Fields Of Gold

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Authors: Marie Bostwick

BOOK: Fields Of Gold
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Fields of Gold
MARIE BOSTWICK
KENSINGTON BOOKS
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
To my husband, Brad, the finest man on the planet.
Prologue
T
his would be easier if I were writing about someone else. Then I could change it, fatten up the thin parts and leave out the dull ones, turning them like frayed collars and cuffs, making them over into something more romantic than they really were, but then the remembering would be neither so painful, nor so sweet. I suppose you can't have one without the other. A name seems as good a place to begin as any, maybe even better than most. I think we live many names in a lifetime. We take them on and off like new suits of clothes, donned or discarded according to the mood and moment.
Everyone calls me Eva. It's a name that makes sense in Dillon, plain and easy to pronounce, not too many syllables. My father always called me by my full name, Evangeline. He and Slim were the only ones who ever did. Papa named me, over Mama's objections, after Longfellow's Evangeline. When I was little he would hold me on his lap and recite from memory. I could feel the verses rumbling rich from his chest,
Fair was she to behold, that maiden of seventeen summers.
Black were her eyes as the berry that grows on the thorn by the wayside,
Black, yet how softly they gleamed beneath the brown shade of her tresses!
My eyes are green and my hair is auburn, nothing like the description of that poetic heroine, but Papa was never bothered much by details. He was given to taking the romantic view of life and always said exaggeration should never stand in the way of a good story. In Papa's stories it never did.
Mama thought Evangeline sounded pretentious. She wanted to call me Cora or Emma, something that wouldn't make my other differences so obvious, though there was never a prayer of that happening. People who are different draw a lot of attention in Dillon. Me more than most. After forty years, people still gawk when I walk through town. They can't help themselves. No disguise or name, no matter how bland, could camouflage me from the eyes of the curious as I thump and twist my way down Main Street.
I was born with a lame leg. My muscles are small and weak below the knee of my left leg, and my foot curls inward, looking like the gnarled root of the cottonwoods that grow near the river. I walk slowly with the help of a cane, bracing myself with one hand, contracting the muscles in my upper leg to drag my foot along the ground, and then swinging and dropping it forward for the next step—an uneven, rolling gait like a wagon with wheels of different sizes.
I never remember either of my parents talking to me about my leg. In Mama's case I think this was because she didn't want me to feel self-conscious, but Papa just didn't seem to notice. It never crossed his mind that I might not be as whole and capable as everyone else. He saw me from the inside out, full of possibilities, and assumed everyone else had the same view.
Until I started school I felt the same as Papa. I tried as hard as I could to fit in, which is to say too hard, but whenever I came into the schoolyard the girls would giggle and whisper behind their hands and I would feel ashamed, though I wasn't even sure what I was ashamed of.
In a sense, I came from a family of outcasts, yet we never left Dillon, even when it would have made a world of sense to go. When the storms came and the dust rolled, we fought with everything we had to stay on the land. Sometimes it seemed like the going price was ... everything.
As I said, Papa wasn't from Dillon. He was born in a small seaside village in County Tipperary, Ireland. He emigrated when he was fourteen, settled in Boston, and became a lobsterman. He always loved the sea, and until he met Mama he never had a thought of living or working anywhere else than on the waves; but one rainy afternoon he went to the public library and happened to reach for a copy of the same book that had caught the eye of a twenty-five-year-old spinster who was on her one and only trip out of Oklahoma. Their fingers met on the spine of a worn copy of
Walden,
and, just that quick, they were in love.
When Mama climbed off the train in Dillon four months behind schedule, she was Mrs. Seamus Glennon. The folks back home were positively scandalized. In Dillon, Oklahoma, even a bride or groom who'd married into a family from only as far away as Liberal, ten miles north over the Kansas border, would be considered an alien for the first two or three decades after their wedding. Mama had brought home an actual foreigner, complete with a brogue and a handshake that wasn't nearly strange enough for a stranger. If that wasn't bad enough, he was a Roman Catholic to boot! For all the people in Dillon knew, the man might have horns.
