The Farm (original version)

The Farm

Jack Wilson bought the farm today.

That’s what he said right before he died. I know because I was there when they'd brought him into the makeshift medical treatment center. I wasn't supposed to be in combat, but the war had made everything in short supply, including reinforcements. Thus, I had to join the brigade that had been sent into to retrieve Jack's unit after the ambush.

I didn't get the chance to really say anything to Jack when I got to the battle. I'd had to direct some cover fire for the wounded to reach safety and had actually taken three enemy rounds into my chest. Fortunately for me, the shots had struck my armored vest whereas the ones that had taken out Jack had hit him just below it, in the kidneys and liver. I'd barely felt my bullets; Jack never stopped feeling his.

After jets from one of our aircraft carrier had firebombed the enemy into oblivion, I had rushed over to the medical triage area. The medics had already given up. I'd dropped to my knees next to my best friend just in time for his final words. The strange thing was that he was really happy to die.

No, he wasn’t suicidal. In fact, he was anything but. He really cared about the men under his command as the company’s senior noncommissioned officer or what we generally called an NCO. He genuinely wanted to make sure as many of them as possible got back home safely. He just didn’t care what happened to him.

Jack and I had been friends since elementary school back in Medford, Massachusetts. We hung out together right up until college. I became an officer through Navy ROTC. Jack enlisted in the army and we both ended up in Korea in 2050, as part of a joint command when the war started. It was one of those conflicts you knew was going to happen one day, but we had been hoping it would hold off another 20 years. Unfortunately, the generals that had taken over for the grandson of late North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il had other ideas. Historians have since wondered if those same generals were aware that this war had started exactly a hundred years after the last go-round with the West.

Jack and I were part of a recon unit that operated remotely piloted vehicles or RPV’s that took off from ships along the coast and could fly over the head of the enemy silently, without the noise of a helicopter rotor or a jet engine. We sometimes fired Hellfire III missiles from the drones to take out high-value targets or heavy concentrations of PRKA (People’s Republic of Korea Army) troops. Once I even sank an enemy patrol boat that was trying to drop off commandos at night, but during a full moon.

Jack’s job had been to go into the field to retrieve downed drones before the North Koreans could get their hands on the technology. Thanks to Russia and China, North Korea was awash in AK-47 and AK-76 rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and anti-aircraft guns. They simply put up walls of lead and claimed several of our drones. I guided the drones as far away as possible from enemy lines and guided Jack’s team to the area.

Jack’s parents had died a few years ago; he had been an only child and had no immediate family. Add in that, thanks to his mother and the after-effects of her horrific divorce, he had been an agnostic since grade school and no one could really blame him if he’d lost all hope. He didn’t, though and I knew the reason.

The day after Jack died in the ambush set near the wreckage of one of the drones (the North Koreans had found another grisly use for anti-aircraft guns), I sat in the command building that had once been a police station. As the company commander, I had the unenviable task of getting the company past his death. He’d been a tough NCO but also one who genuinely cared about those under his tutelage.

As I sat there behind that desk and thought of Jack’s last words – “I bought the farm” -- I thought of the one reason why he’d say such a thing -- Suzette Lincoln.

I hadn’t thought of Suzette in more than 10 years, but it appeared Jack had thought of her often.

She had been a school mate of ours back in Medford and Jack had this crush on her. But, Jack was a jock who was supposed to stay away from a plain Jane like Suzette, with her stringy black hair and her average figure that blossomed much later than the other girls. She hung out with us – me and Jack and my girl at the time Alicia – only because we all lived on the same block. We usually sat around the porch of either my house or Jack’s.

I knew Suzette craved friendships. That was because her dad was an inventor and so eccentric that most of the neighborhood laughed at him. The kids rarely went to Suzette’s house because we didn’t know if her dad was going to accidentally blow it up like he’d done to his garage. Never mind that most of the appliances and technology that we all used contained at least something her father had created. His quirky personality overshadowed his successes and even his own daughter's personality.

So, we maintained the status quo until our senior year. Suzette pined for attention and Jack hid his affection. When we were all together, he pretended not to pay any attention to her.

That was, until she began missing school.

I was shocked when I found out that Suzette had a mutant cancer strain. Medical science had done wonders in the previous 20 years to wipe out cancer. I thought God really had it in for some people. Being an avowed agnostic, Jack disagreed with me and chalked it up to fate.

Jack really changed after that hard news. We all did in a way. Suzette was an outsider to us, someone hanging on our coattails, but she was a classmate and a neighbor. We all thought we’d live forever. We weren’t supposed to die. There were things we still had to do – graduation, class reunions, weddings, college. And why did it always seem to happen to the nice ones?

It was like he’d changed overnight in his sleep. I missed him on the bus home from school one day in the fall of our senior year. Lo and behold, when I reached our street, I saw him laughing with Suzette on her porch. She blushed a little when she saw me looking at the two of them. Down deep inside, though, part of me was both glad and sad to see her like this. Glad that she was finally opening up and sad that it had to happen when she was so sick.

