He gave a strange housewarming gift when we first moved to this farm, one you couldn’t buy in any boutique, one I wouldn’t forget. A wreath of rusting barbed wire, wrapped up remains of a neglected fence that had once lined one of his farms. For years, I would think again on that wreath and wonder what it meant.
The phone rings the other morning. I am serving bowls of porridge, as morning light spills across the table like warm buttermilk. Cradling phone between shoulder and ear, I ladle another serving. The children tumble in from the barn’s early chores. The house swells with laughter and stories and plans for the day. I must have missed the returned greeting for my ear fills with a hollered, annoyed, “Hellloooo?!”
His voice. It was just that tone, that pitch, that he bellowed from the back door, looking for kids home from school who were late for feeding hogs, scraping pens.
I inhale deeply, expediting a prayer heavenward.
“Dad! Sorry, children all just came in for breakfast, and it gets a bit boisterous in here. How are things there?”
The days quickly tally in my head. Can I find what I am looking for? Last Saturday? Or the one before? No, I didn’t call either. I glance at the calendar . Yes, there: “Dinner at Dad’s” scrawls across the square for last Sunday. Does that count? I listen for the nuances, signs of pain in his voice.
“Fine…. I guess.” Is that it, there? That put-out tone? Another heart prayer. “At the corn here now. Just about finished up. Another beautiful day. Sun shining, nice and dry. It’d be the perfect day for you to bring the kids over for a combine ride. I’ll be on the home farm.”
I look up at the clock and try to do the math while handing out spoons to clamouring kids. There’s homeschooling to be accomplished this morning, I have an appointment right after lunch, travel time, and supper to prepare before I have to leave for a meeting this evening. But how to say that a jaunt over to Dad’s today, the perfect day, doesn’t easily fit the schedule? Uncomfortably, I fumble about, buying time until the right words arrive in heaven’s return post.
“Today? I know the children would like that, Dad… and awfully kind of you to call over… I am just not sure that…”
Dad doesn’t let me finish.
“Suit yourself. Could be raining and miserable tomorrow. ”
I hardly say good-bye before the phone signals dead.
Three days pass before the children and I unpile out into Dad’s cornfield. I watch the combine make its way down the field, devouring rows of drying gold corn, bin filling with yellow yield. I have done this every year of my memory, sat beside my father in the combine, watching the corn nose consume rustling stalk upon stalk, time and thoughts passing. He’d let me try the steering wheel, press the control for lifting and dropping the corn head. I’d let him talk me through life, tell me how to work hard, to dig deep, to keep going. The cab of a combine, rumbling loud and dusty, has been my Dad’s fall office all my childhood, the culmination of a season’s work. One stepped in and listens to his victory speech. Now I bring these children, too.
But the relationship between Dad and I over the last string of years has grown barbed. The line that holds us together has rusted, twisted, often threatened to break. The stack of still-warm sugar and spice cookies, wrapped and tied in the bag dangling from my hand, is my well-intentioned effort to tend and mend our fences.
On the headland, Dad idles the monstrous machine and the children and I climb the steps into the combine.
Dad smiles as the children cram into the corners of the cab, trying still to give Dad a clear line of sight to the cornhead. He hands out multi-colored swirled suckers.
“Had these in here for days and days. Didn’t think you guys were going to bother showing up.”
“Well, we’re here now!” I weakly smile, shifting my camera as Shalom wriggles onto my lap.
Dad nods towards the camera. “You’re hauling cameras out to the field now?”
I take a deep breath, trying.
“You’ve got such a fine day happening here, I thought I’d try to capture a few shots.”
He eases the engineered machine of gears, chains, belts back into this corn ocean. “I’ve often thought just the way the light hits these stalks a certain way, or the way the woods are turning color, or there, how Danny Van Veen’s hundred acres rolls down into this piece, if you had a camera you could carry out the things you see in a day. You take wrenches and grease to the field, for when something breaks down. But you never have a camera when you need one.”
I smile. “Well, today we are ready…”
I frame up an old fence line, cedar posts, goldenrod, and grasses bordering a woods still hemmed in color. The scene skirts the dried gold of this sea of corn. The shutter trips several times. I replay the images on the playback screen.
I try not to sigh. “Overexposed and camera shake.”
“So much for having a camera with us. I know what you should do…”
Dad bends over the steering wheel, focused on those cobs of deepened sunlight feeding into the combine. I wait, hopeful to harvest his wise words.
“I think you should just give up.” He chuckles.
Like someone tearing off a scab, the words sting, bite. My brow reactively furrows, protecting. Do Dad and I never heal? We get close, and word barbs catch, rip, cut.