When I was eight, Darla Simpson said her mother had said exactly that about us. I wanted to slap her for saying it, but I knew Mama would be mad if I did. Mama believed that whatever happened in life, good or bad, was God's will and had to be borne with humility or submission, as the occasion warranted.
I, on the other hand, figured that God's will could constitute any number of choices and it was up to us to choose the best among them, but whether we chose well or poorly, God still stood beside us. Secretly, I liked to think that sometimes God made little mistakes, like my leg. I just couldn't believe God would make me lame intentionally.
Mama would have disapproved of my theology. “God will be merciful unto whom He will be merciful,” she would say. “Only He knows why he sends good fortune to some and bad to others. That's His business. Ours is to accept things as they come and bear them by His grace.” To tell the truth, Mama seemed more at ease when things weren't going too well. Too much comfort could only mean calamity was around the corner. Mama was a farmer's daughter that way.
Papa, on the other hand, was a man who farmed and did it well, but he wasn't a farmer at heart. Eventually the people in town, especially the men, came to respect him, but they always held him at arm's length. He was just too different. For one thing, Papa read. In Dillon the only things a real farmer would be caught dead reading was the Almanac, seed advertisements, and the local newspaper. Papa read
books
, practically ate them, with an Irish love for language and lore that bordered on passion. He could recite scores of lines of poetry, and did, at the drop of a hat.
There was no one in Dillon, no one in the world, like Papa. The salt and romance of the ocean always clung to him. He always sat high on the seat of the combine, proudly above billows of golden bowing wheat stalks, looking for all the world as though he were scanning the horizon for a good port, a fisherman lost on the plains.
Papa came to Dillon because he loved Mama. I suppose he could have insisted they sell the farm and move. I could have done the same, but something changed in us. I don't know if Papa's transformation came over time or all in a day, like it did for me, but somehow that alien land became home. There were too many memories tilled into those furrows to just up and leave.
Before Slim came, I couldn't have understood how that was possible. No matter what came after, I shall always be thankful to him for that. The day I met him was the day my eyes started to open, though it took a long time to sharpen my sight. Up until then I saw things, Dillon especially, the same way other people did: a small, dusty farm town in the middle of nowhere that never bred anyone that mattered and likely never would, the sort of place that only looks good in a rearview mirror. But that's just the view from the ground.
From the air, Dillon is enchanted. The river cuts through the fields, carving them like sharp, silver thread. The cheap tin roofs shimmer and wink like gemstones in the sun. The colors of the dark earth bleed slowly into the yellow wheat, and the breathing air, burnt white as ash by the heat of the sun, melts into brilliant blue sky and pearly clouds. When you're airborne, the scales fall from your eyes, and suddenly you can see the full spectrum of quiet colors, inky black-brown to blinding white. So perfect and seamless, you can't feel where one color leaves off and the next begins. From above, the wheat crops are dressed in a thousand subtle shades of gold, each field just different enough to set it off from the others, showing colors you can't see from the ground: yellow and saffron and lemon and sand and a hundred other shades there aren't even words for. The fields make a tidy checkerboard of gold to the horizon, so square that you know they were made by man, cut and planted where they don't belong by sheer force of will. You can feel the sweat and muscle that went into each acre. And though you are so removed from it all, you can't help but feel a whisper of respect and pity for those left below, people of iron will who fight and inevitably die to bring order and plenty out of a hard, unyielding land.
From the air we see with the eyes of angels. I've only seen it that way once, but I remember it perfectly. For the first time in my life I felt sorry for anyone who wasn't me. I was the only one in the world who wasn't chained to the ground, forced to crawl and scratch along the earth, the taste of dirt sour in my mouth, pining without any real hope for one full, clear breath of air. Even when we landed and I was earthbound again, the feeling stayed with me. It is with me still. Slim described it better than I ever could. He said, “I lose all consciousness with the past. I live only in the moment, in strange unmortal space, crowded with beauty, pierced with danger.” I guess that's why I stayed in Dillon, because that one memory we shared so long ago in my seventeenth summer is still stronger than all that came after. It changed everything.
Even when I'm on the ground, I see things as from above.

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