The west field is where my wife walked every evening for sixteen years. She walked it in blue rubber boots with a border collie at her heel. After she died of cancer, I kept walking it every Sunday at sunset in her boots two sizes too small. Then last fall the new HOA president across the road decided that field was the perfect spot for her daughter’s rustic outdoor wedding.
She didn’t ask. She bribed a county clerk to forge a permit. She set up two hundred white folding chairs on my wife’s field. What Bridget Halloran didn’t know was that I’d been a Kentucky farmer for thirty-three years. My manure spreading schedule was on file with the county fourteen days in advance, and the Right to Farm Act made the operation untouchable.
At 7:05 Saturday morning, I drove a John Deere onto that field with two thousand gallons in the tank.
My name is Wyatt Caldwell. I have farmed two hundred eighty-seven acres of bluegrass country in Bourbon County, Kentucky since my father handed me the deed in 1991. He’d had it from his father. His father had bought it in 1894 from a Confederate widow named Laetitia Anders who needed the money and didn’t want to look at the back forty anymore. The original survey is still framed in the front parlor.
I run a small cow-calf operation, forty-eight head of black Angus. I cut hay off the west field every June and again every September. I have a thirty-acre patch I lease to a tobacco neighbor every other year. I drive a 2008 Ford F-250 with a tailgate dent I have never bothered to fix. I am fifty-six years old. I served four years in the army from 1988 to 1992, and I do not generally talk about it.
The farm has not been a wealthy operation in three generations. It has been a profitable one in only two, but it has been ours for one hundred thirty-one years and the land has fed every single person on the deed. My wife Maggie died four years ago this past June. Breast cancer. We had eighteen months from diagnosis to the morning I found her hand cold in mine. She was forty-nine.
We had bought the west field together in 1995 with money she saved teaching second grade at Paris Elementary. After we paid it off in 2003, she walked it every evening at sunset. Same blue rubber boots. A border collie named Pearl trotting at her heel. Pearl died the winter before Maggie did. Maggie said it was a small mercy. I didn’t argue.