The Place Where the River Bends

by James Bohn

Tom Baydesmith had been given a second chance. For twenty three years he’d worked as hard or harder than anyone he knew in the corporate world, putting in those long hours that drain a person’s life while life passes by, sacrificing the things that mean most in the long run for gains in the short run, and presenting an image of power he never really believed in. Tom knew that was all in the past. He had a new life, a fresh beginning, and he savored every day of it.

With dark coffee streaming from the cup in his hand, he looked out the window with June’s morning dew nurturing his fields. HIS fields. Although his cronies at work often talked of “getting back to the land” or “buying some property and settling down,” Tom had done it, really done it. And now he could experience it, just as he dreamed.

Crows barked their arrogant caws; cardinals and jays spouted their shrill songs. The wind picked up the fresh scent of last night’s rain and mixed it with the smell of the earth. In the distance, Tom could hear a front end loader hogging rock and sand from a quarry and loading it into dump trucks for a road construction job just few miles away. This was the way Tom expected things to be; the way he had wanted them to be for all those years.

If the corporate world had done him any good, it had shown him the need to stay physically fit. The muscle and fiber came in handy now. He knew the whole farm idea would have failed if he hadn’t stayed in shape. Size thirty-eight jeans still fit pretty good, and only a hint of a middle age belly could be seen at the belt line. To the jealousy of others, he managed to keep his thick brown hair and there was still a sparkle in his hazel eyes, despite the worries and the tragedies that plagued him when things were tough.

As Vice President of Sales at Maxwell Electronics, he had fought the good corporate fight. He had lived through two takeover attempts, two lousy bosses, three downsizings, scores of management fads and consultants, and still maintained most of his sanity.

Yet though he remained the person he had always been, his family had changed through time in ways he regretted. John, his eldest son, had quit college after only three months and taken up a job as a truck driver for a vegetable grocer. To Tom, who knew John to be exceptionally bright, this was a painful hit. “You’re wasting your life,” he’d say

time and again, but John heard nothing. John looked through his father as though he were glass, not even showing the respect of listening to the man who had ignored him so many years. Marie and Jane, his two daughters, never called him. They had no reason to – they never knew the man except to say hi as he ran out the door to golf on weekends.

And then there was Tom’s wife, Janet. She had seen him through twenty years of marriage, four kids, an MBA at night school and several health problems. Three years ago she left Tom for a younger man who owned a shoe store in downtown Valhalla.

His youngest son, Bill, however, stayed true to the “old man.” Bill came along in 1978, when Tom turned thirty-five, late enough in Tom’s life to realize he could still change, still make an impact on at least one of his children, still lead part of a normal life. Bill came along when Tom got the vision for the land and the farm. Janet complained how Bill was an accident, and she told Tom she would pay for the abortion herself, but Tom talked her out of it. He wanted another chance with a child, and he got that too.

Bill was thirteen when they bought the baler and the tractor; fourteen when they plowed up the first fifty acres; fifteen when they loaded “stone boats” to clear the land of rocks the size of bowling balls.

They worked together in the sun, sometimes sharing water from the same Thermos, sometimes arguing about who got to drive the tractor that day. Though Tom sometimes chaffed and wanted to rattle Bill’s cage, he held his tongue better each year.

They were together, and that’s what mattered most. They were together, and Tom knew that Bill was his umbilical cord to what remained of his family.

As Tom sipped the coffee planning the day’s work, he could hear the boy breathing heavily several rooms away. Alfalfa was heavy in the air, and Bill’s allergy problems were acting up. Tom looked out the window again, noticing that a spider had been busy overnight, carefully lacing the corner of the window with a web that sagged with moisture.

Across the gravel driveway was a John Deere tractor, the kind Tom’s uncle used for years. Tom had farming in his blood and genes. It came naturally – he learned quickly and he worked hard.

The rewards were different from his corporate actions. He never saw a bonus check anymore, but he did get income from renting out a few acres. He never saw the meeting rooms where the wars of corporate politics were fought, but he did gather at the town hall once a month to talk about issues that affected the farming community.

