RED

Behind my house there is a rickety wooden garage.
Its walls are made of railroad ties.
It is held up by two long poles because
it leans to the North and has fallen over twice.
Inside sits a Massey-Ferguson tractor
that has been in my family for generations.
It used to be red, but has long since faded to a rusty pink.

My father’s father was apparently a farmer, just like his father,
and his father, and his father.
Just like my father.
A full line of Gurneys
plowing dirt
cultivating land
planting seed
fertilizing fields
weeding rows of corn
cutting acres and acres and acres of green grass
on that same red Massey-Ferguson tractor.
Each year, come harvest time,
I can see them all,
a patriarchal line of faceless men
with names I have heard but a few times:
Oscar Leslie, William Francis, and John,
riding there
behind my father
on that tractor
calling me, beckoning me to join them.
To lift a bale of hay, place it on the wagon,
help them stack their crop
behind my house,
where it will stay until winter.
Then when it is too cold for the earth to do her own work,
they will use it to sustain the lives
of beasts they will later kill.

My sister now lives on 500 West
in the house my mother grew up in.
The house has been gutted twice, expanded, remodeled, excavated,
painted, stuccoed, covered in rock.
But at its core is a tiny adobe foundation made of red brick.

My mother’s father was once a sheepherder.
But when my mother was only two,
he gave up his ranch
in Panguitch to move his family to Lehi.
Only God knows why.
When they got here, he built them
a red adobe brick house to live in.
With time, the red of those bricks had faded.
And when I was only two,
my grandmother ordered
that the house be repainted.
Only she knows why.
My mother, my aunts, and my uncle,
My father, my sisters, and my brother
took paintbrushes and rollers and they coated that house
with the brightest red paint I have ever seen.
The pigment sunk deep into the thirsty adobe bricks,
and when they had finished, I looked
at that house with my two-year-old eyes
and saw a giant candy apple.
I watched as
the ghost of my grandfather, Glen Orton,
walked across the lawn and picked it up
as if he were plucking it from a tree.
He opened his wide mouth and swallowed
that candy-apple house in a single bite.
When he had finished, he winked at my grandmother,
and he was gone.

Each time I pass that old rickety shed behind my house
I hear whispers, the voices of two men
I have never met.
Oscar and Glen.
They tell me
to repaint my sister’s house,
They tell me
to keep driving that tractor,
to keep cutting the grass behind my house,
to keep spilling the blood of our cattle,
They tell me
to spread that blood all over the Massey-Ferguson,
to make that tractor red again.
Because for some reason,
they expect me to keep them alive.