The Rex

Though the rain was welcome to Johnson, like most Oklahoma farmers, he hoped that no hail would be mingled with it. Hail is the greatest enemy of wheat, especially in this season when the grain is just about ripe, for it is easily knocked out of its bearded head by a simple blow and the stems are often damaged in hailstorms. Johnson had been watching the storm for part of an hour when the sun finally peeked through and cast a lovely orange-yellow tinge over everything it touched. He looked across the ninety-acre field of wheat that spread before his house, flat as a pancake. Underneath the clouds, still thundering and giving flashes of lightning, he thought he saw the figure of a man walking through the yellow grain. He stood up slowly and squinted his seventy year-old eyes to get a better look, but the man was too far away to see him clearly.

The TV weatherman announced the advancement of another storm moving in from the southwest, and this one promised hail and damaging winds. Johnson was distracted by the announcement but then looked back across the field to get another view of the stranger walking in the field. He was about two hundred yards away and walking towards the city.

Johnson picked up his binoculars from the desktop near the window to get a good look at

him. He soon got a bead on the man who appeared to be a young man of about twenty years of age. He had short, jet-black hair, close-cropped to his head. He had a slightly dark complexion, and he was wearing a navy blue windbreaker over a white business shirt and tie. Johnson observed that whoever he was, he was walking very slowly, and from the look on his face he seemed to be doing some deep thinking. He often stopped and just looked towards the city while brushing his chin with the beards of several shocks of wheat.

Then Johnson saw something that made him jump backwards. The dark clouds behind the young man lit up with a streak of lightning, and in that same instant, the young man's eyes lit up just as brightly as the flash in the sky! Johnson was startled, but he reasoned that maybe he had just imagined it or that perhaps the man’s eyes had just reflected the lightning flash because of the angle he stood to the clouds from which it came. As he continued to watch, the incident occurred again. The man's eyes flashed brilliantly in exact sequence to the order of the lightning flashes from the cloud to the south of him!

Then, as if he knew he was being watched, the stranger turned his face towards Johnson's house and stared as if he was looking directly into the old farmer's face. Another flash of lightning behind him produced the same results, and Johnson's hair stood on end. Now he was frightened! He put down the binoculars and went to get his shotgun and his pickup keys. After loading the shotgun he approached the front window again to get one more glimpse of this strange character in the middle of his wheat field. The man seemed to be down on the ground and he couldn't see him very well. The old fellow put the binoculars back up to his eyes and turned them up to full focus. He could only see the back of the young man’s head and shoulders, for he was kneeling in the wheat field. He appeared to be praying.

The impressions that came over Johnson as he viewed this were the most unusual he had ever felt in his long life. He had never experienced anything like it in all his days. He decided to watch the young man for a while longer, and as he did, he saw the sun shine down upon him.

Johnson didn't wait any longer. He ran out the backdoor of his house and jumped into his pickup. He drove down the edge of the wheat field in order to meet this person who had come across his property, but as he pulled around in front of the field he discovered that he could not spot the man. He had vanished! Johnson jumped out of his pickup and started walking in the direction of the last place he had seen the strange visitor. He was nowhere to be seen! Johnson could not spot him, no matter which direction he looked. Then he found footprints--footprints that led in one direction, to the middle of the field. He found the spot where the man had stopped and prayed. The reddish brown clay revealed the fact that someone had indeed knelt in that spot for a while, but there were no footprints leading back out of the field and Johnson knew that the man did not have enough time to run out of sight.

Then something on the ground caught his eye, for at the spot where the young man had knelt to pray he saw a small bundle of wheat stems that had been tied together with a narrow royal blue ribbon. He picked it up, figuring that this was what the young man had been brushing his chin with while he walked. He examined it and then took another look in every direction. The man was nowhere to be seen.

The old farmer left the field and returned to his house, totally mystified. He had a mighty strange story to tell the folks in church the next morning, and as he told his odd story during the Sunday School hour, the nearly sixty people listening had the same strange feelings come over them that Johnson had felt the evening before. He finished his story and sat down quietly. No one spoke for nearly an entire minute after Carl Johnson had told his story. Perhaps part of the reason for this reaction was the fact that old farmer Johnson had not spoken a word to anyone since his wife died in a house fire over thirty years ago.

A few days later, while this same quiet farmer was watching the news on one of the major networks, he saw the face of that strange young man whom he had seen in his wheat field. Not only did he learn his name--he also learned that the man wasn't nearly as young as he had appeared.

After the newscast, Johnson glanced at the thin little glass vase he had set in the picture window of his house, a vase that contained that same little bundle of wheat tied together with a royal blue ribbon. As he sat there moving back and forth slowly in his rocking chair, he noticed how well his new decoration blended together with its background--grain fields that were white unto harvest.