by Joe Hill
Connor bows his head to examine the maps once more. When he speaks again, his voice is somber. “You’ll look after Beth?”
“I already do.”
“That’s right. Yes, you do. Better than I can.” This last is said with a certain bitterness.
“Shhh. What got done to you over in the sand was a crime—but you didn’t come home any less of a man. You came home more of a man, and little Bethy knows it. Beth knows what you can do, and so do I. Someday everyone will know.”
Connor straightens. “I wish we were doing it tomorrow.”
“The big regional ATF assembly is in October. That’s soon enough.”
“If we have till October. If she didn’t tell anyone.”
“She didn’t.”
“You can’t be sure of that.”
“I am, though. I’m sure of it. Beth got everything out of her. Bloom knew what would happen if we got raided by the feds again. She knew it would be like putting a gun to her son’s head. I warned her. I told her more than once. I said if they came, I wouldn’t hesitate—I’d put the boy in the ground myself before I let the law take him away from me. No. She was crazy, Connor. But she wasn’t stupid.”
Jack’s glass slips. His fingers tighten on it before it can drop to the tiles.
He sets his glass down very carefully in the stainless-steel sink and flies back to his bed, like the shadow of an owl moving across a moon-washed field.
9.
He can’t sleep. At ten to five he is up again and outside, legs trembly and stomach spoiled.
The sky shines a soft marigold. A streaming mist shimmers above the long, sloping fields, where green stalks of wheat are just beginning to prod their way out of the earth. He thinks he ought to pass a word with Bloom about what he’s heard and walks in bare feet through the wet grass, all the way out to the family graveyard. He lets himself in through the wrought-iron gate, beaded with dew, and finds her grave, and sinks to his knees before it. The mums are coming up in bunches of oily green stalks, with broad dark leaves. No sign of flowers. Not yet. They need a little more time before they’re ready to blossom.
He can’t think about the rest of it now: something about the ATF, something about what happened to Connor in Afghanistan, where he was almost killed by friendly fire, victim of a drone strike operated by his own government. What happened to Connor below the belt is never discussed, but Jack knows the missing leg is not the worst of it. He has seen Connor with his pants down, has seen the scarred stump of his penis, a horrible thing with no head.
I’d put the boy in the ground myself before I let the law take him away from me. That thought goes off in Jack’s mind again and again, and each time it is like a gunshot, bullet to the head. That and: Beth got everything out of her. There are shades of meaning in this declaration that Jack doesn’t want to examine.
He has to do something with the sick, ugly energy coursing through him. It feels like if he doesn’t break something, he’ll puke, but there’s nothing breakable in arm’s reach, so instead he grabs a fistful of stalks protruding from the ground.
The roots of the mum are embedded surprisingly deep, have an astonishing grip on the soil. He grits his teeth and pulls, and the dirt begins to fall away. It’s almost as if the green stalks are attached to some absurdly heavy gourd. He pulls—shuts his eyes—pulls harder—and opens his eyes—and can’t scream because there’s no air left in his lungs.
He has pulled a head out of the ground.
Not a whole head. Only the top part, from the bridge of the nose up. It is a woman’s face. No—more than that. It is his mother’s face, though her skin is greenish and waxy and her hair isn’t hair at all, but long, tough strands of green fiber, plant stalks. Her eyes are shut.
Jack flings himself back, almost to the foot of the grave. He struggles to cry out and can’t force any sound from his throat.
Her eyes roll open. The eyeballs look like soft white onions. There are no irises, no pupils, no sign of sight. Then she winks.
Jack gets a shout out at last and runs.
10.
He creeps back for another look, just before lunch, when he has a break from the morning chores and the sun has cooked off the mist. He can see where he half tugged the mum out of the ground, but it has sunk back down, dirt crumbling and falling to cover . . . what? He can see the curve of something that might be a skull or could be nothing more than a big peeled stick in the dirt. He kicks loose soil over it to cover it up. When he’s done, he spreads the earth around, smooths it out.
