Mayor Orin Holman sits in the back booth of Brown’s Lunch Counter, back to the door, hoping for invisibility. He stirs his lemon balm tea. His mind wanders on a journey, beginning with the plethora of jargon, of languages ... of all the words for all the things. He laughs to himself, ‘It will be the nouns that go first. Enjoy them while you can, old sport!’
He comes to the infinity of space and to unfathomable geologic time, the Big Bang connecting the two in a physical, yet intangible bridge. He hears Rod Serling of “Twilight Zone” narrating his tangled thoughts, and he chuckles again, transported back to the farm up the West Hills.
Orin sits atop his favored tractor, the 1982 Kubota M4050, which he has babied this past decade, hoping for it to survive him, like the huge ol’ big leaf maple in his front yard, fertilizing, pruning preventively against encroaching rot, sits jostling left and right, forward and back as he disks a five-acre piece recently purchased from a cousin who pulled up stakes to take an assembly-line job in Garfield, the man of slipshod farming, who raised paltry produce on a dubious few acres of tired, mineral-poor earth, packed to the point of cement-like porosity, tossing his mind to the lime and manure and surplus silage and Rushing River glacial sand he had cast and spread across the hungry ground in order to bring this piece up to snuff, pushed and shoved as he traversed the slope, back and forth, up and around and back and forth, watching the breeze in the trees, the hunter green of the firs, the reddishness of the lonely pear, the quakiness of the aspens as his mind wanders about those trees, following the evening grosbeaks and swallows, the soaring turkey vultures sniffing out supper and the crows hunting out mischief, wanders to the mysteries beneath the sod, the soil with its nets and nests of roots, its tunnels of earthworms, voles, and rabbits that have called this neighborhood home long before any biped drove by on a loud, stinking machine and the eyes of the man look up across the West Hills down to the Rushing River and the glance rises slightly to take in Downtown and beyond that the glorious Big River, meandering to and fro through the hills on its way to Garfield and beyond, wanders to his blessings at being a rural fellow atop this orange machine methodically giving back a little something to Mother Earth, hoping, always hoping, now pulling his International 37 disk red implement behind orange, colorful, thinking it’s a kind of parade, pulling the float through town, cruising down Via Valhalla in second gear, the cheerleaders and the pep band up ahead, pulling this flatbed of Future Farmers of America in their blue corduroy jackets, some say hayseeds, but you mark my word the engineers and agronomists and just hard workers that come out of that club will compete against anyone, hoping the disking does its work and the skies do theirs, whimsically a plantin’ plannin’ wondering about the exact mix he’ll use to seed, legume-rich, hairy vetch, sweet pea, maybe some lupine, some red clover for some color, alfalfa to send its roots down and down and pull up what’s down there from the great floods and the ice ages and the death and decay of the passing millennia, the death and decay that spells life and wanting some tall grasses to sway in the breeze, maybe blue stem, and surely some rye, oh and some barley, for as Mosiah wrote, “we began to till the ground, with all manner of seeds, with seeds of corn, and of wheat, and of barley, and we did begin to multiple and prosper in the land,” and then bring in the cows and then the chickens, quickening the cycles of rejuvenation, of revitalizing this land, this small piece of paradise, this Zarahemia and then the wind shifts and in looking up valley he sees dark foreboding weather coming in from the Craggies and naturally the foot gets a little heavier and the pace quickens, just a bit, because he knows this task, knows he’ll be out of the field before he’s wet or at least before the rain is more than a refreshing change upon his skin, his ball cap, his soul, and he muses on his great bounty and the good spiritual health of his soul, thinking that land is good but remembering ‘the worth of souls is great,’ and he spots the dark clouds racing him, he making a turn and remembers the last drenching he had, a drenching on a walk to the barn, a bolt of lightning and there it was, as if a bucket had been turned on his head, already running, galoshes slapping the barnyard gravel, realizing he was running away from the chore, not toward it.
“Orin? Your honor?” waitress Beatrice Dombledock asks. “Would you like a fill up on your tea?”
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