I have his angular cheekbones, his Morton nose. We share the same memories, the same bloodlines, the same ancestors, the same land and way of life. But I have left him. Now I set the table for another farmer each night, massage another farmer’s weary muscles, praise another farmer’s straight rows and weedless fields. I never meant to hurt Dad, fence him off, when I became more of a daughter to a Heavenly Father, more of farmer’s wife than a farmer’s daughter. The day I said, “I do,” that barb tore through Dad. I remember how he cried there at the end of the aisle. For more than a decade, it has scraped, chaffed raw at his back. And our relationship.
I quietly finger the body of the camera, gaze out the window at this land I have known all my life. How to portray on a piece of paper what this dirt, these crops, this sky means to me? How to convey to this worn farmer with creased, thick hands, to this Dad of mine whose laugh and loves and life has shaped me, what he still means to me? What he always will mean to me. I distract from the ache in my throat and pull the viewfinder up to frame another scene, any scene. The back of childrens’ heads lurch into the shot. I shift to one side, remembering: seeing well is the art of subtraction.
The phrase knocks softly, persistently. “Shift to see. This is the art of subtraction.”
And I wonder. If careful subtraction is necessary to encapsulate on film what this day, this light, this gold ocean does to me in deep places inside, might the art of subtraction cast Dad in a different light? Might careful subtraction convey to this man whom I love but can’t express in a way that he feels or knows, what I feel for him from a deep, abiding place inside?
The Spirit encourages, “Whatsoever things are lovely….think on these things.”
Dad’s voice, an echo of my grandfather’s, brings me back to the combine cab. The children are listening intently to his story, though their faces, like mine once was as a child, are mesmerized by the waves of corn lapping in.
“Clare Barlow worked this piece his whole life, and that 100 acres the far side of the road, where you can see Dave Bowles cattle grazing there now, and then this piece beside here, where that farmhouse stands. Clare worked all of this, him and Noreen, though arthritis from all those years of milking cows left him hobbling and gnarled all up. By the end there, he could hardly walk, but he just kept working away, barn chores taking him all morning to limp through. When he finally died, he left it all to his son.” Dad pauses, checking the mirrors to see how full his grain bins runs with corn.
“And that son lost it all. You just remember that: when you don’t work for something, it doesn’t mean much to you. And to think Clare kept his nose to the grindstone for sixty years to give that boy something, and now all the neighbors have bought it all up, and the son not living on Clare’s land at all.”
I reach into my bag and feel for the spiced, raisin cookies. One for each of the children, all grinning, and two for Dad, who holds them both in the same hand as the hand ready at the hydrostatic control.
His mouth full, he mumbles and nods my way. “Good!”
I shift, subtract, see. If I step to the side, I see a man wanting to leave a legacy, wanting to be heard, wanting to bequeath memories of stories to coming generations. From this perspective, I think I see: His words barb to catch us as we climb over, as we race on ahead. He barbs to hold us close, to make us not go. He does not want to be forgotten, an old farmer left behind in the dust. He needs us to need him.
I reach over and pat his arm, offering another cookie. “I’m glad, Dad.”
The combine rattles, devours, fills while the children and I listen to Dad’s stories. After he unloads, fills the wagon on the headland, he turns off the ignition and the field falls quiet. We tumble out of the cab and down into the field. I linger for a moment after the children have given their hugs goodbye.
Dad looks awkward. “Well. Thanks for coming.”
I wait till I catch his eye, aiming the words directly, softly. “I love you, Dad.” I brush his leathery, whiskered skin with a kiss.
Dad closes his eyes and nods. “I love you, too.”
And in that moment I know: if I learn to shift and subtract, to see the things that are good and pure, I can learn to step over barbed wire fences. The family wreath, though barbed and rusty, may encircle and embrace, unbroken.
Related: Seeing Dad’s Heart
Three days pass before the children and I unpile out into Dad’s cornfield. I watch the combine make its way down the field, devouring rows of drying gold corn, bin filling with yellow yield. I have done this every year of my memory, sat beside my father in the combine, watching the corn nose consume rustling stalk upon stalk, time and thoughts passing. He’d let me try the steering wheel, press the control for lifting and dropping the corn head. I’d let him talk me through life, tell me how to work hard, to dig deep, to keep going. The cab of a combine, rumbling loud and dusty, has been my Dad’s fall office all my childhood, the culmination of a season’s work. One stepped in and listens to his victory speech. Now I bring these children, too. 
I frame up an old fence line, cedar posts, goldenrod, and grasses bordering a woods still hemmed in color. The scene skirts the dried gold of this sea of corn. The shutter trips several times. I replay the images on the playback screen. 
Like someone tearing off a scab, the words sting, bite. My brow reactively furrows, protecting. Do Dad and I never heal? We get close, and word barbs catch, rip, cut. 
The phrase knocks softly, persistently. “Shift to see. This is the art of subtraction.” 
