Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Always October
Always October
Always October
Ebook301 pages4 hours

Always October

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

Lucas Taylor has lived a long life. Though his body is failing him, his memory is still strong as he recounts his journey through life, love, and lossâ and shares an incredible lesson he's learned along the way.
LanguageEnglish
PublishereBookIt.com
Release dateApr 26, 2016
ISBN9781456625207
Always October

Read more from C. E. Edmonson

Related to Always October

Related ebooks

Christian Fiction For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for Always October

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Always October - C. E. Edmonson

    Cheryl

    CHAPTER 1

    You look out over April Lake, at the hills and the forest, you might think you’ve stumbled into the Garden of Eden. But these days my life is mostly confined to this place—the April Lake Veterans Home—and the grounds by the lake, and not even the grounds, what with winter upon us. About once a month, the nurses and aides will load us up—including me and my wheelchair—into the facility’s minibus, and take us for a drive around the lake, to a show at the little community theater in town, or to a concert at the local church.

    It’s funny in a way. You’d think any time away from this place would be my heart’s desire, but the hours tug at my heart instead. They speak to a world I lived in once upon a time, a world I’ll never go back to. I’m not complaining. Lord knows, I lived in the world longer than most. It’s just that I don’t need reminding.

    * * *

    I was born Lucas Henry Taylor on June 16, 1910, son of Samuel Edward Taylor and Winnie Lee Taylor, brother of Anne Amelia Taylor, whom we all called Annie.

    My place of birth, and where I lived almost all of my life, was Bear County, Minnesota. In 1910, it was all farm country, plain and simple. We didn’t border the Minnesota or the Mississippi rivers. There were no flour mills, no lumber mills, just farms and more farms and a few businesses to serve them.

    You’d see much the same thing today if you drove through Bear County on the interstate in the early summer. Gently rolling land marked by forested ridges, the occasional small lake, dairy cows lying beneath isolated trees in a meadow, fields of half-grown hay and wheat, vegetable gardens protected from deer and woodchucks by chicken wire fences set before isolated farmhouses. Always to the south, always in full sun. And when you arrived at your destination, if you were asked about the scenery you viewed along the way, you’d probably say, It was all the same. Barns and meadows and fields.

    Farmers look at the world through different eyes. To them, every field is different—alfalfa, clover, timothy grass, wheat, the occasional orchard, apple or pear. Passing through, they note the quality of the crop, the health of the cows. There might even be a debate over the merits of Holsteins versus Jerseys, with a remark or two about the ability of Swiss cows to handle Minnesota’s harsh winters. From there the conversation might shift to the virtues of round barns, the combines parked next to them, or the tractors parked next to the combines.

    But that’s in June, when the crops are in the ground but not yet high enough to cut. A month earlier, the farmers would see things differently still, measuring rainfall and drainage, examining pale-green shoots—only a few inches above the surface—with the eyes of psychics peering into the future.

    See, to the farmers who live in Bear County, the land is eternal and eternally changing, and so intertwined with the weather as to make earth and sky inseparable. They know that land has to be understood in every season, in every weather. And they won’t, not for a single second, believe themselves to be the masters, the land their servant. They’re the servants and they always will be.

    That said, my father, Samuel Edward Taylor, didn’t farm. We lived in the town of Louristan, the county seat, and Dad operated an establishment that sold farm machinery—hay mowers and side rakes, slings and hoists—along with miscellaneous hardware. But Samuel Taylor was descended from a line of farmers that ran all the way back to England. His grandfather and grandmother, Ezekiel and Rebekah Taylor, had come to Minnesota in 1844, refugees from the Catskill Mountains of New York, where the soil’s more rock than dirt. They bought two hundred acres of unimproved land from the U.S. government and set out to make a life.

