Raymond’s Barrels

After 30 years of marriage, Laura, his wife and soulmate, lost her fight with cancer. They’d known it wasn’t a winnable fight, but as a team, they’d laughed and cried through all the operations, chemo, and radiation treatments. In December, just a few days before Christmas, she passed away in her sleep at home. The funeral was right after New Year, a celebration of her life. Raymond was now a widower who had relied on his wife for almost everything during their years together until she took sick.

He did a cleanout in the first week after her funeral with the help of his sister, Lil, as he felt he couldn’t do it by himself. Her clothes went to the Goodwill shop. Broken stuff, things of no use to him, or anything he’d never liked went out for the next garbage pickup. Over the following few weeks, he rearranged the furniture in the small house and got rid of most of her things. He knew some people needed to hold on to things. For him, it was the opposite. He needed to know it was over. She was dead and never coming back.

Lil and her husband, Earl, noticed changes in his personality after Laura’s passing. He became a bitter man following her death. Soon he’d isolated himself from most of the friends they’d once had along with most of his family, except for Lil, who tried her best to be supportive.

As summer wore on, he cared less and less about the upkeep of the house. The once neatly organized yard soon looked like a junkyard, with things piled wherever there was a space. The narrow gravel road leading down to the farmyard was also cluttered. His battered old truck sat in the middle of the road. His tractor, plow, and other bits of machinery, which in the past were kept in a small shed when not in use, were now strewn everywhere. His vegetable garden, once his pride and joy, was now a mass of grass and weeds. The pigpen with its shed for the old pigs during the winter months looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned out in weeks. Apparently, the pigs didn’t care, as they wallowed in the sloppy muck hole.

Then there were the barrels. Though traditionally used for storing and fermenting wine, whiskey, or beer, Raymond had other uses for his collection of oak barrels. He made pig feed by fermenting hay and grain in some of them to create silage. He had cut a barrel in half to use as a trough to hold feed scraps and slop for the pigs. Father told me that Raymond would often roll some barrels down the gravel road from his stockpile in the yard, placing them near the garden to catch the rain, to make it easier to water his garden.

The inside of his home wasn’t much better. A pigsty is what Lil called it. She started taking his laundry and bedding home once a week. She would wash and dry the clothes, iron what was necessary and take them back to him. She also made pots of soup and stews for her brother, when she noticed he wasn’t eating properly. She would spend most of the afternoon trying to tidy up the living room, doing her best to make it presentable in case anyone stopped in to visit him.

Mother and Dad also stopped in a few times, often with a casserole or a pie, some cookies and sometimes squares. Mother didn’t want my brother or me to be in his house, with all the cats that most likely were flea-infested, so we stayed in the car. I spent the time looking out the window at all the stuff he had in Raymond’s yard.

There were so many cats, some sleeping, some hunting for mice, others just running around. There were a few old wooden crates with cats sitting in them and on them, a large pile of wooden barrels tossed this way and that way, a stack of lumber, piles of scrap metal, and other stuff I had no idea of what it was. Raymond had been a farmer who ended up living rough with lots of feral cats, both inside the house and outside wherever they could find a place to sleep.

It’s surprising what a four-year-old will believe. I had always been afraid of thunder, especially those combinations of loud cracks or the long low rumbles that rattled the windows during a rainstorm. Mother would comfort me, saying not to worry, it’s just Raymond rolling more barrels down his gravel road. And to think I believed that – hook, line, and sinker. As I sit here writing this story, it brings back many memories, and even to this day during a loud thunderstorm, I think of Raymond rolling barrels.