GENEVIEVE SMITH

Spring resisted the arrival of summer that year. It held the encroaching season in heated debates that left the world to melt like butter pats in the Dutch oven of May. Ilmar sat on the porch steps for a moment more, savoring the last of the Kool-Aid that lingered in the seam of his glass. It was a treat at any time, but planting days in particular. The glasses Äiti left beneath the apple tree sweat in the sun as though they were the ones doing most of the work, and Ilmar had the strangest sense that nothing would ever be so refreshing. 
        Just as they’d done each year since time had become a memorable thing, Ilmar and his brothers—four in all, each as close to the other as the years in which they were born—had woken up early to plow, pick rocks, and plant. It was day three of the process now, and the field was almost finished. Three months of watering, weeding, care, and waiting and the fruits (or more rightly, vegetables) of their labor would show themselves in a bounty of beans, beets, and potatoes come fall. A harvest to last through winter and back into springtime, when the snow would melt and the process would start over again. Like a chipped phonograph record, perhaps, but they all enjoyed the song. 
        It was the very melody that kept Ilmar in Alston as though he was planted there himself. He had decided long before that he would be a farmer when he was older, just like his dad (though they’d never met), his grandfather, and he supposed the generations before them, all the way back to Cain in Eden. There wasn’t much else to do in this area, except be a lumberjack or maybe head north to be a copper miner. He’d fought fires with the Three C’s for a time before it disbanded, and worked a summer at his uncle’s tire shop in Ann Arbor, but nothing—at least nothing yet in his twenty-one years of living—pulled him back like the farm did.   
        An engine in the distance told him that old Mr. Tervo was turning down the road to deliver the day’s mail. His old Model T was one of the finer specimens of Alston automobiles, rivaled only by Mr. Kentala’s 1932 Deusenberg Model J—a sleek little number which now sat on cinder blocks in his driveway as the old man had given all four of its whitewall tires to the county rubber drive in a fit of selfless patriotism back in ‘42. He liked the idea that the tires were recycled and now part of some scout car patrolling enemy lines, and although it made for an expensive easy chair, he liked using the now stationary vehicle as a place to read. 
        “Afternoon,” Ilmar called as Mr. Tervo pulled up alongside the mailbox. The gravel roads that wound themselves through the countryside ensured that the old man was always coming and going in a cloud of dust. 
        Mr. Tervo turned and nodded through the open window. He wasn’t a man of many words, save for the ones folded neatly in envelopes and marked with a three-cent stamp. The first and only mailman that Alston had ever known, his delivery schedule was that of a military regimen, and each citizen could approximate the arrival time of their mail down to about three minutes with unfailing accuracy. 
        Ilmar prepared himself to oblige the usual questions: “How you doing, Matt?” (although there were five years and a good six inches between he and his oldest brother), and “Back from Isle Royale?” (though he’d been back for nearly two years now from his time at the Three C’s Camp Windigo). He knew answers would have little bearing on anything, since they seemed to pass through Mr. Tervo’s mind easy as a pole bean might slip through a spike tooth harrow. 
        But Mr. Tervo maintained the quiet of the scant summer breeze as he slipped a bundle of letters into the steely mailbox with the “Juntunen Brothers” nameplate. He paused for a moment, and turned back towards Ilmar as if to say something, but resumed his route, the engine filling the silence until it was far down the road—its sandy aftermath reduced to listless wisps. 
        Ilmar watched from the steps as he finished his drink and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand before getting up to join his brothers. It was about four o’ clock now, and before long Ӓiti would be calling them in for supper. Venison, most likely, canned from last winter, and potatoes. Ilmar decided to leave the mail for later—there was never anything exciting anyways. 
        It wasn’t until long after supper, when the setting sun bathed the fields in the ripe colors of summer, that Ӓiti asked one of the boys to go see if the letter she was expecting from Aunt Sally had arrived. It had, soft and blue, garnished in that familiar lazy font, nestled neatly between a bill from the electric company, an ad for the county fair, and three notices from the draft board.