Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

By Brian Backstrand

A former hospice and hospital chaplain and pastor or rural congregations, Brian Backstrand has witnessed first hand some of the slow unraveling of the social and economic fabric of small town and rural America. He and his wife, Marilee, spent the first year of their married life in rural eastern Kansas in the 1960s. Twenty years later, after spending some time in Alaska and New Hampshire, their family settled in the ridge and valley region of western Wisconsin where they currently farm. Coming out of a parsonage in a small town in Kansas one day, and looking at a neighbor, a man in his eighties, half under his jacked up Pontiac fixing the brakes, Backstrand remembers thinking “who will remember him and the rest of these people? Who is going to remember that they were ever here?” Memories, healing, distruptive, nurturing, sometimes denied, play an important role in the stories collected here. Backstrand’s intention is to lift up ordinary people from rural contexts and place them squarely before his contempory and often urban readers. The stories in Little Bluestem come as an invitation, asking its readers to get to know and remember their rural counterparts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Wessex Collective
• Release date: Mar 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476369150

Brian Backstrand

Brian Backstrand is a poet and writer as well as an Episcopal clergyman. He has published poems and stories in several literary magazines, most recently in South Dakota Review and another is forthcoming in The Southern Indiana Review. He lives in rural Wisconsin where he and his wife Marilee own a farm and are in the process of becoming energy self-sufficient and living off the grid.

Book preview

Brian Backstrand’s first collection of stories, Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America, is a welcome relief on the canvas of contemporary fiction. His narratives do what literature is supposed to do. They discover and examine the complexities inherent in the so-called simple life. The lyrical prose makes music that a reader will take away from the page, and the characters that drive the plots are fueled by real emotional substance. We could ask no more from a first book, or a second, or a third…

—Jim McGarrah, author of Running the Voodoo Down and A Temporary Sort of Peace; editor, Southern Indiana Review

LITTLE BLUESTEM: STORIES FROM RURAL AMERICA

by

Brian E. Backsrtand

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

The Wessex Collective on Smashwords

Little Bluestem

copyright 2005 by Brian E. Backstrand

Cover photograph by Kathleen A. FitzPatrick

Smashwords Edition

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Acknowledgements

Side Delivery and October Night were previously printed in South Dakota Review, Kickapoo Winter in Riverwind, and At the Window in the Southern Indiana Review in 2006.

Table of Contents

Side Delivery

October Night

Hay for Sale

Saying Goodbye

Ida’s Café

At the Window

Voices

The Code

Going for the Mail

The Haybine

A Prayer in Winter

Kickapoo Winter

The Bone Yard

Trotter Creek

Ribbons

a note about the writer

##

SIDE DELIVERY

Once again the fields we mow

And gather in the aftermath

–Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It’s hard to get a hay rake in mid-season. Precious hard. They don’t really wear out, you know, and there’s not much to ’em. Most are metal frame with a good coat of rust, and after a few years the rust slows down and they hold. Teeth, a couple of gears, steel wheels and bearings. That’s all they is. You see ’em out by the shed or in the woods near the last field where they was used. Just keep ’em greased. Each time you go past, bring some of that old tractor oil in one of those plastic milk jugs and put it on fresh. Make it plenty. Each year you wonder when you hook on and pull ’em out of the ruts where they is sittin’ but they come, like as not, rolling up onto the new spring earth. Almost ready.

I take mine down to the shed for a final going over. Usually a couple of teeth is missin’—making one of the bars into a kind of grin. But nothing more. He gave me a spare bar or two, with all the teeth, from an old hay loader that had gone south years ago and so I was fixed up kind of like a dentist with porcelain spares with all these long, toothy spikes of metal that is more like fingers really. Long probing fingers. They reach down to just above dirt, gathering up strands, moving them along, pushing them out the side into a long braid of pale-green, sweet-smellin’ hay.

Met him just last year, up Bear Creek way, after I hooked my side-delivery on a post, bringing it in. Careless thing to do. Was goin’ to use the team or the old 8N. Remember standing out in front of the barn in the cool of a real nice day. Then decided on the 8 and got careless—more than I would be with the team, figurin’ them to be green and a little jumpy with the clattering of the rake and all. Hooked the post clean, popped the wheel and out springs all the bearings. Boy. I guess some was flyin’ off and finding the lush growth of spring grass over by the post. Gone. Disappearing like it was quicksand. The only good thing I guess is that I didn’t hook with the team. Gettin’ too old for real adventure!

That’s when I thought of him up on Bear Creek. Figured he’d have something to sell with his age and all. Bachelor farmer. Member of the school board and the township council. Good looking farmstead when you drive past, careful with his gear. Figured the drive would do me good—better than going to Wilson’s dump to search through all the side deliveries he’s got just for the parts. Wilson’s got these heifers grazing in the midst of things and an occasional young bull he sneaks in there to pasture breed. And this time of year there’ll be mud daubers or worse all over the parts. Thank you, no. I may not paint my buildings but I keep ’em clean. I clip everything round abouts down real close. No surprises. I’ll pass on that one, up at Wilson’s, too.

