They Don’t Live in Joy, Illinois

Good morning from Joy, Illinois. It’s 5:30 am. on one of the last days of May, 2022. It is not my usual waking time, but when the pink and orange sunrise steals into your bedroom, it’s insistent.

Begin your day, it said.

The just-awake robins and finches chatter in the tall sugar maples with quaking leaves and lightning bugs slide back into the grass surrounding the massive, spreading oaks waiting for twilight to return. The intermittent croaks of the young toads quiet down in the muddy section of the pasture—they’re thinking about moving to the bushes higher up on the hill.

The big bull—mottled with a cream and sable hide and two curving horns that span at least two feet—turns to look at me and flicks his tail. He stands between me and the two black, elderly mama cows, ages twelve and fourteen, who have had their last calves.

Old girls, the neighbor called them. They probably wouldn’t last the winter. They’re headed to town at the end of the summer. Their calves nudge the udders hard to bring down the milk.

Old girls, I mused. I tried not to think too much about that.

The corn started late, the neighbor said. Came up well, early actually, but then one day, it spiked to ninety degrees and it all burned up. The earth cracked, he said shaking his head. We planted again.

My son, Connor, and daughter-in-law Samantha, are new to the small town 40 minutes outside of the Quad Cities—Moline and Rock Island hail from the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, while Davenport and Bettendorf nod from the Iowa side. The Mississippi River is high now from the spring rains, and it lolls back and forth against its bank moving with a laziness that is deceiving.

Not a time to go into the river, or crick, the neighbor said. He knows a swimming hole down the road that gets deeper every year because the force of the water comes over and dives straight down into the earth. It just keeps digging, the neighbor looked up at me. No end to it, he comments.

Paul and I drove fast from the airport, anxious to see our little ones (big ones too) after four months apart. He crested a hill at sixty, and we landed on a gravel road on the other side.

Goodness, I thought, someone needs to fix this stretch of road. It stretched alright—another eight miles to their house. Their road is numbered now—140th—but it’s known as Rainbow Barn Road to everyone in Joy.

A decrepit white barn sitting at the top of a hill, Rainbow Barn is a smiling Jack o lantern with few teeth, and its peeling paint reveals softened, grey wood that was once hard and new. The barn is known all over Mercer County for the rainbow painted high above the sagging double doors. The cheerful colors are a landmark to the residents in the area, telling them where to turn to travel to Eliza, a tiny town with a brick school house or to Muscatine, a bustling town on the River in Iowa.

The original owners of the barn painted the rainbow years ago, and the elders of Joy say there were a few reasons for their decision. Hope was one, they said. Another was joy. Rainbow Barn was born, and it means something different to everyone who passes it. It makes me smile, Sam said. In tribute to it, she painted a rainbow on their new, white and blue chicken coop. The neighbors love your rainbow. It makes them smile, someone told her.

The babies, as we call them, put on mud boots to play in the yard. They look comical, running through the velvet green grass, shirtless with dusty knees and elbows from where they have crawled under the bars of the fence around the barn. At three and four, they don’t pay attention to the bull staring at them with narrowed eyes. As you can guess, they get hustled back into the yard with a scolding; they don’t pay much mind.

Last night we sat on the back stoop, drinking beer, and watching the kids play on the slip-and-slide. We squirted Dawn soap on their round tummies, and when they reached the end of the plastic and landed in a small pool, bubbles rose into the air and drifted towards the sunset that was just slanting into the cornfield. We forgot the soap would get in their eyes, so we rushed to wipe their faces with our shirts, not wanting them to feel any pain.

Which brings me to end of this piece. On one of the last days of May in 2022, while we’ve been cocooned in this perfect world where neighbors stop by for a quick visit and the last rays of the sunset awaken the lightning bugs from their slumber, there are families unable to speak because of their grief. In Texas, they are planning funerals instead of birthdays and sitting in the lonely silence of small bedrooms where little shoes and toys still litter the floor. Their children are gone. They will never live on Rainbow Barn Road or dance next to a staring bull, or shriek with laughter as their slick bodies fly down their newest toy. The children of Uvalde don’t live in Joy, Illinois.