Becoming Eagles
A Pennsylvania Short Story
by
Michael Bunker
Copyright 2014 by Michael Bunker
The following document was translated from the original dialect by Dr. Phillip Sukhodol of the University of Central Pennsylvania in March of 2050 using the SomText Contextual Interpreting Protocol (SCRIP). Further translation and contextual editing was performed by Dr. Sukhodol and Dr. Joyce Farmer in concert with the TA Office of Information Management and the TA Counter Propaganda Group. The story is an example of “found manuscript” fiction, purporting to be a hand written account discovered in an abandoned mineshaft in Central Oklahoma. The manuscript is dated to the year 2100, fifty years in the future, and it is the opinion of the Office of Information Management and the TACPG that this document is a new and interesting propaganda attempt by the TRACE rebel groups operating in and around the work prisons in Oklahoma, and therefore has historical significance.
Before Uncle Randolph died and the cousins on my mother’s side took over the running of the Dry Valley Farm, things were exceedingly good there for me. My mother and father died at the beginning of the Second Transport War and before I could know them at all, but Grandfather was still alive in those days and because of his steady hand and loving discipline Dry Valley was a wonderful place to live.
After a few hours of morning schooling administered in the library by my Aunt Lisa, I was free to roam the farm at will. On most days I would help out in the gardens more often than not because Steven the old gardener would show me what to do with the plants. His hands would work the earth like he was a creature born from it and he would teach me beautiful songs of the before that would make any grown man cry right on the spot.
I was not a grown man, but I cried too when old Steven would sing of the before and rub his hands on his wrap and dab at his eyes with a cloth.
Some days I would head to the forest with Lupe and Steve, Jr., the gardener’s children, and the three of us would harvest plantain and sometimes morels or wild plums or stinging nettles for Miss Drury’s cook pot. And on some days we would run along the creek, hopping back and forth over the steam and keeping count of the water striders we would see on the surface while trying not to fall in to the cool, clear water. If we did fall in we’d run through the woods laughing like banshees to the little clearing among the trees where we would lay out on the rocks in the warm sun and wait for our shoes and wraps to dry. That was primarily an oak-hickory forest but here and there stood large stands of spruces and pines that towered over us and would sometimes block out the sky. In that particular clearing we could see the powder blue sky and sometimes the puffy white clouds and we’d stare into that beautiful heaven and sometimes we’d drift off for a bit too.
Once we saw a lone eagle circling lazily in the air unaffected by time and place, pressures or strife, and I told Lupe and Steve, Jr. that I wanted to be like that Eagle someday and they said they did too.
Oftentimes old Carol the dairy woman (who we called Aunt Carol) would find us and she’d scold us for running off without telling anyone, but then she’d sit with us and we’d ask her questions about the before.
“When the war came did you have a man?” Lupe asked once.
“I did.”
“And what became of him?”
“He was taken to the mines and was probably killed there.”
“Probably?”
“He would never fight for Transport, so he died in the mines.”
“You never heard from him again, Aunt Carol?”
“I haven’t heard news of him, but I know he’s dead.”
“Was it hard to go on without him?”
“You go on,” she said. “What choice do you have?”
And she would tell us of the time from before when Grandfather could go up by private ground transportation, in his very own vehicle, to a city on the big river. There he would buy a truckload of food even though the prices were terribly high and even though there were bandits sometimes on the way.
Growing up I would listen attentively when the old ones would talk of before the war. They mostly spoke the Plain tongue and though we understood it, our own daily talk was different. We used words mostly from the plain and some from the Englischers and other words brought in and shaped by people like Steven the gardener and Aunt Carol. People who had fathers who were from a country way over the ocean that she said didn’t even exist anymore. Anyway, we would listen to the tales of before and some things made me very sad
Overall though, for me life was very good then. Sometimes I would even imagine that the helpers who Grandfather paid to work the gardens or milk the cows were my family. He treated them like his people, so it was easy for me to pretend that we were all related. I had the cousins and my Grandfather as my true blood, but I spent more time with the help and in many ways I was closer to them than I was with my own kin. Maybe it is not true what they say about blood being thicker than water.
We all lived very happily and comfortably and on nice evenings we would gather out near the fire pit. We’d watch the fireflies and we’d all sing songs in our mixed dialect and the old ones would tell stories in the plain tongue that couldn’t all be true. The scent of damp grass and the waft of breezes from the fields of melons and beans would blend with the hickory smoke and a sublime peace would settle on me that forever established in my mind my understanding of the word “home.”
