by Bart Tuma
When he was completely asleep, an all too common nightmare returned. His dreams took him to another kitchen and a time years earlier. His dad was still alive and Erik was nine. That kitchen was in the old house where he used to live with his dad. His dad had just returned to the table from a phone call that had interrupted dinner. His picked up his fork to eat, but slammed it down hard holding his head rather than his fork. He glared at Erik. It wasn’t a mean glare, but a glare of disbelief. Erik didn’t know if it he was in trouble, but someone seemed to be. When his dad left the table, Erik instinctively followed. They got into the old pickup and Erik didn’t even have to asked where they were going. He just knew
They pulled in front of his Aunt and Uncle’s house. His dad got out of the truck and went into the house as if Erik wasn’t even there. His dad always walked ahead, but this time his steps looked as if they were in quicksand and darkness covered the cement steps.There were men in the house that Erik didn’t know, but they were obviously policemen, maybe even State cops. Erik was told to sit at the kitchen table while the adults went into the dining room; his dad, the police, Aunt Mary and Uncle Henry. Erik could hear their voices, but not their words.
Finally Erik was called into the dining room with its linen covered table. Erik never sat there, when he and his dad shared a meal with his aunt and uncle, they ate in the kitchen, but he sat in the dining room that evening. Aunt Mary tried to look calm with a gentle smile on her face that Erik didn’t believe.
“Erik, I have something to read to you. It’s a letter your mom wrote when she had to leave. We, your dad, wanted to wait until you were old enough to understand before we read the letter to you. Now we think it is time for you to hear it. These two gentlemen,” and she smiled brightly at the police, “just spoke with your mom and she is doing fine, so it’s probably time for you to know why she hasn’t been here.”
Erik still didn’t know why policemen would be reporting on someone if there wasn’t a problem, but their eyes never left Erik, as if he was the one they were looking for.
“Erik, like we told you in the past, your mom got sick and had to go away to get better. She’d be fine, but she had to go, and she wrote this letter. We, uh, we didn’t share it with you before ‘cause we thought she’d get better right quick and be back in no time… But, well, now seems like we better share her letter with you.”
Aunt Mary adjusted her reading glasses without looking at him. Her voice shook and cracked as she began to read from the paper she held in front of her.
“Erik,
I love you very much, but I have been sick and I need to go away. I will come back when I am feeling better, no matter how long that takes. I know every day apart from you will hurt me, but I want you to know I will think of you every minute.
I love you, and it’s best for both of us that I get well.
I love you, and you are always in my thoughts,
Your mom,
Maggie.”
Aunt Mary lowered the paper. Her face and neck was flushed scarlet. She forced herself, nearly defiantly, to meet Erik’s eyes, and Erik knew she had just told the biggest whopping lie of her life. There was a soft exhalation of relief from the men in the room. For his aunt’s sake, for his dad and uncle’s sake, and even for the two strange policemen’s sake, he swallowed once, twice, and then nodded.
He wasn’t sure if they had just protected him from something, or made it worse.
The dream shifted, morphed, melded into a time ten years later. Erik was in the Cooper’s house alone and found himself in front of his Aunt’s open jewelry box. He opened the bottom hand carved drawer and found a poorly fashioned fake bottom holding an old note yellowed with age He had found a secret and suddenly became thrilled at his find, until he read the words. It was very short, but instinctively Erik knew this was the note from his mother.
I’ll leave this so you don’t call the cops. I’ve had enough. I’m leaving the state. Don’t try to find me. I won’t come back no matter what you say. I can’t stand Fairfield and this farm is even worse. I tried. I’m done trying.
The note wasn’t signed, but Aunt Mary had noted in the margin: December 12, 1957, Maggie.
Erik wondered why Mary would want to memorialize that day. It would make more sense to burn the note; not burn the date into everyone’s mind. Then Erik remembered it was his aunt’s insane need to keep everything in place and filed away. At that moment he hated his aunt. It was all her fault. He wanted to go mess up his hallway sink.
Erik quickly noticed he wasn’t mentioned in the note. There was no way he could confront Mary since he was the intruder. He simply had to wait and wonder and come to his own conclusions
He found the truth from complete strangers. He was sixteen. Erik was waiting at the Fairfield Five and Dime for his aunt to give him a ride home after football practice. The store had a fountain counter and on this day there were two ladies sitting two stools to his right.
It was obvious they knew Erik. They kept looking at him as if they had discovered someone on a wanted poster. At first they spoke in low whispers, but as their excitement grew so did their voices. This was prime gossip, and the fact Erik was there only added to the thrill. One lady kept staring at Erik while the other spun the story with increasing gusto. At first Erik couldn’t hear her exact words, but that quickly changed.
The fervor of her voice grew until Erik’s ears throbbed with the sting of her words. That poor boy. I don’t know how he can even go on! How can he handle it? Her voice feigned sympathy, but her eagerness to share her gossip couldn’t be disguised. Erik’s ears began to burn. He turned his head away, trying to block the words from his mind, but it seemed as if the harder he tried to not hear, the sharper his hearing became.