He tries not to feel the top of her head right under the dirt, but his hand moves helplessly to the other plants. Feeling one hard curve of skull after another. Six in all.
This time when Jack leaves, he forces himself to walk, although his legs tremble.
11.
Three days later he squeezes into the front seat of the truck, between Connor and his father, and they drive to the efficiency apartments on Stalwart, where his mother spent the last weeks of her life. The police have finally authorized Hank McCourt to collect his deceased wife’s things. The apartment building is on a wide avenue of shops catering to diminished expectations: a check-cashing outfit, a vape shop, and a Baptist church with a white drive-thru sign out front that reads ALL FLESH IS GRASS AND JESUS IS THE LAWNMOWER.
Hank steers them under a white stucco arch and into a courtyard parking lot. The building is two stories and wraps around them on three sides. There’s a swimming pool in the center of the courtyard, enclosed by chain-link fence, but the water is low and there’s a filthy pair of white jockey underwear floating in the shallow end.
His father rolls up to park beside a police car. A cop leans against the cruiser, a steel clipboard in one hand and his campaign hat in the other. The last time Jack saw this cadet, he was inspecting an unopened bottle of gin. Just like then, he has a slender white stick poking out of the corner of his mouth.
Hank hops down on his side. Jack follows Connor out the other. The junior cadet hands Hank the clipboard and shows him where to sign.
“Kid want to stay out with me?” the young cop asks.
“He’ll be all right.”
The cop meets Jack’s gaze. “Want a smoke?” He offers him the box. At that moment Jack realizes what the cop has in his mouth: a candy cigarette.
Hank nods indulgently, although he takes a dim view of processed sugars, so Jack says, “Thank you, sir,” and helps himself.
The apartment is a single room with a grubby wall-to-wall carpet the color of dirt. Directly opposite the front door is a sliding glass door open to the day. Somehow the brightness of the afternoon makes the room seem even gloomier.
Jack steps out of the entryway into the open space. There’s a cot around the corner, the bed unmade. The air has a sour odor, like feet. A brown paper bag crammed with empty bottles of gin stands against one wall. Flies buzz around an open carton of Chinese food, next to a book called How to Fight for Your Kids and Win—A Field Guide to Divorce. Jack wanders over and peeks into the box of Chinese. At first it seems the noodles are squirming. But they aren’t noodles.
The three of them pack Bloom’s belongings while the cop watches.
Jack finds his mother’s clothes in neat piles under the bed and puts them in a box. He discovers an empty pill bottle: clozapine. Sounds like “clothespin,” what you’d use to clamp down on something, which makes sense—this is what she used to clamp down on the bad thoughts in her head. Jack discovers another bottle of gin, two-thirds empty, tangled in her bedsheets.
“Funny thing is,” the junior cadet says, “liquor store right next door, and the guy who runs the place says he never saw her.”
“People don’t like to shit where they eat, do they?” Connor says, scratching the back of his neck.
When they’ve carried the last cardboard box to the pickup, the junior cadet shuts the sliding glass door and thumbs the lock. When he steps back, the door shudders open a few inches anyway.
“That’s ri
ght,” the cadet says. “Lock is bust. What a craphole this place is. She’s prolly fortunate she drank herself to death before someone could walk in and murder her.”
“My son is in the room,” Hank says, in that mild tone that is scarier than if he yelled.
The cop lowers his head and thumps it against the glass. He looks shamefacedly over his shoulder.
“Ah, gosh,” he says. “I am so sorry.”
Jack removes the last little toothpick of candy cigarette from the corner of his mouth and lifts it in a gesture he hopes will be understood to mean, All is forgiven.
On the walk to the truck, though, he discovers that his hands are sticky with candy-cigarette spit. He says just a minute and goes back in to wash them.
The bathroom is a tiny closet with a rosy pink tub, a toilet, and a sink somehow impossibly crammed into it. He doesn’t look in the tub, intentionally averts his gaze from the place she drowned, won’t even look at it in the mirror. Instead he stares into the sink, where some of his mother’s hair still clogs the drain. They look like the fibers of dirty roots: a bad thought. Jack runs lukewarm water and scrubs his hands and lathers them with the little bar of soap. Then he pauses and lowers his head and breathes in the odor of his soap-slippery hands and tries to think where he has smelled this fragrance before, this particular spicy-sweet scent of geraniums.