I backed and pulled my old worn-out, broken down miserable hulk of a rake down the rest of the lane, thinking of the valley and Wilsons as I snaked it over to just past the coop. You know the one; I cut out the south end for the sheep which works slick in winter. I left it there near that line of popple down by the creek and didn’t even look back, half sick, thinking that it was a good day for raking and good tomorrow they say too. Not even a mares’ tail in the sky to hint of rain. But count your blessings. Lucky I hadn’t knocked down some grass first before getting ready to fuss with the rake.

This is supposed to be a fine time of year and usually is. I go up first to the ridge fields. The crop up there is lighter, easier on the horses. Hook up the International High Gear Number 9 with its five foot blade and good gear ratio and go to it. After a day or two of that, we go down and tangle with the bottom land. Oh, its a worried crop down there. Sometimes I have to break down and use the 8N just because the cutter bar is not ground driven. The top is better, though. Sitting up there with the silence, just the chatter of the mower, the horses’ heads bobbin’, the swish of grass. Sometimes the pittman breaks and I have to take time out down at the shop with my draw-blade to work up another. But mostly its just quiet. I look behind at the flat wake of the hay. It’s like rowing out on a pond the way the grass lies like water behind the stern of a good boat, with just a trickle of wake.

We do it early. As soon as the sun burns most of the dew off the field, we’re there. Then when the heat builds, mid-afternoons, I take my dinner and the horses get grain and rest. Towards evening, we cut some more or rake. Next day it gets less peaceful when I come by with the old 8 and the baler, square bales lying all over the field. That’s when the sweatin’ starts, picking them up and running them up into the barn. Dragging the first to the far end of the loft because I stack ’em. But its better than the old hay loader when you’d get hay comin’ off faster than you could fork it and then down the neck.

’Course there’s a lot of round baling now. Put it up in plastic. Guys driving round in all-wheel drive fancy notions of tractors with these large bales like Shredded Wheat, plopping them down on the edges of the fields or carrying them all up close to the barn and the feed lot. There’s always a lot of the old gentlemen up there from years past, waiting for the new recruits. Wrapped in all that plastic, sitting there in a kind of graveyard for hay, it just don’t seem natural. Get it up in the loft. Steady the barn. Insulate it. Get it up whole and dry and let the smell permeate the place. Mine’s thirty-six by fifty-two with rough sawn oak frames and a good roof. The floor’s spotty in places but it’s a good, solid barn and when you get all the first cuttin’ up there, there’s somethin’ real good and solid about it. You know what you’ve done. You know you’re going to be throwin’ out all that hay down to the livestock and its going to be a good, sweet reminder of summer when they put their nose in it and pull it out of the mow.

I drove up right away. Took my dinner early over at Myrtles’ All Hours Kitchen and then went up the Lobo Road so I could run the ridgeline and come down Bear Creek the back way from up above. Figured if I did that I’d catch him in, pretty close to being through with dinner and I could run down to Hanson’s Implement closer to town on the way back if there was nothin’ he was wanting to sell.

Worked pretty good. Myrtle had her usual specials. Had the hot turkey sandwich and strawberry pie. Gassed up there and took the pretty drive up Lobo. Nice this time of year with the mouse ears of May givin’ way to a full canopy of trees. Popple, oak, red elm, shagbark hickory on occasion.

Drove on in and didn’t see his truck. It was in the shed, it turned out later. He answered the door. Had been layin’ down for an afternoon snooze I suspect and I liked him right away. Wished I had met him earlier. Had heard of the Irish bachelor for several years but never chanced to see him at a sale or in town. His hair had grayed into white and thinned out. White, bushy eyebrows is what I remember at first glance as he put on his cap. A good two days’ growth of white on the pink skin of his face where the sun had found him. Clean lenses on the glasses. Bifocals. Denim overalls. Blue denim shirt. Work boots.

Yes he had somethin’ or two out by the barn he could part with. Not really sellin’ out yet. But if someone like me came by… We walked out. No paint but a clipped yard. And in places, here and there, a new post or board or a square of new blue shingles.

Careful.

Soon it would be in high grass, but now you could see it good. Saw right away he had taken off the long tongue. Yes, and the sulky seat was gone, but right quick he said he had those in the shed. Had just been usin’ it with the tractor in the last years. Then he made a point of telling me that he always raked in second gear, so as to not worry the gears, and I was hooked. We settled on forty dollars. Five dollars more than what he’d paid forty years ago when his first one gave out.

It was in the shed, though, where I felt I got to know him best. There, inside, time sort of stood still and watched.

