West of Here

The first thing they took was the elevator. Not the grain—the elevator. They came in September with a crane from Toronto and a man in a hard hat who kept saying liability like it was a prayer. My father stood across the road in his work boots, watching the old wooden tower come apart plank by plank. He had worked there for forty-two years. He said nothing.

In town, nobody said much anymore. The diner had closed. The mill was condos. The Legion opened only Fridays. Even the highway signs seemed tired, their green letters fading beneath another winter.

My brother Daniel had gone west after high school. Fort McMurray, then Calgary, then somewhere farther north. He sent money at Christmas and photographs of himself beside trucks bigger than houses. The last time he came home, he asked Dad why he hadn't sold the farm.

Dad laughed. “Sell it to who?”

That spring, the river flooded. It came up over the road at midnight, black water carrying fence posts, branches, someone's red canoe. I woke to Dad pounding on my door.

“Get up.”

We drove the tractor through water to the lower field. The wheat was already gone.

By dawn, half the county was underwater.

Daniel called that afternoon. He was calling from a hospital. There had been an accident at the work camp. Nothing dramatic, he said. Just a fall. Just a bad one.

Dad listened without speaking. Then he put the phone down.

“Where is he?”

“Alberta.”

We drove west.

For three days, the country unrolled beside us—rock, forest, wheat, sky. Towns appeared and disappeared like thoughts. At gas stations, people asked where we were headed.

“Family,” Dad said.

They always nodded at that.

Daniel died before we reached him.

We buried him under a maple tree behind the church, in the town where the elevator used to stand.

That evening, Dad and I went down to the river. The water had fallen. Mud covered the banks. In the distance, the old grain elevator was gone, and the sunset burned orange through the empty space where it had been.

Dad took off his cap.

“I should've gone with him,” he said.

I told him that wasn't true.

He didn't answer.

Years later, I learned the elevator hadn't been destroyed after all. They'd moved it. Some developer had bought it and hauled it north, where it became part of a heritage village for tourists. They painted it white. Put a gift shop inside.

Sometimes I imagine Daniel standing there in his work boots, staring at it.

Sometimes I imagine all of us still there. The wheat coming in. The trucks lining up. The radio talking about weather. And my father, younger than I remember him, lifting his hand to wave as the train passes.

But there are no trains now. No elevator. No Daniel.

Just the river, carrying everything it can.

And the wheat growing back, year after year, in fields that don't remember what they have lost.