The Hundredth Year

The Hundredth Year






Grains of wood shone through the whitewash on the doorposts and the lintels that led from room to room, wood that creaked in the hundred-year house on the hundred-year farm, haunted in the November wind. The house was dark, and only lightened with travel though the rooms toward the kitchen where the static of an AM radio could be heard repeating its tinny, four AM weather forecast. A single bulb hung like a lonely soul from the ceiling exposing the yellowed wallpaper containing asbestos insulation in the room that showed only a frugal steel gas heater set between the wall studs so that it heated the kitchen and an adjoining room.

Bjorn Olafsson sat at a small wooden kitchen table, his huge hands working a Bic pen, figuring acres that needed harvest, and projected yields. He was a man with weather creases in his face, he had brown-black hair and a face that was still a little dark from the previous summer’s sun, so that he looked little like the man the name called forth. Bjorn dropped the pen for a moment and dug his thumb and middle finger into the inside corners of his eyes. He remembered the badge flashing. The state trooper had knocked three times on the door before Bjorn could answer it. The trooper had been hesitant, but had told Bjorn that his son Harold had been in an accident. That was a little over three months ago. It had been one hundred days. Bjorn let his breath out which shuddered like a man keeping off the cold. He was unaware that he felt a part of his soul had been cleanly sliced off so that only emptiness remained. A terrible guilt came from somewhere inside and told him of a necessity. What necessity? Bjorn was for a moment emotionally blind unaware that he searched out the beautiful pain. A device inside snapped him back to the moment and Bjorn was once again wrapped in unimportant obsession, picking up the pen and beginning to write again. Louise wouldn’t be up for another hour and he had serious thinking to do. It had rained through the harvest months and only luck had allowed the ground to dry out enough in the past several days. He had pulled in about seventy percent of the corn, his only crop, but the weatherman was predicting a snowstorm in the next twenty-four hours. Bjorn would have to be in the fields before Louise rose to cook breakfast.
The party line telephone rang, though no one else on the surrounding farmsteads were talking.
“Hello Bjorn?” an ancient voice filled with a sympathetic and deep understanding crackled with the static on the telephone, “This is Arny Svenson…how are you doing?” Bjorn was silent for a moment. He knew that Arny was asking about him as much about his emotional state as about the crops. Bjorn chose to speak about the crops.
“Well, I still have some to bring in. I don’t know how I am going to manage it before this snow storm.”
“How ‘bout I come over. I can handle the wagon if you can handle the combine.”
“I…I…” Bjorn knew that he needed the help. He and Louise were poor and even alone barely made it from harvest to harvest and Bjorn knew also that help was a serious thing in the rural districts. He had helped others and it was considered un-neighborly to refuse. “I…would be glad to have you, Arny.” He claimed in a resignation that was deeper than everyday shame. Arny replied in a voice that was concerned and even a little shaky around a man that could explode.
“Well good then… I’ll be over in twenty minutes.”

Bjorn had thrown himself into work after the accident. That is what they had told him to do. He had kept a set face through the entire ordeal. He didn’t know it was fear that had him in its grips. It was just so subtle and he couldn’t understand it. When the greater emotions came he would soon be filling cattle troughs, or stacking hay bales in the barn, or working on the tractors in the aluminum half-canister machine shed to make sure they were working.

Picking up the Bic, he wrote in a last set of figures and then stood, making for the front door of the house. He found a flannel shirt and pulled it on, covering the over-all’s and T-shirt and finally put a green Dekalb cap on his head. He opened the door and the closed it quietly so as not to wake Louise. The November air was cold, but the real shock came when Bjorn realized how quiet, how empty the farmstead seemed. The lack of human presence drilled into him and he didn’t realize that his soul felt the same emptiness and that it was almost unbearable. He didn’t even know that he cast the feeling aside, unable to make sense of it, and made for the machine shed.

He climbed the rung ladder to the door of the John Deer combine. Opening the door he sat in the control seat and turned over the engine several times, dead silence ruling in between each attempt, until the engine caught. It was a relatively new machine and he was making payments on it like any farmer with a combine. Taking a set of noise mufflers from a hook inside the machine he put the headset over his hat onto his ears and climbed down to check the grain wagon behind the combine and to start the older and louder tractor. He climbed aboard the neighboring machine and turned over the key so that the tractor started instantly – a trusty old International Harvester. The din that filled the machine shed was almost unbearable and penetrated the earphones that he wore. The addition of the second engine pointed toward an unconscious internal crescendo, that at once would have frightened Bjorn and put him up to the challenge. He stepped out of the machine shed to see a Lincoln Mercury sitting in the driveway, the headlights switching off as soon as he noticed the vehicle. Arny stepped from the car wearing a Monsanto cap and over all’s beneath a heavy windbreaker. As the man with the lined face walked toward him, Bjorn thought about the tractors behind him he would work that day till he broke. He stepped forward and gripped Arny’s hand.
“Good to have you along,” He said, “The tractors are running, we just need to hitch up the trailer on the rig that you’ll be driving.”
“Good enough,” Arny replied, as he pulled a set of earphones from his belt, also sliding them on over his cap.