Thanks to modern science, she was able to keep her hair and not get nauseous from the new chemotherapy. That allowed Jack to spend more time with her. He helped her with her small garden, a precursor to the farm she’d always dreamed of. He volunteered his free time with her at the hospital helping other patients whose cancers had not yet been conquered by medical technology.

He grew into a man those seven months, to the point of even ignoring the people who criticized him publicly, thinking he'd only taken up with Suzette because she was sick. At one time early in their relationship, he would have decked anyone who thought he was just patronizing a cancer-stricken girl. Later, he simply smiled, waved at the critics and went about his business. As for me, I never understood those kinds of people. I guessed that they just had to find fault with everyone, maybe to make themselves look better.

I still remembered Jack and Suzette's drives. He’d take his grandfather’s rebuilt Pontiac muscle car and cruise around town with Suzette, showing her off to everyone. They’d both wear their parents’ old leather jackets and would be laughing like no one else in the world mattered. They’d look so odd together -- she with a full head of black hair despite being sick and him with some fuzz on top of his dome because he’d promised to shave his head if we won the state football championship.

I don’t know how Jack got through graduation. He should have broken down, but he kept it together. We all sat in that auditorium watching Suzette make her Valedictorian speech. It was on three-dimensional video because she’d suddenly taken a turn for the worse right after final exams (she’d been having so much fun with Jack that she’d kept news of her relapse secret from all of us). I was never one to cry, but I felt myself close to losing it that day.

The funeral for Suzette that June was the largest I’d seen in Medford in a long time. The entire graduating class, plus most of the school staff and half of our neighborhood crowded the street of her church. Jack had the honor of making the eulogy. I wrote it for him, based on his words. He delivered it flawlessly, which surprised me since he was an agnostic who hadn’t been to any kind of church since his parents’ messy divorce.

I didn’t see him much after that. He spent a lot of time at the hospital, continuing to volunteer like he’d done with Suzette. Then, he became withdrawn and was always at Suzette’s house, talking to her dad.

I soon found out why. Suzette, who had kept her relapse from all of us, including Jack, because she had been so happy, had one more secret. She’d been in incredible pain from the cancer and from the advanced chemotherapy. The laser treatments had done wonders to reduce the tumors that had allowed her to live far longer than she would have under the old therapy, but they had also inflamed the nerve endings. As she had weakened in her last days, she had experienced excruciating pain.

I found out from my girl, Alicia that Suzette had done the unthinkable – she’d taken her own life. When her parents had finished their nightly prayer for her, she had taken an overdose of her pain medication. Amazingly, her parents and her clergyman had gone to great lengths to keep her secrets, knowing how everyone had felt about her courageous battle.

However, Suzette’s mother had talked too loudly and had been overheard by Alicia’s mother. Alicia overheard the news while her mother had been on the phone and she had told me. By the time the news had made its way to Jack’s ears, it had reached several other people first.

Whatever religion Jack had rediscovered while being with Suzette in her last seven months and while reading her eulogy disappeared upon hearing the news. He had learned enough of Catholicism to know that suicide was considered a grave sin, one that would keep a soul out of Heaven. Jack had almost broken down knowing that there would be no reward for his love after such a brave fight for life. That had torn him up inside.

He went to the hospital less and less. He wouldn’t even take my phone calls and barely left his house. Then, out of the blue, he began going to Suzette’s house to talk to her dad, a sign I’d found encouraging. Jack and I both knew Mr. Lincoln was eccentric, but he could be very understanding when not talking about his latest inventions.

One day in July, a week after Independence Day, as I came back from an errand, Jack called me over to Suzette’s house. He wouldn’t explain; he just motioned for me to follow him, so I did. We went to Mr. Lincoln’s basement where even my furtive imagination was stunned by all the advanced computers and technological equipment.

Jack led me over to a machine that looked like an old DVD/CD-ROM player connected to an advanced EEG monitor. He handed me a pair of what looked like ear buds attached to oversized sunglasses, while he took another pair for himself. I looked at him questioningly, not sure what his mind was thinking.

“Come on, let’s talk to Suzette,” he said.

I knew people reacted differently to death, but I’d never expected Jack to go off the deep end. He didn’t look crazy, though and he was pretty insistent, so I followed his lead and put the contraption on. He started talking about Suzette and something her dad had built. For my part, I had begun thinking of one of Peter Cushing’s old Hammer Films movies and I seemed to recall that Cushing’s character was named Frankenstein.

Jack pushed some buttons and it was like my whole world changed. One minute, I was in a laboratory; the next, I was on a farm. The sun was shining brightly and we were in a field of tall green grass that swayed with a cool, gentle breeze. I heard some cows moo and when I looked ahead, I saw a large red barn in the distance. I thought I might have been hallucinating until Jack tapped me on the shoulder and pointed. I looked and I saw someone leading one of the cows.

