First Place Award Winning Story in the 6th Annual Warren Adler Short Story Contest.

After my father left us, my mother began speaking to people I couldn’t see and never answered the door. When she was institutionalized, I became a ward of the State, but only for a week.  The court awarded custody to my uncle, who took me to live with him and Aunt Rose on their farm in McMinn County.

“She’s your ma, Melissa,” Uncle Luther said of his sister.  “She’s afflicted with real bad nervous spells; always has been.”

I was seven-years-old and had never been outside Knoxville.  I remembered little of my father, and my mother’s intractable moods rendered her incapable of bestowing affection, so, emotionally, I had left nothing behind.

The sun had not shown its face since morning, the sky rippled and twisted into gray whorls, but then, just before dusk, as we turned off the main dirt road to an even narrower one leading to their house, the same house where my mother had grown up, it streaked low, lingering clouds in scarlet and purple.  For a moment, framed by two, black walnut trees leaning toward one another, the tops intertwined, a soft, yellow light blanketed the valley and the farm.  I lost sense of place for a moment, enchanted by what seemed a perfectly composed portrait of tranquility.

A path of irregularly shaped, stone slabs, with two large, pear trees, so lush with blossoms they appeared drenched in snow, on either side, led to the old, clapboard house that had two bedrooms, a metal roof that roared when it channeled rain to replenish the cistern, a stone fireplace, an outhouse for a bathroom, and a springhouse for a refrigerator.  Since electricity was still years away and considered an unnecessary extravagance, Aunt Rose cooked everything on a black iron, wood-burning stove, which at times glowed like an autumn sunset.  At night, two, flickering, coal oil lamps with tapered, glass chimneys supplied the only light. The two hundred acre farm sat at the bottom of a ridge, forested with virgin hardwood and pine, that stretched ten miles north to where the highway sliced through to Decatur and just as far south to the banks of the Hiawassee.

Each morning I was up at dawn and, after a hearty breakfast of eggs; bacon or sausage, fried in liberal amounts of lard; grits; and biscuits with preserves or jam, out helping with whatever needed to be done. The dew glittered with the emerging light as if sequins had been scattered across the fields overnight; a shuffle of bird calls crowded the mornings, which, along with the croaking of frogs and the ratcheting sound of summer insects, formed an unscripted, ubiquitous chorus; bordering forests, free to grow unchecked, had formed an impenetrable umbrella of green so dense that the ground underneath never felt the sun.

I began following Uncle Luther around, helping in any way I could. He was tall and thin, his arms nothing but sinewy muscle and purple veins, the skin spotted with age.  His face was gaunt, with high cheek bones, a long thin nose, and the bluest eyes I’d ever seen.  Although I didn’t know that much at first, I learned quickly, and a lot of tasks required just two pairs of hands.  After a couple of weeks, there wasn’t much a boy my age could do that I couldn’t.  I’d stand on a box and fit bridles to our old, silver mule Joe and the mare Uncle Luther had never bothered to name. He even allowed me, with careful supervision, to practice driving some of the equipment around the barn.  It came quickly, as if I was doing what I had been born for.

One morning when the grass in the eastern pasture was high enough for the first cutting of hay, and the almanac predicted a clear day, he asked me to get the mower ready.  I hitched Joe and the mare to the double tree, and when the breezes caressing the tops into waves had dried the grass, I was astonished when he strapped me onto the seat.

“Take it slow,” he said and walked away to mend fences and attend to other neglected chores.

My hands trembled as I gripped the reins.  A thin mist lingered above the muddy water as I made the first pass where the creek skirted the field. I took extra care not to snag the fence. The morning air filled with the summer-sweet smell of ravenous honeysuckle vines.  The field was smooth, no hidden gullies or broken ground, except for the ruins of an old slave cottage that had become a haven for bats, so the mowing went quickly. When it was done, I hitched the team to the rake with its large, looped tines and pulled the hay into bunches to be loaded onto the wagon. I was too small to be of much help with that, but in the barn, when Uncle Luther pitched it up into the loft, I spread it around to the sides and into the corners so that we could fit it all in.