The afternoon sun couldn’t get through much, he’d kept a good roof, so I stood just inside the entrance to get my sight. Everything was up, hanging somewhere, and the lane was clear down the middle. You could smell soft earth and old corn and oil. And then leather from the harnesses he had up. I saw old cross-cut saws. Sickle bars. Guards stored neatly in boxes. Grub boxes of parts with old magazines in wooden crates beneath them. Wheels. And to the left, neatly in rows, a sulky disc, six foot, a stack of two harrows, stoneboat, an old sleigh peeking out from under canvas, a high gear like mine, then a power-driven New Idea Number 10A, its cutter bar up in salute, followed by a Deere two-bottom sulky plow, as I recall, and then a ground-driven conditioner. It went all down into the darkness. I could see him driving in and hooking on.

Help yourself boys! Good clean line of machinery, help yourself!

Over here, he said. He motioned right and walked in past a post where there was a good-lookin’ oiled collar, full Sweeney. Back in, he pointed out the sulky seat and, up above, resting in a lumber rack, the long tapered end of the tongue. It was all there he said, and I knew it was. And more. He pointed out the teeth from the loader and said if I wanted it for spares he wouldn’t mind.

It was a temple in there. I could see him coming in with the dapple team of Percherons that he later told me he once had. Coming in with him a young man, backing them slow, while holding the double-trees, taking down the traces, the team standing in the shade of a hot day, enjoying the cool in there, knowing the place by the sounds and smell, shaking their heads. Calm. And him hooking on to one thing or another in the lineup and then out again, slow and careful, and back into the day. In the winter, he had made sure the door would not ice up. One year he hauled his wood back into the far reaches of the place but the bark and all the dust made too much work in the spring. The bobsled was back in there, though, a real good one with solid hardwood runners, sheathed with metal. Hauled a lot of wood over the years with that and the team, he said. It’s funny how when you reach back into all the years your voice can change—become like a prayer.

We stood in there for quite a while. That’s when he said what he would take. I said I thought he was kind of low for the condition it was in but he said no, he wanted to make sure it would be used and worked on and kept right. He had put old pieces of shingles over the gears and at both ends of the axle to keep the snow melt or driving rain mostly off. But it was the oil that did the trick, though. That we both knew. And so I said, well yes, it would be used. Would be used good, and we shook on it. I’d be back in a day or so and take it and then we walked out into the sunlight and over towards the barn to get a look at the ramp at the far end where I might draw up the wagon. Hadn’t clipped that part, he said, steppin’ down on a Canada thistle. Was really the first place where I could see the shrinking of his world, the wild growth getting started now in the late of spring-almost-summer, the long light of days, the natural asking all of us to get going and him wearing out most afternoons, staying in the cool of the house, sleeping longer, mowing the lawn with the lawnmower in the damp of the evening when he was up to it.

Not much fun to get old, he said. Yes, I said, nodding.

Not much fun to sell out, I thought.

Oh, boys, don’t miss out on this one now. Need a good wagon? Boys, look it over. Look it over, now! Look it over real good. Here’s a nice ‘un with good runnin’ gear and good solid timber on the bed. What am I bid? What am I bid for this good solid rack? Who’ll get us started?

I climbed into the truck. Bye, Lester through the open window, and next day I was back with the money. Two folded twenties. He came around with his Oliver 550. I dropped in the lynch pin and he brought it right around, backing it up the bank before I pulled in. Then I climbed up, picked up the tongue and eased the wheels down two planks we had laid and out onto the wagon. The comb of the rake stuck out just a bit, but it was where I could see it pretty good in the mirror and after I got the rake strapped down good we was all set. He had a cup by the hydrant next to the barn. I splashed it on good, to get the sweat off, the sun was well up by then, and then had a good, long drink. The water he said was from a spring, well up the draw, that he had capped as a young man. You could taste a little of the pipe, he said, but mostly you tasted limestone, the cool of the place, where it had gathered—waiting.

I had a good long drink of his water and then left with the side delivery. Started usin’ it next day. Part of Lester’s part of mine.

##

They’re not even going to bother with the house. Jared said they’ll just go on down to Prairie and get one of them modulars. Or a double-wide. One of the neighbors was walking up from the shed towards the barn. There was the tractor up there to do, one Jersey milk cow, the Surge equipment and line, and the bulk tank. The auctioneer was pretty specific about the barn. Then the house. That had triggered what he had overheard. Another neighbor had bought the place for their son. Simmons? He thought that was the name. He looked past the two women, walking up, and down towards the shed. They had worked through its contents like a corn picker, taking the best and spitting out the stalks, the little stuff, for later on. Now they was on to the little stuff. Not much little stuff, but what they had was on that wagon. The auctioneer had got back on the platform he had rigged on the back of his pickup and one of the assistants was up on the wagon.

Now this here is a grab bag item, folks.

The handler lifted up a cardboard box and tilted it towards the crowd, showing its contents this way and that.

This is where it gets interesting now. You take a look. You put your money down and you take your chance. What am I bid now for the whole box? No, ma’am. We can’t itemize it. Just the whole box. Grab bag, folks. What’ll you give for the whole works. Step up and