We saw them better as we drove up the hill towards my house. My mother was behind the wheel of our old Ford, and I squinted through the trees, contorted in the passenger seat. As we drew closer I clenched my fists, and ultimately jumped out of the truck in the driveway. I stepped up the street to the crest of the hill. The farmer's field across from our house faced east and sloped down the hill towards Greenwood and Welchton. It was lit by the orange clouds so that the grass looked prematurely straw. I hopped the wooden plank fence and slowly leaned back with my arms akimbo against the damp wood. I breathed slowly watching the dulled flashes.
I heard my mother call after me to come help her with the bags, but I was too preoccupied to listen. The fireflies were beginning to start their show of sparks, and I thought it amusing how nature seemed to imitate itself. The field was barren other than a long pile of cut wood and the cows all huddled a little ways off, near to it. A few of them in the farmer's rugged Scottish herd turned their heads in question. The weather never fazed them, they sensed the rain before it fell and lay down in turn, slowly munching the weeds. My presence, however, did interest them enough to stir.
A few bulls half stood and then thought wiser of it, and went back to their grass. One heifer got up and gazed a moment. She sniffed the wood and trundled over, huffing and tossing her head at the buzzing in her ears. Her wooly pelt was a light brown, reminiscent of the Californian mud you see on the news, running down the hills and streets in a flood. She treated her horns more like a burden than a means of intimidation; I supposed I was a small thing the time, after all.
She stopped a few feet away, hesitant, huffed through her nostrils and turned an eye on me. I held my breath in and my hand out as you would to a dog; I was in her territory. She stepped a few feet closer examining my fingers with her wet nose to which I was eye level. I suppose she found no threat in my juvenility and sniffed the ground again. She turned her heaving side around and returned to the rest, mooing softly, a short time after. Slowly, their long eyelashes and scrutinizing gazes turned away from me, and the heat lightening, and the grass.
I thought about the fence behind me, and the farmer down the road. How old was this farm? Would the he care that I was here? How old was he when he first saw the lightning... was he a boy my age? I wondered how the cows knew the rain would be here soon, and if they could tell the difference between a hornet and a fly. The atmosphere riled something inside of me that I could feel like a warm drink in my stomach, and a weight off my shoulders. I thought that if I died tonight, and my last memory were the cows, and the bugs, and the ominous, silent heat lightning, wouldn't that be beautiful in a way? If there was a place I'd have rather been, I couldn't think about it then. The world seemed such a vast collection of canvases like this field. They all stood waiting for the right time for their perfect audience. I was young in my life then, but that night I felt older in my thoughts.
***
It was only heat lightening, she said. Maybe I should come in now and eat something before the corn turned to starch and the chicken got cold. I stared at the treetops a little longer and considered it, then nodded. She wrapped her arms around my neck from behind the fence and as she did I could smell her old perfume. It was a captivating sight, she could see how I liked it, she murmured.
Long after she had died, and the photos grown a little yellow, I still remembered that night. She smelled of Shalimar, and the cows of themselves, which I sort of liked. The night held its ghostly heat lightening, which burned heavy in the sky, and I felt a sort of completion, which whispers through my mind still. Even when the years have flown by, and my world is less innocent and whole, the skyline at dusk can take me back to that warmer field of burnt umber and straw.
