In the barn, kittens play as their mother rests on a discarded towel, eyes shut but ears fixed in the direction of her young. Dust moves hazily across the beams of sunlight shooting through the window near the rafters. The smells of old straw and oil intermingle. Shiny green tractors, freshly washed, drip water onto the dirt floors next to hay bales piled high. The barn doors are thrown open.

       Outside the barn, two dogs sniff around and occasionally bark at one another. The strident hum of emerald cicadas fill the air. A group of children play in the yard in front of the blue one-story house. They vary in age, from a baby to a long-limbed boy kicking a red-and-white ball. The younger ones sit on a wide gingham blanket while the older children run about, occasionally fighting over the toys thrown here and there, shouting. The dogs, children, and the bright fuchsia flowers beginning to open on the nearby bushes give off the feverish energy that the living exude on the first warm day of spring after a long winter and its rainy retreat.

       The children, the children. The baby, her head covered in red fuzz, is busy in the way babies are, occupied with objects, turning them over, examining them, wet lips slightly parted. The ball comes too close to her and the oldest, in his rush to retrieve it, knocks her in the head with his knee, hard. The infant wails. A few of the children stare at the baby, with the rest ignoring her cries and continuing their play, including the one with the ball. A woman emerges from the house, pulling off bright yellow washing gloves. She scoops up the crying baby and shushes her, while chiding the older child to be more careful. The baby quiets in her mother’s arms, then reaches down to continue her work of examining the small toys.

 

***

    

Everything has changed, in this place. The inside of the barn rattles and whistles from the force of the wind in the darkness. The tractors are covered in a thin sheen of dust. No kittens play among the hay.

       Outside, the ground, the other barns, and the house are covered in snow. A silence blankets the grounds as well, with no living thing in the yard. The muted green pine trees look almost black against all that white, lined up along the edge of the property like sentries in the night.

       A strong wind picks up, stirring the branches and rattling my bones. No, that couldn’t be right. I don’t have a body.

       A vehicle rolls into the gravel driveway, its shiny sides gleaming. The car stops and a man, tall, broad, and dressed in military fatigues emerges. No small faces appear at the windows of the house. The man bends his head against the wind and enters the house. The silence and stillness continue on. I am the wind blowing through the trees for a while.

 

***

    

I remember now. These barns had been full of pigs. I worked with them, day and night. I did the feeding. I had a husband, John, who did the mucking. To keep the pig supply up, we bred them often. It was always frightening and miraculous to see the piglets born, to see how many there were, whether they looked like the sow, the bull, or a different pig entirely, some ancestor pig. Then, to watch them nurse with a feral hunger and hear their squeals at fresh hay being laid in. I despised my lot in life only when death paid the farm a visit, leaving behind a squashed piglet under its mother, or fading a stalled labor into a permanent, silent end for mother and babies. I remember the difficult labor of one of our sows, my husband watching over it in the pen like some judging god. After straining fruitlessly for hours, the sow gave one last tremendous push and in her grand effort propelled the entirety of her uterus out, a pulsing heavy mass. I watched John grab it with his fist and push it back up inside the sow. She and her unborn piglets died, poor things, and I was sick afterwards. I said prayers for them for weeks, although the priest had made it clear during several homilies that animals did not have souls.

       The death of this sow and her unborn had seemed a grave omen to me at the time, as I had not yet fallen pregnant. All around us in Stearns County, women welcomed children at a steady pace. Although Martha and Jacob down the road were younger than us by several years, Martha was already expecting her third baby, her belly huge whenever we saw them in town. Meanwhile, month after month, I would wash the blood from my undergarments, and seeing them alone on the drying line, lonely and white like a flag of surrender, John would stop speaking to me for a few days. I prayed for a child, not because I feared his contempt, but because the Minnesotan prairie was vast and empty and I wanted to know what it felt like to be reached for.

 

***

    

I knew a mother’s love could be tremendous. One dry summer, our neighbor’s house caught fire from an errant ember. We could smell the smoke from our field, where we prepared to harvest. John rushed over. When he returned, he told me of the extraordinary sight he had witnessed, of Martha reaching through a blazing window to pull her child through to safety, sustaining horrible shining burns on her arms in the process. The child, remarkably unscathed. John chuckled and said that her cooked flesh almost smelled like bacon. How my stomach turned.

       The next spring, John entered a stall to do the mucking when the sow within, usually a gentle and timid creature, rushed him with an unearthly scream and bit a hole clear through his hand. I had to clean the wound and stitch the hole together, since we had no one near to fetch the county doctor. I feared that as soon as I was finished, John would take his gun and storm into the barn to take his revenge upon the sow. But to my surprise, he leaned back in his chair and praised the pig’s maternal instincts, saying she did what any decent mother would do if she sensed danger. Then he told me that even pigs knew how to get pregnant and become mothers.

 

***

    

My mother lost two babies before me, held their tiny, delicately formed bodies close before burying them herself in the far corner of the field. Then I was born on this very farm as the Second World War raged on. Mother told me I was a colicky baby who grew into a clinging child. I always tried to kiss her hands, hug her legs, but she pushed me away until I stopped trying.

