April 27, 2003, cont'd
I'm standing at my brother's grave. His gravestone soaks up heat. The bare fields surrounding the cemetery warm beneath full sun today. The story of the Resurrection must arise in an agricultural context.
I stand at my brother's grave. If you don't know wind, you don't know Iowa, you don't know this place where I would be with my brother if I could believe my brother could be here with me. Far off, a pheasant calls. I hear some creature snapping or chattering at me, my presence disturbing its afternoon. "MONTAG" says my parents' gravestone, "Oma M." and "Philip J." The earth is patient, waiting to accept them in their turn. They will some day be buried here amongst the Kacmarynskis and Schullers and Dramans and Ditches. Plantz and Graff and Leuer. Wilson, Joe B., my friend's father. Wilson, Bryan Lee, my friend, killed in Vietnam. The land keeps soaking up sun. We keep coming back to places like this.
My mother said again this morning how disappointed she always is when she stops to visit Randy's grave - "There's nothing there." Worms and soil. Grass and wind and sky. The lonesome song the pines know, the only song they ever sing. The sounds of all the birds, as if this story is about life, not death, about going on, not giving up. We learn to carry a lot of sadness. Every disturbed patch of cemetery soil is another sadness laid on someone.
I drive past the place where the old homestead used to stand. I slow but I don't stop. Every year there is less and less here, too. The evergreen that stood at the driveway is gone now. The big old cottonwoods we used to play beneath, gone. When I visited here a few years ago, I found then that house and barn and cribs and sheds had all been torn out. Where the house had stood, only the green ghostly shape of a house in the grass. Now even that has been plowed up for a few more bushels of corn. Only a line of windbreak remains, so much less than my memory of it. One wonders how long it will be til the windbreak gets torn out for the sake of a few more bushels of corn. We cannot contain how much we've lost, we cannot carry it, yet we must go on. Sometimes the sadness is as palpable as rain.
Yeah, yeah, Tom, sing them blues....
The farmers are out working their fields today, whatever I say. They'll tell you it doesn't matter what we say, it's what we do that counts. You can talk all day but that doesn't plant any corn.
*
7:00 p.m. It's Nebraska. The sun is in front of me. I'm on a detour where Highway 9 into West Point has been closed and I have to go eight miles out of my way. I see an old farmer walking towards a big rig at the end of a field. You can tell he's an old farmer by the way he leans towards his work as he walks. It's 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday in Nebraska, the western sky is orange with evening, and this farmer is going out to work a field. His wife is in the van in the driveway to the field, she has the car in reverse, she drove the farmer out to the field, now she is going back to the house. The image of all this moves me very deeply. I cannot swallow what's choking me. This salt-of-the-earth image? The man and his wife and the land and the late day sun on everything?
I feel as if I've fallen into a great chasm of belonging. I feel as if this image is an emblem of my task. I feel perhaps that this old farmer and his wife are the folks of whom I will speak when I talk of the middle west. He is Any-man, she is Every-woman, I am the obedient servant of this soil.
***
April 28, 2003
Well, she laughed hard, then she laughed again. I didn't even know her name yet. She said, "This is some kind of joke, right?" She said, "We can't even get people to ride along with him to see if they'd like to work for him. This is some kind of joke, right?" She laughed again. "This is a new one on me."
I had called Wisner Rendering, I'd simply asked whether I could ride along with her husband on his route some day this week as he picked up dead animals to take to the rendering plant. "No one has ever asked us before," she said. "Well, if you grew up on a farm, I suppose you know what you are getting into. I'll talk to my husband and have him call you."
I'd already been down to the Chamber of Commerce and met Staci Jensen, the Chamber director. She'd given me the phone number for Wisner Rendering. Maybe she looked at me a little funny when I asked? She'd given me names and phone numbers for a whole lot of other people I should talk to in the area as well.
To be continued....
Yep. We do carry a lot of sadness, and it makes me grateful for the wind sometimes when I'm standing in those places where the sadness is soaked into the soil. And the part about the chasm of belonging -- yes, that's the task, I think.
Posted by: beth | July 11, 2005 at 07:08 PM
Thanks, Beth. I would only add that some days the wind needs to blow harder. It's not always covering my sadness....
Posted by: Tom Montag | July 16, 2005 at 08:46 PM