Fields of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

farms where the herders and the proud came so long ago. Jackson's people fought those rocks. Here they struggled still. Those sole places where a man still could walk where great-great-great-grandfather walked, still sleep where he died. Not because they were the first and seized it. Because it was the last and no one wanted it.
    He took a dirt road that scratched a hump in the tracks and walked along it, through a stream of chilled winter dust. When the spring rains came the dust would be floods of ankle-deep mud. He walked two bends in the narrow road and stopped, facing her house.
    On the old gray wood of the front porch there was a new antiqued white rocker. A gleaming aluminum television antenna jutted incongruously above the tar-paper shack. Her first television set. He had bought the television and the rocker for her with his advance pay.
    He had been visiting her forever. At least it seemed that way. It was the best of his early days, when he would slick his hair down wet and brush it hard with his mother's brush, and button all the buttons on his shirt and spend his Sundays there. He would leave the house and walk the same roads and the tracks, throwing rocks at the barking dogs that seemed so big then, walking past the scattered houses and their gardens, thicks of green dotted with red and yellow.
    He stood in his new green uniform and stared at the house and it became an aromatic memory. Days with lilacs and roses and the apple tree's explosions, the huge garden in the back that he would dig for her each spring. The heavy haunt of honeysuckle and the thickets where blackberries offered up sweets along the well path. And in the back, the outhouse he would lime for her each Sunday, and the chicken pen that once rattled truculently with the pecks of angry hens and the love-cry of a rooster.
    Most of it was gone. The garden was a small one he would dig for her each Easter when he was home from school. She was too old for even chickens. The pen was a museum. The roses were wild, huge bushes of them. The honeysuckle owned the outhouse, and blackberries covered the well path.
    In the bleak rainwinter air he stood on the road and remembered those early days, the summers when he would cross the damp, steamy yard of high grass and horseweed, fighting his way through the humid thickness, tucking his shirt in just so as he approached the porch. And in the summer she would be waiting for him on the porch, thick and gray on her old faded wood rocker, filling it with age and heaviness. When she saw him she would rock forward, slowly finding the porch floor with her feet, and then stand heavily there on the porch, looking at him with a mix of love and agony, and reach an arm toward him. Then she would call warmly, still not smiling, “Come on up here, boy. Come on in the house. Grandma's cooked you up a nice lunch, just special for you.”
    He would climb the porch steps, each Sunday feeling the wood grow older and softer, and look at the floor while she briefly hugged him. Then they would walk slowly, she behind him, into the darkness of her house.
    They would eat a quiet lunch, just the two of them there in the dimness of the house, he struggling to remember proper manners and she serving him like an honored guest. The lunch would be rich with her own things, a part of herself: greens from her garden, chicken from her pen, homemade peanut candy.
    He would sit small at the table, trying to be the man she was remembering through him, trying to ease the pain of her memories and make her present days more bearable. And lunch would soften her as water melts the stiffness of a sponge.
    After lunch he would do chores for her: hoe weeds in her garden; lime the outhouse, maybe; mend a fence, perhaps. And then they would talk. She would always ask him. He would come in from choring and she would have the dishes cleaned and she would stare a moment and then ask him, each Sunday as if it were the first time. “You got time to visit? I know