Black Autumn Travelers

by Jeff Kirkham

  “You can shovel the dung out of the milking stall. Are you saying you didn’t notice the cow crap when you milked this morning?”

  “Yeah,” Sage answered, feeling like an idiot. “I noticed.”

  “You didn’t imagine that we leave it there, right?”

  Sage hated this conversation. “Where’s the shovel?”

  “God put your eyes forward-facing. Lucky you.” Angeline turned back to her work.

  Sage looked around carefully and noticed two shovels hanging by the milking stand. He picked one off the wall, entered the milking stall and shoveled up a big dollop of ripe cow dung.

  “What am I supposed to do with it now? Throw it out the door?”

  Angelina guffawed, not looking up from her horse.

  Sage glanced around and discovered a big wheelbarrow full of dung.

  “The wheelbarrow’s full. Where should I dump it?”

  She exhaled loudly. “There’s a large bin made of pallets over by the garden. That’s the compost pile. Dump the wheelbarrow on the pile.”

  Sage set the shovel down, still full of cow crap. He grabbed the wheelbarrow and rolled it out of the barn. When he got back, she was still combing the horse. He lingered in the doorway.

  “You liking the view?” she asked, still not turning around.

  Sage startled, then continued toward the shovel. “The view of what?” Somehow, she knew her butt had caught his eye.

  “You know what.” Angelina hung her comb on a hook, opened the horse stall, executed a pirouette and danced out of the barn doing a ballet skip and a leap. “Enjoy shoveling the stalls.” She disappeared into the sun.

  Sage was left in an awkward position. Should he shovel the milking stall, even though she had walked away? Should he shovel all the stalls?

  He went ahead and shoveled them all.

  Later that morning, Sage took a break on the porch, sipping a glass of iced tea Thelma had given him. Angelina danced in the front yard to music only she could hear. Sage didn’t think he had ever seen such an ethereal creature. There were hot girls and then there was this… person. He didn’t know what had jacked up her face—he assumed it was a birth defect—but she had personality and then some. Her nice rear end couldn’t compete with the sparks coming off her in showers. All the boring-ass Shakespeare they had made him read in private school suddenly made sense. His teenage worldview wobbled a little on its axis.

  Farmer Holland came around the corner and climbed the stairs, apparently coming in from farm duty. His hands were covered in grease and he carried the six-shooter on his hip.

  “Where’d you get that iced tea? Thelma, your man’s thirsty,” he yelled. Thelma came out with a glass. She slapped the big farmer on the butt as she turned back into the house.

  Sage and the farmer gazed over the lawn and the cottonwoods, taking in Angelina.

  “So let me give you a word of advice regarding my daughter…”

  Sage had stumbled into an awkward social situation. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have with a father, especially not after only two days at the farm.

  “I like you. Any boy who’ll eat a rattlesnake is probably okay as a son-in-law.”

  Sage said nothing. He liked admiring the girl but he wasn’t thinking marriage. Maybe that’s how they did things in farm country. You look. You buy.

  The farmer meandered in a new direction with his thoughts. “You ever seen a lynx?”

  Sage shook his head.

  “We get them around here. You mostly see them in the winter. Their coats go almost completely white. They hunt rabbits. You’ve never seen anything as athletic as a lynx chasing a rabbit. They got these ears that point straight up with long feathery tufts. They’re just gorgeous. I’ve never even thought to shoot one for its fur. They’re such beautiful animals.”

  Sage didn’t know what to do, so he kept staring out at the lawn and Angelina, sipping his tea.

  “I caught one in a cage once as a boy and I took it up to my bedroom. Right up those stairs.” The farmer nodded his head back toward the house.

  “When I got tired of watching the lynx, I reached into the cage to pet it. I got a passel of stitches and a couple of good scars out of the deal. My dad had to come in and shoot that lynx just to get it out of my bedroom. The bullet’s still in the floor.”

  The farmer stopped for a long drink of tea.

