Requiem [COMPLETED]

The Homestead

            The first day was unseasonably warm, a crisp breeze and a panorama of blue and gold surrounded us. I was expecting to see the fields waved endlessly to the horizon with wheat, barley and corn. I forgot though that it was October already; all the grain had been threshed and sent to the elevator in town long before. Grandpa hadn't chisel plowed yet though, so their stalks stood in rowns like a field of miniture graves, toothpick-sized stubs splintered near the base into fans, crosses and plumes. The corn had been left to dry and now it wouldn't be collected until after the first snows if they came early again this year around Halloween.

The corn rustled like dried seedpods, their mummified stalks rigid and unrelenting in the face of death. The husks shrink and suction to the cobs in an ever-tighter embrace, as if seeking to retreat back into themselves their essence; let nothing be lost. Drying corn in the field has such an appearance of a living cemetery, of slow death, that it always made me feel deeply sad, as if their primordial struggle where humanity's. The sheaves of barley, copper-tinted, and the golden shades of wheat would have been only beautiful, especially with the playful gusts of wind that stirred flashes of shadow and glints of pearlized seed; but corn was somehow a melancholy reminder of the futility of the struggle against nothingness.

Sven has long known of my strange sentimental associations with corn, and just looked at me. "You're so weird," rolling his eyes and trudged from the overgrown drive up towards the old homestead, carrying stakes and surveying tapes.

"I can't help it!" I snapped, only half able to joke.

The farm had always been quiet except for the sound of a tractor or the cattle mewing when in the enclosed pasture up by the barn for the winter. They had yet to be brought home from the pasture down the road by the swamp though, so it felt kind of ghostly, as if I was in a picture. Only the corn made noise in the wind; the leaves were already on the ground in wet piles, sculled up against tree trunks and tall grass hummocks. The garden had been freshly ploughed over, I could see from here. There was no sign of life from the house.

"Are you coming?" Sven hollered, already heading back for another load. Ranger was bounding around with unbridled joy, off leash and able to chase squirrels to his heart's content. I knew it'd be no good calling him to heel; he had very selective hearing.

"Yeah," I said, bringing myself to attention. I shook my head and started pulling out the ground penetrating radar equipment in two different cases that weighed about 50 lbs each. And so this is cutting edge technology? "Streamlined and modern?" Yeah.

Charlie came out in the afternoon. Sven and I had set up the first grid together, so Sven continued to set up more lines on his own as I ran the radar and Charlie became the 'data manager' a title I came up with to soothe his ego since he was stuck recording values I called out in a little notebook all afternoon.

"That's what I'll credit you as in the paper, you can be third author," I added. I didn't point out there were only three of us anyway. He seemed to cheer up at the notion, until he perceptively asked, "Wait, does that mean I'm stuck doing this every day now?" As soon as I finished one row, Sven stole the tape and laid out another grid row. It was surprisingly efficient, but then it shouldn't be since they're both quick learners. We got the whole clearing done, except inside the buildings. Ranger stayed away from the grid except to bring Sven the occasional stick-- or squirrel-- which Sven always praise him for.

"Don't encourage him!" I called. "Grandpa will wonder what happened to all the wildlife."

"He's a hunting dog, it's his instinct to hunt animals; what do you want from me?" He shot back. "Do you even know how much it costs to teach dogs to do what he just did naturally, not chewing it up and just retrieving it?" Clearly I am not a dog connoisseur because I failed to appreciate this.