    There was good news and bad news about the section they purchased. The land was rolling, which meant good drainage, and the soil was rich enough to grow hay and wheat for a hundred years. That was the good news. The bad news was plain as day: their acreage was covered with trees for the most part. Big trees, old-growth trees, maples, oaks, basswood, and the like. There was just enough meadow to produce hay for their two horses. The rest was dense forest.

    When you get to a certain age, you start lookin’ back on the past as though everything was golden, so maybe I’m exaggerating. But men and women like Ezekiel and Rebekah Taylor—yes, she cleared that land alongside her husband—were pretty near superhuman. The work went on every minute of every day, from sunrise until it got too dark to see. They built a log cabin first, then cut enough hay to get their horses through the winter, which is no little accomplishment in Bear County. There’s not a winter goes by when the temperature doesn’t hit minus twenty-five. Back then every farmhouse had a thicket of trees runnin’ in a tight curve around its sides, facing north and west, to hold off the winter winds and the drifting snow. Without that protection, the snow would pile up to the roof and the wind would seep through the window frames no matter how tightly they were sealed.

    It took Ezekiel Taylor twenty years to get his farm how he wanted it—him and his wife and children, too, as soon as they were old enough to work.

    Close your eyes and imagine an old-growth oak tree standing in the forest, the trunk maybe six feet in diameter, the branches stretching up a hundred feet, the roots digging almost as deep into the earth. Now imagine transformin’ that oak into planks and beams and shingles with a few hand tools. And doin’ it in the middle of the winter, too. That’s how the Taylors built their first and second barns, a real house to replace the log cabin, their wagon beds, and the split-rail fencing that surrounded their haystacks. It’s how they built cabinets and shelves and stalls for the cows they bought as soon as the land could produce enough hay to feed ’em.

    Gracious, I haven’t even begun to touch on what the pioneers accomplished, the Taylors and all the other families that started up before the railroads came through. I haven’t mentioned the Dakota Indian War in 1862, the grasshopper plagues of 1876 and 1877, hailstorms that destroyed crops in the fields, spring thunderstorms that left fields flooded for weeks. But I don’t mean to dwell on my family’s origins. I’m only making the point that farm life runs deep in my veins, town boy or not. Farming was and is the life of Bear County, as true today as it was the day I was born, or in 1844 when Ezekiel and Rebecca Taylor faced two hundred acres of wilderness.

    * * *

    So, now me. You know, ever since you got me talking about my life, bits and pieces from my early years have been coming back to me. The smell of horses for one thing. And automobiles—they were few and far between in those early years. The town doctor had a Buick he drove to make house calls, and I seem to remember one of the lawyers in town had a car of some kind, but horses and wagons filled the streets on working days in Louristan. The smell of them, the horses, was very strong—the smell of living, breathing creatures, a smell that seemed familiar the first time I smelled it. Later on, after tractors, trucks, and cars came along, folks claimed they disliked the smell of horses. Thought it was unclean somehow. They were sadly mistaken, at least in my opinion. Motor vehicles run on the remains of creatures that died millions of years ago and they smell like it, too.

    Of course, horses did leave their waste behind, which wasn’t so pleasant and had to be cleaned up. And that reminds me of another smell that’s popped into my mind: the stink of a chicken coop that needs cleaning. In those days, even town boys had chores to do, and my first chores required me to collect the eggs and feed the chickens we kept. Truth be told, there were times when the ammonia smell set my eyes to burnin’. Other times, after Annie finished cleaning the coop, the chickens gave off a warm, contented odor that I found downright comforting. That is, when the hens weren’t trying to peck me.

    Let’s see, what else. The smell of a wood fire, in the kitchen stove and the pot-bellied stove in the living room. The smell of the oil my father used to lubricate the machinery he sold. The smell of a fresh blackberry pie left to cool on a windowsill. The smell of the lilac toilet water my mother used every day, and the smell of the tiny, red roses that grew on a trellis alongside the house. The smell of sweat-soaked farmers in town for the day. There were no water heaters back then, no washing machines. Washing clothes was a day-long chore. You had to heat water on the kitchen stove, scrub the clothes on an old-fashioned wooden washboard, rinse out the soap—which was lye-based and caustic—in clean water, then hang the clothes out to dry. Gracious, there wasn’t even electricity outside of the town itself. Most farmers bathed once a week and they smelled like it, too.