  “Yeah. A lynx is a beautiful thing,” he continued, his eyes coming back to his daughter. “But, if you’re going to take one into your bedroom, be ready. It’s a goddamned lynx, after all.”

  The farmer patted Sage on the shoulder, set his glass on the railing, and walked across the yard.

  Sage finished his tea, wondering what had just happened.

  Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saint Area of Control, Colorado City/Hildale, Arizona/Utah Border

  Wounded or not, Cameron was being put to work. Over the last two days in the hospital, he had pieced together why the polygamists had shot him and then saved his life.

  The potato harvest.

  Most of the beds in the hospital were filled with men and women who had been ambushed along Highway 389. As soon as a man could walk, he was hauled out of the hospital ward to what the polygamist candy stripers called “repentance.” This time of year, apparently, repentance meant harvesting potatoes. The only potato harvesting machine in town had busted and the community needed slaves to work the fields.

  Cameron could barely breathe without wincing, so he had no idea how he was going to do manual labor. Just the truck ride to the giant circular fields west of town felt like a three-round fight against a dude with an ice pick.

  When the truck arrived at the field, another crew of “the penitent” were being herded off for lunch. Cameron’s crew of a dozen men climbed down off the pickup trucks, and a man dressed like an Amish guy gave them instructions on how to pull potatoes from the tilled soil. Behind the crew of slaves stood three men with rifles. All of them appeared to be in their mid-twenties.

  Once the instruction was finished—mostly teaching the workers how to handle potatoes—Cameron and two old men were separated from the group and assigned to “secondary picking.” A young polygamist in a cowboy hat led the three men off to a far corner of the field where a small tractor awaited.

  The more Cameron moved about, the better he felt. Something about getting up and mobile caused the pain to recede to a dull roar rather than crippling pangs.

  “Secondary picking” meant picking through the already-harvested rows. The attachment behind the tractor ran powered fingers through the soil, jiggling the dirt and sifting up spuds that would float to the top. The rows had already been picked over once, so Cameron and the old men walked behind the potato digger and grabbed the occasional straggler. Two men watched for potatoes while the third man carried a crate. The polygamist kid in the cowboy hat drove the tractor, and carried an old scoped rifle at his side.

  The two old men on his crew didn’t know much more than Cameron about the polygamist community. The three men shouted back and forth over the chugging of the ancient tractor and the rattling of the potato harvester. They had been ambushed alongside the highway just like Cameron, though neither had been shot.

  Cameron gathered that all men from the FLDS community were called “priesthood men” and the slaves were called “gentiles.” The women were called “sisters,” whether fundamentalist Mormon or not. The last bit set off a wave of disquiet in Cameron. The system had a distinct air of women being handled like cattle and, at this moment, his wife and boys were being held in the figurative corral. Julie’s strange willingness to believe the dogma wasn’t making him feel any better about things. Until he could gather more information, he would have to bide his time, play the good worker, and maybe make his way into the community system.

  Much later in the afternoon, with the shadow of the Utah Mountains nibbling away at the sun-baked earth, the team stopped for water while the young man watched over them with his gun.

&
nbsp; “When do I get to see my wife and kids?” Cameron asked his new boss.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. You have plenty to worry about right here.” He pointed at the dirt.

  “I mean, if I do a good job here, can I work my way up into being part of this place—part of the town? This is ‘repentance,’ correct? Eventually, we will be able to get good with the Lord, and all that, right?”

  The young man guffawed.

  “When do I get to see my wife and boys?” Cameron persisted.

  “Drink your water and get back to work. You need to forget about your former wife.”

  “Wait. What did you say?” Cameron took a step forward, dumping his cup of water onto the clotted soil. The young man ran the bolt of his rifle and pointed it at the ground in front of Cameron.

  “Back off, gentile. It’s not my fault you’re of a wicked generation and not blessed with celestial marriage.”

  “You’re going to have to sh… sh… shoot me, motherfucker, or explain what you just said,” Cameron stammered, the blood rushing to his face. “How is she my former wife?”

