Posted by Lonnie Ratliff Short Story on June 26, 2008, 5:37 pm
Board Administrator
Excerpt from the forthcoming book The Wordweaver
Sharecropper’s Rose (Final Section)
By
Lonnie Ratliff

Sharecropper's Rose (Final Section)
By
Lonnie Ratliff
There it was, the rose bush, pretty much as Clayton remembered it from over forty years ago, when his mom had stuck a single cutting in this almost barren Oklahoma ground and carried water from the well as it fought for its meager existence that first year. It never was much of a rose bush, or at least nothing like the pictures of the ones shown in the seed catalogs they would get in the mail every year. As best Clayton could remember it only produced a bumper crop of the beautiful flowers that one year. Other than that one time it was pretty much like the woman who planted it and the sharecropper kids that chased the cattle away from it, always looking like they were both only one more bad year away from disaster.
.
Never more than a few roses grew on the bush, but they always managed to bloom right when they were needed the most. Although Clayton tried to build a little fence for his Mom around the bush to keep the cattle and other varmints away from the roses, it was usually a losing battle. As he stared at the bush now he thought to himself, this old sharecropper's rose bush is a living monument to a time long past and has pretty much served its purpose on this earth quite honorably. Noticing the scraggly condition it was now in, he figured that the lonely rose bush at best had just one or two more blistering Oklahoma summers left on this earth. Like a lot of things that had grown on this farm, it had lived its life right there on the edge, but at least it had always found the strength to keep going when it needed to and someone was depending on it.
.
Clayton remembered the first time the rose bush had come through for him as clear as could be. It was his graduation from Moyers High School and mom's rose bush came up with that one perfect flower for his date for the prom. The next time of any significance he remembered when the rose bush was called in to duty it offered up just enough roses for a bridal bouquet for his oldest sister's wedding. Those two times the sharecropper's rose bush acted just like a trusted member of the family, producing just enough roses for the job at hand and saving Clayton and his sister from embarrassment. The third time they turned to the rose bush for flowers for the family was as far as he could tell the reason that God probably put that rose bush on earth and gave his mom the strength to draw water from the well every day of those hot summers and carry it to the corner of the yard where she would water it and manage to keep it alive for the future job that lay ahead.
.
As his mind drifted back to that last winter he spent here on the old Tarkington farm, he almost shivered as he remembered just how uncommonly cold that winter was. His and his brother's little lean-to bedroom that had been built on to the house had cracks in the walls that were big enough to throw a cat through. They had picked up some empty cardboard boxes when they were in Antlers and ripped them apart and tacked them up like wallpaper and that kept a lot of the cold wind out. Luckily their bedroom was on the south side of the house or they might have frozen to death. No one had time to think about their mom's rose bush during that winter, and even if they had, there was nothing that could have been done. The sharecropper's rose bush appeared to be just another lost cause in a family that was used to lost causes.
.
Spring came through like gang busters, and lo and behold one day, Clayton's mom quietly announced that the rose bush they had given up for dead was just loaded down with rose buds. As much as she loved that old rose bush, you would have thought she would have been more excited about it looking like it was going to have a bumper crop of roses that year. From the safety of all the years that had now passed, Clayton realized that his mom must have sensed a dark omen of things to come that spring as she saw the rose bush with all those young buds. That was just not the way a rose bush planted in Pushmataha county soil and living under the worst of conditions was supposed to act. Clayton remembered how she would just sigh when one of the little kids would break a toy or some other knick knack and then say "We can't have nothing". It seemed to Clayton that life by then had probably beaten his mom down so many times that even on a beautiful spring day after a long hard winter she could not let herself believe that a sharecropper's wife living out on the Miller Road could even have a rose bush full of beautiful roses. That was a hard truth to face but it brought him much closer to her at that moment, sitting by a rose bush she had planted over forty years ago, than they had ever been in life.
.
Now he could see that destiny had already chosen the destination that spring, when the rose bush was loaded with buds and preparing for its triumphant summer filled with flowers. They were all just along for the ride, never suspecting it was the end of the line for life as they had known it up until then. Clayton's last memory as he got up from the ground by the rose bush was that his mom never got to see all those beautiful roses the one year that the rose bush produced its bumper crop. That was the summer that, even though she was not that old, she came to the conclusion that she just couldn't take any more of a life where you just can't have nothing. One morning as the sharecroppers rose bush came alive with the roses that would cover her grave, she refused to open her eyes and her battles were over.
.
This is the second and final half of the Sharecropper's Rose story. As usual your comments are welcome. Just send me an E Mail at:
NashvilleShowcase@comcast.net
Copr. 2008 Lonnie C. Ratliff
Acknowledgments: Erin Hay for the original idea to flesh out this partially true story. We are now writing a song together with this same title..
Linda Carter & Bill Littleton for making sure my original hen scratchings and poor spelling became readable.
Thanks for convincing me I had something worth saying to Bill Littleton, Jim Carter and Dick Damron.
Message Thread:
« Back to thread