Cloud of Locusts by Michael Loyd Gray

I was only fifteen when we lost our farm and had to move into town. All the stock and equipment were auctioned off and there was only enough money left to rent a duplex on the edge of town by the grain elevator. Our towering farmhouse on a rise overlooking the county was sold to a developer who flattened it. New cookie cutter homes sprang up out there like wildflowers on a prairie. My father called it “a capitalist pestilence.” He said it would sweep the countryside like a cloud of locusts.

I got a paper route to bring in a few dollars after school. I even delivered eggs on weekends for a farmer we knew. My father rigged a basket on the back of my bike for the egg cartons. It tickled him to do that, to make something with his hands.

My mother cleaned houses and assisted several elderly ladies. For a while, my mother and I were the only ones working. What the two of us earned barely kept us all fed. My mother urged my father to call in a favor and hire out as a hand to farmers who hadn’t yet sold out, but his stubborn pride wouldn’t allow it. He would shake his head sadly and look away each time she brought it up. He said he could never look a farmer in the eyes again.

She said, “Then you better avoid mirrors.”

My father grudgingly filed for unemployment and then swallowed pride and put on his one good suit to interview at Contented Cow Dairy to deliver milk to houses on what used to be our land. That was a bitter pill for him to swallow but rent was due and there were only a few dollars left in my mother’s cookie jar on the kitchen counter.

The route manager for Contented Cow had a soft spot for farmers who’d gone belly up and so he put my father to work. The milk he delivered might have even come from our cows. The cookie jar was back in business as our little bank, my mother the bank manager.

Contented Cow Dairy made my father wear a “prissy” white uniform and a white cap with a black visor and a smiling, contented cow emblem over the visor. He drove a white panel truck with a smiling cow painted on the truck’s side. He hated the white truck, whose horn made a mooing sound. He hated the smiling, contended cow. He hated the rows of bottled milk rattling against each other as he drove.

“I know how to milk a fucking cow, for Christ’s sake,” he said one day standing on the Contented Cow loading dock, but the other men just smirked and exchanged glances as they shuffled off to their trucks.

Mostly, though, my father hated the hat. He said it made him look like an ice cream vendor. He tried wearing it at what he called “a jaunty angle,” like a solider might, but the route manager had him pull it back down square on his head. One day, my father wore his faded John Deere cap on his route, and they docked his pay.

The regional manager told him he could be fired for violating corporate policies. My father had never been fired before, although losing the farm amounted to pretty much the same thing. He called it “The tyranny of capitalism.” He said America needed a good dose of socialism and he congregated with a group of other men, some of them farmers who’d gone belly up, too. They were all men with some degree of “hard luck” who believed socialism could one day sweep the countryside like a cloud of locusts.

It wasn’t long before my father started drinking.

He’d never been that much of a drinker, maybe a light beer after dinner and then off to bed early, but after each day of driving “that white monstrosity with that fucking cow,” he’d sit out back of the duplex and drink beers silently, his eyes scanning the horizon beyond the soybean field, until the sun faded and dipped away, and my mother called him in to dinner.

My mother would have us all link hands around the table and she would thank Jesus for the food. After the prayer, my father’s head always stayed bowed a little longer. I suspected he was praying for something more than just mashed potatoes, which was a staple for us in those days.

One day, he watched a green John Deere tractor plowing the field behind the duplex. He told me it could even be one of his tractors sold off at auction. He felt sure of it as he tracked its progress, no doubt judging the quality and dexterity of each pass up and down, how the farmer made his turns, how he kept a tight row on each pass. He believed he knew the farmer and one day the man waved at him but at that distance, I’m sure the farmer had no idea who my father was. Just another townie, he probably supposed, who romanticized farming life. My father would have been mortified at the thought.

My father hung his head and watched the tractor head back up the field. He could probably still feel the vibrations from steering a tractor down a field, the steering wheel quivering in his hands, the whine of the engine—the satisfying feeling of nobody looking over his shoulder. He no doubt remembered being his own man, the only boss, and enjoying how to ply his trade.

I went back inside to help set the table, but my father watched that tractor until the farmer was done plowing and had gone off down the blacktop road, a rash of red colors on the horizon as night fell, and my father rose, a little unsteady, and chugged his beer and threw the bottle against a tree trunk. But he managed to bungle that, too, and it didn’t even break. It caromed off into the yard and he had to fetch it because he knew my mother wouldn’t tolerate beer bottles littering a yard.

He picked at his food that night, never said a word at the table, and went to bed early while my mother gave him some room and stayed up late doing some sewing for Mrs. Blanchard.

It wasn’t long before my father got arrested.

