I wondered at the airy sawdust just below the springy wet surface, Dad walked across the yard from the barn, his face a tanned triangle under his green hat. I was surprised when he stopped in the yard. I saw him often enough: he spent most of his days just feet from the house where we girls did crafts and made cookies, but he worked with the pigs or tractors alone. We only interacted on my ground—in the kitchen, at bedtime in my room, or over dinner—never on his. We shared atmosphere but not space, like two lions naturally distant from each other precisely because we were the same species.
When he came close, he asked if I wanted to swing. I nodded and ran across the yard with my fingers in fists and my arms swishing against the coat, the lining crinkling in my ears. I wrapped dimpled fingers around the cool chains and Dad stood close and gave me a push. He smelled like pigs and dust. On the backswing he grabbed the chains and ran alongside while he pushed, then he thrust his arms up and let me go in the sky.
After a couple flights, he slowed me down and my feet skidded on the dirt under the swing, my toes wiping the soil crumbles back and forth as the seat swayed. He squinted up at the sky and watched a line of geese flash over the yard, arrow across the field, and sail toward the distant trees. I watched him look at the birds. He looked back down from the sky, his eyes still squinted at the corners: “What do you say we walk to the woods? See what’s out there?”
The woods were behind the house, a crease in the rippling fields, locked in by acres of worked land. The only way to them was to walk over the fields. I was not allowed near the field that bordered the yard, but at harvest time, yellow cornstalks flew from the combine into the grass and became my brooms and magic wands. I played with them around my stump, knocking the stalks against its sides and tracing the tangled grooves in its weathered flank with tips of leaves. I nodded and we started across the grass, his crusted boots and my pink tennies.
I kicked the leaves as we walked and spattered my shoes with the leftover rainwater locking the leaves together. The field ahead of us was grooved like God had raked it. At the edge of the yard, tufts of seeded grass perforated the line between, marking the boundary. Dad stepped cleanly over them and the seeds caught on my corduroys. When we stepped into the field, my knees pumped and lifted up and down the waves of soil while Dad’s boots skimmed the ridges. Uncle Jeff had come to help with what small harvest there was and all the fields around the house were quiet, waiting for the snow.
Another angle of geese called above us. The house and yard looked like a framed picture from this side, a small protected image. I walked up and down, crusty broken stalks bumping my shins and ankles, holding Dad’s hand under the open sky. We walked slowly over the stubbled field, a moving wisp breaking the lines on the earth that marked tasks to their places.
When we reached the edge of the fields, Dad lifted me and I put my arms around his neck. My toes bumped against the work gloves in his pockets and the trees ahead held up the clouds like the beautiful, heavy nests of hawks. Soon we stood on the edge of a brook, Dad’s boots washed clean of the manure, my hands empty of swing chains or dolls. We could go see the trees, walk through the woods and pick up stones or walnut husks. He could step across the creek and we could see where the geese flew when they left the parks and lawns, what they did when they didn’t have to find food and protect a place for their chicks to sleep.
Dad looked out into the woods, his hand reaching out to snap the hollow stem of a cattail before we crossed. He handed me the cattail and I held it heavy in my fist. The outside was soft and dense with velvet. He lifted his heel to cross the gurgling water and said, “We should take some treasures home to show Mom and Megan and Mindy. They’ll be sorry they couldn’t come with us.” He smiled, his lips thin like Grandpa’s, his eyes blue like mine.
But when he looked back over the creek to see where we were going, he paused. He squinted at a small red square floating against the cluttered branches at the edge of the trees. I tried to find what he was reading, but only saw a spot of red. I couldn’t read the words, but the sign was clear. We shouldn’t cross the brook; it was time to go back home.
Dad talked to the trees as we both looked past the brook. “Maybe I should get back to the new piglets—and we wouldn’t want to scare the geese away from their nests.”
When we stepped back into the yard, Dad set me down and I went back to the swing set to push down the slide. Back in my yard I felt safe and adventuresome, protected by the house and the aspen fluttering over the slide, with the cattail as a new prize to add to my kingdom. I laid it down on the end of the dimpled slide and Dad pushed me again on the swing.
Soon, he had to go back to the barn. He thanked me for going on a walk with him and gave me a kiss on my cool cheek. Then he slipped his work gloves back over his hands. He walked back to the barn, his head up, angled toward the edges of the grass and field and brook. His brows were folded, but I couldn’t see what his eyes were focused on. As he crossed back to the gravel of the barnyard, a line of geese called overhead. I looked up at them and suddenly felt confused, not sure if I was happy to be in the square of my yard or not, not sure if I was happy to have left it. Dad watched the geese fly into the woods before walking through the door of the barn; I went over to crouch by my stump, hungry for rippling places with centers, heavy with so many lines.
By fall Dad was driving to the bank nearly every day. The crops weren’t making enough money and, even though he had found a buyer for the second farm and was selling a few hogs each month, FHA started sending demand notes. The land he’d planted was pulling away.
When he’d left the farm for the first time, pulling himself away, Dad had gone into the city to college, looking deep into the words he’d grown up with, leaving home to discern if God was calling him into a pastor’s ministry. He tried to find God’s voice in schooling, but after hints and leadings, there had been no voice from heaven, no fatherly affirmation of a gift held up in open hands. So he went back to the land.
On autumn afternoons in the combine, rolling over the soil shabby and spent, he could have wondered why. Wondered if harvests of grain were his highest entrustment, the task for which God thought him worthy. But on spring days—the land snapped out black and ready, the trees whole again in glossy sun—Dad sat alone in the high cab of the planter and, feeling the space warm in the rays from the sky and waves from the land, could have believed God had guided him to the place he could be most fulfilled. Could have believed he’d been brought back to the land of his fathers to raise his girls and love his wife, to work out a hard but simple living in the landscape of heritage. Could believe that, like the shepherding of Moses and David, the wandering of Elijah, God could use the land to shape and fill a man.
But prophecies came by envelope and soon it was clear even this might be taken. Dad heard FHA was anxious enough they were accepting proposals. So, he walked into the county office and prayed they would accept his: whatever I can sell my farm for is yours. They took it.
When he came home, I couldn’t see his face—the line of his lips or his squinting eyes, which would be ridiculous, now, with no distance around them, fixed in the wrong frame of vision. We would move to town; Dad would wear a suit. I wished for the bone of my stump and the flank of the yard, thought about the woods and the sound of the geese. Dad cleaned the fodder off his boots and set them in the square closet between his dress shoes and my pink Kangaroos, something else put away.
The night before we moved, Meg, Mindy, and I jumped on Mom and Dad’s mattress in the living room, Meg’s self-trimmed hair flopping jagged and lopsided, and Dad put the last box by the door. We’d already eaten supper and packed away the dishes, and our Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite sleeping bags were laid out in the bedroom. The only other things in the house were five toothbrushes, the couch, Mom’s contact case and the record player. Dad came in, surveyed the empty kitchen, and walked into the living room. As he squatted next to the record player his knees cracked like they did when he walked down the stairs. He slid a slip of vinyl from its cardboard sheaf