Bjorn climbed aboard the combine while Arny mounted the roaring life of the older tractor. The combine cramped the ‘Harvester so he pulled it out of the machine shed first and waited for Arny. While Arny backed the old red tractor toward the green wagon at the side of the barn, Bjorn looked to the empty space in the driveway where his son Harold had once parked his ‘souped up’ Chevy Malibu. He was unaware of a great emptiness that that he felt inside. The wind seemed pure, and he went through a moment of clarity. Everything in the world had its place, planting and harvest and long summer days and short winter days and life and… He threw the gentle feeling to the side, unthinkingly avoiding the thought that was unbearable to him before he knew what it was. He climbed down the combine and walked over to the wagon to secure the hitch as Arny backed the tractor. He kept his hand well away from the hitch it self, since he knew men that had mangled digits in the clasp so that they ended up with an amputated thumb, or forefinger, or pinky although the physical pain didn’t seem important to him at that time.
As the tractor clicked in the hitch, Arny turned and waved with a weak and ancient smile to Bjorn, signaling that he was ready to go. Bjorn faced it without panicking, and he couldn’t see it as a parting since his mind was in a different place, and the signal from Arny was as clean an amputation so that there was a false and phantom feeling, just as he had missed the reminder a minute before. The loneliness was terrible, though he didn’t seem to know it in his soul. He was pulled out of the lethargy, and once more became semi-obsessive, walking deliberately toward the combine.
Louise, who had just risen, stood in a lit window, and waved also toward Bjorn, and expression of both love and concern on her thin face and in her thin figure. He tried to replace the expression on her face with another time and setting. He remembered the winter night that she had slid off the gravel into the ditch, he remembered the worry he felt when she first told him of the accident over the phone of a farm near the accident while the farmer had rigged up a friendly and eternal old tractor and pulled the car out of the ditch. Outside thoughts slipped into his mind, and unable to control them, he once again remembered the State Trooper. His son wasn’t over far enough over on the gravel riding up that hill by the Tolaffsons. He dug his fingers into his eyes again as he turned the combine so that it roared with doom toward the fields. His son had rebuilt that Chevy Malibu, had souped it up. It was only natural to get reckless with such a car – he should have never let Harold have it. The Trooper had spelled it out further. There had been a grain semi truck on the other side of the hill. There had been no relief as when Louise had slid into the ditch. Why hadn’t there been any relief with Harold? Looking ahead toward the dead fields that needed harvest, his heart was disconnected. He knew the facts about Harold, but only in an everyday way.

Arny pulled up the tractor, ghost-like in the morning hours and crept into line behind the combine, so that both wagons trundled along behind the stack of the bigger tractor’s large grain spigot. He followed the rutted tractor road through the empty fields until he came to the second hundred-acre mark and turned the combine into the un-harvested field. He felt nothing. There was just this dawning need to work as among many other workers, searching for that singular honor among them. The second tractor pulled up beside him, at the ready and Arny killed the ‘Harvester’s engine shivering in the unnatural November wind as he began to loose feeling in his hands and his feet. He would wait until the first wagon was full and then switch up and drag the full wagon back to load one of the two silos on the farmstead. Bjorn turned into the endless stalks of corn, mowing the row with the large fork at the front of the tractor so that corncobs and debris fell behind and a torrent of grain spilled into the wagon. It seemed as if he had done it one hundred times before, smashing his head against a wall, bloody from one hundred repetitions. An eternal sense of one harvest broke into his thoughts at two hours, a multiple memory radiating from eternity. Three more hours passed as he fell into a thought-free place that he had once long ago considered boring. There was a presence that seemed to move along-side him, and he grasped at it, but wasn’t able to identify it.

