Free A Far Piece to Canaan by Sam Halpern

worn, but there was no mistaking its identity to a 1940s farm boy. This was part of a workhorse’s hames. I grabbed the knob, pulled, and brought up a rotten, curved piece of wood attached to rusted metal. I wondered if I had geared Daisy or Gabe with this relic.
    I took a deep breath and tried to imagine the smell of the feed room where we kept the harnesses. A delicious odor, harness oil and cattle feed. Perhaps Fred and I had eaten sweet apples on this very spot, lying on feed sacks and dipping the apples in coarse cattle salt. My childhood friends were reborn nostalgically in my mind. Funny, Mom always worried I’d become like them. In retrospect, I had adopted many of their ways of thinking, especially their straitlaced view of what was expected of a man.
    Nora’s question about one of my colleagues came to mind when she urged me to make more friends. “What’s wrong with Jason Tilden as a friend, Samuel? He’s bright and humorous. His wife, Regina, is fun.”
    I didn’t answer that Jason’s lectures were canned, that his creative work peeled back at least three atoms of depth, and that while Regina Tilden was fun and nice, I had accidentally walked in on Jason servicing a coed.
    No, what I did was change the subject and use any excuse to bring back the bubbly Nora I loved so much. Why the hell hadn’t I told her that I couldn’t respect a guy who didn’t challenge his work and wasn’t faithful to his wife? I wondered if I would rat out Jason Tilden if I could call back those years. I doubted that Fred would have done it, or Lonnie. What Tilden did was unacceptable to them. A man did his best at work and was faithful to his friends and his woman or he wasn’t a man.
    Thoughts of Fred had ricocheted through my mind for several days following Nora’s comment. I wondered where he was, and how he was doing. He had wanted to see me again and I hadn’t responded. Had he needed me? I didn’t know, but I had found excuses why I couldn’t make the time. I had lived most of my adult existence by the creed of these hill people, but I sure as hell hadn’t followed it that time. Now I had to face them, face Fred, and it bothered me.
    I pitched the hames into the grass and walked to the car thinking about the first time the old barn had made a difference in my life. It was 1945 and . . .
    . . . I was having a great summer. It turned out to be an even better summer than I thought it would because the war ended. The day it was over, I was standing by the chicken house and heard Dad yell, “Liz! Liz! It’s over, Liz! It’s over!” and I went running up to the house and busted through the screen door. There was Mom, crying and clapping her hands and Dad just staring off in the distance with his eyes wet and Lowell Thomas talking on the radio. The war was over and my brother Bob would be coming home safe, and that meant more than anything in the world to Mom and Dad. Me too!
    We got a call from Bob a few weeks later, and he said his ship had just got into San Francisco, but he didn’t know when he would be getting home. We didn’t hear from him for quite a while, then one Sunday morning he come walking up the lane, just walking through the ruts in his sailor suit, carrying his duffel bag over his shoulder with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I was in the yard, gave a yell, run and flung my arms and legs around his middle, yelling and yelling and him laughing and trying to hold me and the duffel bag at the same time. Soon everybody was there, crying and laughing and having a great time.
    Just a couple hours after Bob got home it seemed everybody in the hills knew about us having a boy home from the war and neighbors started dropping in. First the MacWerters; then Rags Wallace; Bess Clark and his wife with Buster their boy; Pers Shanks and his wife, Bea; Mr. Lamb and their boy who had been in the navy; Mr. and Mrs. Shackelford,