by Joe Hill
“Jack,” says the third.
“Jack, Jack, Jack,” the mums singsong into the night as he clears the dirt away from their heads, six in all, buried up to their necks in the dirt. One of them has grown wrong. She has a dent in the right side of her face, and her right eye won’t open. The whole face has a misshapen gourdlike quality to it, and there are hundreds of tiny ants crawling in and out of a black gouge in her right temple. She grins toothlessly. When she tries to say his name, it comes out, “hhhHHh-hack! Haaa-ack!”
17.
He says, “Are you a plant? Or an animal?”
“They’re only different categories in people’s heads. There are really only two categories, Jack. Alive . . . and dead.” The first head he’d dug up does all the talking. The others stare at her with their slick white onion eyeballs. “I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave you.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it?” She smiles, eyelids sinking with a certain sly suggestion.
He looks back at the farmhouse and spits.
“They’re going to do something bad, Jack,” she says. “Your father is going to do something bad.”
“He already did something bad.”
“hhhhhhHHHHHAAAAaaants! Haa-ants! Haants in my p-p-pants!” says the mum with ants crawling in and out of the hole in her temple.
“No, love,” says Mum #2. “Not in your pants. They’re in your brains.”
“Grains?” says the deformed mother. “G-grains? Haaants in the grain!”
A few of the other mums sigh.
“He’s going to do something worse than what got done to me,” says Mum #1.
“I know. I know what he’s going to do and how he’s going to do it. He’s got all of it out in the barn: the fertilizer and the nitro. Connor is going to use it to blow people up.” Jack almost adds, And kill himself while he’s at it, and then Dad can marry— but he won’t even allow himself to finish the thought.
“You need to go. You need to warn people.”
“Why didn’t you warn people?”
Mum #1 smiles sadly, wistfully. “He had you. He said he’d kill you if I told. He’d shoot you, and then he’d shoot himself. I thought Meemaw could help us, but she didn’t get here until after I was gone.”
“She didn’t get here at all.”
“Yes she did,” she says, and the smile is sly again. “You’ve already met her.”
The other heads are nodding. A black, three-inch centipede falls out of the dirty root-tangle of Mum #2’s hair and onto her forehead. It crawls down the bridge of her nose, and then her tongue pokes out of her mouth and reaches up and licks it off. There is a crunch as she closes her teeth on it.
Jack says, “You were a seed. I planted you myself. You can’t really be my mum. You’re just pretending. You’re like that movie. The one where the plants wrap up people who are sleeping and grow copies.”
“We are rooted in your blood, Jack McCourt. And in hers. We draw from her strength even now. Our roots are tough and hardy and grow fast, to find what we need.”
He thinks of the piglet and shudders. “You must be thirsty. We’ve been in a dry spell. Do you want me to get the watering can?”
“We’re not thirsty for that,” Mum #1 confesses.
“No,” he says. “Do you want another piglet?”
“Maybe something with a little more juice in it,” she says. “We’re almost strong enough, Jack, to pull up roots and have us some fun. We could paint the farm red tonight, boy!”
“It’s already red.”
“Redder,” says Mum #3, and she laughs a hoarse, smoker’s laugh.
“Tell me what you want,” Jack says.
“How about you walk that sow over here,” Mum #1 suggests.
“Sow!” says the one with ants all over her face, and her tongue lolls out, and she slobbers on her lips. “Sow—now!”
“Okay,” Jack says. “I understand. Mom? I don’t want to stay here one more night.”
“No,” she says. “You won’t have to. Just do this last thing for us? Bring us a sow to build up a little strength. And then, Jack—”
“We’ll help you do the rest,” say five of the six heads at the same time. The sixth head, the deformed mum, licks ants off her cheek and smacks her lips.
As he reels out of the graveyard, the first poisonous line of crimson light shows in the east. The edge of the world glows like an ember.
18.
Jack is in the kitchen when Beth wanders in, her hair mussed up from sleep and her feet bare. He always expects her to enter from the porch, through the screen door, but instead she lets herself into the kitchen from the front hall, doing up the top button on her flannel shirt as she approaches. Is it her flannel shirt? It looks like a man’s. It looks like one of his father’s.
