The Farm Youth’s Companion

Death was in the cemetery of strangely named ancestors;
in old farmers with abandoned cancers on their faces where cheekbones angled skin always to sun;
in the family that slept through a house fire on the first cold night of fall;
in the bloated circle of cows rounding a lightning-struck black oak;
in the ancient, shrunken uncle spitting tobacco juice and blood into a rusted coffee can in his wrought-iron bed;
in the little goats poisoned by spring grasses;
in the classmate who fell from a tractor and into his father’s machine;
in the hound lost in a scent crossing a road;
in the remains of an old woman burning leaves alone in a long dress;
in the bullhead and bluegill minnows gulping at surface air in the last muddy puddle spared by drought;
in the blind boy who panicked while swimming and drowned his brother with him;
in the framed photographs of farm boys stiff in new uniforms;
in the lamb that could not nurse;
in every Sunday’s soundings of vengeance and brimstone;
in young wrens and their mother swallowed into a blacksnake’s darker night;
in the gutted deer hanging by hushed heels;
in the reclusive widow not missed for more than a month;
in the frantic, defiant cries of coyotes;
in the stillborn calf licked clean by its mother;
in prophecies of whippoorwills;
in the broken farmer hanging from a rafter.

It waited in the cottonmouth lying in the limbs overhanging the swimming hole;
in the undercurrents of the flooded stream;
in the falling of a log tree;
in the rock or stob pitched by the bush hog;
in the inviting silence of the thinly frozen pond;
in the rotted floor boards of the high hay loft;
in the nest of red wasps in the corner of the machine shed;
in the spinning whispers of the power shaft;
in the science of stagnant waters;
in the screaming jealous jaws of the mother sow;
in the hunger of the wood saw;
in the cracked rung of a ladder;
in the kick of a horse or cow;
in the hay dust stored for seasons in the lung;
in the proud bull in the pasture;
in the decayed rails of the tree house;
in the depths of the hand-dug well;
in the avalanche of hay bales;
in the poisoned rust of a nail;
in the airy and comforting whirl of the mill blade;
in the snap of tree limb.

Death was dealt to the bait in the bucket;
to the fish quivering under the blade;
to the pet steer called to slaughter by the rattle of his feed pail;
to the sack of unwanted kittens;
to an old dog led the last time to woods;
to young rabbits and mice and birds in the freshly mown field;
to the possum in the trap;
to the water snake sunning in warm sand;
to the sinewy squirrel stripped of his skin;
to the coon in the tree;
to the frog impaled and gesticulating on the gig;
to the quail in their flush of rising;
to the chicken on the block blinking an eye as the hatchet rose across the sun;
to the headless, croaking chickens tossed into the tall grasses to bleed and settle;
to the gentle, worn-out milk cow sold to market;
to the fattened hog lifting his face to the rifle, smiling.

Douglas Stevens is a seventh-generation Ozarker and has taught history and English at both the high school and college level. A sometimes poet, he is currently completing a second obscure volume of poetry.