    What I’m gettin’ to, in my old-man way, is a memory that’s still sharp even though I couldn’t have been much more than five years old when it happened.

    Cut hay smells good, plain and simple, whether the hay is timothy grass or alfalfa. Neither one, though, can stand alongside the smell of newly cut clover. There’s a poet named Robert Frost who described cutting clover as the sweetest dream that labor knows, and I can’t claim to disagree. I can remember times when the family gathered on the front porch after supper, sipping lemonade. This was on hot nights, before the house cooled enough to allow for sleep. The smell of cut clover would come drifting on the night breeze from the farms across the creek, and Momma would shake her head and laugh.

    Somebody needs to put that in a bottle, she’d say. It puts lilacs to shame and makes the daffodils blush.

    CHAPTER 2

    Haying season in farm country is all about speed and cooperation. You have to cut and stack the hay before it rains, which is not a job for one man or even one family. In my day, farm families took turns helping each other. Town folks turned out as well—including my dad, who hoped to sell machinery to the farmers. Talk about hard work, especially for townies who weren’t used to such grueling manual labor.

    Minnesota’s not a state blessed with a friendly climate. I’ve already said how the winters were bitter cold, which you’d think would mean the summers were mild. That wasn’t the case. No, sir. Haying took place in July, when temperatures reached ninety degrees in the shade. Sweat? You don’t know the meaning of the word till you’ve spent a day raking newly cut hay into haycocks or loading hay bales onto a wagon bed.

    My point here is not to complain about the hard work. In fact, the memory I’m workin’ at happened when I was too young to help out much. I was brought along because this was Momma’s baking day and she didn’t want me underfoot. What I saw on that day has stuck with me for a lifetime.

    By the time I had made my appearance on this planet, most farmers had switched from hand tools to machinery, horse-drawn side mowers, and side rakes that let a single farmer, perched up on a seat, do the work of ten men. Not Thomas Beckmeyer and his boys, though. They sweated for every stalk, wielding their scythes—Bear County Minnesotans called ’em sighs—hour after hour. As if they were born to it.

    We started out right after breakfast. My father hitched our horse, named Cinnamon, to the small wagon we used for deliveries. Off we went—my father, Annie, and I—leaving Momma behind. The day was already warm, the sun bright in a cloudless sky. Main Street was still quiet, and it would remain that way until haying season was over. Only the town barber, Carl Golson, was about. He was perched at the top of an extension ladder that reached the roof of his little shop, paintbrush in hand.

    Howdy, Samuel, he said as we passed by. Thought I’d catch up on the chores while the catchin’ was good.

    That’s fine, Carl, my dad replied. Maybe after you finish, you could do my place next.

    With that strong, young man sittin’ next you? No, sir, you don’t need my help.

    We were past the barber shop and almost out of town before I realized Mr. Golson was referring to me.

    Now, I know I said Louristan was the county seat. The courthouse was located on Main Street, and we had two doctors, a dentist, and two lawyers. But Louristan was still a small town by American standards. Main Street, which ran all of three hundred yards, featured two clothing stores, a meat market, two grocery stores, a small restaurant, a bank, a feed store, my dad’s shop, and churches for the Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, and Seventh Day Adventists. A pair of taverns, the blacksmith’s forge, the livery stable, and the Bear County Clarion were located on our two side streets, First and Second. The grain elevator and the creamery were down by the railroad station at the southern edge of town. They were cooperatives even back then, the farmers organizing to counter the power of the mills and the railroad to dictate prices.