When she sees him on the far side of the kitchen counter, her chubby, pale face darkens with a blush and her fingers lose their grip on the button. The flannel shirt springs open to show her pretty, freckled breastbone.
“Jack, I—” she begins, but Jack doesn’t have time for her explanations or, worse, her confession. He reels around the kitchen counter, holding his right hand up in the gesture that means “hello” but also “halt.” Blood falls in fat drops from the bright line raked across his palm.
“Oh, Beth. Oh, Beth, quick, quick, come with me. I did something stupid. I did something really, really bad,” he says, and is interested to find he is close to genuine tears, his eyes tingling and the world blurring.
“Jack! You’re bleeding. We ought to do something about that hand—”
“No, no, no, please, just come, just come see what I did, Beth, you’ve got to help me, please—”
“Of course I will,” Beth says, and clutches him to her, thoughtlessly squeezing his face to her bosom. Only a few weeks ago, such an intimacy would’ve dizzied him, but now he finds it as repulsive as a centipede crawling over his face.
With his uninjured hand, he tows her by the elbow to the back door. Blood plinks and plops on the tiles.
“I let her out of the pen, and she wouldn’t go back in,” he says in his choked voice. “I thought I could scare her.”
“Oh, Jack,” Beth says. “One of the pigs?”
“The sow,” he says, leading her out into the pearly, brassy light of dawn. He hurries her across the dewy grass, past the kitchen garden, through the open gate of the graveyard. “I’m so stupid. I think she’s going to die.”
He slows as they approach his mother’s headstone and the plants growing in a wild tumult before it. They’ve all cleverly sunk back into the ground, so nothing is visible except the disturbed earth and their tufted green branches. He lets go of Beth, and she takes another few steps forward, looking around, puzzled. When she frowns, Jack can see she has a small second chin, and it strikes him that someday she will be unpleasantly fat. Then he thinks, No, she will never be fat.
“Jack,” Beth says, and her voice has a note of caution in it. “I don’t see anything. What are you playing at?”
He reaches behind his back and grips the handle of the trowel, jammed down into the back of his jeans. He means to drive the point of the blade into her calf, but she turns at the last instant, and he sinks it, with a gritty crunch, into her thigh, above her left knee. She cries out and sits down among the mums with a thud. Beth draws a long, quivering breath and holds it, staring at the trowel buried in her leg. She rests her shoulders back against Bloom McCourt’s headstone.
“Get her,” Jack says to the mums. “Finish her off! She’s yours!”
The plants do not stir.
Beth lifts her chin and gazes at him with bewildered eyes, brimming with tears.
“Have you lost your mind?” she asks.
“Get her! Kill the sow!” he shouts at the mums, something almost like hysteria in his tone, but there is no response.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” Beth asks again.
Jack stares into her pale face, a
t her damp eyes and quivering, girlish chin.
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” Jack says. “I think I am.”
His hand finds the handle of the trowel. He yanks it out of her leg. Then he puts it back in, this time in her chest. She tries to scream, but the third blow sinks into her mouth, cutting it open wide. The fourth finds her throat.
For a long time after, there is only the sound of digging, although Jack never once sinks the trowel into soil.
19.
Once he’s done making a red, chewed-up clay of Beth’s breasts and face, he tries to dig up his mums. He pulls up plant after plant and finds only the twisted white claws of roots, dirt falling off them. The sixth plant is sickly, the leaves full of holes, ants crawling up and down the roots.
Jack touches his head, which feels queer, and leaves red fingerprints on his face. Whether he has marked himself with Beth’s blood or his own, he could not say. He wonders if this is what it feels like to be hungover. His arm is sore from sticking her so many times. Butchering a full-grown woman is tiring work.
What exactly was he thinking when he led her out here anyway? It’s already hard to recall. He can never truly remember his night terrors when they fade. They are like one of those flowers that only open by moonlight, and the night is well over, the sky is brightening, turning a shade of lemon.
Beth, with her slashed, savaged mouth yawning wide, gapes blindly at the coming dawn.