When it was done, we fed Joe and the mare and put them up for the night.

As we walked back to the house, darkening clouds rose from the west, nibbling at the setting sun until it was fully occluded, sheet lightening flickering around the edges.

“Just in time,” Uncle Luther said and rubbed my head.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

After supper each night, Uncle Luther and I listened to the news through the static on his battery radio, and then we’d go outside and lie in the grass, the only sounds, the distant baying of foxhunters’ hounds racing the ridges in pursuit of prey they’d never outwit. If no clouds blinded the stars, Uncle Luther would trace the constellations with his finger and tell me legends behind each.  On moonless nights, I remember how humbling it was, especially the Milky Way, the spectral flood of stars overwhelming. We whispered as if we were in a cathedral. Sometimes we’d see a shooting star.  Aunt Rose said they were signs from God, that good fortune would follow whoever saw one.  Although I never told her, I later learned those signs from God were nothing more than rocks in space that had lost their way.

Toward the end of winter, when the snow on the ridges behind the farm began to thaw, the crooked branch that ran a half-mile from the springhouse, through the pig pen, and on to the creek became clogged with gravel at a bend below the house and began washing out the road to the barn. Uncle Luther decided to clear it with a plow.  Somehow the blade became tangled in his overalls, shattering his right leg.  Aunt Rose and I rushed him into Athens, the county seat, but the doctor at Foree Hospital sent him by ambulance to Erlanger in Chattanooga where they had to amputate the leg at the knee.

In a few days he was moved to the Veteran’s Hospital in Johnson City where they fitted him with a prosthetic. After weeks of rehabilitation, he learned to walk again, but with a slight limp, sometimes having to steady himself.

When we returned to the farm, the grass was high enough for the first cutting of hay.  Neighbors helped with the harvest.  After I ran the mower and the rake, they pitched the hay onto wagons and then up to me in the barn’s loft. Although he tried, Uncle Luther couldn’t do what he had before, several times falling off balance while trying to help.

“Go sit in the shade, Luke” one of the men said.  “We’ll take care of it.”

We got the crop in, but there were other things to do, always other things to do, filling the crib with corn, slaughtering a hog, the second cutting of hay, but more and more, it seemed, he could do little but walk, and not well at that. The neighbors had their own farms to care for, so they could only help occasionally.  I was growing all the time, taller and stronger than most girls my age, and, with Aunt Rose’s help, I could have kept the farm going, but she said his pride wouldn’t have permitted it, her doing his work.

Although it had rained hard the night before, the next Sunday’s dawn came with the bluest sky I’d ever seen.  A partial rainbow lingered behind bruised thunderheads sinking below the eastern horizon.  It was the kind of morning that made you feel things just had to work out. As Aunt Rose and I made our way to the car for church, Uncle Luther held my hand and then closed my door.  He reached through the window and stroked my cheek with the back of his hand and smiled.  I looked back as we pulled away, Uncle Luther limping toward the house, his thin, gray hair wafting in the breeze.

He wasn’t home when we got back mid-afternoon.

“Maybe that leg give out on him,” Aunt Rose said.  “We need help.” Telephones were a novelty, which had not made their way past the Athens’ city limit, but everyone had a large, cast iron bell mounted near the house.  Aunt Rose began cranking the handle to summon the neighbors.

