A Clear Eye

PROLOGUE - July, 1970

Callie McKenzie drives the truck into the yard and parks behind the small farm house, still sitting foursquare on its log foundation. It looks neglected and shrunken, windows bare, white paint faded. It's been empty for a long time, the voices that once filled the rooms gone forever.

She can still hear Lewis's croaking legacy to her six years ago, only hours before he died. "The farm's yours when your mother goes. If you want it. She'd wanted it at twelve. Does she want it now? Can she bear to give up this link to the valley she'd loved so fiercely?

Callie brushes away the tears on her cheeks. The early morning air had been cool when she left town but now the sun beats down on the cab roof and fresh sweat bleeds into the plaid wool shirt and jeans she'd worn to fly down from Barrow in northern Alaska two days ago. She climbs out of the pickup and breathes in the scent of earth and green growth, the spice of spruce and jack pine in the remains of the wood pile. Grasshoppers chirr in the lush grass, swallows soar and dive through the blue air.

Yesterday she'd sat through her mother's memorial service, nails biting into her palms. Father Penrose, black hair streaked with silver, had blathered on forever about Lillian being a wonderful woman and how much her children would miss her. Russell and Peter may but she won't. The war between them left too much bitterness on both sides.

Young wheat shimmers green in the field across the creek. Behind her, the grass on the pasture hills is long, no cattle now to keep it shorn. To her right, barn and chicken house stand empty and desolate. To her left, across the spring, the garden is overgrown with foxtail and pigweed. She imagines Lewis in the barn, milking Rosie, hens gossiping in the yard, rows of potatoes in the garden. The tears start again.

Should she come back and live here, take care of the land as she'd once longed to do? It seems unfair to Russell, who's worked the land these last six years. And surely Peter should have his share.

Callie unlocks the back door, then turns the shiny key over in her hand. The lock is something new. So is the paved road running past the house, then west across the valley and over the jack pine ridge to the Alaska Highway. So are the farms and gas wells littering the valley, making it an alien place.

When she was growing up, no one lived here except the McKenzies, the nearest neighbor seven miles away. No phone, no power, no school, no way of getting out in the winter. No running water, no friends, no movies. Too much work and too little money. But the isolated, silent valley had been companion, teacher and solace.

Her hiking boots thud on the worn linoleum floor.

"Callie, don't wear those filthy boots in here! Lillian's voice echoes in her head.

Callie climbs into the attic's stale heat and looks out the south window. She knows every inch of the half section and the creek that runs through it. She could walk here again, listen to the birds and the creek sing, look for buttercups. Do wolves still howl on the jack pine ridge in winter? Probably not. Too many people, too much traffic.

She'd have to work hard. But it would be a simple life: earth, air, sunlight and water nourishing the plants and her soul. She'd have her own land under her feet.

A fly bounces and buzzes against the glass. She opens the window and he zooms out, down toward the spring, free, going about his business.

She has to fly back to the Arctic tomorrow. There's only this one day to think about the valley, about the farm. To make her decision. Not very long. Her mind drifts back to the year she turned twelve.