by Erica Boyce
None of that matters now, not anymore.
A car horn beeps beside me, two jaunty taps, and there’s our neighbor, Marlene Cadbury, smiling through her window at me. “What a lovely surprise!” I can almost hear her saying as she rolls down her window. I fling the cigarette to the pavement and flap my fingers at her—so sorry, really must be going. It’s time to drive back home.
* * *
Sam is in the kitchen, rummaging through the cupboard next to the oven for the ancient box of Cocoa Pebbles buried behind the canned tomatoes. Every time I try to throw it out, he plucks it out of the garbage can and slides it right back into place. I poke him in the small of his back and say, “The grapefruit’s in the fridge, same as always.”
“Oh, come on. Why do you ruin my fun like that every morning?” He squeezes my finger and retrieves the unappetizing bruised fruit from the fridge. I pluck a lumpy bag of granola from the cupboard, special-ordered online every month for its antioxidants, and hand it to him. He pours the granola into his favorite bowl; once upon a time, it had our college insignia printed on it, before decades of washing wore the colors away. He’d bought it for me for our first Valentine’s Day together. “For those Cheerios you’re always eating,” he’d said as I unwrapped it.
“The fields’re doing all right,” Sam says before I can ask. “Corn feed’s a little rangy from the cutworms, but it’s almost time to harvest anyway. I’m thinking Nessa might be right about that permaculture thing. Maybe if I start growing something more edible, we can eat something better than this for breakfast.”
Vanessa always comes back from California aglow with ideas, making it impossible for her father to listen to any voice of reason. The last time she came home, the two of them hatched a plan to burn out the weeds instead of using chemicals—flame weeding, they called it. I watched them from the window, towing a propane tank that sprayed a line of feral fire behind the tractor. A few minutes in, a bush at the edge of the field caught and went up in a blaze. Nessa spun, spraying it out with an extinguisher, while Sam’s hands flapped overhead. Back inside, they glanced slyly at each other when I told them that they would not, under any circumstances, be trying that again.
“Yes, growing something edible would work great, if we could find anyone around here who wanted to pay for the thistle and wild mint that seem to do so well here,” I say.
Sam is already shaking his head. “I know, I know. But maybe one of these days, we can give up corn for good and plant some fruits and veggies. Wouldn’t that be nice?” He’s scraped his bowl clean by now, and he drops it in the sink before pulling me into a brisk hug. I close my eyes and feel his chin pressing into my forehead as he speaks. “Whatcha got planned for the day?”
I pull away. “Oh, I don’t know. I thought I might get started on a new batch of bread, get some laundry and sewing done.” Same as always, same as ever. “What about you?”
“Well…” He leans back and hooks his thumbs into his fraying front pockets. “I’ve got to go see about those fungicides, maybe get some more rye seed. Hey, I was thinking.” He scratches the gray stubble on his cheek. “If we’re gonna try to get going on this veggie thing, it might be good to start with the garden out front, you know? You think you could start clearing out some of the dead stuff in Nessa’s patch?”
I can do almost all the things a proper farmer’s wife should: I cook, I clean, I sew, I even play hostess every once in a great while. I have never been able to grow anything myself, though. Our front lawn was all tall grass and weeds before Nessa attacked it when she turned thirteen, and to tall grass and weeds it has returned since she left. Sam looks sheepish. “All right, all right.” I sigh, but I pat his elbow.
I start to rinse out his bowl as the door claps shut behind him, and I watch him walk past the window. Instead of continuing toward the barn to stare at the empty stalls, his midmorning routine, he slips down a corn row to his right. The water runs over my hands, gradually growing warmer as he peers at every stalk he passes. He must be thinking of that boy who came by a few weeks ago, the one he chattered about for weeks beforehand. It was ridiculous, really, what Sam was planning to do, but he has a way of sweeping you into his enthusiasm, making you lean forward into your elbows on the table to hear more, to sit closer to the brightness of his ideas. Oh, my Sam.
* * *
I was sitting next to him, his fingers curled tightly around my own, when they found the first tumor after the melanoma. It was supposed to be a routine follow-up X-ray. The doctor stood before the screen and pointed at a spot glowing bluer than the rest in the folded balloon of his colon. All I could think was that this was wrong, seeing inside my husband this way, that this was private, that I should not have to layer this new picture of him over all the ones I’ve taken in the past forty years. I heard the word tumor and looked at Sam. Him? No. No. Sam was setting his jaw, he was nodding. Yes. Him.
We’ve been back in front of that light box five times in the past two years: two remissions, three recurrences. Every time, he nods the same way, so serious. Every time, I refuse. I cannot think about what my days will be without him.
Our last appointment was one of the bad ones. When they’re good, he sweeps me up and swings me around, whooping and singing. I can’t help but laugh and cradle his face in my hands, even though I know it will never last. This time, instead, he trudged up to our room, shut the door behind him, and stayed there for an hour, emerging with his cheeks all splotched and his mouth set small. And I waited until he’d fallen asleep that night to cry.
The chemo had worked before, though. And it must be working now. It has to. That’s what Dr. Cooper said: he had “no reason to believe” it wouldn’t work again.
I look down at my hands, suddenly flushed in the scalding water. I turn the faucet off. If Sam is really serious about this garden—and I know he is—I’ll have to buy some fertilizer tomorrow, while it’s cheaper just before the harvest season. For now, while the sun draws the chill from the air, I will make this dough.
Chapter Three
Daniel
The summer I turned seventeen, I went to farm camp. My grandpa had just died, and I needed to get away from the eggshell silence of the upstairs guest room where he used to sleep. I wanted to learn firsthand about the dairy farm that had used up all his better years. My mom sucked in her lips when I told her my plans, but my dad just asked me to bring home some colorful bugs from Delaware for him to study. So I went.