20.
Jack is a while in the barn. The forty-pound plastic sacks of ammonium nitrate are piled against one wall, the white cans of nitromethane lined up next to them. He works by the shaded steel lamp on the plywood table, crafting a simple explosive out of a couple inches of copper pipe, black gunpowder, cotton swabs, and some other bits and pieces. He caps either end of the pipe, feeds a fuse punched through a hole in one end. He works in a kind of half-awake trance, without second-guessing himself, without second thoughts. There is no going back now. There is only going forward.
After due consideration he nestles the nitro tanks here and there among the heavy-duty plastic sacks of fertilizer. He uses electrical tape to secure his homemade IED to one of the cans, directly beneath the valve—then rotates the tank so the gleaming copper pipe is out of sight, facing the wall.
By the time he leaves the barn, the sun is snagged in the branches of the big oak beyond the house and the entire tree is aglow like a burning skeletal hand of glory. The grass rustles in the breeze, a hundred thousand burning filaments of green light.
21.
“Dad,” Jack says. He pushes aside the shower curtain. “Dad! I did something bad, I did something really, really bad. I need help.”
His father stands, broad-shouldered and powerfully built, in the hot and foaming spray. His face looks curiously naked without his spectacles. He twists his head around and stares nearsightedly down at his son. Hank McCourt’s face is almost innocent in its shock.
“I went out, I went to Mom’s grave—sometimes I go out in the morning, just to spend time with her—only I heard something moving in the corn,” Jack says, his words almost running together while tears run down his cheeks. “I went in to see what it was, and a man tried to grab me. A man in a black helmet and a flak jacket, and he had a gun. He tried to grab me, and I hit him in the neck, I . . . I . . .”
Jack produces the blood-sticky trowel in one shaking hand, holds it out for a moment, and lets it drop to the floor.
“I think I killed him, Dad,” Jack says.
His father turns off the water and grabs for a towel.
“Did it say anything on the flak vest?” his father asks.
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Jack moans. “I think . . . I think it said ATF? Dad, there’s more of them out there. I saw two other black helmets in the corn, and, Dad, oh, Dad, Beth came to look for me, and I think they got her,” Jack says, all breathless. “I heard her shout.”
His father pushes past him. In the bedroom he grabs his jeans off the floor and steps into them, cinches his belt. The Glock is in its holster as always. Jack put it back after unloading the magazine.
“Dad, I don’t think any of the other men in the corn know about the one I stabbed, I don’t think they’ve found his body yet, but what’s going to happen when they do?” His voice rises to a keening wail, and his whole body is shaking. It isn’t hard to feel sick with grief. His mother is in the dirt, and she’s not even a plant either, just food for plants. His mother is never coming back. Also, Jack’s brain itches. He has been wondering in the last few moments if there might be ants in his head. It’s been itching ever since he finished murdering Beth.
“What’s going to happen,” his father says, “is we’re going to put a hurt on them like they never knew they could be hurt. But first we need the guns in the barn.”
He doesn’t bother with a shirt or shoes but plunges out of the room in nothing more than his jeans, leaving behind a cloud of steam and Ivory soap smell. Ivory soap, not geranium-scented hotel-room soap. Maybe the crazy old thing at the farm stand was just a crazy old thing, not his hundred-year-old witchy grandmother come to give him magic seeds so he could grow a new mum. Maybe there is nothing in the garden but dirt and roots and plants and Beth’s corpse and a piglet Jack himself slaughtered in his sleep.
But Bloom McCourt didn’t drink, not anymore, and the sliding glass door in her hotel room didn’t lock, and Jack knows what he smelled on Beth’s hands. He didn’t dream that. His father sent Beth to visit Bloom as a sympathetic friend, to find out who she might’ve told about the explosive materials in the barn. Once Beth made sure Bloom hadn’t told anyone, she smashed his mother’s head in, and watched her drown, and planted the empty bottles of gin. Jack might suffer from night terrors, but not idiocy, and the facts have been in front of him for some time now.
