Once Upon a Farm

by Rory Feek

  “It’s okay, honey, just let go . . . ,” I whispered as my fingers softly stroked the place where her once-beautiful hair had been. “We’ll be okay, everything’s gonna be okay.” And moments later, the rattle stopped and along with it the life of the greatest person I’ve ever known.

  What happened next was a bit of a blur. Nothing. Everything. We all held hands and said a prayer for the gift that she had been. For the gift that she would always be. Someone called the family pastor, Jerry Young, and Mike Owens from the funeral home across town. One arrived wearing an Indiana basketball jersey with hugs and prayers and the other in a dark suit with a kind smile and a stretcher that waited outside. Mike gently reminding us, “There’s no rush . . . take as much time as you need.” And we did.

  The snow was falling a few hours later as our Chevy Suburban merged onto I-65, headed south out of Indianapolis. Heidi was riding shotgun and Indiana was in the car seat directly behind her. The baby silently watching Finding Nemo on the video screen that folds down from above. Her eyes barely open—not because she was sleepy but because a crust had slowly been taking over her eyelids since we climbed in the truck a few hours before. Pinkeye.

  The sign said twenty-seven miles to Bowling Green. I’d called Theron Hutton, our family doctor back in Tennessee, to ask him what to do. “Wipe them clean, and I’ll call in a prescription you can pick up at the next big town,” he’d said. And so I kept an eye on the road in front of me and one on the little face in the rearview mirror.

  She looked pitiful. Beautiful and precious, but pitiful. One eye already swollen shut and the other nearly there. There was no sign of any unusual pinkness in her little almond eyes when we hugged Joey’s mama and sister Jody goodbye a few hours earlier and pulled out the driveway of the brick house that our family had been living, and dying, in for months. The gunk in and around her eyes had slowly grown thicker over the miles, just like the heaviness of what had just happened and where we were going had been growing in our hearts and minds as we drove.

  “You doin’ alright, Dad?” Heidi asked as she smiled softly and put her hand in mine.

  Strength wasn’t one of our oldest daughter’s strong points, but today she had been incredibly brave and strong. She had surprised even herself, I think.

  “I’m okay,” I answered. And I was. And I wasn’t.

  Just three weeks ago we had been blowing out the candles on Indy’s second birthday cake . . . and my beautiful wife, Joey, had been there to see it happen. She was just a shell of herself by then, but she was there. We all could see the joy in her eyes as two dozen family members gathered around and sang “Happy Birthday” to a pair of little almond eyes that only knew sign language.

  It had been a long goodbye, and I was thankful for it. It could have been fast. Painless for her. But the pain for us would’ve been greater, I think.

  And so we drove on in silence. With peace in our hearts.

  Day One

  A walk to remember . . .

  MARCH 5, 2016.

  We pulled into our driveway at about two in the morning. The moon was shining brightly in the sky, illuminating our big white farmhouse and the red barns that surround it. It looked like a scene out of a movie. A movie that I knew well. The setting of an incredible love story that I never would’ve dreamed I’d get to be part of when we first bought the place in 1999.

  I arose at sunrise just a few hours later and loaded the K-Cup coffee machine and hit start. As I waited for my Marcy Jo’s mug to fill, I glanced out the kitchen window onto the back deck. Everything was the same. Almost just like we had left it five months earlier. The round metal table and chair set where Joey spent many spring mornings filling eggshells with soil and tiny vegetable seeds, preparing for the garden that she loved so. And the red Crosley glider beside the west wall of the farmhouse, covered in peeling paint, where we had held the baby in our arms countless mornings and thanked God for her and the beautiful life He had given to us.

  With my coffee in hand, I slipped on a pair of rubber boots that were sitting by the door and took a stroll down the steps and into the yard. The woodshed beside our Hardy Heater was still filled with the cords of hardwood we had cut the summer before but never used, and the henhouse that was once filled with as many as a hundred small brooder chicks lay empty. The few hens that had remained last fall, we’d given away to neighbors, knowing that we wouldn’t be home to take care of them.

