The Green Valley
I sat gazing at the wallpaper, white
farmhouse, red
barn and silo and down
the path the red mill where the blue stream
turned
the brown wheel, 20 paddles wet
and dripping. One night I dreamed my
father
lived alone there, pouring sacks of gold
kernels as the round stone
turned on the grinding
floor. I couldn’t see him clearly—he wore
a
bandanna across his face in the room
filled with flour dust. Forty years
ago
on the south bank of the Kings River
Aaron Winters built a great
wooden
wheel, 30-feet across, with hinges, sand
bags, traps. People
came to watch, it ran
for three weeks—someone said if it kept
spinning the
War would end, until it began
to slow and finally stopped, its motion
not
perpetual. The mill and farm and hill
of wheat made a world repeated
50 times,
each blue sky balanced by a yellow
sun and two clouds. A
door slammed
and for a second I thought it was the white
door to all the
wallpaper houses. I looked
over at the framed picture of the
remuda
clipped from a magazine. The grass grew
up to their knees.
Their heads were bent
down as they grazed the lush stems. Last
September
10th I counted the horses
as I listened to the second storm
ruining
the raisins, not wanting to look out
at the rain like black bars.
There’d been
two hurricanes, Mexican from Baja, Belinda
and Charles,
the emergency weather
station blaring on and off with its red
light
flashing, the forecast a certain inch and
a half, no wind, high
pressure backed
up from Reno to Kansas. And three
days later the
grapes blew up into frog
bellies, the moldy stems turned canary
yellow,
before the fruit went dull black
with botritis. The raisins stuck to the
paper
trays, good only for cheap brandy or wood
alcohol, $50 a ton. There
were 53 horses.
Had anyone else ever counted them?
I had given them
names. Under the pine
tree, shadows on their backs, Smoke
and Blue and
Rusty browsed. How sweet
the grass was! How green was my valley!
Before Harvest
While I cooked the light had changed, the lawn
chairs’
shadows thrown like scaffolding across
the drive. The Hollywood plum was
darkening,
red-purplish leaves turning bluer and suspended
from the limb
the dinner gong looked sooty,
a burned overturned plate. The knife’s
rasp
against the grinder had stopped and I stepped
onto the porch where no
vine leaf rustled, no
crow or top-knotted quail called. My husband’s
faded
denim shone burnished gold as he stood
by the great yellow wheel. The tandem
disc
with rows of round blades made a dozen setting
suns and the green
Oliver tractor with orange
terracer waited forever past the glowing
barn.
The trash barrel near the peach tree was awash
with light. Catalpa,
white barn, running-horse
weathervane, Delmus, his cap a bronze
helmet
with lifted visor— Everything was kindled,
revealed by the lowering
sun. His shadow lay
stretched on the straw-colored dirt as he
stared at
his knife, his shadow looking down
at its three-foot sword beyond the long
oval
and webbed shadow of the grinder. “Dinner!”
I called suddenly at the
screen and he lifted
his head, frowning toward the house, maybe
sun in his
eyes. It was in the south now, crossing
the paved road, the direction the
terraced earth
would lean to catch the light mornings and late
afternoons.
What a simple, innocent, dangerous
thing to do, tend the vines all year until
the grapes
turned yellow-sweet, pick and spread them on paper
on the
ground to dry, in the wind, under the sun,
the moon and stars! From the
corner of the porch
I could see one of Mrs. Watkins’ walnut trees,
the
trunk and branches amber, the lit leaves
moving gently, all one way, like
blown palm
fronds on a tropical isle. I turned back to the kitchen
and
opened the oven. The biscuits glowed, twelve
wheat-gold days and with my
glove I grasped the tin
sheet, tilting and letting them slide into the
basket,
and tonged the crackling chicken from the pan.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. He
graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the U of Montana and his fiction received the
San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award. His stories have appeared in
Antioch Review, Texas Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, Montreal
Review, and other journals. "Now the River's in You," a 2010 story which
appeared in Ruminate Magazine, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and "No One
Can Find Us," which was published in Ray's Road Review, has been nominated for
the 2012 Pushcart Prizes.
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