And he never saw any of his subordinates any more, those people he had worked so hard to infuse a sense of work ethic into, who often turned on him when they rose to a position of power. Instead he saw the way the land responded under his hand, the way the earth graciously gave back tenfold, a hundredfold, sometimes a thousandfold what he had put into it.

He never grew tired of the miracle of death and life, never fully understood but always marveled that seeds which were planted one day, hard and crusty and tired and grayish-brown, could turn into a green field flowing with life, yielding a rich harvest of corn and hay and oats and potatoes. Though the earth had her secrets, she was more predictable than people. She was both boss and servant, caregiver and caretaker, wisdom and intuition. Tom had EARNED his way back to the land, saved every dime he could to find his way back, and he had done it. And in return, the land yielded her wealth and riches.

He walked out the back door, being careful not to let the screen slam. He wanted to let the boy sleep just a bit longer. Ambling slowly across the gravel driveway, he saw a squirrel scurry up a tree and out onto a branch. He laughed.

The big red barn doors were still closed from the night before. He pulled one to the side and looked in. Sun slivers shone from the top of the walls down to the graying floor, revealing a hundred million specks of hay and dust dancing softly on the air.

At the middle of the barn was “The Deer,” the old tractor he’d bought when he first started this venture. The green paint was sunburned to a flat pastel in several places, while the underside still held that rich pine green that John Deere tractors were known for. Tom was planning to plow forty acres of sod to prepare it for planting next fall.

He climbed up on the leather seat, turned the key and brought it to life. “RRuupp—up-up-up-up” it hummed and rasped as he pulled throttle out and eased the machine out of its hovel. He smiled again. There was nothing like the freedom of driving his own tractor on his own land on his own time. The tractor had power that didn’t talk back, just did what you told it to do.

Beyond the barn was a dirt and gravel road, a well-worn set of tracks, with a green strip of weeds and grass down the center. It led out to several fields, including the one near the woods and swamp where he was heading. Tom bounced along on the dirt like a schoolboy with a new bike…smiling again.

He reached the edge of the forty just before 6:30, parking the tractor near a plow he was going to use to rip up the land. The sun was already well above the horizon, gleaming down on the land, but shadows blended with the ground cover in the woods, making a dreamy landscape that quivered and moved so erratically that it was hard for Tom to focus on anything. He turned his head back to the plow.

Perspiration started to bead on Tom’s forehead. “It’s going to be hot today, hotter than I planned on.” Tom peeled his shirt off, getting ready to attach the plow. From the corner of his vision, he noticed a sharp stick pointing out of the ground.

He walked over to it and looked around, then scratched the dirt around it with his knife. The stick was round, like the handle of a tool, smooth to the touch, but broken off at the end, with wood splinters sticking out of the end like spines on a thistle. He pulled at it until the ground loosened around it. Then he tugged at it some more until it became free. It was a shovel, a very old shovel that had been in the ground for a long time.

Tom looked around some more, carrying the shovel with him. The sun in the woods bounced gently across the ground, still making it hard for him to focus, but he could distinctly see long mounds of dirt, covered by thick sod, maybe eight or nine of them in a row. There were another five shorter mounds of dirt. It hit him.

“This is a cemetery.”

With the shovel in hand, he walked into the woods, stepping lightly, with a sense he was intruding on someone’s territory. Head stones were still visible at three of the graves.

“Madeline Morrison,” he read across the top of one stone. “Born 1765, Died 1834 of…”

As he bent down to brush the dirt away from the rest of the inscription, he leaned hard on the shovel and a splinter went deep into his hand. He tried to pull it out, but it was stubborn. He felt dizzy and sat down next to the mound.

At first the pain was like burning fire in his arm. Then it started to ache and throb until Tom thought his arm would explode. When he stood up to walk, he fell down and pulled himself over to rest against a small tree, grimacing in agony.

“We’re proud of you,” he heard a rich feminine voice say. A tall woman with a long blue muslin dress stood over him. She wore a straw hat that was stained with perspiration, and a red bandana around her neck. The features on her face were hard to see, because she was standing directly in the sun.

Tom tried hard to shake the delusion. He was sure the pain was causing this trauma and he winced his eyes, certain that the person would go away.