  “How dare you profane a priesthood man!” The young man leveled the rifle at Cameron’s chest. “I’m not afraid of you… Fine. I’ll tell you. Your wife and children were placed yesterday with the prophet Rulon’s son Isaiah. She has been married into the holy bonds of celestial marriage—real marriage—and you won’t ever see her again. So get back to work.”

  The two men stood staring at each other, the young man pointing his rifle at Cameron, his finger on the trigger. After a long, tense moment, Cameron tossed his empty water cup into the potato crate. The young polygamist slowly backed away and climbed onto the tractor.

  Big mistake, Cameron thought to himself, the hot blood pounding in his ears.

  The tractor fired up and the potato digger began its herky-jerky dance, fingering the dirt, drowning out the tension that had gone through the group of men like crackling electricity.

  Only Cameron hadn’t cooled down at all. Somewhere between discovering that his wife had been given to another man and the scorching pain in his chest, Cameron forgot about his plan to insinuate himself into the community.

  A few moments later, when he picked up a potato to find it was actually a stone, the die was cast.

  Cameron had played little league baseball, then high school baseball, then city league softball up until the day before the collapse. He ran center field and could throw a softball a hundred feet like a rope, burning throws from center field all the way to home plate with deadly accuracy. The rock he picked up was slightly smaller than a baseball and its weight and size felt like a nod from Satan himself.

  Violence had always been part of league softball—the draw, the juice, the unspoken raison d’etre, as his fancy sister might describe it. The penalties for fighting—or “emptying the dugout” in a melee—sounded stern in the rulebooks, but those punishments were barely worth consideration: forfeitures of game and suspensions of play. Somewhere in the hallowed halls of city league, there persisted a knowledge that not half the league would play if not for the promise of an occasional fistfight.

  When an offense occurred on the softball field, be it a runner unnecessarily smashing into the first baseman, crossing the line with trash talk, or ripping the pitcher with one too many line drives, the dramatic tension would ramp up, harbinger of the coming conflagration.

  With some final insult, gloves would be flung to the ground. Hats would be torn from heads. Sunglasses would be hurled. And violence would erupt like an orgasm long-awaited.

  Yet the violence had a pageant’s air to it, as though everyone had colluded to incite the conflict, but within an agreement that men should be hurt rather than wounded. It was a game, after all, and games are to be played only as a precursor to war. They aren’t the act of war itself. Bloody, even broken noses, mangled hands, blackened eyes, and cauliflower ears were all de rigueur—well within the bounds of gentlemanly battle.

  If a softball player ripped off an ear, bit off a finger, or stove in the knee of an opponent, that would be beyond the pale: a violation of decorum. Such a violator would be looked upon as a despicable sort of savage, and even his own softball team would gladly see him hauled off to jail.

  Physically, it might be easier on the fists to punch a man in the throat and possibly collapse his esophagus, but no man would dare do it. Even with a dozen baseball bats at arm’s reach, few men ever left the fight for the hospital. The level of injury adjusted itself, mostly, within reasonable limits.

  Afterward, the warring teams would sometimes share a beer at the nearest watering hole, celebrating their injuries and basking in the post-coital glee of having once again survived mock combat.

  Cameron had been the veteran of over a dozen such softball battles; he knew the limits and had learned the means of causing pain without injury, wounding without maiming. He had reveled many times in violence without consequence.

  Standing in the red dirt rows of a northern Arizona field, the violence pounding in his head ratcheted beyond pageantry. Murder took hold. The look in Cameron’s eyes would be instantly recognized by any man and would have alarmed the young slave driver, except that he had turned his back.

  The old man standing beside Cameron sucked air through his teeth as Cameron wound up and rocketed the stone at over seventy miles per hour directly into the dimple where the back of the young man’s skull met his spine. The young polygamist crumpled over his steering wheel like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Cameron rushed forward and jumped into the cab, triggering a massive stab of pain in his chest. He hunted for the ignition to shut the tractor off but reconsidered and left it chugging. He draped the limp man’s arm over the steering wheel, stabilizing the plodding trajectory and buying himself a minute or two before the tractor pitched off the row into the scrub beyond.

