Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was a soldier once, born south of the Ohio River in a border state that declared itself neither North, nor South in that most uncivil of civil wars. I grew up on a tobacco farm where I learned the skills necessary for living and farming such as, how to plant, cut and strip tobacco, drive a tractor, hunt frogs, snap beans, bale hay, call cattle, play baseball with ghost runners, bounce a basketball on a dirt court and find with ease the warmest spot next to a drum stove in winter. Now I write.
Orlan Feal
Orlan Feal walked his Last Trip to Town.
Town stood as one store and a couple of houses tied up in a lonely little package along a road that once was The Road. Back when more people lived along it and took it daily from farm to farm to town to visit and church on Sundays.
The sun heated up his Army boots that They sent back when his Brother was killed off in That War. Stuffed in one of the boots was a piece of paper with some lines scribbled on it. Brother liked words and went to real school before the War. Only the first lines were readable. The rest were all smeared from something wet.
as easy as
rain on ruin
That was all you could read. As easy as rain on ruin. Nobody knew what that meant. Orlan remembered those words and said them every time he put those boots on. He had worn nothing else on his feet ever since he grew into them.
Orlan Feal walked up the steps of the store.
Orlan went up to the counter and picked up his baloney sandwich, fizzy drink and bag of chips that Wilma had laid out for him. He always walked to town for lunch.
Father used to call baloney “poor peoples’ round steak”. Father laughed at that joke like it was the greatest joke ever told. Orlan always laughed along and Mother did too. They never knew when he would check to make sure that they were with him on the joke.
When he and Brother were kids, working for local farmers, they called lunch, dinner. Everyone left the fields around noon to eat. Some even ate outside their houses around big tables set beneath the trees.
But all of that came to an end. One by one Orlan watched as the farms he had worked on became part of bigger farms, that became part of bigger and bigger farms, until they stopped being farms and became what some of the Last Farmers called limited liabilities.
Orlan Feal had liked dinner. He tolerated lunch.
Orlan sat on an ancient stool and watched the card game going on over in the corner. A group of Retired Farmers sat playing cards around a wobbly formica table tucked in next to an ancient iron stove. They sipped on fizzy drinks and took the occasional spit in cups carelessly placed on the floor.
Orlan Feal watched until he finished his lunch.
Orlan slid off his stool and pointed out to Bob that he had the winning hand. Orlan put his napkin and empty can in the trash. He thanked Wilma for the lunch. As always, Orlan left her a ten dollar bill to keep his tab up to date.
Bob looked at his cards. Damn, if that boy wasn’t right. He did have the winning hand! Bob threw down his cards and waved his thanks to Orlan Feal’s back.
Bob had been playing cards in the Retired Farmers Card Union since it was just the Farmers Card Union, way before they’d attached the Retired to it. The Farmers was the important part, that’s what they were. Being retired or not, once a Farmer, always a Farmer! That, by the way, was their unofficial motto, or at least in Bob’s mind it was, since he had come up with it.
They started out meeting in the gym of the old Grade School on Friday Nights. Over time the monthly meetings began to look small and ragged in the once too tiny gym. So they’d moved into the Odd Fellows fancy meeting hall, after that the Bank meeting room, until it closed, and then a room at the Library before their final arrival at Wilma’s.
Bob had walked in to Wilma’s one day and saw the old formica table with mismatched chairs nuzzled up next to the big old iron stove. He introduced himself to Wilma and made his pitch. The Retired Farmers Card Union (Once a Farmer, Always a Farmer) were looking for a new place to play. The Library decided that one too many spit cups had spilled one too many times. The table and chairs in the store were just the right thing in the right place for the right time. The Union would play here and become a semi-constant source of purchases: snacks, fizzy drinks and a sandwich or two. Also, the store would acquire what all country stores needed, some local color.
Against her better judgement Wilma agreed, but as Bob had predicted, the Union and its card game had become a fixture that kept the snacks from going out of date, drew a looker or two and provided entertainment to those travelers looking for an “authentic” experience to take back home and tell the folks about.
Bob remembered when Orlan and his Brother were kids. Bob had watched those two boys cut their way through a field of tobacco like it wasn’t nothing. They could work all day and be ready to work all night. Bob always said those boys had dirt flowing through their veins, too bad about the Brother.
Wilma looked up.
She swept the ten dollar bill into a cigar box under the counter marked, “Orlan’s Tab” and went back to reading her book.
Gray Shadows: The Shadows Collide, was the tenth book in a long running series about Tonal Gray and his sometimes sidekick, Ruthless Tao. They traveled through space and time fighting The Shadows. The Shadows had lived on the Earth long before humans stood up and acted like they owned the place. The Shadows inhabited humans and fed off their emotions. Not exactly great literature, but it passed the time.
