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Authors: Jim Heynen
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more sharpened version of the person she had always been. Maybe her father understood her and saw something good, though
other people saw what Alice saw: an icy presence who would complain about anything that didnât fit her fancy. Alice absorbed the looks on merchantsâ faces when her mother walked into a store, the look that said, âOh no, get ready, here she comes.â Her mother was an embarrassment.
People probably talked about her whole family, not just her mother. No other family looked like them. Both of her parents looked older than most parents with teenage kids, and their height made them stand out even more: her mother was over six feet tall like Alice, and her father was a towering several inches above them. Unlike most of the farm folk, the three of them were skinny. Then there was Aldah, who was barely five feet tall and weighed twenty pounds more than Alice. Outward appearances were just a start. Aldah at fifteen had a vocabulary of sixty words, though she was progressing every dayâthanks to Alice, not her mother.
Alice was no doctor, but she was convinced that there was something very abnormal about her mother and the way she looked for the darkest possible side of every issue. The approach of the millennium only made things worse: some part of her seemed to relish the most gruesome predictions of what the millennium might bring. That was her mother.
Alice glanced at the clock. She needed sleep. She had to get to sleep. The steers would be as hungry in the morning as they were earlier that night. She breathed deeply and tried to relax, but an uninvited guest came into her mind as she was starting to doze. It was her mother from her shoulders up, looking at Alice with eyes that said, âI know you. I know you better than anyone knows you.â The face hovered against Aliceâs closed eyelids. The image of her, yes, perhaps this is what her father saw, a strange warmth. It was love. Alice couldnât fight the feeling. Her mother, bizarre as she was, loved her. She was like a guardian angel, and no one ever said guardian angels had to be nice.
Maybe she was just trying to forgive her mother so she could get some needed sleep, but the feeling was a comfort. As sleep moved toward her, new pictures came into her mind like a shuffling of photographs: pictures of farms, one after another. Dead farms. Dying farms. Farms that hid their sickness. Chronically ill farms that wheezed through the night with sad and drooping fences, with fence posts that looked like contorted spines, farms with thistles on the loose, cocklebur farms, farms with poorly installed culverts that spring floods spit up into the ditches
and fields, soil-depleted farms, farms with rutted driveways and flapping barn doors. And the modern transformed farms, megafarms, feedlot confinement farms, polluting farms, farms that stank to high heaven. Eye-watering-stench farms. Sickening smell, gagging farms. Farms whose odors had color and textures and taste, like dense green fog farms, sticky hot mauve farms. Curdling slime farms. The living-dead farms. Monster farms. With the images flooding her mind, so did the smells.
Fading farms, falling off the landscape one broken piece at a time, the old equipment rusting in the grove, the unterraced hillsides giving way to deeper gullies every year, the sway-backed sheds, the leaning mailbox. The slow death, two decades for shingles to wear out, another decade for barn ribs to show, then years of desertion before vandals smashed all the windows. Until the farm looked terminally ill, overburdened with chemicals, on its last breath, exhausted, one finger on the morphine button.
Like the Den Moolen farm two miles awayâfirst the storage sheds, then the chicken coop, then the hog house, then the cow barn, then the lawn and garden, then the seven-gabled white house with its white picket fence and the blood-red rose bushes. The U-shaped grove like a good-luck horseshoe lingering for
other people saw what Alice saw: an icy presence who would complain about anything that didnât fit her fancy. Alice absorbed the looks on merchantsâ faces when her mother walked into a store, the look that said, âOh no, get ready, here she comes.â Her mother was an embarrassment.
People probably talked about her whole family, not just her mother. No other family looked like them. Both of her parents looked older than most parents with teenage kids, and their height made them stand out even more: her mother was over six feet tall like Alice, and her father was a towering several inches above them. Unlike most of the farm folk, the three of them were skinny. Then there was Aldah, who was barely five feet tall and weighed twenty pounds more than Alice. Outward appearances were just a start. Aldah at fifteen had a vocabulary of sixty words, though she was progressing every dayâthanks to Alice, not her mother.
Alice was no doctor, but she was convinced that there was something very abnormal about her mother and the way she looked for the darkest possible side of every issue. The approach of the millennium only made things worse: some part of her seemed to relish the most gruesome predictions of what the millennium might bring. That was her mother.
Alice glanced at the clock. She needed sleep. She had to get to sleep. The steers would be as hungry in the morning as they were earlier that night. She breathed deeply and tried to relax, but an uninvited guest came into her mind as she was starting to doze. It was her mother from her shoulders up, looking at Alice with eyes that said, âI know you. I know you better than anyone knows you.â The face hovered against Aliceâs closed eyelids. The image of her, yes, perhaps this is what her father saw, a strange warmth. It was love. Alice couldnât fight the feeling. Her mother, bizarre as she was, loved her. She was like a guardian angel, and no one ever said guardian angels had to be nice.
Maybe she was just trying to forgive her mother so she could get some needed sleep, but the feeling was a comfort. As sleep moved toward her, new pictures came into her mind like a shuffling of photographs: pictures of farms, one after another. Dead farms. Dying farms. Farms that hid their sickness. Chronically ill farms that wheezed through the night with sad and drooping fences, with fence posts that looked like contorted spines, farms with thistles on the loose, cocklebur farms, farms with poorly installed culverts that spring floods spit up into the ditches
and fields, soil-depleted farms, farms with rutted driveways and flapping barn doors. And the modern transformed farms, megafarms, feedlot confinement farms, polluting farms, farms that stank to high heaven. Eye-watering-stench farms. Sickening smell, gagging farms. Farms whose odors had color and textures and taste, like dense green fog farms, sticky hot mauve farms. Curdling slime farms. The living-dead farms. Monster farms. With the images flooding her mind, so did the smells.
Fading farms, falling off the landscape one broken piece at a time, the old equipment rusting in the grove, the unterraced hillsides giving way to deeper gullies every year, the sway-backed sheds, the leaning mailbox. The slow death, two decades for shingles to wear out, another decade for barn ribs to show, then years of desertion before vandals smashed all the windows. Until the farm looked terminally ill, overburdened with chemicals, on its last breath, exhausted, one finger on the morphine button.
Like the Den Moolen farm two miles awayâfirst the storage sheds, then the chicken coop, then the hog house, then the cow barn, then the lawn and garden, then the seven-gabled white house with its white picket fence and the blood-red rose bushes. The U-shaped grove like a good-luck horseshoe lingering for
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