On my journeys I returned there to the Dry Valley ranch one time in late fall not many years ago and the old porch has sagged and has lost all of its whitewash and the old doors just don’t hang right anymore. Steve, Sr. still runs the place but only his kin are there now (and not many of them) and most of the windows are busted out with boards tacked over them and the gardens are only poorly tended. Dry Valley ranch has suffered, as has most of civilization, by the ongoing war and the scattering of the population. But Dry Valley is still there, which is more than you can say for just about any other place that used to exist. Now, there’s a lot of rubble and salvage, and that’s how I make my life anyway.
My friends – most of them – are not there anymore.
Mrs. Drury got the cancer, they say, and went to the Amish Zone not far from the Big River where it is said they have old ones who can cure anything.
Aunt Carol was put out by the cousins when they say she stole some things that she said belonged to her vanished husband. Steven told me that Carol headed toward the mines in Oklahoma with the hope that maybe her husband was still alive.
Some of the workers left and took promised positions in the cities up on the Shelf, but I have very little hope that their lot improved with their migration. Lupe and Steve, Jr. left with rebels one time and their father has not heard from them in many years.
When I was there, this time as an adult, I walked up the stream to that clearing in the woods and sat on the stones that seemed so much smaller to me than they were in my youth, and so much of my life in Dry Valley rushed back over me like water.
I remember walking with Steve, Jr. and Lupe up the cattle path that crested the hills on the south side of the valley with the smell of honeysuckle and blue violets and chickory in our nostrils, and then down again through the pines and spruces until the land got wet and marshy and the scent turned to that of wet grass and rotted leaves and mucky earth.
I remembered climbing the stone wall that surrounded the gardens at Dry Valley Farm as a boy and dropping on the outside, and the feel as the tall grass with seed heads moving with the light breeze would tap against my legs.
And I recalled that we would hunt in the fall, usually with bows and when I wa
s too young to hunt Grandfather would let me carry his quiver and he’d tell me to shush and to get down when the party would spy a buck or a boar or perhaps, on unluckier days, a gopher or a rabbit.
Those were good days at Dry Valley, before Grandfather passed and the cousins took over and before I married Renata and eventually hated her and left her so I could live in the wilds like an eagle.
***
My life changed forever after Grandfather died. Who knows how it happened, but one day they were hiding things from me and covering up the mirror in the great room and then, sometime after that – after I’d had time to speculate and worry and fret – Miss Drury told me that Grandfather was gone on to heaven and that we’d be sticking his body in the ground.
And that was that.
The cousins took over and things were alright for a short while but before long we weren’t sitting out by the fire pit at night any more. No one showed up to eat supper at the big table in the great room, and eventually the big table was sold off and we only sat for supper when Miss Drury would bring us a bowl of stew or dumplings out on the porch or in our own rooms.
When I was a boy we only missed eating a meal all together as a family when Grandfather would take me in the cart and we’d go to the old city up by the big river. It was on one of those trips when my Grandfather told me that the rest of the family had decided that I was to marry Renata.
Renata was my second cousin, and the family was worried that if Grandfather died that there would be competition for the Dry Valley Farm. He said that if Renata and I were married that ownership of the farm wouldn’t be in contention and all the cousins could feel at home there.
I married Renata when I was seventeen so that the cousins wouldn’t be afraid of losing their place in the world. Not long after that Grandfather died.
The cousins took over the running of the place because (they said) they were older and would do a better job of holding the family together. None of that turned out to be true, and for me things only got worse.
Renata was not a good woman – not to me – and before long I found myself taking my long rifle and heading out into the wilderness rather than staying home at the Dry Valley just to see it slowly decay right before my eyes. My wife and her family took the income from the farm, so long as there was any, and spent it on fine clothing and trinkets, but very little of that money ever went back into the running or care of our home and farm.
My journeys took me farther and farther afield and sometimes I would be gone a fortnight at a time. And as soon as I would return, Renata would yammer about the need for more money and how we should be moving on to a city, perhaps up on the Shelf where there were jobs for men like me.
And one day I just didn’t go home again.
I followed the eagle and became a man of nature. And of salvage.
The war still rages and that kind of political peace seems far off but for me I have found peace in the midst of it all. Sometimes I have to fight but most times I’m as free as that eagle and I do my best to avoid any trouble that doesn’t come looking for me.
And sometimes I see my bird friend circle high in the air and he takes my thoughts back to Dry Valley and to my home there that I had back when I was an eaglet.
And my mind soars with the eagle, my friend, and we live free. Him up in the air, and me here watching over the earth.
The End