Ten
I STOP THE truck and turn off the engine maybe a quarter mile from the farmhouse and the barn my great-grandfather had sure built to last. The older they got, the more both of them sometimes looked as if they might be on their last legs.
But they are still here, the way EJ, God bless her, is still here, making me think of a little more of my secret Cackalacky talk with my father, about how he liked to say that my grandmother was tougher than a cheap steak.
October through December.
Football season, I think in the driver’s seat of my father’s truck.
And what’s that going to feel like, boy, when you’re here instead of Pittsburgh, waiting along with EJ to see how well the planters and tractors have done their work this time, how this year’s crop will measure up against last year’s, your feet up on Sunday afternoons and Sunday nights and Monday nights, watching football instead of playing it?
That’s a good damn question right there.
How am I really going to feel when I’m not winging it and flinging it, like the Tar Heels play-by-play man, Jones Angell, used to say about me, because that man could surely tell a good story with words, too, like he was some kind of football poet.
If you only had one more game to play in your life, how much would a game like that be worth to you? Echoes of wisdom from the Original Silas Tucker, who talked to me before every peewee game I played when he was still around.
“You appreciate these games you’re playing,” my father used to say. “Because someday when you’re as old as I am, you’ll be willing to pay all the money you have just to have one more of them.”
In the fields in the distance, I can see the lone figure of Charlie Hall, who’s managed the family farm since before I was born and still manages it along with his son, Les. He’s standing next to EJ’s green combine harvester.
My dad always said that Charlie would never use two words when none would do.
He’d been born in this part of Carolina, had only known farming and family his whole life, was tall and skinny as a knife and could go hours in a workday out in the fields where his only conversation was to spit—like a champion—some of the tobacco permanently lodged in his cheek.
I’ll be joining the farm crew this year.
Before we can plant the soybeans, we have to harvest all the winter wheat, then load it into the back of the combine, drive it ten miles to Old Mill, come back and do it again and keep doing it until the fields are clear of everything except wheat stubble ready for the planting.
Up the road, I can also see EJ’s ancient Suburban parked in front of the house, and know she’s up there waiting for me, her little self and her big heart.
And right then I think of another Kris Kristofferson song because I’d been listening to it on the way here, because that man really was a damn poet:
Yesterday is dead and gone…
Tomorrow is right up ahead, after all, and all around me.
And I know in my own heart that EJ will try her hardest for me not to be sad, and so will Tay.
So will Vince Tarplay, who knows plenty himself about having football cruelly taken away from him, because it had happened to him before it happened to me, and he’d had more practice living with the loss of his own dreams.
And it’s sad to be alone…
But I can’t help myself. I sit here and wonder how I’m going to make it through the days and long nights that I know are coming up fast on me, with everybody in this town staring at me every time I leave this farm, probably feeling sorrier for me than I ever could myself.
I don’t want their pity, but know I’m going to get it whether I do or not.
Just like that, I start up the truck, back it up into the grass, and turn it around, feeling the sudden urge to keep driving, toward Virginia or Kentucky or Tennessee, see if I can somehow outrun every one of the memories that truly have chased me all the way home.
I need some daylight, bad.
Some open field.
Or maybe just some kind of sign that this is where I’m supposed to be.
Then I’m doing what I said I’d never do again in my life, driving too fast down a country road, hearing the roar of the engine in my ears, right before I’m forced to turn the wheel again, jerk it hard to the left.
Not for a deer this time. For the dog that’s right in front of me, but only for a blink, there and gone, before it disappears under the front wheels of the truck.
My dog.