Horrible Harvest

When you set at the edge of a river, the world hums. Like a mother hums to her baby, cradled in her arms. It’s a small, soft sound that wraps you up and gives you a well of peace that soaks the sting of time away. It’s the one thing I loved from my years spent on the farm – other than Momma – And I s’pose I even loved Charles back then, too. Everything else about this goddamn place irked me to my soul. It’s more thorn than flower yet I come back to it every hour left quiet in my mind. I can’t escape it. I done and seen awful things in near every corner of this country, but the awful here, it tugs at me the most. I feel deep in my gut that if I’d been spared the hard years on this little speck of a rice farm, I would’ve escaped the horrible harvest that my life’d become.

“So,” Allison said, “this is it.”

“It?”

“The anchor.”

I give her a squint of my left eye. “I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

“This is what has you moored in place. This farm – It’s not even a farm anymore. It’s joined the woods around it. It’s an overgrown field guarded by nature.”

“What’re you getting at?”

“I’m getting at this. It’s moved on. It’s grass and trees and brush and this critter and that -It’s had sense enough to find new purpose in this world. It don’t hold onto what it was. It don’t hold a grudge. It don’t hold nothing but the hope for peace that comes from the new hours each day brings.”

I shook my head. “Hope don’t work its way into the goings on of nature. What you see going on here – the field, the trees, the things that slither and crawl – Going about their day –

They work toward need, not hope. That’s the only thing that turns the clock in the natural world.”

She give my point some thought. “Well, goddamn. You out philosophized me.”

I give a laugh. “That’s because I’m an old-shit who’s done a lot and seen a lot. Can’t live the life I’ve lived without picking up the truth of this and that along the way.”

She wrapped her arms around her knees and bent towards the running waters of the Ashley. “What is your truth, Augustus Tennyson?”

I smirked. “I ain’t learned it yet.

“Okay, what’s your need then?”

“That I know.”

“So.”

“I can’t say. It’s what you might call a sacred need.”

“Then I really must hear it.”

“It’s too sacred to share. When I find it, you’ll know.”

The river ran before us for a time without conversation interrupting its flow. The hum found flight through the marsh and the traveling waters sang to us.

Allison broke off the song with a request. “If I can’t hear this need of yours, then tell me what become of your trip to the Dakotas?”

I stretched out my tired bones. “I ‘spect you already know.”

“I know what everyone else says – their truth. Don’t know yours.”

I scratched at my jawline and let the hum cradle me for a tick of time ‘fore I reached my mind back toward another story.