Jack hurries after his father. As Hank crosses the porch, he grabs the clapper in the old rusted dinner bell and gongs it, once, twice, a third time: the signal for a raid.
His father crosses the dirt apron in front of the farmhouse, angling toward the barn. He doesn’t seem to notice that Jack has moved the F-150. As Hank reaches the big double swinging doors, Jack sees Connor coming up the road, moving in a jerky, hopping stride, his eyes wild and his shirt unbuttoned, a hunting rifle in both hands.
“What . . . ?” Connor cries.
“They’re here,” Jack’s father says. “It’s happening. They’ve got Beth, so she’s out of it. We move quick enough, we can cut through them like a knife through butter, shoot our way through their line and get to the east side of Long Field. The old Jeep is parked in the corn shed. We could be in Iowa by lunch. There’s plenty of men in the movement who will hide us. But we need the guns buried under the tractor.”
“Fuck!” Connor says, and staggers into the darkness of the barn.
His father yanks himself up into the John Deere. Connor hurries to the air compressor, flips it on, and grabs the big post-hole digger. They can have their fully automatic machine guns in five minutes if they work quickly. Jack watches from the open double doors long enough to be sure they’re both occupied, and then he walks to the pile of ammonium nitrate against the wall. There’s a box of kitchen matches on the worktable, next to an oil lamp. Jack lights the fuse on his improvised pipe bomb, constructed just exactly the way Connor taught him.
Jack walks back to the big double doors of the barn like a sleepwalker, but he isn’t sleepwalking—he’s got his eyes wide open, and the morning is bright and blue and clear. He swings the doors shut and locks them with the big Yale padlock. The two men won’t be able to get out the side door either. He has already backed his father’s Ford F-150 against it, so it can’t be forced open.
He strolls down the gravel lane, a thirteen-year-old American boy in Converse All-Stars, with dirt on his nose and blood on his hands. A child of the land that grew him.
Behind him someone shouts in surprise. Connor? One of them throws himself into the double doors, which shudder and quake and remain
closed. His father yells Jack’s name. Now both of them hit the double doors, with a splintering crunch. A few pieces of wood go flying, but the lock holds. Jack turns back, halfway down the drive, to see if they will kick their way out—and that’s when he sees ropy greenish vines, slithering up out of the soil, long cables of root that crawl up the sides of the barn, run across the double doors in trembling threads, binding them shut. The next time the two men hit the doors, the panels barely move. The cords draw tight around the base of the barn, a net around a fish. Jack smiles and rubs at the queer feeling in the left side of his head. She promised she’d help.
The barn disappears in a silent, obliterating flash. A gust of wind picks Jack up like a leaf and flings him weightlessly into the sky.
22.
When Jack McCourt comes to, he is lying in a great feather bed of violet blooms. He has wound up in one of Beth’s flower beds, out in front of the cottage she shared with Connor. Sweet green fronds stroke his cheeks, and a fuzzy flower kisses his left temple. He can’t hear a thing, and there’s a trickle of blood running from one ear. He can taste blood in his mouth.
The barn is gone. It is hard to even look at the place where it stood. There is an orchid of light rising there, a stem of fire, with petals of flame spreading out from the top. The F-150 has been tossed a hundred feet to the east, a black charred wreck flipped on its side. One half of the farmhouse has collapsed in on itself, a balsa-wood dollhouse that has been kicked by a giant. Blackened beams stick out of the ruin, trickling smoke into the brightness of the day.
A part of Jack doesn’t want to get up. He has not felt so at peace since the morning he left the house with Bloom to go and see her family. There among the flowers, he feels as happy and comfortable as a child curled up beside his mother on a lazy summer morning. When he forces himself up at last, it’s with a lazy sigh of regret.
His balance is screwy. He reels halfway across the little dirt drive and then catches himself against the hood of Connor’s sweet ’71 Road Runner, the car he’s always wanted. Well. It’s his now. He can’t have Connor’s cool carbon-fiber leg, and he doesn’t yearn for Beth anymore, but the car is all his. He may only be thirteen, but he’s tall enough to reach the pedals and is already a perfectly competent driver.
