through the cornfields with Ernest. That was 1967. She stayed alone until her death, twenty-one years later.

We drove slowly past the old farmhouse as my mother spoke, and I imagined them as they must have been, my great-grandparents, his work-roughened hands parting the waist-high leaves, the cornstalks pulling at her skirts. Their backs to us. Walking toward the fence line, the green smell of plants and damp earth pressing the soles of their feet. Her hair pulled tightly back in a knot. Him tall, a little stooped, his hair thinning at the crown, neck tanned and speckled from the sun. Maybe I’ve got it wrong. But maybe when she remembered her happiness it looked like this: his known face turning aside to examine the corn as the reclining summer sun turned the sky pink behind him, his hands brushing the leaves. She tended him as he’d tended the ground and what grew there, never sparing a day; not for profit or pride, but because this was the work she knew.