August Drought And A Funeral
By the first week of August the rain had quit and there was no argument about when it quit, because it had quit cleanly, the way certain things quit in this country, with a last showery afternoon on the twenty-third of July and then nothing at all, and the thermometer on the side of the feed store began the long straight climb it makes in a dry year, and the fields began the long straight descent they make in the same year, and everybody agreed without agreeing out loud that this was going to be one of those.
The corn
looked good from the road
for a while
and then looked good from the road
only if you did not stop
and walk into it,
and then did not look good
even from the road.
The leaves curled up
along their long green edges
the way a man's hand
curls up in sleep,
loosely,
without meaning to.
The pasture
went from green
to a gold
that a man
from another country
might have called beautiful,
and a man from this country
knew better than to call
anything.
The creek behind the lumberyard
thinned
and thinned
and by the middle of August
was only a series
of standing pools
with minnows going nowhere
in them,
and the kingfisher
who had worked that creek
since anyone could remember
went somewhere else
and did not tell us
where.
The funeral, when it came, was not the one the town had been quietly expecting, which was Earl Nygaard's, because Earl had been sick in the spring and slow