Fred's Last Night Home

Fred looked at the room where he was staying and thought to himself, "Home is just about the most important factor in whether life has anything redeeming in it.  If you don't like the place you call home, nothing else much matters."

Just thinking about it made his brain race with thoughts.  They weren't fair thoughts.  They came from years of expectations, years of stories handed down generation to generation, stories like "finish your plate, there are people starving".  Fred wasn't certain where they were really starving anymore.  He saw the world differently now, differently from when he was a child.  He understood something that his family, raised in cities, born from cities, never would quite get.  How Fred even knew that he was more a farmer than most farmers was something that could not be figured, but it felt true enough to him.  He was American.

Maybe the story started with the Cherokee legend, how they made their way out of Georgia and became "native" to Oklahoma.  Fred laughed an ironic laugh at that one.  To the travelers who made it out west along what became known as the trail of tears, Oklahoma natives might have been as closed a society as could be.  There was no promise that the natives would let anything happen, but what would happen when they were claiming something like, well, something like that about home ....

Fred felt like the farmer who continues to plow the field to raise food.  He doesn't really know anything else.  There isn't anybody there these days.  It's just a long stretch of land and sky.  Still, it takes money, and the money is going.  The tractor doesn't seem to reach the end of the line in the field, and the bills are coming due, and it's getting hard to stay awake until the sun goes down enough to head into the barn.  "A days' work is a days' work"  Fred had heard that too when he'd heard about the starving people someplace. 

The fact was that Fred was getting too old to care about any of it anymore.  Nellie, his last love, was gone.  She'd decided to move to Denver, where they found her dead one morning.  He'd cried long enough about that, into the evening, dark shadows hung around his eyes for days; there was nothing he could do.  He didn't know Nellie from Denver, he knew her from before she left.  It was just going to have to stay that way.  Still, she had made it feel more like home.

The closest Fred came to Nellie's Denver was in something written by Ken Haruf.  Fred had read.  It was the only place where nobody else could tell him what to think about what he was thinking, even while he was thinking about what the writer had written.

His brain wasn't enjoying the racing.  He'd rather be at peace.  He'd rather be home ....