The Mysteries of Soldiers Grove Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    The farm has been closing in around me, the woodland is unkempt and its paths overgrown. The cows have been sold. The fields are untidy, cut hastily by a worker from a co-op farm that rents them. I pay a young man to mow the grass close to my house, but the extended lawns that Heath and I created are wild now with hardscrabble weeds, and my sculptures are swarmed over with vines and prickly ash.
    But to give all this up for an air-conditioned, sepulchral room in a building crowded with other elders? There seems to be no decision here, and yet there is a decision that must be made. I have never been brave, yet I was plucky enough to come to these hills years ago—it does not matter now whether I was right or wrong, it is time to reach again into my meager reserve of courage.

    I T WASN ’ T that Heath changed when we first arrived at the farm in Wisconsin, but his focus was redirected. He was once again locked back into routine and custom. I realized quickly that he had no choice—his instincts were overwhelming. His older brother had been caretaking the farm while Heath was in the service and had done his best—but now it was time for Heath to take up the ceaseless work: moving our cows from pasture to pasture, mending fences, cleaning our barns, cultivating and planting hay, mowing, raking, baling the cuttings, milking the cows. He had no choice. The work enveloped him from dawn to dusk.
    Heath took such care in tending our fields. As I watched him he was like a poet masterfully cutting his rows of grass—windrowing them as if he were polishing his lines. Then his machine swallowed the rows of hay, and rolled out bales like poems—and the land was cleared again for a short while like a blank page.
    In summer I would carry our lunches out to the acres in a basket and join him to sit under a large, solitary oak that had been left standing in the middle of the fields. Heath would be sodden with sweat, seeds and broken stems in his eyebrows and blond beard, but he would gather his energy to chat with me as we rested. In winter I would go and seek him in the barns as he worked with our cows, but sometimes he was so busy and preoccupied he could only speak briefly, his mind and body overwhelmed by duties and chores.
    Soon after we came to the farm I recognized that this was what he had been born to. Had he conveniently forgotten these responsibilities when he held me in his arms in France? Had he effaced this from his mind when we were so young? Had he misrepresented? I do not hold any of this against Heath. He loved me, wanted me to come to America with him. That seemed to be all that was on his mind at that time. He was a guileless man, at all times grateful for my presence. I never asked him if he had forgotten.
    In the evenings after supper we would retire together to our living room to read, and I would put on some music; Heath would turn the pages of one of his agricultural magazines as I read my books. He tried hard, but before long, in his weariness, he would nod off. I would gently shake him; we checked the windows, turned out the lights and went to our bed.
    During our first years together I had two dangerous, almost fatal miscarriages which—in our remote rural environment, many miles from medical care—were such very close calls, frightening us into deciding against further attempts to have children. This was a fact, like many others, that I learned to live with.
    Heath and I rarely had time to take walks together, but every day I strolled the ridges of our woods alone, over the weatherworn driftless hills, which had been gently shaped over the eons by the elements and not gouged out by glaciers. I fancied these serene rises in summer, the patient competition of their vegetation, their flush, slow-motion scrambling, feeling the comfort of the cool rustle of trees as I strolled in the green light beneath their canopies. I cherished them in all seasons, their changes, colors, the winds battering, and their