Nature's Children (O'Keeffe)

So Mother Nature, in her willy-nilly way, chooses to do some more winnowing of the human population. Is it any wonder that sometimes we forget we are her children? Or, maybe it’s precisely because we have forgotten that she occasionally comes up with harsh reminders, like the one we now endure.

But her usual manner is to tell us more gently. And when that happens, when she takes the puffed-up designs to impose our will on her and turns them back in our faces, we are left feeling a bit foolish.

My mother seldom spoke of the illness that devastated her neighborhood. I don’t know if she lacked detailed recollection of that episode from her childhood, or if it had simply lost its importance to her. Probably some of both, but if I had to choose, I’d pick the latter. Raising us nine kids in a drafty Pennsylvania farmhouse, as well as taking in our three orphaned cousins, she was a person who pretty much lived in the present—like Mother Nature herself. My most immediate memory of her is of those small, soft hands sprinkling flour—forget the measuring cup—out onto a hardwood table. And of the way she smelled—like bread dough, cinnamon, and nutmeg, with a little rosemary or sliced carrots or beets, maybe a hint of onion—like the kitchen.

My father’s hands were hard. They were rough and callused and had lots of cracks. Tiny little creases were penciled with grease and dirt from whatever piece of equipment he’d last applied a hammer or screwdriver or box wrench to around the place. At the dinner table, he smelled like soap, although those tiny creases didn’t always completely give up their dirt. Sometimes it was just vestiges of regular earth, what he called “clean dirt.”

My father talked about the Spanish Flu—a lot.

“In the fourth grade,” he’d say, “the kid in front of me was absent, and the next day Sister informed us he wasn’t coming back—ever. A few days later, it was the kid in the next row over and one seat up.”

It went on like that all through the school term, a kid here, a kid there, the killer influenza sweeping up children without deference to the orderliness of the rows of desks Sister had arranged them in.

One Friday in spring, while we were all in school, Jack and Eleanor rounded the curve where the dirt road that led from town up to our farm came out of the woods. They spotted our neighbor’s heifer, Patches, helping herself to new-growth clover down in our hay field. My father brought the jeep, the back loaded clear to its ragtop roof with a week’s worth of groceries, to a halt.

“Oh, Jack—let her be,” my mother said. “Let’s get the groceries into the house.”

“El, it will only take a minute,” he said, jaw set.

He turned off the road and pointed the vehicle down a steep slope in the direction of the hay field. Jeeps, at least the ones built in the late '40s, which were simply modified versions of their military cousins, were not known for offering a smooth ride on the road, much less when traveling down a rock-strewn hill. My mother did her best to hold on against a bouncing, jarring ride—and to hold down the groceries. Mud flying, gears whining, engine growling, my father chased Patches on a zig-zag course that ended with the wayward heifer jumping a ditch at the end of the property.

Mission accomplished—the churning wheels having done far more damage to the field than a grazing heifer could ever do—he headed the mud-spattered vehicle back up the hill to the farmyard. My mother climbed out, furious.

“Look at this mess,” she fumed. “Everything turned every-which way—eggs, two dozen of them, broken and splattered…” When she was angry, she spoke with a furrowed brow and crimson cheeks, lower jaw jutting.

“Well,” my father shrugged, “it’ll be a long while before the neighbor’s heifer dares to come over here again.”

When we came home from school, low clouds of dark quiet were hanging in the air throughout the house. It was only after my father went outside to work on something that we heard from my mother what had roiled up that something-must-have-happened atmosphere.

Around 5 o’clock, when my sister and I went down to the pasture to bring up the cows for milking, off in the distance, a shifting shape appeared through evening mist rising out of the ground. Approaching the end of the pasture, we peered over the fence into the hay field.

Eyes round, flared nostrils gently puffing into the dew, Patches was back in the clover.

So it is with Nature’s children.

Patrick Lawrence O’Keeffe, raised on a Pennsylvania farm, studied for the priesthood, and later worked in industry. He and Karen raised five children, and reside in Port Clinton, Ohio. A published historian and novelist, he is writing his second novel following Cold Air Return, published by Bottom Dog Press.