This Nameless Field Raymond Luczak

THIS NAMELESS FIELD

Raymond Luczak

Among the strident goldenrods, we kids knew exactly where to find clusters of barely pink strawberries and avoid the thorny roses, abandoned when its owner arrived to find his old house burning one spring afternoon.

We watched the firefighters from our porch. The owner didn’t rebuild. He left, the winds brushing the ashes away, tumbling across roof shingles spun about like frisbees. They became patches waiting to be sown right onto the unkempt quilt

of grass and goldenrod. We dared not approach the charred remains, just like the cave-ins that hadn’t then swollen with water. They were mammoth holes sloped with young trees trying to stand upright. We didn’t understand how this nameless field

could be hived with ghosts invisible, their memories of the Old World still fresh with ache in their bones, their exhilaration of pulleying carts of iron ore up from the pits, their horror when a tunnel buckled under. Sometimes nothing more

could be done after extricating the dead from the rubble and tearing down the headframe. Yet the more they dug nearby, the more Ironwood would get emptied and buried in their glory days of war overseas. We were all Americans, weren’t we?

Nearby a thin row of birch saplings stood. We didn’t know how quickly they’d grow tall into a muscular wall that would’ve blocked our view of St. Michael’s spire had it not been razed for a parking lot. Who knew our church would fall too?

Then came another summer when we came unexpectedly across those roof shingles, having already forgotten the burnt house, the man who’d owned it, and the roses too. We lifted each tar-hot shingle to find tiny snakes electric-shocked by the sun writing across the white-yellow grass.

We gathered up their squiggly forms in our hands. We squealed at them trying to wrestle free of us. We giggled at their desperation, not knowing that souls, like ours, bound to this field are forever excavated under our footprints. We didn’t know we’d become caretakers.