It was Suzette!

She turned to us and waved. I was stunned. I started to wave but then my vision blurred; I became nauseous and had to rip the glasses off. When the world stopped turning, I opened my eyes and saw that I was in the basement again.

I noticed that Jack didn’t appear to be in any discomfort. He had obviously been using this device for a while, enough to be trusted with it. He’d walked right into the lab without Mr. Lincoln being home and hadn’t set off any alarms.

“It was Suzette,” Jack said, his face giddy and flushed. “You saw her yourself, so you can be a witness. Mr. Lincoln hooked her up to this machine just before she died. She’s in a better place. She’s in Heaven.”

Maybe Jack had found God again. If Suzette had imparted that to him, I was more than glad. But, I was worried more about his mental condition. Suzette was gone, yes, but he still had a full life ahead of him. And, she had committed suicide, so she wasn’t in Heaven, no matter what Jack might have thought.

“Jeez, Jack, it’s one of those new encephalographic recordings the Catholic Church is up in arms about,” I told him, sternly. “I know they're supposed to be used for terminally ill patients so that their loved ones will see them in better days. But, the government hasn’t approved them yet. Probably never will. Jesus, Jack, I still feel like puking. God, you could get into big trouble for using this. So could Mr. Lincoln for creating it.”

“So what?” Jack snapped. “Why can’t they understand? She never did anything bad to anyone. She was stricken with a cancer that all those vaunted doctors and their new equipment couldn’t cure. She withstood the pain for months, but when she finally couldn’t take the pain anymore, she’s punished for her choice. Everything she’d done up to then was thrown aside by some stupid rule.”

“C’mon, Jack,” I countered. “What is this then? It’s not her. It’s just a memory, a dream recorded with technology. She was Catholic. She knew the consequences.”

“She’s in a much better place,” Jack spat, stepping closer to me and sticking his finger into my chest. “I just had to know. She’s on the farm we both wanted to own. She’s there now and I’ll be there, too.”

I gasped audibly and looked at Jack. I’m sure my expression was one of horror. Jack suddenly grinned and slapped me on the back hard enough to make me cough. He led me out of the basement.

“Don’t worry, Jeff,” he said, wearily, along the way. “Suicide’s a sin, remember? I just see this as something to keep me going.”

I didn’t tell anyone about the experience. I didn’t need Jack cracking up on me if I brought down any condemnation on him. What he saw wasn’t really Heaven, but if it kept him sane then it could be whatever he wanted.

“Heaven’s what you want it to be, Jack,” I’d said to cheer him up as we left Suzette’s house.

Jack and I talked a few more times after that but I never mentioned Suzette or the machine again. We eventually went off to college and then graduate school, occasionally trading phone calls, e-mails and a few letters in which he sounded sullen. We didn’t see each other again until the war found him as my senior noncommissioned officer. He looked good, as if the war had somehow propped up his flagging spirits.

I brought myself back to the present and looked around. I was still alone inside the old police station in the middle of Korea, with my memories and my bruises from being shot, though they didn't feel like the badges of honor others had made combat wounds out to be. I just felt lucky to be alive, unlike Jack. It remained to be seen, however, just which one of us got the better end of the deal.

I was still in Korea, piloting RPV's that ultimately killed people. Despite this, I was still the pyschoanalyst;s dream -- a pessimistic optimist. I'd seen enough to make me skeptical of most things, but, deep down, I always wanted to believe the best in people. As I'd gotten older, I'd switched from expecting the best and getting the worst to seeing the worst and hoping for the best from people. Alas, no one was like that anymore. No one was like Jack.

I thought of the encephalograph. Aside from a few test models and the machine in Mr. Lincoln’s basement, they’d been discredited by at least three government and four scientific agencies. It made me wonder if Suzette’s encephalograph was still in her father’s basement and if it even worked anymore.

Next, I wondered about Jack. I remembered talking to the chaplain a week ago and he had told me that even he wasn’t sure what lay next in the afterlife for agnostics. He liked to think that anyone who lived their life well could go to Heaven, provided he accepted God and Jesus Christ. I’d never asked Jack if he had ever done that.

Would he go to Heaven or just limbo? What lay in store for him? Would the chaplain be wrong and Suzette might be up there at the Pearly Gates to welcome him? Maybe that thought had kept Jack going all these years. And maybe, just maybe, he’d hooked himself up to that machine before he had left for college. Maybe that’s what he had meant when he’d said that he’d be with Suzette.

I had to admit I really didn’t know much, but there was one thing I did know. All puns aside, I knew Jack. And I believed I knew where he’d be now. On a farm with eternal sunshine, tall wavy grass, a giant red barn, some cows and, most importantly, the only girl he’d ever loved.