  I cracked opened the door of Joey’s garden shed: her domain for a dozen springs and summers. The place where a good portion of the food in our bellies and freezer had originated. Her hand tools and baskets and canning supplies were all there, but covered in dust. Many of them untouched for the past two years or so.

  Nearby was the fire pit where we’d grilled expensive rib eyes and sipped cheap wine and the clothesline where men’s overalls, women’s jeans, and cloth diapers had once flapped in the soft breeze. On the side of a cedar tree was a bird feeder made from a Wyoming license plate that Joey and I had bought at a fair we played out west and below that a large pig made entirely of horseshoes—a thousand-pound piece of art from a fan who was an artist from Florida. He had brought it to us as a gift and backed his trailer into the yard and set it there, never to be moved again.

  I walked through the gate into the garden. Recently mowed by Thomas, our trusty farmhand who’d been with us for more than five years, it looked more like a grassy field than the huge rectangle of measured rows, filled with corn and cukes and beets and beans, that it usually was. Four rusting T-posts marked where the corners had been as did a row of tall grass with a hand-printed sign that read “ASPARAGUS” that Joey had put up years before to keep me or anyone else from mowing down the precious plants that grew back year after year.

  Behind the garden were the fruit trees and blackberry bushes we had planted. And the wooden raised-bed boxes that I had built for Joey to grow strawberries. And from where I stood, I could see three of my wife’s favorite birthday gifts from years past. Memories of her sweet smile lighting up the farm.

  The first one, a ten-by-twelve-foot greenhouse I had found a picture of online and built for her three years ago. I had no idea what I was doing, but I made countless trips to Home Depot and spent days cutting and recutting joists because it was something she had always wanted. Needed, actually. I gave it to her for her birthday in early September 2013. By the time we turned the page of the calendar that hangs on our back door to October, there was spinach and kale growing inside. She really got to use it only one full summer, but she loved it and knew that it could take her favorite season of the year—garden season—and extend it a bit on both ends, and that excited her.

  The second birthday gift—a hundred-year-old outhouse with a hand-painted sign that said “Potting House”—still sat at the top of the rise by the windmill. I’d found it in a wooded lot in Nolensville in late August 2005. It was covered in vines, and you wouldn’t have even known it was there unless someone told you. The man who owned the property said he’d give it to me if I could find a way to haul it away. I had a truck and a trailer and knew it wasn’t just trash; it was a part of someone’s family. Someone’s story. And rather than letting it get set on fire or carried to the dump, I knew it needed to be part of someone else’s story. Someone who would appreciate it. And I knew just the person.

  There’s a series of pictures in a photo album somewhere, and an even clearer one in my mind, of me with my hands over Joey’s eyes on her thirtieth birthday. Me saying, “Are you ready?” then pulling my hands down and saying, “Happy birthday, honey!” and her throwing her arms around my neck. Still on the trailer from pulling it out of the woods with my neighbor Spencer’s help, Joey loved it and knew exactly where to put it and what to put inside. And now all the years later, I didn’t have to walk across the yard to know that it, too, was still filled with canning jars and tobacco sticks and twine along with other things she had a thousand uses for around the farm.

  The last of the three isn’t
just one birthday gift; it’s two. Just north of the garden stands a large barn made mostly of recycled wood from a dismantled hundred-year-old tobacco barn that had stood on the property. Once filled with lawn mowers, garden tillers, and a wood splitter, the new, old barn now houses two quarter horses named Moon and Ria. Originally from Texas, the mares were owned by close friends of ours who gifted them to me last fall so I could gift them to Joey. We were in Newnan, Georgia, at the time. Joey was deep in the middle of six weeks of chemo and radiation following a ten-hour surgery that she had undergone in Chicago two months earlier, and her fortieth birthday was only a few weeks away. She loved horses and had one named Velvet when she was a teenage girl and had always wanted another, but it had just never come to be. We were always too busy and she was much too practical to worry about making that dream come true up until then. But time was precious now and I knew that there was a good chance it was going to be “now or never.” And so I drew up some plans to open a wall of that barn and put in two horse stalls and a small paddock surrounding them. At a Cracker Barrel one morning, I scribbled out where the stalls could go and texted a picture of it to Thomas. And then I made a call to our friends Ray and Linda in Texas. By the time we came home on Joey’s birthday weekend two weeks later, it was a horse barn, and soon after, a red and a blue roan were eating hay inside two beautiful stalls that Thomas had built.