    Beyond the edge of town, all was cultivated fields and woodlots. It didn’t take long to cross the little, stone bridge spanning the creek and be out in what Dad called the country.

    Tell me again, Annie, what we’re gonna do? I remember asking.

    We’re going to rake the windrows.

    Windows?

    "No, windrows."

    What’re windrows again?

    I’ve already explained it five times.

    Tell me one more time and I won’t ask again.

    Lucas, you are an exceptionally tedious child.

    Annie was five years older than I, a world-weary girl saddled with looking after her little brother when our parents released us for play. Myself, I figured all sisters were bossy by nature, and I didn’t argue with her.

    Haying season had only just begun and the fields we passed were lush with hay—timothy grass the most common, but also clover and alfalfa. Timothy grass produces a long flower stalk lined with pink-purple blossoms. With the breeze moving through acres and acres of the grass, the fields I stared at were a magic carpet—at least they were to me at that moment. I’d played in timothy grass, even chewed on the stalks, a habit Annie pronounced common but I’d never seen it exactly that way. The grass swayed and recovered with the ebb and fall of the breeze, giving way, coming back, as if the grass and the wind had cut some kind of deal. I remember the stalks were bright green, like they were proud to be alive, and the flowers rose at the ends of the stalks like the tail feathers on a peacock.

    I was impressed enough to stay pretty quiet on the short ride to the Beckmeyer farm. Not so Annie, who argued, as she’d done the night before, that she should have been left behind to do the baking so Momma could open the store. This was ridiculous because no farmers purchased machinery—or much of anything else in town—in July. All their energies were directed toward cutting and curing the hay before it rained.

    My dad was a talkative man back then, back in the good years—talkative by nature. I suspect that was why he chose to live in town. If he’d followed in his father’s footsteps and stayed on the farm, he’d likely have talked to the horses. The answer he gave my sister, then, was the same he’d already given two or three times.

    Think for a minute about life without farmers, Annie. You’re old enough now.

    And I wasn’t, obviously. I kept my mouth shut, and Dad went on without so much as glancing in my direction.

    That roof over your head? The one that keeps you warm in the winter and dry in the rain? That roof wouldn’t be there if farmers didn’t buy the machinery I sell. And the food your momma sets on the table, the food that keeps your stomach full? Farmers provide that, too, and not only when they patronize the store. Somebody has to grow the food you eat, and farmers are the ones who do it.

    I don’t see what that has to do with the baking.

    The baking will get done without you.

    The haying will get done without me, too. Annie had her arms folded across her chest by then, a sure sign she’d stopped listening.

    It’s not all about us, Annie. We’re small pieces of a community that comes together when the need is greatest, like in haying season and threshing season. By coming together in the name of the community, we admit we depend on each other. Depending on each other is just the way humans are made.

    I’m pretty sure Annie had a comeback. She had an answer for everything. But as we rounded a grove of trees, I spotted Thomas Beckmeyer and his sons in their field, whereupon my sister’s protests fled my little brain like field mice scurrying from a side mower. I was that scared.

    Annie was big on picture books and, every so often, when she was in a generous mood, she’d read me a story. One story was titled The Grim Reaper and right there, on the first page, old man death was pictured in all his dark glory. I suppose we’re all familiar with that image—a skeleton dressed in robes, carrying a scythe. Only I didn’t know the instrument used by the grim reaper even had a name. I only remembered his skull face and that long, curved blade. The Beckmeyers had their backs to us when we first sighted them. They might have had skulls for faces—imagination has a tendency to run wild at five years old—but there was no mistaking the blades on the scythes they wielded.

    My first instinct was to jump out of the wagon and make for home as fast as my little legs could take me. As it was, I grabbed my dad’s hand and wouldn’t let go.

    What’s wrong, Lucas?

    He’s takin’ souls, I responded, which was what the grim reaper did in Annie’s book.

    Taking souls?

    The grim reaper. He’s takin’ souls.