       My father was a kind but absent man. He had wanted to leave Stearns County for the war but with a wife and new baby, he received a letter commanding him to keep the farm running and help feed the troops. The war claimed his two brothers instead. When I was a girl, Mother would tell me to thank God in my prayers that Father didn’t go to war, although I wonder, given what happened later, whether she wished he had gone after all.

       It was a quiet farm with just the three of us. The seasons turned faithfully, summers green and bright with growing the corn and haying, the round-the-clock labor of autumn and its marigold hue, the sharp sting of winter air with its smell of woodsmoke, and the heady unfurling of spring. The sky always felt like it hung low over us no matter the season, close enough to touch, almost upon our heads. Mother was a constant presence, undertaking the never-ending work of the home, but Father seemed to grow more transparent with each passing year. Sometimes when I went to fetch him for dinner, he would be staring into the fields as if he were trying to remember something.

       He began leaving the house more in the evenings, washing up carefully after chores and disappearing down the country road in his truck. He told Mother he was meeting with other farmers to discuss agricultural matters. She didn’t protest, because he needed the advice. Father did not have a talent for farming. I believe that’s why Father allowed John to marry me, reluctantly. John courted me as I had no brothers to inherit the farm after my father. He had promised to help my father start raising pigs, since the corn wasn’t going too well. There was nothing my father could say to that but yes, despite the fringes of John’s temper that showed here and there.

 

***

    

Those babies on the blanket are grown now. Three boys stand around the well off to the side of the barn. Their hair is long and shaggy, unlike the shorn heads of the men I had known in my lifetime. Two are tall and muscled from the farm labor, the younger one shorter with a spindly frame, yet to fill out. They are laughing, pulling up a bucket from the well. No, there are screams piercing the air. They are grasping something, one leg each…they are holding someone upside down there. After more screaming, shouting, taunting, and false-slipping, the boys’ brows glistening from the effort, their muscles straining, they finally pull their victim out of the well’s yawning black hole and drop her on the ground. It is their younger sister, with unruly red hair barely contained in a disheveled braid. She gets to her feet, shoves the nearest brother, and runs into the house as the boys laugh. A few moments later, a large angry mustached man appears, his face already red from shouting. Their father, brandishing his belt. The boys run off, their shouts echoing in the air, while the father threatens violence from the porch.

       The air is cool and smells like apples.

 

***

    

The scent reminds me of my wedding. A small and humble affair, even by our county’s standards. Roast beef and fried chicken, sauerkraut and cucumber salad, and dinner rolls with salted butter were served, alongside cold cans of beer. The late September date was unseasonably warm and the fallen apples from the trees planted near the barns were rotting, perfuming the air.

       John insisted on holding the wedding as soon as possible once Father gave his blessing. I think he wanted to get away from his own father and begin to work on the land he’d already begun to see as his own. Mother, already laboring from dawn until dusk, began to stay up late sewing her own wedding dress to fit me. She also learned to pipette buttercream flowers. I came close to tears when I saw the pure white two-tiered frosted cake covered in pink roses.

       Everyone wished us a long life and many children before departing shortly after our lunch reception. There was no dancing or dinner, per my new husband’s request. He moved in and began working the farm the very next morning.

 

***

    

The winter after we got married, Father was dumped in our front yard one night, bloodied and bruised. When John found him the next morning, he was nearly frozen to death. Father refused to say anything about what had happened, but people talked in that small town. Drunk at the bar, he had reached for a man. Mother tended to him for a few weeks, and then he disappeared, with no note, no word to my mother or me. We never saw him again.

       That same winter a virus surged through the county. Mother, her body weak with shame and despair, succumbed almost eagerly to the disease. She refused to go to the hospital and passed in the night, so silently it felt like she left the same way Father did, in secret. The funeral was sparsely attended since many were sick and we were meant to avoid crowds. There was no time to grieve, with so much work to do on the farm and now only me and John to do it.

       With my parents gone, John’s anger made itself at home. He began to break things around the house when he got angry, things precious to me, porcelain plates and ornaments my great-grandparents had brought over from Germany and a doll from my girlhood with a glass face. I spoke rarely to avoid incurring John’s rages, which usually began when I failed to do the cooking or tidying the way his mother had done. His quiet and doting mother had died when John was a young boy, leaving him to fend for himself against his cruel father and older brothers. I tried to heed his complaints and do things the way I thought she might, but John was rarely satisfied. I think he missed her greatly.

 

     ***     

    

A pewter-gray day on the farm. Another vehicle pulls up on the driveway and pauses, before the rumbling sound dies out and a man emerges—the soldier, but older now. A woman materializes from the car as well, wearing her black hair in a dignified twist. By her skin color and the shape of her eyes, she looks like she’s from a country far from here.