  Joey had got to ride them only one time. She and I both saddled up and rode into the field that day beside each other, her on the red and me on the blue, holding hands, riding off into the sun that was setting just behind the cemetery that we rode out to, circled, and rode back. A trip that now seems to have foreshadowed the ride our lives were about to take.

  From the garden I could see the horses were still there. A bit chunkier than they were last fall since the fields were lush with grass and there’d been no one to ride them, but they looked healthy and happy as can be in their new home. I walked over, and they came to me. Moon put her muzzle into my armpit, and I rubbed behind her ear. “Good to see you, girl,” I said, as she whinnied softly—my eyes focused on the round wooden fence with the headstones inside of it just across the gate and through the field.

  I walked through the paddock and opened the large gate to let the horses out. They sized me up at first, as they passed through the gate, then started moving a bit faster until they both took off running, and I watched them. Not just running but flying. Just thankful to be free. To be alive.

  They stopped and settled in a spot in the center of the back field, and I set my coffee cup on a wooden post and started for the cemetery. When we bought the farmhouse in the fall of 1999, I had originally put a small fence around the nine headstones that were there. Built to keep cows from getting in and pushing the stones down. I had recently had that fence torn down and a new, larger one put up. It was the call I made to John Osborne, our local fence builder, from the hallway of Ball Memorial Hospital in Muncie about four months before. The news we had just received was more of the bad kind, and after another surgery we’d be bringing Joey back home, along with hospice, to her mama’s house. At the time the doctors thought Joey would be here for only a few more weeks, max. So I told John, “I know you’re busy, but hurry, if you can.”

  He was at our house the next day, and within a few days after that, the large three-rail fence that I was now looking at for the first time had been installed. “Make it a good bit bigger, John,” I had told him. “Room for her . . . and for me one day . . . and maybe our children and theirs.”

  Not a phone call I wanted to make but one that I was thankful I did. The fence was beautiful, and there was a wonderful shady area in the front where we would soon add one more stone and name to the others that marked those buried there.

  The sun was still barely rising as I opened the gate and walked in and looked around. There in the center of a small grove of sassafras trees were the headstones of Calvin and Sarah Hardison, who originally built and lived in our farmhouse, and their daughter, Ida, and her husband, William, and a few others. Names associated with this farm for much of the 1800s and barely into the next century. The earliest date on the Hardisons’ stones was for their four-year-old son, Orlando Boon, buried in 1862, and the last one was Sarah’s, dated 1906. And in front of those was one made of much newer marble with my mother Rita’s name on it from where we had buried some of her ashes in 2014.

  I found a spot on a makeshift bench we had put out there years earlier and sat down. Not really believing that this was happening.

  But it was.

  Joey had passed away the day before, on a Friday . . . and that coming Tuesday afternoon we would lay her to rest here. It was surreal. All of it was. I kept thinking of the dozens of times through the years that Joey and I had walked out to the cemetery and talked about being buried beside each other in this spot someday. Dreaming about someday. A day that seemed hard to even imagine. But now here we were.

  And I couldn’t help but think about another time that I had sat in almost this exact spot as part of a music video for “When I’m Gone,” a song we had recorded that imagined a day when the singer had passed away and the man in the story was left alone. We had filmed the music video at our farmhouse. In our bedroom . . . on the porch overlooking the back field. And I had made pretty much the same walk I made this morning and ended up at the same cemetery, sitting in almost exactly the same spot. Acting. Imagining for the camera, and the sake of the song—a life without my beautiful wife. A pretty day very much like today. Except now I wasn’t imagining it. The whole song had come to be, almost word for word.

