The man in the barn

"Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life." — Ecclesiastes 9:9

I have been thinking about Earl's mornings.

He was up before me in every season, which is saying something because I have never been a late riser. But Earl was up before the coffee and before the light and I would hear the screen door and know he was going to the barn. He went to the barn the way I go to the kitchen table. It was where the day started. The cattle needed what they needed and they needed it early and Earl gave it to them without ceremony because that is what he did. He fed them and he checked them and he stood in the barn in the dark with his coffee and looked at nothing in particular and then the light came and the day began.

He smelled like the barn. Not in a bad way but in the way that a man smells like the work he does. Hay and diesel and the particular smell of cattle that is not exactly unpleasant but is unmistakable. He carried it into the house and I could tell what kind of morning it had been by where the smell was strongest. A hay morning was different from a calving morning was different from a fence morning.

He worked the farm and he worked the feed-and-seed and between them he was gone from the house more hours than he was in it for thirty years. He came home tired and he sat in his chair and he did not talk about the day because the day was not the kind of thing he talked about. He talked about the weather and the cattle and the price of hay and whether the creek was too low, which are all the same thing if you are a farmer, which is to say they are all the same worry wearing different clothes.

I do not go to the barn anymore. I went for a while, the first year, because I thought if I stood where he stood I would feel what I was missing in a place where the missing made sense. I do not know if it helped. The barn is the barn. Earl's truck is in there, where he left it, with the keys still in it, and I have not moved it and I have not sold it and Dan has offered and I have said not yet and I do not know when not-yet becomes something else but it has not happened.

It is Monday morning and the heat is already in the house and I can hear the cattle on the neighbor's place across the road and they sound the way cattle sound, which is patient and unhurried and the same sound Earl heard every morning for all those years.

Lord, I can still hear it.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.