  Cameron grabbed the rifle and scanned the potato field, grateful no one had noticed except his fellow slaves. He searched the man’s pockets, finding a box of bullets and a set of truck keys. He tossed the keys to one of the old men. Without saying a word, Cameron climbed down from the tractor and lurched away, wounded and crooked, loping to the edge of the field where a dry creek bed ran away from the potato field into the red hills above the town.

  11

  “Dying world of radiation, victims of mad frustration

  Burning globe of oxy'n fire, like electric funeral pyre.”

  Electric Funeral, Black Sabbath, Paranoid, 1970

  The Holland Farmhouse, Wallula, Washington

  It was la madrugada—the middle of the night. Technically, early morning. Sage’s guard duty.

  Guard duty meant sitting on a chair in Terrence’s room, looking out the highest window in the house toward the backyard while the farmer’s oldest son snored beside him in bed. The farmer’s wife, Thelma, left coffee warming in the kitchen for Sage, and he had scrounged an insulated coffee mug, the kind of mug with a cup for a lid and a big “Thermos” printed on the front. It probably held six cups of coffee; apparently a farmer’s dose.

  Nothing in this world felt cozier to Sage than a mug in his hands. Sage would have rather been asleep but, if he couldn’t be asleep, coffee with cream was an outstanding consolation prize.

  If there was a paradise amid the collapse, it would be right here, living with the Hollands. Sage couldn’t think of a time when he had met better people.

  Even with their high-minded ideas about social equality, the Starbucks Clan hadn’t necessarily been good people. Maybe Nora was good people and maybe Penny, but Sage understood now in a way he hadn’t before. He remembered the trappings of society once important to him: skinny jeans, the hip-hop music scene, and luxury travel. He had spent time in Manhattan with his parents, and the allure of running with the elite lit him up back then.

  In a rare indulgence while on that trip, his dad took him to Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Caught up in the glitz of New York, the two Ross boys splurged on matching pairs o
f fashionista high-top sneakers. His dad handed over his credit card and paid almost $300 a pair for the shoes. Back at school in Utah, Sage wore them like the cock of the walk, slipping the story of the high tops into any conversation he could. It was his sophomore year and, eight months later, they no longer fit his feet.

  The Hollands hadn’t probably ever paid more than a hundred bucks for a pair of Carhartt work boots, and that had likely been for Christmas. The way they lived and loved struck Sage as human bedrock. With darkness submerging the heartland, the Hollands—and a few hundred thousand like them—might be the final islands of American society.

  His thoughts about the city and the farm felt a bit overly dramatized, and Sage knew he tended to grow sappy when he was tired. He filed the musings away to be considered again in the light of day. The last thing he wanted was to fall asleep on guard duty, so he pulled himself upright and took another sip of coffee.

  The sunrise drifted begrudgingly over the farm. Sage noticed the packed firmament of stars dimming, then silently vanishing, one by one, the color of the sky going from black to dishwater gray. He had seen nothing all night, and his guard shift would be over soon.

  A hundred yards out, a fence separated the backyard from an endless hayfield. The Hollands raised paddocks of hay and alfalfa to tide their animals through the winter.

  At the fence line, Sage noticed something move. He focused hard on the spot, but the movement vanished. Then he heard a human voice, barely audible on the wind. At once, scores of shadows pushed through the barbed wire fence, silently trampling trails in the alfalfa. Sage didn’t need to look through his scope to confirm what he saw.

  “Wake up! Wake up!” Sage screamed with a trill of panic. “People are coming. Wake up!” The house stirred as feet hit the floor, family members startled from sleep. Terrence grunted and came full awake, reaching for his rifle.

  “What do I do?” Sage implored.