  I talk often, to pretty much anyone who will listen, about the magic of songwriting and of storytelling. Of not knowing where the story’s going and how, if you have faith, the story will write itself better than you can write it. And how life is the same way. If you let it be.

  At least my life has been. Joey’s and mine together has.

  I sat there for a long time thinking about the days ahead of us. And the years behind us. All that has happened. And all that is going to happen that I don’t know anything about. And all the lessons I’ve learned. The ones I’m still learning.

  And how now, a new story was about to unfold. As one chapter was closing, a new one was beginning, and like it or not, my only option was to turn the page and read on.

  A Bigger Love

  Love is bigger than fear.

  It was a day or two after we buried Joey. And I was sitting at the kitchen table with our middle daughter Hopie. She was twenty-seven years old at the time with beautiful brown hair and soft green eyes. She’d been taking care of our farm for the last six months or so while we had been gone. While we’d been at hospitals in Chicago and Atlanta for cancer treatment and then in Indiana when the treatments had stopped working.

  Hopie had made trips to Indiana every chance she could, for as long as she could, to be with Joey. Some trips she made with Heidi, and some alone, by herself. Once she stayed for a month. Helping with Indiana. Helping with Joey.

  But that was in the past now, and we were all at home, back in the farmhouse in Tennessee. Everyone except Joey. Through the kitchen window I could see the field and the cemetery where her wooden cross stood.

  “Is there anything you want to tell me?” I asked. Hopie was sitting in the seat at the table where her mother always sat. To the right of mine. The kitchen, just like the house, was clean, and fresh flowers were on the table. All Hopie’s doing. She wanted things to be just right when we got home.

  “No,” she answered. Her smile as big and kind as ever.

  Hopie has a special gene in her that the rest of us weren’t given. She is filled with joy all the time. Even when she is upset or heartbroken or scared . . . she radiates joy like no one I’ve ever known. From the time she was little, Hopie would brighten every room she walked into. Always rooting for the underdog and the misunderstood, she loved everyone the same, no matter who you were or where you were from.

  In my first b
ook I talked about how strong she is. How much weight she carries on her shoulders without anyone ever knowing and how she keeps her feelings inside. So deep that at times even she doesn’t know what she’s feeling or how to respond. Without me knowing it, that weight was about to come crashing down along with a bunch of feelings that I never even knew were there.

  “Are you sure?” I asked again. Her right leg crossed over her left, nervously wiggling back and forth (a Feek habit all of us have).

  “What are you asking for, Dad?” she answered, her smile only slightly fading.

  “The truth, Hopie,” I said. “Just tell me.”

  Her eyes started getting red, and tears started to fall. A big, big deal for Hopie, who almost never cries. Her hands were shaking now, and a lifetime of secrets were upon her.

  “You won’t understand,” she answered through her tears. “You’ll judge me.”

  “Just tell me, Hopie,” I said again. “It’s okay.”

  And she did.

  She told me that her friend Wendy is more than just her friend. And that they had been dating for almost a year. And she was in love.

  I’m not sure what I was expecting her to say, but I wasn’t expecting that. A tear started to fall from my eye now.

  “See, you’re judging me,” she said. And without even knowing I was, I was. She could see it on my face, see it in my eyes.

  “I wasn’t gonna tell you right now,” she said, “you’ve been through so much.” Immediately turning her pain to compassion for me and for Joey.

  What happened next, I’m not really sure. We talked. We talked for a long time. I said some things I shouldn’t have said. Reacting. Trying not to react.

  The worst of it all, though, was my first reaction. My gut feelings down deep inside. Didn’t she understand that I had a two-year-old baby, for God’s sake, and I had just spent the drive home from Indiana and the last five months before that thinking about how I was going to need to protect the baby now more than ever? From hurt. From pain. From sin.