Oral History
Her husband found work
Teaching in a
backcountry schoolhouse
After the war.
It wasn’t her first
choice, she said,
But in lean times like
those,
You took what
opportunity presented.
They headed west
In a beat up Ford truck
Given to the couple in
dowry.
The birth of their first
child followed—
A boy with sandy hair
and blue eyes.
She named the child
after her husband,
But everyone called him
Little Bit.
It was a happy time, she
said.
Living in an old farm
house
On the edge of an
alfalfa field
Paid for by the school
board.
The teacher’s salary was
paltry,
But the children’s
parents would bring them:
Potatoes. Onions. Ham. Apples. Butter.
Whatever bounty the
season had to offer.
The weather turned sour
early that year
And the baby caught a
fever.
People remembered it
as the worst winter ever.
Despite the prayers and
doctoring,
Sickness took the child
one moonless night.
But the man and woman had
to wait
To lay their firstborn
to rest
Until some men from
church
Built a fire to thaw out
The iron hard ground for
burial.
Even in her 80s, when
she talked about
Dressing her son for the
funeral—
Her hands moved
hesitantly
In their grim
remembrance of that day.
And in that instance,
I saw, not an old woman,
But memory’s ghost: A
young mother
Standing at the edge of
a bed
Where a child lay bathed
in lemon water
And slanted winter
light,
Brushing the boy’s hair
for the last time.
Tom Darin Liskey spent nearly a decade working as a journalist in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. His fiction and non fiction have appeared in the Crime Factory, and Driftwood Press. His photographs have been published in Hobo Camp Review, Roadside Fiction, Blue Hour Magazine, Synesthesia Literary Journal and Midwestern Gothic.
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