It was fall. Vast fields of straw colored corn plants should have spread from the edge of the road on through the dormant field. A red cart, it’s axle snapped by a freak accident, sat derelict on the side of the field. Mosses were beginning to crawl up onto it’s wheels that no longer turned. Leaning against that cart was Maximillian Romulus West, who preferred to be called Max.
The sinking sun cast a ray on his troubled face as it dipped beneath the horizon yet again. Max glanced at the cart, and then turned and began to walk north along the road.
His pace was not the brisk walk of a man with purpose, but almost a leisurely tempo which could show little more than either patience or indifference. Max was almost twenty-one now, and he had worked in the fields that bordered his path for as long as he could remember. Most of those fields were now worked by hired hands, and the West family worked only the south quarter.
The potatoes that would soon be harvested lie to the east of him. Those had been planted by Max’s father Alex, who did most of the work around the farm. Max and Alex worked together, and made quite a team in all matters agricultural or athletic.
Alex West had conquered a great number of things in life; poverty, sickness, despair, but he had failed to defeat chance. Max’s father had died two weeks ago, and been buried promptly afterward, in the land he had worked for thirty years. Now, Max could no longer feel the way he did when his father and him worked on the fields together. It was almost as if God, not being content with his father’s soul, had sucked the life right out of Max. No longer could he feel invigorated by the smell of a freshly tilled field, and no longer could he grin upon hearing his father exclaim mock surprise at the height of the corn fields.
On the way to town, one warm August morning, Alex West’s old red truck was broadsided by a young man in a sunshine yellow corvette. Alex had died upon impact, and Max had been thrown into a ditch, but was otherwise unhurt. The driver of the corvette was also killed, though Max wasn’t sure if it was the crash or the great amount of alcohol that had somehow found it’s way into his bloodstream that did it.
The funeral had been traditional and kept simple, just as Alex would have wanted.
Family members shuffled into the chapel, spoke highly of the deceased, and then left. None of this, noted Max, had made the situation any better.
The eulogy had been given by the local priest. Throughout the entire speech, the young West simply sat and pretended to listen. In reality, he had not even been able to comprehend what the priest was saying, or why he was saying it. In the end, his father was still gone forever. At one point he did listen. Father Carter pointed out that Alex had lived a life of virtue, free of greed, and that others should learn from him.
"Learn from him? Awfully hard to learn from a dead man," Max had silently fumed. He missed his father too much to fathom. Nothing was making sense. It was as if the world had been held together with Alex West himself as the cornerstone, and when he was removed, all the order in the universe fell to pieces, leaving only meaningless chaos.
The weight of a thousand questions on his back, Max staggered, and then leaned on a nearby fence post for support. Nowhere could he find the energy to go on.
"Right here," he thought, "Right here I’m going to lie down and let the Earth take me. I must know why the world is what it is."
Ages may have passed in the time he spent crouched there, staring into distant places few minds venture to. He clung to the post and gave himself to whatever forces were willing to take him.
After some time, Max realized he was staring at the field in front of him. In that field, he knew, life was at work. Never did it stop to acknowledge the tears of a broken man, nor did it delay for a war. Life did not stop for anyone or anything. It kept working until the bitter end.
Just like my father did, thought Max. So there it was. Perhaps not the great god-sent message that everything would be alright, (everything would not be alright) but it was more than he had expected to find in his rapidly collapsing world: Despite it all, there was a greater force out there that would never stop. Now he could see that this was not only what the force of life did, but also what his father had done. Never a wasted moment.
Max blinked back tears that formed in his eyes, and pushed himself to his feet. He began to walk down the long road, heading home.