His mom abandoned that boy and his dad. She had moved to Fairfield because her dad got a job transfer from Denver with the railroad. She hated Fairfield and everything about it. It wasn’t long before she started to get into trouble and everyone knew… well, they knew she really wasn’t a lady, but a real fluzie. She was doing whatever she needed to do to get a husband and get out of Fairfield, and she did it with every young boy in town. Finally she found a naïve farm boy who spent so much time on the farm he hadn’t heard about the other guys. She got her hands on Jimmie Cooper, that boy’s father, and wouldn’t let go. The word is she told Jimmie she was pregnant, but she wasn’t because she didn’t have that boy for a time. She married Jimmie because he was strong and funny and she thought he would take her away from Fairfield.
Little did she realize the place he was taking her to was a farmhouse twenty-two miles north, even more in the middle of nowhere! She could look out the kitchen window and see the hills of Canada, it was so close to the border, but there was little else to see. It was two miles from the closest neighbor, and the neighbors, the Jorgensens, were strange enough to laugh at, but no respectable person would associate with them. Three years after that she left them without a word or even a note.
Erik fought the urge to jump up and yell at this busy-body with nothing better to do. She was wrong. His Mom wasn’t like that and his dad was no dummy. There was a note to prove it. But his voice didn’t work and his body was frozen no matter how hard he tried to move. He had to move. He had to scream at those ladies and call them fools. But the harder he tried the more his limbs froze to his side. His only refuge was to turn his head away from the ladies so he wouldn’t see their faces. But the face he saw was his Aunt’s. She had come to pick him up and she had a grin on her face. The two ladies saw her too and quickly left. Erik became sick.
He awoke in a paralysis, his mouth an open grimace of mute screaming. He saw the walls of the bunkhouse. His nicely starched dress shirt was now soaked in sweat and his arms hurt with exhaustion. He cursed himself for allowing himself to nap since the nightmare was sure to follow. He got out of bed and put only his head in the shower, drenching the dream away. He used the still wet bath towel he had just used to wipe himself down again. Then he lef
t the bunkhouse and walked until he was calmer. The nightmare was so common it didn’t have the depth of horror it once had. He returned to the bunkhouse and the bed.
Erik forced himself to dream. Dreams were the only thing that made him feel real and wanted and they took away the pictures of the nightmare. He dreamt of a woman, different in every way than the bleak land of his life. He dreamt of Laura. Laura was the name of the girl he was going to see that evening. Laura was not just another dream, but a person with features he could see and smells he could remember, and although he hadn’t admitted it to his aunt, he had planned all week to visit her after his work was done.
Erik thought of the few times he had seen Laura, a waitress at the Mint Bar in Sweet Grass. He didn’t particularly like Sweet Grass. It was a border town with the Customs stop its only reason for existence. It was only eleven miles east of the Cooper’s farm, but in a direction Erik seldom took. In Sweet Grass, Erik was still a stranger.
The town was so small Erik didn’t know why they gave it a name except to find it on a map. There was nothing in the town that would remind anyone of sweet grass. It had a few houses for those who worked for the Customs Service and a rodeo grounds used once a year. There were three grain elevators, a Farmer’s Union Co-op to get some gas, a church that straddled the US-Canadian border, and the Mint Bar. It wasn’t a place you would go for excitement, but rather than Fairfield, Erik would go there to see Laura. He would go there that evening.
Erik remembered seeing her for the first time. He wanted to get away from the farm, but he didn’t want to face another night by himself in Fairfield. He went east instead and found himself in the Mint and there she was. She was beautiful, like someone who would be in a big city. She carried herself like someone who hadn’t been worn down by farm life, and her clothes, although simple, were different than Fairfield’s clothes. Later, alone in the bunkhouse, he reasoned this was more than a chance meeting. It was meant to be. He had found out she worked every Saturday night and he had designed trips whenever he could manage just to be close to her.
Laura was different from the girls in Fairfield. Even the way she walked spoke of grace and class. The girls in Fairfield were the ones you settled for and married and had kids with. They were not girls you dreamt about.
Laura was tall with long, dark brown hair that curled at the ends. Erik liked her a lot. He spent hours on the tractor and bunkhouse bed having conversations with Laura as if she were really there. Those conversations heightened his fondness for her. It was fondness that kept her in his thoughts on the tractor and him quiet in her presence. He almost feared her the more he thought of her. The fear was a combination of the fear of rejection and the fear that she might destroy his image of her. It was a chance he didn’t want to take. He needed her in his dreams.
Erik finished his pop and threw it on the concrete floor to join the collection of other empty bottles. It’s time to get on with Saturday, but as he looked at his watch, it was still too early; he would draw too much attention in the bar. The sound of the tractor still rang in his ears and he needed the fresh air to rid himself of the remnants of the nightmare. He went out to his favorite spot.
It was 9:00 p.m. but the sun had not yet set in this northern open prairie land. Behind the house and the buildings and the last barn on the farm there was a slight bluff that gave way to a large coulee. The coulee stayed green longer than any place else on the farm. Its grass had never been broken by a plow and its ravine held the spring runoff in reserves. Next to the bluff, an oak tree had grown somehow, very much out of place. Erik sat at the base of the tree and watched the picture unfolding before him.