Time slowed and was gulped in huge swallows, time marked only by the first and second switch-up of filled grain wagons, a grueling task shared between Arny and Bjorn that seemed to hover imperfectly around the two-hour mark. The day had only five hours spent, and he knew that it would be fourteen to eighteen hours before the work was finished. The coming snowstorm which would cover the world in white innocence only made the work at hand of busting through the brick wall of cornstalks, even with the combine, to be back-breaking. He thought hard work to be an honorable thing and felt that people who did hard work to be honorable people, to be good people. He remembered the silver badge on the chest of the State Trooper. With working folk, the badge they wore came from heart itself, an un-sensed glowing place that rose through the voice. Something about that touched him and for a moment and his eyes became moist and he felt an elusive mote of love for something he couldn’t figure. He lost the thought to the pain of hard work, which was dull and also wore through his spirit.
Although time slowed, it also became desperate and necessary. Another hour passed. Every minute counted. Another hour passed. He knew that Louise wouldn’t be driving the pickup along the tractor trail today, and it made him lonely since her visits helped him to fill an empty space, it was also a loneliness that made his gut hurt from lack of food and which she usually supplied with hot roast beef-on-butter sandwiches and steaming Thermos’s of coffee. It gave him the opportunity to disinterestedly dig a hole in himself. She would understand today. He suspected she had heard the weather forecast, and would suffer with the men in the field. Meanwhile the work exhaustion seemed to be breaking down an invisible wall inside of him as the endless cornstalks continued to mount up against the combine.

Another three hours passed. Knuckles white against the curve of the combine’s steering wheel, he could feel his arms pushing against the sluggish mechanism, willing the sluggish machine to move faster as the cloud ceiling lowered little by little. He remembered the same desperation when his father and he had brought in a harvest one October when the weather had come early. He remembered his father’s death to cancer. He had wept for days after, though as days passed to months and then half-years, his memory of the man had cemented and now he smiled to himself in the combine. He remembered sitting in the side tractor while his father worked in the fields. In blinding coincidence Arny pulled up to switch wagons, and Bjorn was surprised by the aging man in the tractor seat so that his heart seemed to skip a beat and he unintentionally drew in his breath. The side tractor had always been a place that had been reserved for youth. Arny gave him the same weak smile as they mussed with the hitches and then Bjorn was alone again. His father had been eighty-seven when he had died, but Bjorn felt melancholy and tired for a moment, and that he himself had lived a hundred years.

Two more hours dragged by at the speed of a tractor in a field. He felt vulnerable. The clouds had lowered further and the wind was becoming wet and icy. Who knew when the snow would start? Along with the tension, though, came a second wind. The twilight was leaden, and he turned on the combine’s floodlights. He could see Arny doing the same in the distance. He felt that he could drive the tractor all night if need be. As the time crept by he began to think about the farm. He felt ordinary, another farmer with a wife such as Louise. The whole thing, his life and the farm and his family left him wondering. It wasn’t a bad thing or a good thing. He felt he was was just an everyday person. He felt in a cold analytical way that the loss in his life opened up a whole world of possibilities. He suspected his being capable of a much different existence. He couldn’t understand what that existence included, but he felt that he could reach out and find what he needed. He was curious. What could bring that about? He turned the tractor and started on another row of corn. He suspected that there was a wonderful change possible in the loss, a good thing.

Five hours dragged by darkness long having crept in, and he was exhausted and the dust kicked up by the combine, the dust that hung in its floodlights reassured him of the tremendously long day he had spent at the harvest. He felt worn to the bone, that the stamina of his flesh had become the same debris that surrounded the big tractor. He wondered whether his will would hold even as he looked at the last couple of rows to be finished. He felt like he was at the breaking point, disjointed and wobbly. He felt like crying from weakness, as he turned into the second-to-last row of corn. He had tested himself and as he turned the last row, knew that he had succeeded, but he still came up short. An emotion raged inside him that he couldn’t understand, and his chin shook like an older man with Parkinson’s, an emotion that was buried and that still shook him.
He found Arny at the farmstead unloading the last full wagon of corn. His eyes widened in surprise as he looked at the man and realized how close he was to the other. Arny again gave him a weak smile, loaded with sympathy and understanding.
“ You go into Louise. I’ll take care of the rest of the grain,” he said.

Bjorn made for the house like a man might head for the toilet, ready to vomit. He stumbled in through the front door as the last of the walls came down and walked through the long hall to the kitchen where Louise was cooking corned beef from the meat locker. The everyday man, the cold and analytical was unlocked by the sight of her and for the first time he understood the pain and the possibility of the hardest growth. He stood stock still for a moment, staring at her in shock. He felt the loneliness crush him for the first time. It seemed a hundred years since the boy had died, and it seemed like it had just happened, both at the same time. He remembered the Trooper’s badge.
“He was so honorable,” he said, “Such a good boy.” He took several halting steps toward Louise and sagged to his knees in front of her, wrapping his arms around her waist. She began to stroke his hair.
“Oh, Bjorn, I love you,” she said
“My son,” he cried in a broken voice. He began to sob, and tears started to pour from his eyes. “Oh, my son,” he cried again. “My son.”


By Hans Sigurd Lillegard