He’d been out one night with his band of wannabe socialists, and they stopped at Bunny’s Tavern and drank too much whiskey. My father recognized a farmer as the man was leaving and he grabbed the man’s arm as he walked by their table. He just meant to say hello, I’m sure, but the farmer didn’t recognize my old man right off in his Contented Cow uniform and words got tossed around that couldn’t get taken back. My father slugged the man when he called him a drunk townie and the farmer went down hard on a table and broken beer pitchers littered the floor.

The police came and led my father out to a squad car, but the officer in charge was a young man who’d once bailed hay on our farm in the summers when he was a kid. He recognized my father and took off the cuffs by the car and let him ride in front down to the station. My mother had to go down and bail him out. She was fit to be tied and let everyone know it. The cops all smirked and let her have her say. My father had to pay Bunny’s Tavern for the broken pitchers. He was banned from entering the joint for a year.

I woke up when they got home and I heard her shouting at him, calling him a damn fool and a drunk, but he never said a word, was as meek as a lamb, and even slept on the sofa. He was gone the next morning before first light, before my mother and I even stirred from bed.

It wasn’t long before my father became careless.

Headed back to Contented Cow one day after making his deliveries, my father tooled along Dorsett Road, his mind no doubt off in the clouds, probably daydreaming about plowing a field with a powerful John Deer tractor. Had he been alert, he might have turned away enough to lessen the impact, to sort of deflect it some, but a pickup truck that ran the light caught him unaware and square on the driver’s side and the Contented Cow panel truck rolled over through the ditch several times.

They had to cut through the wreckage with the jaws of life to get my father out. But a lot of that life had already ebbed, and the cops took bets on how long he’d last as the ambulance drove away with lights blazing, the siren wailing. We got the call and rushed down to the hospital, my mother pulling me out of school because she’d been told he was touch and go.

He made it out of a long surgery, and I napped in the waiting room on a sofa while my mother drank endless cups of vending machine coffee and paced. A doctor finally came out, slipping his surgical cap off and looking grave. He looked like a man who’d tried his best but knew it wasn’t enough. My father would have appreciated that quality in the man. The doctor took my mother aside and she listened, head down, nodding a few times, and then he left looking back once, a sad look on his face, and she came over and hugged me and after a while they let us go into the room.

My father’s head was bandaged, his face swollen. It barely looked like him. There were tubes sticking into him and a young nurse with a blond ponytail checked his pulse. The machines he was hooked up to made quiet clicking noises. The curtains were drawn, and it was kind of dark in there, sort of a half-light atmosphere. The nurse nodded at my mother and left us alone.

My mother leaned over my father, and I watched from just behind her, peeking around at him. She spoke to him, her voice so low I could not quite make out the words. I did finally hear his voice, but it was a squeaky whisper. Then my mother reached back and tugged my sleeve and pulled me closer to the bed. She sagged into a chair in a corner, arms crossed over her chest.

My father raised his good arm slightly and motioned me closer. I leaned in close, terrified, but I knew I had to, and that’s when I saw how badly beaten his face was. One eye was swollen shut. I couldn’t make out what he said at first and I leaned closer.

“Look out for your Ma,” he said, straining to be heard. “And watch out.”

“Watch out for what, Dad?”

He tilted his head my way a little and winced.

“Watch out for the cloud of locusts,” he said, his voice raspy and even weaker. “They’re a coming, sure as day.”

I nodded and squeezed his hand. It was very weak, barely perceptible, but he squeezed back.

My father died the next day.

My mother was with him and held his hand. She told me later that they made their peace with each other. She said he was a good man who just had hard luck. After the funeral, the regional manager for Contented Cow Dairy came around and gave my mother a large check, to go along with the insurance money because the accident had been the other driver’s fault. Contented Cow even paid for the headstone. The regional manager suggested they have a cow chiseled into the headstone, but my mother put her foot down on that. Instead, she had it say, “Here Rests a Man Who was a Farmer all the Day Long,” which was my father’s favorite saying. That Contented Cow money helped see us through those dark days until she re-married and I’d finished college.

One day in the fall, when the sun’s strength was waning and I could smell autumn in the air, I took my young son out to see his grandfather’s grave. It had been a while since we’d visited. My son only knew a few photos of his grandfather, the ones we kept on the fireplace mantel. We only displayed photos where he was working on the farm or driving a John Deere tractor. In those photos, my father was always smiling, waving—happy. It was how we chose to remember him, at his best.

“What was he like?” my son asked me while we stood there, a question he’d asked many times, and for which I always struggled to answer well. My father’s grave was nestled under several oaks, and I could hear a soft breeze stirring leaves above us. Then I felt a chill as the sun ducked behind a cloud. I thought about my son’s question for a moment as I stared at the headstone, at my father’s name chiseled in gray granite.

“He was unlucky,” I said.

“Are we unlucky?” my son said.

I smiled and squeezed his hand.

“No, not at all, son.”

But I knew that on any day, it could all bottom out if I didn’t keep a tight grip on things, and that luck had nothing to do with it.

Learn more about Michael on the Contributors’ page.