Going Home

Going Home

D. A. Ratliff

I hadn’t planned on going there. Fate brought me to speak at a seminar in my home state, and the fact that I was only an hour’s drive from my old homestead gnawed at me. I tried to push it away, but the itch was there and needed attention.

Foolish to do it. I closed that chapter of my life thirty years before and made my escape from the doldrums of country life, never looking back. Didn’t want to look back. Memories suppressed were the best kind as far as I was concerned. But I did it anyway. I decided to go home.

A flurry of activity by my assistant secured a change in my travel plans, an extra night in the hotel, and a rental car. After a leisurely breakfast with colleagues before they caught their flights home, I set out down the state highway to the town where I once existed.

I say existed because I despised every moment in that backward place. I was born for more than the 4H Club. I hated cows, chickens, and plows. And my family—they were what I loathed the most.

As I neared the small town, I was a bit surprised at the pressure building in my chest. The day I left seething with anger, I never looked back. That burn of hate was building again, but I pushed it back. No need for that anger now. I was free.

The town had changed little. A rail line cut through the center of Main Street, several shops shuttered and dilapidated. The diner my father dragged me to on Saturday mornings was still open. I had to chuckle, probably still serving those awful, doughy pancakes and rancid coffee. A few old codgers sat outside the courthouse, moving nothing but their eyes as they watched my luxury rental pass through. I laughed out loud. I could hear them now, Who’s that city slicker? If they knew, they would bust a vein. If they knew.

The cotton mill on the edge of town was in ruins. My mother and grandmother had worked there. Both became sick with brown lung from the cotton dust, and I got so tired of them hacking and spitting mucus. Not how people should have to live. Certainly not how I had to live.

Two miles on the other side of town, I slowed down to look for the gate. I almost passed it by, but the old mailbox was still standing. Bent, broken, and rusted, but it was there. I turned onto the overgrown gravel drive and drove in as far as I dared until the car was past the tree line and, hopefully, not seen from the highway.

I exited the car and looked down at my expensive loafers. I hadn’t planned on hiking on this trip, and I didn’t think of packing boots. This place wasn’t worth scuffing my shoes, so I would watch where I stepped.

As I walked deeper into the now overgrown land, I had to admit it was beautiful. The grove of trees where my parents built the house was thick with underbrush, lush and green. Beyond the tree line were the family cotton fields. I leased those out, not stupid enough to lose money on the place. Just wanted no part of life here.

When I spotted the path, I stopped. A chill passed through me despite the building heat of a summer day in Louisiana. My mother had painstakingly dug out the path, laying steel rails across it so she could terrace the slope, something she had seen in a magazine. She had made me help her. Hour after hour, leveling each slightly raised terrace and filling it with finely ground granite. Made her feel like a queen to have such a grand path to the house. Made her look like a fool to me.

As I continued along the walkway my mother created, it was apparent that all that fine granite that had sparkled with bits of quartz in the sunlight was now nothing but dirt. The metal rails lay exposed, tree limbs scattered across her grand path. The carefully manicured edges were ragged, covered with weeds. It was grand, all right.

It was at the end of the path that I felt my first pang of regret. I shouldn’t have come here. Every cell in my body shook as the old hatred for how they tried to ruin my life came flaring back. They had tried, but I had won.

Cinder blocks that once served as the foundation were all that remained of the large, white, French-style farmhouse. I cracked a slight smile from a bit of morbid satisfaction. There were still scorch marks on the blocks from the fire that raged that night. Now only a partial outline of the house remained as vegetation filled in where rooms once existed.

If they had only listened to me, this wouldn’t have happened. But they met my childhood dream to be an attorney with disdain and outright amusement. I had to follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, grow cotton and be happy about it. It was my fate in life.

No. It was not my fate. I was a brilliant student, and the local schools couldn’t keep up with my need for knowledge. Only one of my teachers recognized that, and he arranged lessons through the mail from a college for me. I lived for those lessons. I had to rush home to get the mail before my mother got home from the mill, and my father came out of the fields. He would laugh at my crazy ideas and throw the envelopes in my face if he had gotten to the mailbox first. His words cut through me still. You ain’t going to college, boy. You are gonna stay right here and raise cotton.

I was nearing seventeen when I began to formulate my plan. I agreed to work for my father during the summer before my senior year in high school. He was so happy, confident that he had beaten me down. He had no idea. Before I started my senior year, I applied for life insurance policies on my parents from one of those companies that didn’t do medical exams—or rather, my grandmother did. The brown lung and erratic, swallow breathing made her lethargic and confused, and she signed the applications without question. I paid the premiums from my summer earnings in her name via money orders for five-hundred-thousand-dollar policies on each of my parents, and I was the beneficiary. My parents may have been fools, but I was not. I stole the key to my grandmother’s safety deposit box at the bank. Small town—who would ever doubt a loving grandson wouldn’t go to the bank for his grandmother to put something in it for her. Buffoons they were, but the insurance documents were safe.

During my senior year, I applied to the colleges that I wanted to attend. With my top grades, schools clamored for me as scholarship offers arrived without my parents’ knowledge. I was no fool and had secretly rented a post office box. As the end of the school year approached, I hatched my plan.

An old oil furnace heated the house, and propane gas provided the cooking heat. I began to sabotage the furnace in February so that there would be a trail of repairs. Then the night I made my escape, I waited until my parents and grandmother were sound asleep, and I blew up the furnace, which in turn caused the gas line to explode. Flames engulfed the house within minutes. I called the fire department seconds before I lit the oil furnace on fire. When the fire department rolled up, they found me soot-covered, my hands burned from trying to rescue my family. The firefighters, and more importantly, the police, believed my story without question.

The town mourned my tragic loss. I played the shocked son and allowed all the good folks to take care of me. I graduated from high school, and a month later, I turned eighteen and received a settlement from the insurance company for the fire and the life insurance policies. I was out of this town as fast as I could flee and never said goodbye.

With one last look around, I decided it was time to leave. I had enough nostalgia for a lifetime. As I walked along the path toward the car, I took in the dappled sunlight streaming through the thick copse of trees. I knew I should feel remorse, but I didn’t. If I hadn’t escaped, I wouldn’t be a federal judge and wield the power I now possessed.

Better than growing cotton.