Wilma thought about Orlan.
Orlan started coming for lunch a couple of months after his Mother shot herself. That’s when Wilma made his first baloney sandwich. This soon became their daily ritual. Sometimes he spoke, others he didn’t.
Orlan was a good Boy.
She thought about that for a minute. Orlan was in his mid thirties, not much of a boy anymore. With his Mother dead and his Father gone years before, Orlan really didn’t have anyone except the people in the store. Wilma had once wanted to be a Mother, but things never worked out. Her husband had been indifferent at best. Then one day she woke up and he was gone, heart attack, end of discussion.
Wilma worried about Orlan, and with what Motherhood she had left, said a silent prayer as she went back to her book and the door slammed behind him.
Orlan Feal stopped and looked left and right.
The last step off the front door of the store almost stepped right out on to the road. A leftover from the old days when people pulled up their buggy or horse and left them right on the road. The only buggy’s seen here these days were driven by The People that lived out along the old logging road.
Their big broad houses, barns and animals had come to settle here a few years ago. Some thought they were stupid or slow, some thought they were fools, Orlan thought that they had made a decision on how to live and stuck to it. Orlan respected that. They lived as they believed and there was no shame in that at all.
Orlan Feal put his head down and started walking Home.
Home. It held all the meaning and feeling of the word that any place could acquire once people lived and died there. Home was always there to take him in and care for him. Home ran through his veins and was known to him as a living, breathing, place of Peace.
Orlan Feal walked.
He put his head back down and saw that his bootlace had come loose. He stopped, bent down beside the tall fescue that grew on the side of the road and began to tie his bootlace.
They used to hire people to mow the roads. Yellow tractors with a state seal and long sickle mowers hanging off the back cutting out to the fences. One day, the tractors, like the fences were gone and the men simply pitched aside.
Orlan Feal tied his bootlace.
Orlan felt the Wind as it took a liking to the tall fescue and gently ran its hand over the long drooping seed heads. He felt his hair being tugged at by the Wind as it stirred up a small dust devil at the edge of the road and lightly pulled him into the dancing grass.
Shelton Lee rolled through town and cleared the last speed sign.
Shelton double clutched, dropped his left hand down to pull up the high range handle while his right hand slammed the transmission into fourth gear. He just about had his old rock truck rockin’ and a rollin’ when he dropped the phone he had been holding in his mouth.
Baring his teeth in a crooked grimace he leaned over to pick up the damn thing from the damn truck cab floor. He hated this road. Hated it. Hated driving it every day, the same damn loop every damn day from nowhere to nowhere.
Shelton Lee’s hand came up empty.
Shelton shook his head. Damn phone. Damn road. Nothing on this damn road but lots of damn road and old forgotten damn things thrown up into the damn weedy folds of the damn ditches on the sides of the damn road.
Shelton nearly bent double as he made one more long reach down and then up under the dashboard. He just wanted to grab the damn phone and get back to his damn business. His fingers fumble stumbled around the slick aluminum body of the phone until he finally wrapped it up tight in his sweating hand.
Shelton Lee unfolded upwards.
Shelton moved his head up high enough to give him a crooked look out over the hood of the truck. He heard the long grass hissing against the door and he felt the sudden dull thud that nearly brought the whole damn truck to a halt, before it jerked forward and swerved back up onto the road. Damn!
Orlan Feal looked up.
Orlan felt the cool shadow and tasted the hot air thrown out by the speeding truck as it erratically rolled past him. He watched as it careened across the road and took a sudden almost halting hop over what looked like a swollen deer carcass. He saw it pull itself out of the opposite ditch and back on the road, driving off without any care or willingness by the driver to stop or look back to see what he had hit.
Orlan Feal walked.
Orlan took the Last Weedy Lane towards Home. He stopped, looked down and was happy to finally see Brother’s boots at rest in the late afternoon grass of the yard.
Orlan Feal waited.
Orlan closed his eyes, dropped to his knees and spread his fingers out and down into the grass and dirt. He rummaged through the encrusted layers of years, letting each one tumble aside as he searched for what the hour and the place called for.
There! Just under his thumb he felt an old, old acorn.
Orlan waited for the acorn to guide him. He reached one hand deep down low and raised the other up on high, lodging himself firmly between Earth and Sky.
Orlan pulled one to the other, sending his very essence of self downward to settle deep and upwards to wave among the wayward winds. His back bowed, his shoulders spread out, up and around him as his feet settled deep. He felt his toes anchor against the bones of the Earth itself.
The Universe paused for the smallest of moments and in an act of willful contemplation accepted the fact that the yard now fell under the bountiful shade of an old oak tree gently swaying in the evening breeze.
Orlan Feal was finally Home.