    I seem to recall my dad stifling a laugh at that moment. No, he’s not, son. That’s Thomas Beckmeyer and he’s only cutting his hay.

    My father’s quiet tone reassured me just enough to take another look, and sure enough, every time Thomas and his boys swept their scythes, swaths of clover fell to the earth. Then the smell reached me, strong enough to forever mark itself in the center of my being.

    Suddenly I became aware of the rhythm of the work. Scything a field is slow business. A step, a swing, another step, another swing. The reapers work behind each other and their bodies rotate with each step, turning until their heads face backwards. The sweep follows—not too fast or the grass will bend, as it does before the wind, only to recover a second later. But not too slow, either. Too slow will produce the same effect—the grass springing back to life. Every stroke has to be the same, a stately progression as formal as any waltz, each man working at exactly the same rate. If not, the back man is liable to cut off the foot of the man working in front of him. The blades are that sharp.

    Beckmeyer and his sons stopped when they heard the wagon—not to greet us, though they did, but to sharpen their scythes. The cut grass lay behind them in three neat rows, called windrows, where it would be left to dry for a day or so. I recall my dad pausing to admire the perfectly straight windrows before approaching Mr. Beckmeyer to shake hands. Then he formally introduced me and Annie.

    How do? Thomas Beckmeyer said to each of us. His boys just nodded as they ran their whetstones across the edges of their blades. Flies buzzed around their heads and their bodies were soaked with sweat. Most likely their thoughts were only of the water jug resting in the shade of a tree. They would take long drinks before they resumed cutting, the only real pleasure they would know until their momma brought their lunch.

    Other families had made appearances before us. They were in a field cut two days earlier, raking the windrows into what folks called haycocks, which looked to me like the igloos I’d seen in one of my own picture books. My father and Annie joined them, and pretty soon they were as sweaty as everyone else.

    I was too young to wield a rake and so was left to myself. I didn’t mind. I climbed up on the wagon and watched the Beckmeyers, father and sons, return to their labor. Mr. Beckmeyer was the master there, his back arrow straight, his body swiveling, the blade of his scythe cutting through the grass exactly parallel to the ground. Low enough to leave only stubble behind, yet high enough to avoid the occasional rock or clump of earth.

    Step, turn, whoosh. Step, turn, whoosh. Again and again and again. There was something about their labor that captured my attention, something large, and something else, too—something that stayed with me for many years but I couldn’t name. Everything was locked up with everything else: the tools, the men, the waving grass, even the occasional partridge that shot up out of the grass in a flurry of wings that sounded like an explosion. I didn’t know what to make of what I saw, but at my young age I didn’t feel a need to provide everything with a name, and so I kept my feelings to myself and just watched.

    CHAPTER 3

    I’ve been thinking on this, trying to understand why people remember some things as if they were happening right this minute, while so much else is lost in the haze of a long life.

    I have an impression of me and my sister Annie and how we got along. That’s only natural, as Annie was often charged with my care and we spent a lot of time together. I can still conjure up a few images of Annie skipping rope with her girlfriends, of a fight she had with Roger Olson, who tugged at her braids, of Annie hunched over her dinner with Momma urging her to sit up straight. But these are like faded snapshots. My recollection of the Beckmeyers working their scythes is as vivid as daylight. I don’t know why, and I’d rather not know. I’d rather move on to the next incident, which just might qualify as one of my happiest moment in those early years, the good years.

    As a young boy, I was crazy for baseball. Back then, it wasn’t like today. Nowadays people are so concerned with their e-mail and their text messages and whatnot. Well, I think the first thing you need to do is put all that technology stuff out of your head. And I’m not just talkin’ about the Internet and cell phones that can do more tricks than Lassie. Forget television, forget even radio. The farms in Bear County didn’t have electricity back then. Electrification would come later, during the New Deal, when President Franklin Roosevelt wired the backcountry. We did have electricity in town, and my father owned a radio

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1