Fiction

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There was never before and never will be again a place as beautiful to live as Whispering Creek. Father was up long before the ink of night faded from the pages of morning. It was a special time between him and hi Maker as they planned the day’s toil together. As soon as the birds began to sing and the smell of mother’s biscuits drifted through the house, he’d come to wake me. After a hearty breakfast, we were off to the barn to hitch up the horses and out to the fields.

God blessed each sunrise here with soft pastel colors and skies so open that it took our breath away. Sometimes, I’d run as fast as I could trying to race the clouds across the sky, and father would laugh at his barefoot boy. It was a big explosive laugh that started way down deep in his belly and came out of a weathered mouth. His complexion looked like leather from all the years of farming in the elements and from the first moment I was aware I existed, riding through the corn fields on a horse drawn wagon, I knew I would be a farmer too, just like my father.

Time raced by so quickly as we labored in the fields. It was a good way to make a living and I can’t remember a time when any of us complained or felt put upon to feed the nearby town of Whispering Creek. “It was what we were put on this earth to do,” I often heard my mother say, and there was no question in my mind that she spoke the truth.

Before I knew what happened, I was no longer that barefoot boy racing clouds, but a grown man with a family of my own. Father and mother had gone to their eternal rest and the farm with all its responsibilities to Whispering Creek had become mine. It was my duty now to feed the townsfolk and I took that very seriously. Maybe that’s why God blest me with each golden sunrise and splash me with the fire of crimson sunset each night.

I heard from time to time about the goings on in town, the scandals, the murders, the wife beaters and the children born and died. I heard about the marriage of the young, new Reverend and the pretty Rosetta and about the school marm and the traveling salesman. You don’t miss much if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut. It wasn’t my business to judge what went on in town, I didn’t have time to mind other folks lives. I was content to reap what I had sown, as they would when they left Whispering Creek in
pine boxes.

It’s impossible to explain to you why God put such an ordinary fellow as me here to till the rich black fields, but I am most certainly glad He did.

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