The Kingdom Land (3 page)

The fervor of her voice grew until
Erik's ears throbbed with the sting of her words.
That poor boy. I don't know how he can even go
on! How can he handle it?
Her voice feigned
sympathy, but her eagerness to share her gossip couldn't be
disguised. Erik's ears began to burn. He turned his head away,
trying to block the words from his mind, but it seemed as if the
harder he tried to not hear, the sharper his hearing
became.

His mom abandoned that boy and his dad. She had
moved to Fairfield because her dad got a job transfer from Denver
with the railroad. She hated Fairfield and everything about it. It
wasn't long before she started to get into trouble and everyone
knew… well, they knew she really wasn't a lady, but a real fluzie.
She was doing whatever she needed to do to get a husband and get
out of Fairfield, and she did it with every young boy in town.
Finally she found a naïve farm boy who spent so much time on the
farm he hadn't heard about the other guys. She got her hands on
Jimmie Cooper, that boy's father, and wouldn't let go. The word is
she told Jimmie she was pregnant, but she wasn't because she didn't
have that boy for a time. She married Jimmie because he was strong
and funny and she thought he would take her away from
Fairfield.

Little did she realize the place he was taking her
to was a farmhouse twenty-two miles north, even more in the middle
of nowhere! She could look out the kitchen window and see the hills
of Canada, it was so close to the border, but there was little else
to see. It was two miles from the closest neighbor, and the
neighbors, the Jorgensens, were strange enough to laugh at, but no
respectable person would associate with them. Three years after
that she left them without a word or even a note.

Erik fought the urge to jump up and yell at this
busy-body with nothing better to do. She was wrong. His Mom wasn't
like that and his dad was no dummy. There was a note to prove it.
But his voice didn't work and his body was frozen no matter how
hard he tried to move. He had to move. He had to scream at those
ladies and call them fools. But the harder he tried the more his
limbs froze to his side. His only refuge was to turn his head away
from the ladies so he wouldn't see their faces. But the face he saw
was his Aunt's. She had come to pick him up and she had a grin on
her face. The two ladies saw her too and quickly left. Erik became
sick.

He awoke in a paralysis, his mouth an open grimace of
mute screaming. He saw the walls of the bunkhouse. His nicely
starched dress shirt was now soaked in sweat and his arms hurt with
exhaustion. He cursed himself for allowing himself to nap since the
nightmare was sure to follow. He got out of bed and put only his
head in the shower, drenching the dream away. He used the still wet
bath towel he had just used to wipe himself down again. Then he
left the bunkhouse and walked until he was calmer. The nightmare
was so common it didn't have the depth of horror it once had. He
returned to the bunkhouse and the bed.

Erik forced himself to dream. Dreams were the only
thing that made him feel real and wanted and they took away the
pictures of the nightmare. He dreamt of a woman, different in every
way than the bleak land of his life. He dreamt of Laura. Laura was
the name of the girl he was going to see that evening. Laura was
not just another dream, but a person with features he could see and
smells he could remember, and although he hadn't admitted it to his
aunt, he had planned all week to visit her after his work was
done.

Erik thought of the few times he had seen Laura, a
waitress at the Mint Bar in Sweet Grass. He didn't particularly
like Sweet Grass. It was a border town with the Customs stop its
only reason for existence. It was only eleven miles east of the
Cooper's farm, but in a direction Erik seldom took. In Sweet Grass,
Erik was still a stranger.

The town was so small Erik didn't know why they gave
it a name except to find it on a map. There was nothing in the town
that would remind anyone of sweet grass. It had a few houses for
those who worked for the Customs Service and a rodeo grounds used
once a year. There were three grain elevators, a Farmer's Union
Co-op to get some gas, a church that straddled the US-Canadian
border, and the Mint Bar. It wasn't a place you would go for
excitement, but rather than Fairfield, Erik would go there to see
Laura. He would go there that evening.

Erik remembered seeing her for the first time. He
wanted to get away from the farm, but he didn't want to face
another night by himself in Fairfield. He went east instead and
found himself in the Mint and there she was. She was beautiful,
like someone who would be in a big city. She carried herself like
someone who hadn't been worn down by farm life, and her clothes,
although simple, were different than Fairfield's clothes. Later,
alone in the bunkhouse, he reasoned this was more than a chance
meeting. It was meant to be. He had found out she worked every
Saturday night and he had designed trips whenever he could manage
just to be close to her.

Laura was different from the girls in Fairfield. Even
the way she walked spoke of grace and class. The girls in Fairfield
were the ones you settled for and married and had kids with. They
were not girls you dreamt about.

Laura was tall with long, dark brown hair that curled
at the ends. Erik liked her a lot. He spent hours on the tractor
and bunkhouse bed having conversations with Laura as if she were
really there. Those conversations heightened his fondness for her.
It was fondness that kept her in his thoughts on the tractor and
him quiet in her presence. He almost feared her the more he thought
of her. The fear was a combination of the fear of rejection and the
fear that she might destroy his image of her. It was a chance he
didn't want to take. He needed her in his dreams.

Erik finished his pop and threw it
on the concrete floor to join the collection of other empty
bottles.
It's time to get on with
Saturday,
but as he looked at his watch, it
was still too early; he would draw too much attention in the bar.
The sound of the tractor still rang in his ears and he needed the
fresh air to rid himself of the remnants of the nightmare. He went
out to his favorite spot.

It was 9:00 p.m. but the sun had not yet set in this
northern open prairie land. Behind the house and the buildings and
the last barn on the farm there was a slight bluff that gave way to
a large coulee. The coulee stayed green longer than any place else
on the farm. Its grass had never been broken by a plow and its
ravine held the spring runoff in reserves. Next to the bluff, an
oak tree had grown somehow, very much out of place. Erik sat at the
base of the tree and watched the picture unfolding before him.