I conducted my own search, inside the barn, around the outhouse, the corncrib.  I followed the branch, which widened to a deep ravine thick with pine saplings, and walked the banks of the creek for a while, thinking he might have gone fishing and forgotten the time.  The pealing of the bell echoed forebodingly across the pasture. When I’d gone as far as I thought he could, I started back toward the barn when I saw something lying in a tangle of blackberry bushes lining the back wall. Then, I smelled it, the stench I was so familiar with, of life fleeing from a dangling hog after it had been shot and its throat cut. Next I saw his feet, his brogans, a hole worn in the sole of one, the heels apart, the toes touching; he lay slumped with his back against the barn, leaning on one elbow, his arms scratched from the briars he’d fallen into, the shotgun lying to the side, splattered blood fanned along the wooden slats, half his head gone, one eye open, unblinking, staring at the sky.  I didn’t yell or run for help.  I started for the house.  As I rounded the corner of the barn, Jimmy Stubblefield pulled up in his truck.  I pointed behind me without stopping, Aunt Rose, wiping her hands on an apron, stood at the gate.

“Did you find him?” she said, as if she knew the answer.

“Yes,” I said calmly.  “He’s gone,” and clutched her skirt.  It was time to cry.

The farm sold quickly. Aunt Rose bought a small house in Knoxville, where we lived until I went away to college. Rather than having Uncle Luther buried in the family plot across Spring Creek, she wanted him near her.  He had served in the Army, so he was eligible for a military funeral and interment in the National Cemetery on Wray Street in Knoxville.

As we left the farm for the final time, I mentally documented things along the way that had become commonplace and, unfortunately, taken for granted:  gaunt men in overalls walking the dusty shoulders, often with scrawny, mixed breed dogs trailing, and women hanging out wash with clothes pins in their mouths, each waving as we passed, as if we were someone they knew, which in most cases we were; defeated scarecrows, nothing more than rotting clothes hanging on crooked crosses, perpetually on guard but largely ignored by foraging crows; unpaved roads with a least one flattened possum, its head twisted around, its mouth opened as if it had just turned to confront the thing that killed it; front porch swings hanging by chains; abandoned cars, without hoods or wheels, engulfed in weeds, some with weathered “Not For Sale” signs on the windshield; and for the first time, I could appreciate the grace of vultures in flight, circling on thermal cushions as they waited patiently for the inevitable cycle of life to complete itself.

For some reason, I had a premonition, a coiling in my stomach, like a knotted fist, that the simple but rewarding life we had known was as good as gone.  In a few years a multi-laned bypass would intercept Highway 11 well north of Athens and rejoin it ten miles south at Riceville.  Along it a new Athens would emerge, a tinseled world of McDonald’s, Kawasaki and Pizza Hut.  And then years after that, many miles to the west, an interstate would slice gracelessly through the countryside, marring the agrarian beauty that had remained practically untouched since the Civil War. To those passing at highway speeds, and above, Athens would become nothing more than a green sign, a collection of motels, and a blur of neon and salmon colored lights, the kind that make everything look jaundiced, tearing the heart out of the heartland.  Looking back now, I think it was the right time to leave, for both Uncle Luther and myself.

*    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

The day of his funeral dawned with a crystalline brilliance.   By the time we arrived at the cemetery, the casket, draped in an American flag, sat suspended on straps, soldiers lining the back side; behind them, a half dozen wreaths, with pink gladiolus, red and white carnations and baby’s-breath, on wire stands. We seemed to be amongst a field of stones, each identical to hundreds of others, most undecorated, arranged in circles and rows as if there was a brotherhood and anonymity in death.

After a chaplain in uniform stood at the head of the casket and recited some words spoken so quietly and reverently I doubt anyone understood, a row of guns fired several times; I plugged my ears after the first round; then soldiers wearing white gloves removed the flag from his coffin and folded it with robotic precision.  One of them offered it, trapped between his hands, to Aunt Rose; she nodded and accepted it as she wept.

As we left, I thought of the nights Uncle Luther and I had spent scanning the sky, and, if it was present, watching the moon grin through its phases.  Although I never told him, I believed it to be opening a bit each night until, just before it began to wane, a hole had formed in the sky.  Was that the portal to Heaven?  Had he found that portal, or had he simply gone to sleep and never woke up?  I couldn’t see that it mattered. In either case, he was at peace.