       The woman opens up the car door and pulls out an armful of blankets. A small pale face is barely visible through an opening, the sleeping face of an infant. The man speaks in a low, rumbling tone which sounds increasingly strained. The woman stands there with the baby in her arms, listening. He touches her shoulder, brushes stray hair behind her ear. She neither pulls away nor leans into his touch. The man puts his arms around her shoulders and they walk towards the door together and enter the house.

       More than the vehicle, their clothes, the fact of the woman’s foreignness, the way the man touches the woman reveals a different time than the one in which I was living. I have never seen a man touch a woman like that, yet the woman didn’t look any less alone for it. She clutched the baby close as if it were a tether to the world. I coveted that warm weight in her arms.

       Snow began to fall, and I joined the sparse white matter falling into the collective on the ground. Later, the foreign woman emerges from the house, without the baby, to walk toward the barn. Out of view of the windows, she leans against the barn wall and looks out towards the fields. She doesn’t shiver despite her thin blouse, and stares at the expanse of the land meeting the leaden sky. She already looks dead.

     What am I still doing here?

 

***

    

Something had happened to me in the barn. The memories fall back into consciousness slowly, in fat chunks, like globs of thick batter falling out of a bowl into a pan. A barely-there visual memory of a sweeping arc in reverse flying up towards the rafters. One misstep backwards off the hay bale pile, the back of my head hitting the edge of the brand-new tractor. The faint scent of engine oil joined by the tinny smell of blood. I looked at the weak daylight leaking through the dirty window near the ceiling before the blackness at the edge of my vision crowded in. The face of my son in my mind's eye for the final time.

       Paul. 

       The weather outside had been ungodly, dark as evening although only midday. Bare sticks protruding off branches like the bones of degloved fingers rattled in the wind and scratched against the dirty glass windows. John was out in the barn, feeding the animals. I was with Paul, my only baby. My nipples were sore. Paul looked like a baby bird, all sharp angles, elbows and knees. He had mottled skin and cold, purple hands. He was a good-looking baby nonetheless, with a fine face. He was less than a week old. I was still bleeding a lot, but next week I would go back to helping John in the barn. It was too much for one man to do alone.

       Paul and I lay nestled in the blankets in the middle of the day. What a luxury. I didn’t remember the last time I laid in bed for hours upon hours like this. The baby rested against my bare chest. My breasts were swollen, all the linens around me smelled like old milk. I could feel time ticking by, John hovering, waiting for me to get back to work. But I stayed there as long as possible.

 

***

    

The sun is finally out. The sky looks exactly as I remember it in my girlhood, all that blue stretching for miles, filled with rolling fluffy clouds traveling lazily for miles on end. There are many vehicles in the dirt driveway now, with people milling about the yard. They are talking softly and eating from paper plates heaped with ham sandwiches, potato salad, and chocolate cake. Everyone is wearing black for the funeral luncheon.

       People are circling the soldier-man, who wears a strange look on his face, a mixture of disbelief and grief. The red-headed woman approaches him and hugs him tight to her side.

       That man. I need to be close. I take in every feature, the hair protruding from his nostrils, the blackheads dotting his nose, the pointed chin covered in stubble, the high forehead. I observe his expressions as he listens to those around him, turns his face this way and that. Yes, this is my son. I had missed everything.

       I notice a toddler, kicking a red and white ball in the yard, same as the children of the past used to do. My granddaughter. I come in close. The girl’s face is a mishmash of her parents’ features. She has her father’s high forehead, angular jaw, pointed nose, but her mother’s dark hair, black eyes. The girl stops in her tracks and begins to cry. She senses me, an unfamiliar presence.

       An older woman hugs my son. This woman, John must have married her soon after my death, she raised Paul, raised her own children alongside him. And there John is, that angry man now deflated and hoary, I see now he’s always been all bluster and no punch, yet, how did he manage to marry again?

       The family did well without me. This woman looks patient. Paul was only a toddler when I fell. He does not remember me. But I think of him, even now.

 

***

    

The summer after the winter that the baby was born, I would come into the house at the end of the day, removing my caked boots at the door, my face streaked with the dirt from the weeding. The baby came along for chores, tied securely to my back. Each afternoon, he would take a bath with me. Then came time to cook dinner. I had begun to cook quick meals, to save one precious half hour for the baby and me to play in a ray of setting sun on the carpet in the living room.

       Paul had a full personality then, teeth that had come in early, a tiny giggle that made my heart tighten. His light hair was thin but covered his scalp evenly. His thighs and arms were thick with fat folds. His fingers wanted to touch and explore everything, but I had to watch him carefully so he wouldn’t get them stuck somewhere and cry. He would sit there, his back to me, examining bottles, blocks, books. I loved kissing the back of his neck, where the stork bites were still visible, and smelling the top of his head, the scent reminiscent of sun-warmed grain in the silo.

       I linger on the farm to remember this, to stay within this memory as long as I can, when it comes. Whenever it fades, I will fade too, like the apples that fall and then disappear into the ground, like the snowflakes melt into the green almost black trees, like the fuchsia flowers that turn brown each autumn and crumple into nothing.