The Caretaker of Lorne Field

There was a time when the Caretaker of Lorne Field was held in reverence. When people respected the position and understood the sacrifices the Caretaker made so the rest of them could be safe. With his pa things started to change-slowly, maybe, but they changed as the ones who believed started to die off, and it had only grown worse under his tenure. Damn it, he had the most important job in the world, and now it was just one slight after the next. If not from his wife, then from the rest of the townsfolk. Even from his own boys…

Thinking of that made his back ache more than it had been.

Years of tending to Lorne Field left him with a rounded spine, bowed legs and creaky knees. All that bending and stooping he had to do all day long. Fifty-two years old and he felt like an old man. More than that, he looked like one. The sun had dried him out during all those years of walking back and forth across Lorne Field. Left his skin like a piece of rawhide. Probably responsible too for a good part of his hair falling out.

He stopped to work out the kink in his back. Bad enough he had creaky knees, now he had a kinky back. And if that weren’t enough, he was reduced to walking on foot down the dirt path to Lorne Field because some delinquent punks stole his bike. He had asked Lydia to buy him a new one, but she refused, claiming they didn’t have the money. When Chester Conley owned the town’s sporting goods store he would’ve gladly given Durkin a free bike, but Chester had long since retired to Arizona, and his son who took over the shop didn’t see things the way Chester had. Now Durkin was going to have to wait until the first frost to figure out how he would raise enough money for a new bike, which left him stuck having to walk for the rest of the season. One more indignity piled upon all the rest. One more stinking burden to shoulder.

A black, black thought entered his head. He could teach them all a lesson. If he bought a bus ticket, he could be in California in three days. Probably take eight, maybe nine days for the Aukowies to mature, another week or so for them to ravage the land and make their way to the west coast. That’d give him more than two weeks of peace and quiet. Two weeks without some raisin-faced shrew picking the flesh off his tired old carcass. Two weeks without his ungrateful boys rolling their eyes and smirking at him. Best of all, two weeks without any condescending looks from those townsfolk when he walked past them. Oh boy, would that teach them! Let them see how funny their jokes were when Aukowies shred them into mincemeat! Of course the Aukowies would get his wife and boys first, not only because they were closest but ’cause of the grudge they held against him. They’d make ’em suffer. Probably take their time too, at least as much as an Aukowie could.

He imagined Lydia and his boys in the grasp of the Aukowies, imagined the pure horror that would blind their eyes as they realized how all his stories weren’t just stories. As he visualized it, his thoughts turned into a lead weight that sunk into his gut. As much as he would never admit it, he did care for his battle-axe of a wife and his two gangly teenage boys.

That’s right, you old fool, he thought to himself. Teach the world a lesson by destroying it.

Whether or not the rest of the town still understood it, his position was one of the greatest responsibility. He had never yet forsaken it, and he wasn’t about to. No matter how miserable the weather was, no matter how poorly he felt, he had been out there every day since his twenty-first birthday doing his job as stipulated by the contract. Even when he was nearly dead with pneumonia he was out tending Lorne Field. Lydia had been near hysterical trying to get him to the hospital, but he wouldn’t be deterred. Stayed there seven in the morning to seven at night as he always did. Even though he was almost blind from fever and had chipped a tooth ’cause he was shaking so bad, he weeded out the Aukowies and kept the world safe. Took him two years to lose the cough that pneumonia had given him. But he did his job.

Straightening his back as best he could, he pushed out his chin and quickened his pace as he headed to Lorne Field. If he didn’t let that sickness stop him, he sure as hell wasn’t going to let feeling sorry for himself do it now.