Empty Barn, Dead Farm

Houses are incidents, barns four-square and real
with doors to swallow a wagonload of wheat,
with empty windows to let the pigeons in.

They used to speak of Elliot’s barn-foor
as clean enough to eat your dinner off it.
He was a hard man, careful of his stock,
proud of his farm.

The last week in July they threshed his wheat
behind the barn. Upstairs in the pink bedroom
in the four-post bed, under the owered and quilted
coverlet, old Elliot lay dying.
—Moyve
the bed closer to the window. Prop
my head with pillows. Raiseithipher. Go.
My back aches. I feel tired, dead tired.
I want to see the farm.

The square back of the barn hid most of it.

He heard the roar of straw In the separator,
when belts ran slack the chut-chut of the tractor,
saw nothing, only the Jutting end of the stacker
and straw that fell in a river from its tip—
straw falling as water falls,
chaff in a yellow mist.

His eyes were colored like new straw, and damp
he wiped them with a corner of the sheet,
then saw his stubble fields beyond the barn,
farther the green of month-old buckwheat, farther
his woodlot ending in a misty line.

It touched the house, almost, and hid the fields
the time he drove here frst, in a new wagon
proud of his new wife, fifty years ago.

She dressed in printed cotton.
They owned a stumpy clearing
ten acres, pine, a cabin
empty and windowless, no barn.

He hitched the horses to a chestnut root
and took a double handful of black loam,
sifted it through his fingers slowly, fetched
his axe from under the wagon-seat and chopped
the tallest of the pines.

He was a hard man, and he made the farm,
working into the dusk to clear his fields
sparing nobody, careful of his horses,
slowly buying more land as prices rose.
Next spring he’d plow the valley fields for corn
and hills for clover to keep the soil from washing.

Hogs to fatten. Corn would be going higher.
He suddenly understood that he should do
nothing of the sort, that corn and clover
would grow by natural laws and harvest come
without his supervising.

—Bob will have it all.
Bob is fighty.
He l tear up everything to suit himselí.
Hell ñnish nothing.
Bob is lazy.
The farm will go to sticks.

He saw the felds and felt that he was wrong.

—Bob 1s like the other Eilliots.
He wIll settle down.
The farm 1s stronger than all the Elliots.
The farm will keep on growing and me dead.

—Tell him to buy a tedder. “The barn needs shingled.

He heard the dinner-bell.
The tractor grumbled a moment.
The belt creaked and was still.

And suddenly old Elliot was seized
with an immediate fury to destroy
all, to starve the cattle in their stalls,
to fire the woodlot, mow the buckwheat green,

plant corn along the hillsides, so the storms
would wash away the soil, and so this farm
which he created with his living hands
by two dead hands might be destroyed. He prayed

—Christ, Q merciful Christ, to give me strength.
There’s matches on the mantelpiece, the straw
is dry as powder.

He strained upward, clenched his chalky hands
as if they held the farm. Hlis face went white.
His head fell slowly back upon the pillow
which Annle had embroidered with an E
in purple cotton, and she brought it out
only for speclal occasions. People said
she was a grand good housewife, Simon was
a hard man, wealthy but a poor provider,
rough and blaspheming, only loved his land.
Pity the wicked. Empty barn, dead farm.
The way he was taken off it was a Judgment.