The heat had begun to give way to the cool of the
evening, and twilight was advancing. The sunset started with a
slight tint of pink and grew as a spill until it totally engulfed
the whole land with scarlet. A stray cloud caught fire on its
border, and then burst into flames. The alkali reservoir to the
farm's east that before was stale and dead suddenly became a pool
of gold, and the foxtail beside it, torches of tar. The willow
bushes near the coulee seemed to be touched by a spell to become a
king's silver arrows.

For those few minutes the land was silent and even
the grasshoppers settled into its spell. Erik no longer saw the
dryness of the land, but a painting of some lost kingdom. This was
a king's land now. The stripes of wheat were roads to the royal
palace. The rough field road was a stream rushing over pebbles. The
coulee was a valley where the fruit was held ripe to the vine. The
land had become the sky, and held the majesty of the heavens
themselves.

There was nothing hard in the land of those moments.
It was a land Erik would have chosen to be part of. The image
imprinted itself into Erik's mind. This was the real land. This was
the land as God intended it. Not the dry, the barren, the dead.
Erik felt an answering glimmer within him, as though something just
as majestic lay within him, waiting to be revealed; God's purpose
for him.

The sunset made the land into a dream world, but it
wasn't a dream Erik had imagined in the bunkhouse. This was not a
fantasy of a distant time or love. This scene was not only created
by the sun touching the horizon; in Erik's eyes he could see that
the Creator had created this scene.

He didn't have to question whether this was the land
or only a mirage. He knew that this was the real land, and not the
land of the drought. This was the way God meant it to be. As he
thought, he even allowed the words, “God's land,” to creep over his
tongue, and he smiled to himself.

At this time there was no denying it. He knew God
abided here. It was not an Aunt Mary's prayer or Aaron Hanson's
conversation. He knew, maybe best of all after seeing the
dismalness of the land, that there was the reality of the Creator.
The sunset made the land into His kingdom, and for that moment He
seemed very close.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

T
he road to
Sweet Grass curved gently to the right and then to the left for no
obvious reason. There were no hills or gullies to make the road
builders divert their course. It looked as if they had done it to
break up the boredom of the country and a road that didn't bend for
unnumbered miles.

Erik had driven this road so many times that the
curves didn't even break into his consciousness. He had finished
cleaning up, and had put on some clothes that were good enough for
a trip to town. On most days he would drive this road to get spare
parts or take the tractor to the other section of the Cooper's
farm. Tonight was different. Tonight he was going to see Laura and
hear her voice. It was time to leave everything else behind.

Even if Sweet Grass wasn't big enough to be called a
town, he felt a warmth of excitement as he saw those few lights
that marked a town. Any lights meant the farm had been left
behind.

As Erik pulled into town he made sure he parked the
old pickup on the far side of the Mint Bar where no one would see
it. He was ashamed of the old pickup. It was a stupid gesture.
Everyone drove old pickups and, besides, they didn't care what a
person drove. But still he didn't want to be viewed as just another
local, even though it was quite obvious he was. Everyone in Sweet
Grass was either a local or asking directions how to get somewhere
else.

As he walked into the Mint he picked his table
carefully. He chose a table close enough to another that he
wouldn't look conspicuous, but far enough way that he wouldn't have
to join in with the talk. Also, he wanted a table where he could
freely see Laura make her rounds from the tables to the bar.

A “Lucky” sign revolved over the solid oak bar. A
bear frolicked over a waterfall on a clock that spelled out
“Hamm's” and the room was very dark. It was dark enough that Erik
had to feel his way to the table before his eyes could adjust to
the change. He strained to make out more details and the people
that he had joined. Though he still couldn't see much, he could
tell from the sounds that the men at the nearby table had already
begun to drink heavily. They had quit the farm early that day and
immediately come to their refuge, the Mint.

“
What can I help you
with?”

His eyes hadn't adjusted to the darkness, but he knew
that voice. It was Laura. He hesitated for a second so she bowed
closer to speak over the sound of the loud neighbors.

“
What can I bring you?” she
repeated.

Erik's eyes quickly focused on her. As Laura leaned
over to take his order, he picked up a scent of perfume or lotion
that perked his senses. Nothing like this was found on the Cooper's
farm except in his dreams in the bunkhouse. Now she was there and
the reality almost kept Erik from answering even after the question
had been repeated. “Just a long neck Lucky will be fine.”

When she left, his eyes followed her. He tried to
time it so he could glance for a second without obviously staring,
his mind working quickly to absorb every frame of that picture and
to capture her lingering scent to his memory.

He was ready when she returned with his beer. He had
laid a twenty on the table so she could take what she needed and
leave the change.

“
Here you go, let me know when you
need another.” Her voice was inviting to Erik's ears as she left
the change.

She smiled at him. He hoped she was smiling at him
and not just being a barmaid hoping for a tip. In any case, it was
appreciated and he stored it into memory. Erik had visited the Mint
several times and he wondered if Laura recognized him from his past
trips.

Erik wanted to start a conversation, to keep her
there at the table and beside him for a precious few minutes, but
he didn't know what to say. Laura solved the dilemma.

“
Are you here by yourself
tonight?”

“
Yeah, it's been a long week and I
just wanted to relax. I really can't stay long, but its Saturday
and I needed to go someplace.” Erik thought that was a stupid thing
to say since it made him sound desperate, so he quickly added, “I'm
going fishing tomorrow with a couple buddies so I need to get to
bed early.” That sounded better, even if it was a lie.

“
Good luck. Next time you come in,
you can tell me some fish stories.”

Erik had run out of things to say so he simply nodded
as she worked her way to the next table. He followed her with his
eyes as long as he could.