The Road Home by Patrick E. Craig

“Dutch closes early these days, so I’d get going if I were you. Good luck.”
    Bull turned and walked back to the cruiser. He was laughing. Johnny could hear him say something about Jenny Springer and laugh some more. Suddenly Johnny felt very out of place. He turned the engine over and put the van in gear. Bull pulled out and passed him. Johnny could see that he was still laughing.
    Johnny headed out of town, trying to remember Bull’s directions. Back down Walnut, left on Liberty, right on Bever, and follow the road to Apple Creek.

    The countryside was beautiful, but Johnny wasn’t able to admire much of it as he slowly nursed his van along the road. It was a lovely day, and a nip of fall was in the air. The smell of fallen leaves and wet earth and freshly burned wheat stubble, something he remembered from his childhood adventures to the farm country around his grandfather’s place at South Hampton, wafted in through the half-open window. Then Johnny saw something that grabbed his attention.
    Up ahead on the right-hand side of the road, a group of men were working together in a large hayfield. They were harvesting and baling the hay, but they weren’t using tractors or gas-powered machinery. Instead, a team of horses pulled their baler through the field. A man out front with a horse-drawn hay cutter was mowing down the greenish-brown hay. Behind him, another piece of machinery was raking the hay into long rows. And at the end of the line, a big machine was being pulled by four horses. It was scooping up the hay, baling it, and then dumping the bales onto a large flatbed wagon following close behind.
    But it wasn’t the machinery that attracted Johnny’s attention. It was the men operating the machines. They wore straw hats with widebrims and overalls or jeans with blue shirts. None of the men had mustaches, but most of them had beards.
    Johnny pulled over and got out of the van. He walked to the fence and stared at the scene. There were men of all ages in the group. An old man with a long white beard operated the cutter. Behind him younger men with dark beards drove the horse teams as boys walked alongside them. It seemed to Johnny that the men were teaching the boys as they moved through the field, pointing to the row of hay and calling the boys’ attention to the teams of horses and machines as they walked. It was strange, but these were like the men he had seen in his vision or dream or whatever it was that night in San Francisco.
    Johnny watched intently as the long file of machines turned the corner of the big field and came along the fence line. They obviously had just started working this particular field because they only had a few swaths cut and baled. As they passed close by him, Johnny heard some of the men singing.
    â€œ Lassen Sie ihn, der gelegen hat, seine Hand auf dem Pflug nicht sehen sich um! Presse zur Absicht! Presse Jesus Christus! Derjenige, der Christus gewinnt, wird sich mit ihm von den Toten am jüngsten Tag erheben .”
    Without knowing why, Johnny waved at the men. A man in a black hat waved back at him. Then the emptiness that had been so poignant back in his flat in San Francisco filled his heart again. Suddenly, powerfully, a realization swept over him—nothing about his life and how he was living made any sense. The only thing that was real for him in that moment were the men and their horses and machines and the land they were working.
    The smell of the fresh-cut hay rose up to him, and the hot sun beat down on his face. To his surprise, Johnny found tears in his eyes. Why, he didn’t know. Maybe he was crying for the lost dreams of his youth, or for the foolishness that had gotten him into such a mess, or for the fact that he had never really known his father. Soon, great sobs weretorn out of him, and he clung to the fence to keep from falling. His head was down, and he didn’t hear the approach of the man with the black hat until