“We’ve seen your love for this place – you’re a part of it now, part of the land. By the way, plant the corn a little earlier in the spring; it’ll get taller and the cobs will be sweeter during August.”

Tom continued to shake his head and wince his eyes. His arm still pulsated with the pain, then abruptly it stopped. He pulled the sliver out and looked carefully at his finger.

“There must be some kind of hallucinogenic fungus or something in this soil. That’s the strangest thing that ever happened to me.”

He stood up, feeling a bit dizzy. Then he walked slowly toward the tractor, still carrying the shovel. Pausing to catch his breath, he pressed the shovel into the earth again near a different stone, with the name “John Heskins” on it.

“I see you're raising cabbage. I could never get a cabbage to grow out here. Puhtaytahs, well, that’s a diffurnt story, puhtaytahs grow better here ‘an any other place I ever growed ‘em. Good soil fur puhtaytahs. Good land.”

Tom shook his head again, still thinking he was hallucinating. Yet he remembered clearly how the man looked: heavy denim jacket with manure stains, long bony hands burned cherry brown by the sun, a look of knowledge beyond book learning, a look that was in touch with the land. And there were those dark eyes, almost

black, but not evil, penetrating, not menacing, like the deep beauty of a clear winter night with no moon.

“Maybe I’m not seeing things,” he said, worried about how he was going to explain this to Bill.

He pulled the shovel out and walked a few steps, then intentionally pressed it into the ground at a stone marked: “Deborah Masterson, born 1835, d. 1846.”

She looked straight at him. With peach and crimson cheeks, green eyes, curly brown hair, she was a child of unspeakable loveliness. In her hand was a blue and white faded teddy bear. She wore a white dress and a lacy white hat, probably for her communion day. In a soft, almost dreamy tone she whispered, “I loved the sunrises and the sunsets over the land. And I loved the smell of the soil when my father turned it over with a plow. Are you going to plow today?”

“Well, I was planning on it. I…” Tom heard himself talking to the apparition. He quivered.

“If you plow to the end of that field,” she said, pointing off to the west with a tiny finger, “you’ll find my favorite spot, the place where the river bends. It has a big weeping willow tree hanging over the water. And there are fish there. My brother Tommy caught lots of them when we lived here.”

In all of Tom’s life, he had never believed in ghosts or anything supernatural. He had been a logical, hard-hitting, straight-shooting guy, and anything that looked “hokey” was just not for him. This was too much. “Maybe it’s the heat, maybe I’m tired,” he said.

She continued to smile and talk to him. “Before I left my family, Tommy and me built a raft to use in the summer. We floated on it and swam almost every day.”

Baydesmith pulled the shovel out of the ground. Pressing his fingers against his brow, he tried to shake the apparition. Something in him ached. It was a dull, hard pain deep in his chest, as though someone had hit him.

“I gotta get back to the house. This heat’s killing me.”

He powered up the John Deere and rolled it quickly back to the house. Bill was standing at the door when Tom arrived.

“You o.k., Dad? You look pale. Maybe you have heatstroke.”

“Yeah, I’m feeling a bit sick.”

“Did you fall down or something?”

“Nah, I just…Get me a glass of cold water. I need to sit down.”

Bill got Tom a glass of water. He sat across from him at the kitchen table.

“Hey Dad, I was thinkin’ we might do something different today.”

“Like what? We have work to do.”

“Yeah, I know, but I was walking through the back woods the other day and I found an excellent spot for swimming. I was thinkin’ we could build a raft and lay around out there. Maybe you could cool off.”

Tom cut him off, “I really want to get some of that work done…” then he stopped and thought. “Where did you want to build that raft?”

“There’s a place where the river bends, you know where…by the big oaks at the end of the long field. It’s great. The water is deep enough to really swim.”

“You know, maybe that’s a good idea. Once I feel a bit better, we’ll go down there together. Why don’t you grab the hammers and a saw, maybe a few nails. I got a feeling the lumber will be nearby.” Tom Baydesmith knew he had been given a second chance, and every time he swam with Bill, he heard the water laugh, and he felt the land singing.