The Betrayer (First Line Challenge)

Welcome Short Story First Line Challenge members and anyone else who finds this story.

"Music is the best means we have of digesting time."

W. H. Auden

The Betrayer (940 words)

The only sound in the quiet evening was the lonesome wail of John Winston's old fiddle weeping 'Wildwood Flower.' He sat alone in his aging farmhouse save for his yellow tiger-striped cat, Taffy. His mind slipped back to another Saturday night of the past. With his hair slicked back, he'd changed out of his dusty overall jeans and headed to the gathering spot of most farm kids his age. A live band played for the square dancing, but during an intermission a record player blasted June Carter Cash singing one of her mama's songs about love and heartache from being betrayed by an uncaring lover. He heard 'Wildwood Flower' for the first time and he also spied for the first time the most beautiful girl to ever grace the Deschutes County Grange Hall.

Mary Stanton came from the big city, Portland, to visit her country cousins Jim and Sarah Connor for the summer. She reminded John of the wild yellow rose he found growing near the pond at the edge of the alfalfa field. She didn't really belong there, but she made the best of the situation. He leaned against a wall, drinking a Dr. Pepper and cooling off, fanning himself with his cowboy hat. Mary bravely marched across the concession area to introduce herself. He usually talked the ears off his herd of cows, but found his tongue tied tighter than wire on a bale of hay. Her eyes smiled, John remembered and he mouthed the words of love and betrayal as he played his fiddle. Of course Mary never really betrayed him in all those years since, unless you counted her dying last summer before him.

Mary may have been a city girl, but she took to farm life like a house afire. When they got married, his parents built them a small farm house at the back end of the property so he could have privacy, but guaranteeing he'd stay on to work the farm. Mary took over the chores revolving around care and feeding of the chickens from his mama. She got up with him at the crack of dawn, and they drank cups of strong black coffee before she pulled on rubber boots and he slipped on his shit-kickers as they left the front porch. John headed out to the fields to move the big sprinklers from one acre to the next, while Mary fed her hens and collected the morning eggs. She washed them off carefully and packed them into cartons before depositing them in cold storage up at the big house. Her mother-in-law sold them along with honey, fresh vegetables and big showy dahlias at a farm stand on the main road to town. A lot of folks drove out to get farm fresh food.

John and Mary met up at nine each morning for a big pancake breakfast, then he headed off to do more chores with his dad and Mary tended to the house. He ate out in the fields or in the barn with his dad and didn't get back to Mary's loving arms until the end of the day when she was putting her chickens to bed behind the safety of their henhouse away from owls and foxes. She tended to the eggs laid during the day and then they'd return to their little house for a dinner of pot roast or stewed chicken and dumplings that she'd been cooking on their woodstove all afternoon. Sometimes she surprised him with a blackberry cobbler. She certainly surprised him with a son and daughter that they raised on the freedom of all that space.

John sighed and stopped fiddling. He scratched Taffy under her chin and she stretched contentedly toward him so he'd do it some more. He wondered where all the years went. He looked around him and saw the microwave in which he heated the frozen meals his daughter Margie cooked and brought him once a week, the coffee maker that started all by itself each morning and the dishwasher that took a week to fill with the cups and plates and forks of one old coot.

No, it wasn't Mary that betrayed him, but time. Over the years the acres became his and then eventually when farming stopped being something he could do to support his family they were sold off to subdividers who put in housing tracts. He no longer needed to get up in the morning to make hay while the sun was shining, but he also didn't have a herd of cows to feed or a flock of chickens to care for. The rural had become suburban and just down the road, people got all the honey and vegetables and eggs they ever wanted at the brand new Wal-Mart. Of course the eggs never compared to the eggs Mary sold with their thick whites and golden domed yolks. All food is a mere shadow of what they produced even twenty years ago.

John put his fiddle away and heated up a Tupperware container of pot roast, potatoes and carrots in the microwave. Afterwards, he fed Taffy, and then pulled out a CD from the pile his son brought over earlier. He popped one in the player by John McCutcheon playing on hammered dulcimer, "The Wind that Shakes the Barley." There was a medley with Wildwood Flower, Red Wing, Wake up Susan and the Temperance Reel, called ‘The Carter Store Medley.' He and Taffy settled into the recliner and as he listened to the music, he went back to remembering time as it used to be, before it betrayed him and took away his Wildwood Flower.

© Susan K Barton 2007

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