Clearing the Sky part.2

"Fertile," he laughed as he reached down and picked up a double handful of leaf-rot Joam. "This is the land, son! This is it. I've tried all kinds of land!"

nostrils, Then he smelled the dirt. He whiffed and whiffed the smell of this wild dirt into his

"Just like fresh air," he said as he let the dirt run between his fingers. "It's pleasant to touch, too," he added.

"But, Dad-"I said.

cul of alk

"I know what you think," he interrupted. "Your mother thinks the same thing. She wonders why I ever climbed this mountain top to raise my potatoes, yams, and tomatoes) But, Jess," he almost whispered, "anything grown in new ground like this has a better flavor. Wait until my formatoes are ripe. You'll never taste sweeter tomatoes in your life."

"They'll soon be ripe, too," I said as I looked at the dozen or more rows of tomatoes on the lower side of the patch.

Then above the tomatoes were a half-dozen rows of yams. Above the yams were, perhaps, three dozen rows of potatoes.

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"I don't see a weed in this patch," I laughed. "Won't they grow here?" "I won't let em," he said. "Now this is what I've been wanting you to see!"

"This is the cleanest patch I've ever seen," I bragged. "But I still don't see why you climbed the top of this mountain to clear this patch. And you did all this against your doctor's orders!"

"Which one?" he asked, laughing.

Then he sat down on a big oak stump and I sat down on a small black-gum stump near him. This was the only place on the mountain where the sun could shine to the ground. And on the lower side of the clearing there was a rim of shadow over the rows of dark stalwart plants loaded with green tomatoes.

"What is the reason for your planting this patch up here?" I asked.

"Twenty times in my life," he said, "a doctor has told me to go home and be with my family as long as I could. Told me not to work, Not to do anything but to live and enjoy the few days I had left with me. If the doctors have been right," he said, winking at me, "Thave cheated death many times! Now, I've reached the years the Good Book allows to man in his lifetime upon this earth! Three score years and ten!"

He got up from the stump and wiped the raindrops of sweat from his red-wrinkled face with his big blue bandanna.

"And something else, Jess," he said, motioning for me to follow him to the upper edge of the clearing, "you won't understand until you reach three score and ten! After these years your time is borrowed. And when you live on that kind of time, something goes back. Something I cannot explain. You go back to to the e places you knew and loved. See this steep hill slope." "He pointed down from the upper rim of the clearing toward the deep valley below. "Your mother and I, when she was nineteen and I was twenty-two cleared this mountain

slope together. We raised corn, beans, and pumpkins here," he continued, his voice rising with excitement-he talked with his hands, too. "Those were the days. This wasn't the land one had to build up. It was already here as God had made it and we had to do was to clear the trees and burn the bush. I ploughed this mountain with cattle the first time it was ever ploughed. And we raised more than a barrel of con to the shock. That's why I came back up here. I went back to our youth. And this was the only land left like that was."

"And, Jess," he bragged, "regardless of my three score years and ten, I ploughed it Ploughed it with a mule! I have, with just a little help, done all the work. It's like the land your mother and I used to farm here when I brought my gun to the field and took home a mess of fox squirrels every evening."

I looked at the vast mountain slope below where my mother and father had farmed And I could remember, years later, when they farmed this land. It was on this steep slope that my father once made me a little wooden plough. That was when I was six years old and they brought me to the field to thin com. I lost my little plough in a furrow and I cried and cried until he made me another plough. But I never loved the second plough as 1 did the first one.

Now, to look at the mountain slope, grown up with tall trees, many of them big enough to have sawed into lumber at the mill, it was hard to believe that my father and mother had cleared this mountain slope and had farmed it for many years. For many of the trees were sixty feet tall and the wild vines had matted their tops together,

"And, Jess," he almost whispered, "the doctors told me to sit still and to take life easy. I couldn't do it. I had to work. I had to go back. I had to smell this rich loam again. This land is not like the land Thad to build to grow aifalfa. This is real land. I had to come back and dig in it. I had to smell it, sift it through my fingers again. And I wanted to taste yams, tomatoes, and potatoes grown in this land."

From this mountain top I looked far in every direction over the rugged hills my father and mother had cleared and farmed corn, maize, and cane. The one slope they hadn't cleared was the one from which my father had cleared his last, small patch.

I followed him from his clearing in the sky, down a new path, toward the deep valley below.

"But why do you have so many paths coming from the flat up the steep second bluff?" I asked, since he had promised that he would explain this to me later.

"Oh, yes," he said. "Early last spring, I couldn't climb straight up the steep path. That was when the doctor didn't give me a week to live. I made a longer, easier path so I wouldn't have to do so much climbing. Then, as I got better," he explained, "I made another path that was a little steeper. And as I continued to get better. I made steeper paths. That was one way of knowing I was getting better all the time!"

I followed him down the path that wound this way and that, three times the length of the path we had climbed