He was grazing on a hilltop in the summer of 1940 when a thunderhead appeared in the northwest. Sometime during the storm's approach, a lightning bolt struck him down just as it had his mother so many years before. I found him the next morning on that hilltop, his final mouthful of grass still clinched between his teeth. I left his grain bucket beside him. I reckon Lightning was thirty years old.
We sent our oldest boy, Glenn, off to war in 1941. He was killed at Iwo Jima while serving in the Marines. Jenny and I retired from the farm in 1960, rented out our land and moved to a new house in St. John. Today, the farmstead is nothing like it was. The old barn was destroyed by a tornado in the '50s and the house burned down in the '70s. The sandhill pastures have been worked under and are now covered with modern circle irrigation systems. Acres of irrigated corn and sorghum grain now grow where once there were only sandhill plumb thickets and rolling grassland. There is no room in the modern world for the quiet pastures of yesterday.
If you should ever find yourself in Kansas and should happen to venture four miles west and five miles south of a sleepy little grain elevator village known as Seward, you will find an unbroken corner of one of the circles of irrigated crop land. At the top of a small sandy knoll is a great cottonwood tree. At the base of the tree is a tiny grave plot enclosed by a modest, unpainted picket fence. Inside the fence is a plain, white marble cross with the engraved name, “Bill Sunday.” Beside the cross is the relic of a rusty old grain bucket and a small, gray, marble stone jutting just above the surface of the ground. You may have to wipe away the grass and debris to read the simple inscription, “Lightning.”
If you visit in the evening on a pleasant summer's day, don't be disturbed to find a very old and feeble couple visiting there as well. Feel free to stop and introduce yourself. They would love the company and enjoy the chance to retell the story of Sunday's colt.
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