Going Home

by Christopher Volk

The grain turned to honey as the sun churned its yellowed hair.  Low in the sky, it burned the land brown, changing the earth to chaff, dust tossed.

He walked down the narrow gravel road leading up to the house.  Time had shortened his stride.  Age showed beneath his fingernails.  Like the rings in an old tree.

Faded overalls and a straw hat were his only companions as the sun sank deeper.  Gravel crunching under his boots, he watched as a breeze rolled across the swaying grain.  Ripples in a lake.  The sun nearly low enough to ride as a great glowing ship, set sail for distant shores.

The house was a small one.  Only one story, and yet with so many empty rooms, dusty, white paint peeling along the window frames, exposing dark red wood, it lay in the midst of ever-stretching fields like a chunk of broken chalk.  It had a little porch, pressed against the door, a short railing hemming in barely enough space for a chair.  Still, it was his home.  And had been for sixty years.  A family home.  Passed down from father to son to father to son to father.

He came up the front steps and to the door.  He took the doorknob in his hand, already cool despite the bristling day, and slowly clicked it open.  It was always left unlocked.  The house was planted along the side of a narrow road that kissed both horizons, shimmering away in either direction into nothingness and melting grain.

And, as the years sifted by, there was nothing inside his home that he considered particularly worth protecting.

As he entered, he looked into the kitchen, hopeful, but turned slowly away, heading to the dining room.  He passed an old organ, carved smoothly like chocolate out of cherry wood, with keys uncovered and beaming-white in the faltering light.  Instead of skimming them with his fingertips, he simply passed with his fingers a couple inches above the keys and shut his eyes for a moment.  Light felt its way into the house from a few wide windows, since the lamps remained unlit, and caught dust stirred into the air by his passing fingers.  It swam, coasting from the surface of the keys.

The dining room was small, like the rest of the house, but it seemed wide, and as empty as a vacuum, as he eased himself into a chair at the bare dinner table.  There was too much space.  Pictures hung, lonely, on the walls.  The only furniture being the table and chair.  He recalled when the table had been much longer, broader, challenging the walls to cave out.  As the seasons passed, grain yearly lit and snuffed like a row of advent candles, the table grew smaller and smaller.  Chairs surrendered to dust in the barn.  He wondered in how many cases grief could be measured in square feet.  Two was his answer.

He understood that.

As he sat quietly, breathing in deeply the rich musk of worn hardwood floor and the fresh earth rubbed into his overalls, the sun pierced the horizon and spilled itself across the fields.  Gold to crimson.  The table’s polished surface painted a deep, warm red.  As each minute passed, the cherry-light grew deeper and deeper.  And he knew that he had to get moving—there were things which still needed to be done before the light failed entirely.

He rose, sighing, creaking, from the table and pushed the chair in after himself.  He walked through the halls of the house one last time, stepping into each of the rooms, standing for a moment, and then checking to ensure the lights were out, shutting each door carefully, and locking it.  He went through his house in this fashion.  Before he came to the front door, he paused at a row of four photographs hung on the wall.  Small portraits that could fit in the palm of a hand.  Each one, he slid from its hook, smiled at for a moment, straining his old eyes in the fading light, and then slipped into his deep overalls’ pocket, patting the pocket each time to ensure that they were protected.

By this time, the house was doused in the blood-light of the setting sun and he could feel it warm on the back of his neck as he approached the front door, filling in from the West windows.  He let the door drift closed after him, its own weight carrying it, and then turned a small greying key in its lock.  A bolt shifting into place.

He could still distinctly remember when, many decades in the past, before he stopped attending the town church twenty miles West, he would lock up the house and herd his wife and three kids to his small red pickup, just as the sun began to climb the horizon, shoes slick with fresh dew by the time they had entered the church’s doors.  He would sit with his family in the third pew back from the front.  He would wear his one suit.  The suit that now hung wrinkled in a wardrobe.  He hated that suit.  What it later entailed.

He began again on the gravel driveway.  A large red barn towered in the opposite field across the road.

He had once enjoyed spending his Sunday within the doors of a church.  The cross led down the aisle.  The rigid pews.  The hymnals that smelled of musty October leaves.  He was too old now.

Bones sore and joints tattered, he couldn’t kneel down no more.  Head bowed, palms held upwards, as an elderly man sidled over to place a piece of bread, with shaking hand, upon his tongue.  He was too tired.

The world pooled in orange and crimson, he could still sense the setting sun resting on his neck.

He was too old.  His hands were too unsteady to guide the cup to his lips.  His voice too much like dried corn husks to match the hymnal’s spidery-ink etchings.

Pushing through waist deep grain, after crossing the road, pavement cooling, he stepped into a wide clearing of flattened dirt surrounding the barn.  He approached its side and hefted a huge door, puffing as it screeched on its rails.  The barn was a mess.  Boxes stacked haphazardly in every corner, junk hanging off hooks, and the main floor covered in bits and pieces of scrap metal, as if seven cars had been stripped and beaten down.  A small metal crate sat on its own off to the side.  He crossed the barn’s floor, crackling straw, and gripped the crate, staggering as he pulled it up.  He set it outside the barn, but, before shutting the barn’s doors, he walked to the center of the barn and gazed at the piles of boxes.  Each box stenciled with a fading phrase, detailing the contents.  It was in his wife’s handwriting.  A rusting kid’s tricycle hung from a hook in the wall.  Three Spelling Bee trophies pointed out like spearheads from an open box.  The trumpet almost half buried behind the boxes caught his eye and his gaze dwelled on it longest of all.  It was always easier to consider the bright kid than it was the man.  There was also an empty, cobwebbed water dish labeled with Bartley in black.

He needed rest.  He couldn’t dig through those boxes; he would emerge half-covered in dust and smelling of stale cardboard.

Closing the barn door was more difficult than opening it.  It got jammed and he had to wiggle it and then shove it even harder, as if he was trying to roll some enormous stone.  It eventually shifted and gasped closed.  He stooped, lifted the crate, and then rounded the barn, circling it to the other side.

The sun having nearly disappeared, the air cool, the light steadily growing dimmer, the moon stood out bright in a thin, blue sky that was pinpricked with a few stars sparking to life.

He set the crate at his feet on the opposite side of the barn, beside five red canisters of fuel, the barn blocking even more of the sun’s last rays.  The wheat in the fields grew heavy as shadows breathed deeper and darker.  He regarded the sky.

It was vast.

The wide, open field that extended in every direction was consumed by the largeness of the sky.  Feeling as if the barn or the grain or the house or the road or he could at any moment be sucked into the giant, deepening hole above his head, he strained his eyes to make out more stars.  One by one, they materialized.  Lending substance to the heavens.

Then, he walked to it.

It stood tall and slender and sliver and gleaming.  Born.

He placed his palm against its side.  The metal was warm.  Like the glazed crust of freshly baked bread that’s been pulled from the oven.

It was time.  He stood by the rocket.

And said a quiet Goodbye