12.
They have one more stop before they head home. Hank turns the truck into the lot at Motorsports Madnezzz, and Connor lowers himself laboriously down to the asphalt. The disabled veteran limps inside, leaving Jack alone with his father.
Hank leans back, one arm hanging out the window, and turns his head to fondly consider his child. Country music twangs on the radio.
“What do you know, Jack?” his father asks, and Jack’s heart skips, and for a moment he thinks his father has somehow guessed the terrible certainty that has begun to harden in Jack’s thoughts.
“Not a thing,” Jack says. “I don’t know a single thing.”
“That’s not true,” his dad tells him. “You know your rights under the Constitution. You know how to pull weeds and how to drive this truck. You know how to safely operate a firearm, and you can make an improvised explosive device or a simple detonator from scratch. You know your mother loved you and would’ve died for you.”
“Did she?” Jack asks.
“Did she . . . ?”
Die for me, Jack doesn’t say. Instead he says, “Love me? She walked away and drank herself to death. Just like the policeman said. She took clothes-a-pin.”
His father laughs without humor. “Clozapine. She would’ve pumped you full of that stuff if she could’ve. The Medical Establishment would like to have all of us on it, to make us less likely to question or resist.” He looks out the open window, drums his fingers on the steel window frame. “She loved you in her way. A mother’s love is planted deep. You can’t uproot that. There’s no one who can replace her. Although there is Beth. God knows Beth thinks the world of you. And she’s a good example of what an upright and dutiful woman can be. I’m glad you have Beth in your life. That’s a girl who knows how to keep her hands clean.”
“Of course,” Jack says. “She uses soap.”
And then he surprises himself by laughing—a slightly crazed, crow caw of a laugh. Suddenly he has remembered where he last smelled that particular sweet odor of geraniums. If his father knew half of what was in his head, he might not think clozapine was such a bad idea.
His father frowns, but then the doors to Motorsports Madnezzz open and Connor emerges. He has a big white fifty-gallon tank of liquid nitromethane. A man in a Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt follows him out, carrying a tank himself. Hank gets out and lowers the tailgate, and they pile the tanks in.
“I got two more for you,” says the guy in the Skynyrd shirt. He has a grungy little beard and oily hair sticking up in odd places. “I can’t wait to see you racin’ again, Connor. ’Bout time you saddled up. When are you putting tires on the track?”
“Look for me at Caledonia in August. But don’t blink or you’ll miss me.”
“Same Road Runner? I always thought that ride was the bomb.”
Connor grins. “Brother, you got no idea.”
13.
The sow has had piglets, and in the afternoons Jack likes to go out and throw scraps to them, to watch them dance on their little trotters. More than once he has dozed off in the sweet grass outside their enclosure, their shrill, girlish shrieks following him into sleep, a sound like children being skinned alive. He feels a bit sleepy now, leaning over the fence, feeding them pork rinds out of a bag, and doesn’t notice for several minutes that they are one piglet short. There are four hopping beneath his feet, grinning their hobgoblin smiles, when there should be five. Their mother, all 630 pounds of her, snores on the far side of the pen. One ear twitches at flies.
He hops the fence and ducks into the hog house, a long, open-faced shed. The interior is ripe with the green smell of pig shit. He kicks at the hay the sow uses for her bed, wondering if he will find a dead piglet with a black face. It wouldn’t be the first time the sow has accidentally sat on one of her young and suffocated it. But no.
Jack steps back out into the bright glare of the day. He has a crowd of piglets underfoot, hopping at his ankles, grunting for attention and hoping he will drop more rinds. He ignores them and walks the length of the fence. As he approaches the far southwestern corner of the enclosure, the piglets fall away behind him, let him go on alone.
