HE’S OUT BACK
Depending on who you were listening to
it had several names. Pa, my grandfather, called it “The Shop.” Dad always
called it the “Old Machine Shed”. To my Mom it was “The Shed,” the one she grew
up with, the one that was always there. To Grandma, who knew best, it was
forever “Out Back.”
From when I was
little on it, was adventure. It was musty, with its dirt floor and silky
cobwebs dangling from the beams. Sunlight streamed through dormer windows and
glistened off particles of dust that wandered into its path.
The odor of
leather harnesses lingers. Rubbed with thick oil once a year, to keep them “soft
against the hide.” Still ready, they hang from wooden pegs, even though the two
greys that wore them had disappeared when I was very small. I hold fuzzy
pictures of them in my memory. Tall like pillars, their lips wet, their massive,
weighty bodies shifting side to side, impatient to be at their task. Pa talking
to them like they were family. To him, I’m now sure, they were.
Red rusted
machinery that looked like it had never
seen paint occupied most of the space. A great deal of it was Grandma’s dowry,
passed on to the young couple by her father and his brothers “to help the kids
get started” when Pa bought the land on contract.
I would sit on
the cast-iron seats while Pa explained, step by step, how the machines and the
mother and daughter horses who pulled them worked together. His voice softened
when he spoke of the “girls”.
On the outside,
there are still some scattered spots of the red it used to be. The rest is so weathered
paint would never stick to it anymore. When I ask him, Dad says, “It would be
horrible expensive to get it back into shape and the doors aren’t big enough
for the machines we use now. But she is sound and the roof holds it dry. Best
to just leave it be.”
I suppose
someday economics will dictate the dowry will have to fall to the torch and
leave the farm for good on the scrap dealer’s truck. The walls will weaken even
more in time and have to come down. I know Dad could never do it. That job will
probably be passed on to me after I finish my last year of Ag at the U and I
come home for good to the house on the corner where Pa and Grandma lived.
Today, I’m here
to say a last good-bye to Gram and I guess to stare at the shed and remember. Times
of long ago pass through my mind and I wonder if she is “Out Back”, finally
together again with Pa.
