Legacy by Steve Gerson, soda water

My grandpa, never met him, ran a feed store, so the family tells, out by Brownfield, Texas, east of Clovis, New Mexico, west of Tulia, Texas, high plains, windblown, dry as shed rattlesnake skin.  Nothing wanted to grow there, though the people, tough as fence posts, kept on planting.

 

I lived nearby, so one day I thought, why not drive down Farm Road 26, turn left at the third cow, go right past the windmill straining for water like a lover wanting someone’s touch, and see where grandpa raised my dad and his seven sibs. 

 

“Where we goin’, hon?” my wife Rachel asked.  “And why?” she added, sipping on a soda water.  “Ain’t nothin’ here, far as I can see.”

 

She was right about that, nothing ahead of us but a horizon, nothing behind us by a past.  Still, we hanker for something, always.  I guess that’s why they make TV commercials promising better this and better whatever.  I guess that’s why Micah 7:7 says, “But as for me, I watch in hope.”  You know, when the larder is empty and days are spent whittling wood, hope sounds pretty good.

 

So, we drove on.  And there it was.  The feed store still stood, though barely.  Hand hewn wood, once green as dreams, had grayed, a few boards shattered by storms and government pullbacks on subsidies. 

 

Farmers long gone drifted as chaff into dust.  Grandpa’s tack for men, gingham for women, bitter licorice for kids had sold at auction, a dime on every dollar, as worthless as shoes for amputees.

Windows, where grandpa’s late-night lamps had burned in doubt as he bent over bills unpaid, were black as eyeless sockets. 

 

The front doors were padlocked, but no need, since who would want to steal emptiness, like grasping at motes dying in dead corners.  A signboard above the front porch, where old photos showed our family’s name, was blank as a gravestone ready to be chiseled. 

 

And the fields were brown.  Cornstalks stood shorn, thresher-fed, ripped ragged as hope deferred, the wind moaning through them like a dirge in marrowless bones, a tune from Vince Gill’s “Go Rest High on that Mountain.”

 

This was my legacy, the land retaking what it owned, as I stood at a crossroad to nowhere, and the evening darkened into dusk.

About the author 

  

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life's dissonance. He has published in many journals plus his eight chapbooks: Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; The 13th Floor; What Is Isn’t; There Is a Season; Have Not; and Who am I Today. 

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