The pigs have trampled their pen to a floor of churned, sun-baked mud, except in the corners, where there are tufts of weeds and pale grass. As he approaches the nearest corner, he sees what looks like a fat pink lump of sausage, tangled in the grass. He slows. He smells something bad, like offal, like a warm split intestine in the sunshine. He shades his eyes with his hand.
The missing piglet is tangled in roots and weeds. There are tough wiry roots wrapped around and around its throat. Each little leg is bound up in more loops of weed. Roots twist around to fill its open mouth and cram deep into its throat.
As Jack stares, the roots seem to tighten. A fresh tendril squirms like a grass snake and pushes itself into the piglet’s half-open right eye with a faintly audible splort!
Jack doesn’t know he’s dropped the pork rinds until he finds himself on the other side of the pen, gasping for air, bent over and clutching his knees.
The piglets creep carefully toward the dropped bag, nervously monitoring that mass of squirming roots in the corner of the pen. The bravest of them grabs the bag by one flap and runs away with it, squealing triumphantly, while the others give chase.
14.
Jack McCourt has never felt less like going to sleep. He has a digital clock beside the bed, but he hardly looks at it. Instead he watches a rectangle of silver moonlight rise on the wall. It climbs higher and higher, moving from right to left across the room, raking the ceiling. Then it falls toward his bureau, dropping ever lower, until it vanishes. When he does peek at the time, it is almost 3:00 A.M.
His mother believed in astral spirits, and maybe there’s something to it. He is so quiet, slipping down the back stairs, he might be a ghost of himself. He lets himself into the greenhouse—the air is so steamy and warm it’s like stepping into a bathroom after someone has had a long, hot shower—and finds a trowel. Jack takes it with him to the graveyard.
He will tear up the mums, he thinks, when he gets to his mother’s plot, and he will see they are only plants. Something has come loose in his mind, like a nut slipping on a pipe, and bad-dream ideas are leaking out. He can’t be surprised. It runs in the family. Not for nothing did his mother want the clozapine.
Only when he arrives at her pink marble gravestone, he understands he isn’t going to find ordinary plants with hairy, dirty roots.
The head of the slaughtered piglet is here, balanced carefully on the top of her marker. Its eyes are gone, and the sockets have been filled with white and yellow daisies. It smile
s idiotically.
The mums beneath her gravestone are three feet high and obscure everything chiseled into the marble except her first name, which now reads as a command: BLOOM! He cannot think, at first, how the decapitated head of the piglet could’ve gotten out here unless someone carried it out. The swine enclosure is more than two football fields away. Then it comes to him that the mums must have root systems that reach all the way to the house. Perhaps this lump of pig has been carried all this distance underground. Is that possible? There is a lot of dried filth on the piglet’s face.
Jack grips a handful of stems and pulls. Whatever is below the soil is heavy, so heavy. Dirt falls away.
The top of his mother’s head comes out of the earth. Her eyes are shut. Her face is slick, and there’s a grub on her filthy brow.
He uses his hands to clear the dirt back from her nose, to unearth her mouth. Her eyes roll open. The onions in her head stare blindly out at him.
“Jack,” she whispers, and smiles.
15.
“You aren’t my mother,” he says when he gets his breath back.
“We’re all your mother,” she says, and his eyes dart to the other plants. “We grew you. Before you grew us.”
“My mother is in the dirt,” he says.
“Yes, but we don’t have to stay here.”
That’s not what he meant.
“I’m imagining you.”
“Give me your hand.”
He holds out his palm, close to her face. At the last instant, he thinks her mouth will suddenly distend, open into a grotesque horror-movie maw full of teeth, and she’ll bite his hand off at the wrist.
Instead she closes her eyes and rests her cheek against his palm. The texture is not quite right, not quite flesh. It’s more rubbery, like the outer skin of an eggplant. But she’s warm, and she gently kisses the ball of his thumb, as his mother did a thousand times in life. He shivers with relief and pleasure.
He didn’t know until right then how much he missed her.
16.
“Jack,” says the second mum when he tugs her head up out of the black, cake-dough soil.
