His name was Mike Ashley.
I don't have a photo of him. But in my mind's eye I can still see him. Nineteen years old. Brown hair and a little bit of a mustache. He was a handsome young man. With a twinkle in his eye and kindness in his words. He was as all-American a boy as you'd ever be likely to find. A pure wholesome country Christian man. And a hard worker and just as much an eager learner.
Dad had known Mike's father. The elder Ashley had died a few years earlier. Mike's father had been a farmer. Something that Mike had found himself wanting to get into. And so it was that late in the spring of 1985 my dad brought Mike aboard on our family's farm. Mike wasn't just going to help out with the operation. Dad made it his mission that he was going to teach Mike everything that he knew about what it meant to be a dairy farmer. Being with us was going to be like college for Mike. It was an education he took to with enthusiasm and zeal. And it was one of the happiest times that I had ever seen Dad. He was getting to be a mentor to a young man. I can't remember Dad ever being such a teacher-figure to anyone else in his lifetime. But he certainly took Mike under his wing and was going to teach him all that he could about the dairy business.
But that's not all that Mike was to us. To our family that fast took him in as one of our own. Mom thought the world of Mike. My sister, I am pretty sure, had a crush on him. And as for me...
Mike fast became someone who I never knew that I needed: the older brother that I didn't have. He was someone I looked up to. I respected Mike and he respected me. I showed him some things too, that he had never seen before. During the lunch break that lasted a couple of hours each day (while the cows were replenishing their milk), Mike would often come by my room. I got to show him my Transformers toys: something he VERY quickly picked up how to make them change from robots to vehicles. I let him read my comic books, and my many copies of MAD Magazine. The latter was something he especially found hilarious! I can still hear him laughing at some of the stuff he was finding in MAD.
Mike was eight years older than I was. He was the kind of person who I wanted to grow up to be like someday. I don't think he had a girlfriend but if he ever got married, she was going to be a very blessed woman to have him in her life.
On the day before it happened, on August 6th, Mike had been in my room during the lunch break. And I showed him how to change some more Transformers. After he and Dad left to go back to the barn for the afternoon's milking, I found myself thanking God that He had put such an amazing person into my life, and that I hoped to be like him someday.
It was forty years ago today, on August 7th, 1985, that we lost Mike.
He had been behind the barn, on a tractor, scraping cow manure into a manure spreader. And if you don't know already cow manure is some of the best fertilizer imaginable. On a small farm it is a very valued and precious resource. And scraping it into the spreader was something that had been done like a zillion times.
It worked like this: the manure spreader was parked below the high end of a concrete ramp. Whoever was on the tractor would tow a bladed attachment and scrape manure that had come out of the barn and cattle stalls, off the ramp and into the spreader.
That is what Mike was doing.
We will never know what caused it to happen. Maybe he saw a deer off in the field and was momentarily distracted. Maybe it was something else...
The tractor drove over the top of the ramp and flipped over and onto Mike. He was probably killed instantly.
It was Dad who found him a short while later. He saw smoke coming from behind the barn. And then he saw the overturned tractor with Mike crushed beneath it.
My sister and I had been told that Mike got killed. We watched from our house as first responders, an ambulance, law enforcement and many other people descended on the farm. A short while later Mom arrived, she had left work as soon as Dad had gotten through to her.
That evening Mom took my sister and I to my grandmother's house in Reidsville. Dinner was pizza from Domino's. I was in such shock, my heart torn in pieces, that I really couldn't taste the food.
Granny said something that night that has always stuck with me: "The good die young." It's still the closest thing to an explanation for why God would take someone as wonderful as Mike, so young, as I've ever heard.
A few nights later was the visitation at the funeral home. It was an open casket viewing. I now wish that I had not gone. It didn't look like Mike. That's the best I can put it. I didn't recognize him. And that became one of the many memories that I've had to carry for the rest of my life, that I want to go away and never torment me again.
Nothing was the same in our family after that. We had lost one of our own, very much so. Dad came in from the barn every evening afterward and would sit by the fireplace and break down in tears. Two months later he himself was involved in another farming accident, one that almost cost him his right hand. Dad figured that God was telling him to get out of the farming business. Several months later, that's what he did. But I digress.
Every year on this date, I remember Mike Ashley. And I tell others about him. He's mentioned in the book I've written and as I say in it, I refuse to let the young man who was the closest person I ever had to an older brother be forgotten by the world. Because more than most he deserves to be honored.
And now you know about him, too.