The heat had begun to give way to the cool of the evening, and twilight was advancing. The sunset started with a slight tint of pink and grew as a spill until it totally engulfed the whole land with scarlet. A stray cloud caught fire on its border, and then burst into flames. The alkali reservoir to the farm’s east that before was stale and dead suddenly became a pool of gold, and the foxtail beside it, torches of tar. The willow bushes near the coulee seemed to be touched by a spell to become a king’s silver arrows.
For those few minutes the land was silent and even the grasshoppers settled into its spell. Erik no longer saw the dryness of the land, but a painting of some lost kingdom. This was a king’s land now. The stripes of wheat were roads to the royal palace. The rough field road was a stream rushing over pebbles. The coulee was a valley where the fruit was held ripe to the vine. The land had become the sky, and held the majesty of the heavens themselves.
There was nothing hard in the land of those moments. It was a land Erik would have chosen to be part of. The image imprinted itself into Erik’s mind. This was the real land. This was the land as God intended it. Not the dry, the barren, the dead. Erik felt an answering glimmer within him, as though something just as majestic lay within him, waiting to be revealed; God’s purpose for him.
The sunset made the land into a dream world, but it wasn’t a dream Erik had imagined in the bunkhouse. This was not a fantasy of a distant time or love. This scene was not only created by the sun touching the horizon; in Erik’s eyes he could see that the Creator had created this scene.
He didn’t have to question whether this was the land or only a mirage. He knew that this was the real land, and not the land of the drought. This was the way God meant it to be. As he thought, he even allowed the words, “God’s land,” to creep over his tongue, and he smiled to himself.
At this time there was no denying it. He knew God abided here. It was not an Aunt Mary’s prayer or Aaron Hanson’s conversation. He knew, maybe best of all after seeing the dismalness of the land, that there was the reality of the Creator. The sunset made the land into His kingdom, and for that moment He seemed very close.
Chapter Three
The road to Sweet Grass curved gently to the right and then to the left for no obvious reason. There were no hills or gullies to make the road builders divert their course. It looked as if they had done it to break up the boredom of the country and a road that didn’t bend for unnumbered miles.
Erik had driven this road so many times that the curves didn’t even break into his consciousness. He had finished cleaning up, and had put on some clothes that were good enough for a trip to town. On most days he would drive this road to get spare parts or take the tractor to the other section of the Cooper’s farm. Tonight was different. Tonight he was going to see Laura and hear her voice. It was time to leave everything else behind.
Even if Sweet Grass wasn’t big enough to be called a town, he felt a warmth of excitement as he saw those few lights that marked a town. Any lights meant the farm had been left behind.
As Erik pulled into town he made sure he parked the old pickup on the far side of the Mint Bar where no one would see it. He was ashamed of the old pickup. It was a stupid gesture. Everyone drove old pickups and, besides, they didn’t care what a person drove. But still he didn’t want to be viewed as just another local, even though it was quite obvious he was. Everyone in Sweet Grass was either a local or asking directions how to get somewhere else.
As he walked into the Mint he picked his table carefully. He chose a table close enough to another that he wouldn’t look conspicuous, but far enough way that he wouldn’t have to join in with the talk. Also, he wanted a table where he could freely see Laura make her rounds from the tables to the bar.
A “Lucky” sign revolved over the solid oak bar. A bear frolicked over a waterfall on a clock that spelled out “Hamm’s” and the room was very dark. It was dark enough that Erik had to feel his way to the table before his eyes could adjust to the change. He strained to make out more details and the people that he had joined. Though he still couldn’t see much, he could tell from the sounds that the men at the nearby table had already begun to drink heavily. They had quit the farm early that day and immediately come to their refuge, the Mint.
“What can I help you with?”
His eyes hadn’t adjusted to the d
arkness, but he knew that voice. It was Laura. He hesitated for a second so she bowed closer to speak over the sound of the loud neighbors.
“What can I bring you?” she repeated.
Erik’s eyes quickly focused on her. As Laura leaned over to take his order, he picked up a scent of perfume or lotion that perked his senses. Nothing like this was found on the Cooper’s farm except in his dreams in the bunkhouse. Now she was there and the reality almost kept Erik from answering even after the question had been repeated. “Just a long neck Lucky will be fine.”
When she left, his eyes followed her. He tried to time it so he could glance for a second without obviously staring, his mind working quickly to absorb every frame of that picture and to capture her lingering scent to his memory.
He was ready when she returned with his beer. He had laid a twenty on the table so she could take what she needed and leave the change.
“Here you go, let me know when you need another.” Her voice was inviting to Erik’s ears as she left the change.
She smiled at him. He hoped she was smiling at him and not just being a barmaid hoping for a tip. In any case, it was appreciated and he stored it into memory. Erik had visited the Mint several times and he wondered if Laura recognized him from his past trips.
Erik wanted to start a conversation, to keep her there at the table and beside him for a precious few minutes, but he didn’t know what to say. Laura solved the dilemma.