ALWAYS
OCTOBER
A NOVEL
C. E. EDMONSON
© 2015, C. E. Edmonson
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any way by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without the prior permission of the copyright holder, except as provided by U.S. copyright law.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-2520-7
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For Christa, Chelsea,
and Cheryl
CHAPTER 1
You look out over April Lake, at the hills and the forest, you might think you’ve stumbled into the Garden of Eden. But these days my life is mostly confined to this place—the April Lake Veterans Home—and the grounds by the lake, and not even the grounds, what with winter upon us. About once a month, the nurses and aides will load us up—including me and my wheelchair—into the facility’s minibus, and take us for a drive around the lake, to a show at the little community theater in town, or to a concert at the local church.
It’s funny in a way. You’d think any time away from this place would be my heart’s desire, but the hours tug at my heart instead. They speak to a world I lived in once upon a time, a world I’ll never go back to. I’m not complaining. Lord knows, I lived in the world longer than most. It’s just that I don’t need reminding.
* * *
I was born Lucas Henry Taylor on June 16, 1910, son of Samuel Edward Taylor and Winnie Lee Taylor, brother of Anne Amelia Taylor, whom we all called Annie.
My place of birth, and where I lived almost all of my life, was Bear County, Minnesota. In 1910, it was all farm country, plain and simple. We didn’t border the Minnesota or the Mississippi rivers. There were no flour mills, no lumber mills, just farms and more farms and a few businesses to serve them.
You’d see much the same thing today if you drove through Bear County on the interstate in the early summer. Gently rolling land marked by forested ridges, the occasional small lake, dairy cows lying beneath isolated trees in a meadow, fields of half-grown hay and wheat, vegetable gardens protected from deer and woodchucks by chicken wire fences set before isolated farmhouses. Always to the south, always in full sun. And when you arrived at your destination, if you were asked about the scenery you viewed along the way, you’d probably say, “It was all the same. Barns and meadows and fields.”
Farmers look at the world through different eyes. To them, every field is different—alfalfa, clover, timothy grass, wheat, the occasional orchard, apple or pear. Passing through, they note the quality of the crop, the health of the cows. There might even be a debate over the merits of Holsteins versus Jerseys, with a remark or two about the ability of Swiss cows to handle Minnesota’s harsh winters. From there the conversation might shift to the virtues of round barns, the combines parked next to them, or the tractors parked next to the combines.
But that’s in June, when the crops are in the ground but not yet high enough to cut. A month earlier, the farmers would see things differently still, measuring rainfall and drainage, examining pale-green shoots—only a few inches above the surface—with the eyes of psychics peering into the future.
See, to the farmers who live in Bear County, the land is eternal and eternally changing, and so intertwined with the weather as to make earth and sky inseparable. They know that land has to be understood in every season, in every weather. And they won’t, not for a single second, believe themselves to be the masters, the land their servant. They’re the servants and they always will be.
That said, my father, Samuel Edward Taylor, didn’t farm. We lived in the town of Louristan, the county seat, and Dad operated an establishment that sold farm machinery—hay mowers and side rakes, slings and hoists—along with miscellaneous hardware. But Samuel Taylor was descended from a line of farmers that ran all the way back to England. His grandfather and grandmother, Ezekiel and Rebekah Taylor, had come to Minnesota in 1844, refugees from the Catskill Mountains of New York, where the soil’s more rock than dirt. They bought two hundred acres of unimproved land from the U.S. government and set out to make a life.
There was good news and bad news about the section they purchased. The land was rolling, which meant good drainage, and the soil was rich enough to grow hay and wheat for a hundred years. That was the good news. The bad news was plain as day: their acreage was covered with trees for the most part. Big trees, old-growth trees, maples, oaks, basswood, and the like. There was just enough meadow to produce hay for their two horses. The rest was dense forest.
When you get to a certain age, you start lookin’ back on the past as though everything was golden, so maybe I’m exaggerating. But men and women like Ezekiel and Rebekah Taylor—yes, she cleared that land alongside her husband—were pretty near superhuman. The work went on every minute of every day, from sunrise until it got too dark to see. They built a log cabin first, then cut enough hay to get their horses through the winter, which is no little accomplishment in Bear County. There’s not a winter goes by when the temperature doesn’t hit minus twenty-five. Back then every farmhouse had a thicket of trees runnin’ in a tight curve around its sides, facing north and west, to hold off the winter winds and the drifting snow. Without that protection, the snow would pile up to the roof and the wind would seep through the window frames no matter how tightly they were sealed.
It took Ezekiel Taylor twenty years to get his farm how he wanted it—him and his wife and children, too, as soon as they were old enough to work.
Close your eyes and imagine an old-growth oak tree standing in the forest, the trunk maybe six feet in diameter, the branches stretching up a hundred feet, the roots digging almost as deep into the earth. Now imagine transformin’ that oak into planks and beams and shingles with a few hand tools. And doin’ it in the middle of the winter, too. That’s how the Taylors built their first and second barns, a real house to replace the log cabin, their wagon beds, and the split-rail fencing that surrounded their haystacks. It’s how they built cabinets and shelves and stalls for the cows they bought as soon as the land could produce enough hay to feed ’em.
Gracious, I haven’t even begun to touch on what the pioneers accomplished, the Taylors and all the other families that started up before the railroads came through. I haven’t mentioned the Dakota Indian War in 1862, the grasshopper plagues of 1876 and 1877, hailstorms that destroyed crops in the fields, spring thunderstorms that left fields flooded for weeks. But I don’t mean to dwell on my family’s origins. I’m only making the point that farm life runs deep in my veins, town boy or not. Farming was and is the life of Bear County, as true today as it was the day I was born, or in 1844 when Ezekiel and Rebecca Taylor faced two hundred acres of wilderness.
* * *
So, now me. You know, ever since you got me talking about my life, bits and pieces from my early years have been coming back to me. The smell of horses for one thing. And automobiles—they were few and far between in those early years. The town doctor had a Buick he drove to make house calls, and I seem to remember one of the lawyers in town had a car of some kind, but horses and wagons filled the streets on working days in Louristan. The smell of them, the horses, was very strong—the smell of living, breathing creatures, a smell that seemed familiar the first time I smelled it. Later on, after tractors, trucks, and cars came along, folks claimed they disliked the smell of horses. Thought it was unclean somehow. They were sadly mistaken, at least in my opinion. Motor vehicles run on the remains of creatures that died millions of years ago and they smell like it, too.