The camp was fun for the most part, once I got some calluses and learned to wear a hat. There was this one guy, Hal, who slept in the bunk above mine. His parents probably sent him there to separate him from the patch of pot plants growing under their porch. He used to rattle our bunk every night from his mattress, moaning and pretending to jack off. It never got old for him somehow. But one night, when the sounds of everyone else’s sleep whooshed through the cabin, he stuck his head over the edge of his bed into my face.
“Yo, Danny!” The whites of his eyes glowed. “I heard a rumor there’s a crop circle being built tonight in that shithole field down the road. You in or out?”
Any other person, and I probably would’ve said no. My muscles still screamed every night, pulsing angrily in my shoulders and legs. But this was Hal, and I knew that if I didn’t go, he would brag the rest of the week about what I’d missed. Totally insufferable. I stuffed my feet into my sneakers and followed him into the night. On the way there, he filled me in on all the details I hadn’t cared enough to ask about. He’d gone out for a walk after lights-out the other night and was smoking a joint on the edge of a field nearby when he saw some kid prowling through the wheat. Hal being Hal, he demanded the kid tell him what he was up to—never mind the cloud of pot smoke wafting above Hal’s own head. “He didn’t last long,” Hal smirked. “I swear I could see the dude sweat, even in the dark. All I had to do was ask a few questions, and he told me everything.”
T
hey were already almost done when we got there, two men and a woman, dressed in black and slipping through the neck-high wheat. I still remember how they managed not to shake a single stem of wheat apart from the ones they were crushing.
They were making a simple circle. “Practice for that pussy new guy I saw the other night, I bet,” Hal whispered. The “new guy” he pointed at, the skinniest, stood at the center of the circle, his hands stuffed in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He shifted on his spot, moving so that he was always facing the other two. The woman was walking along the edge of the circle, making sure it was even and bending over to snap off stems where it wasn’t. The other man was doing the real crushing. He had a board with a piece of rope coming off each end, and he would rest one end closest to the center of the circle on the ground and step slowly on the other end until the board flattened, flush to the earth. He gripped the ropes the whole time, the wheat crumbling beneath him.
When they finished, three white grins flashed, and they padded across the circle toward us. It was beautiful; it really was. The moonlight broke over its surface so it looked like a wheel, spinning if you moved your head. It seemed to almost shimmer from the depths of the wheat around it.
“Pretty awesome, huh?” The woman was beside me.
I couldn’t speak. I stared at the wheat. Hal tried to impress her—or maybe intimidate her—with his story about cornering the new guy, but it was me she squinted at, the wrinkles around her eyes scrunched. “We usually make sure we don’t have any bystanders,” she said over Hal’s babble, “but you campers get a special pass. We know you’re here to learn and won’t tell any townies. Lionel has a soft spot for you kids.” Her hand slid toward mine and put a slip of paper in my palm. And then she was gone, hustling with the two other men toward a van parked down the road.
“What’d she give ya, her number?” Hal’s sour breath filled my nose.
I stuffed the paper into my pocket, wiped his spittle off my ear, shrugged. He shoved my shoulder, and we turned back to the camp in the dawn light. Hal wouldn’t stop talking about some poor girl he’d dated the summer before. When I knew he wasn’t paying attention to me anymore, I slipped the paper halfway out of my pocket with one hand. It was just a white strip with a date, time, and address typed across it. And that was it.
* * *
My parents still don’t know. They think I’m farming, plain and simple. Which is weird enough for them—that their kid reverted to the old family business instead of going off to college like he was supposed to. I call them once a month, and my dad always does the talking, asking about crops and pests. My mom stays quiet mostly. I’ve gone back to visit a few times, and she spends the whole time almost avoiding me, scooting around me in the kitchen, going on random errands in the middle of the day.
It’s my second night of circle work here in Munsen, and I’m just about done marking the first section. My arm’s burning a little bit from spending so long above my head, reaching with the paint can. At night, the paint will pulse against the cornstalks, cutting across the rows of the crop. But it’s glow-in-the-dark, so during the day, it’ll just look like a slightly different shade of the green fields. And like most farms I work on, Sam’s road is so remote, there probably won’t be anyone driving by to see it shining at night.
I glance down the road that stretches into town and step toward the worn, yellow median line. I put my hands on my hips. For a minute, I’m just another restless farmer, checking on things.
* * *
The general store in Munsen was a lot like all the others. Grimy floors, pegboards hung with fishing tackle, abandoned DVDs on shelves in a corner. I hunted through the aisles for work gloves, past lemonade mix and extension cords, before finding them, lonely and yellow.
There was already a potbellied man at the checkout, pushing his cap up his forehead. “Yeah,” he said as the cashier reached back toward the cigarette case, “my wife keeps trying to get me to quit, but not this year. I need them this year.”
“Drought’s been pretty bad, huh?” The kid slapped two packs on the counter and crossed his arms, settling his hips back against the shelf behind him. I knew that position—he was getting ready for a long one.
“Yep. I can’t even get a pile of corn big enough for the pigs to roll in.” The man roared one big, meaty laugh.
The kid smiled. “Each year, it gets worse and worse. My brother’s working down at the Derrys’ farm again, and he says the cutworms are bad, too. Brought home an ear to show us, and it was half eaten away, rotten-looking, you know?”
The man shook his head, ran one hand down the front of his T-shirt. “Yep. They’re awful, those cutworms. And did you hear Sam Barts talking at the town meeting? He wants us to stop using pesticide-coated seed and switch over to some sort of untreated alternative. Meaning, what, we’d have to spray atrazine all over instead? Poor old man, on his way out.” They stood there for a while, grunting together at the truth.
I thought back to Sam’s words and wondered how long he thought these guys would stick around before they joined the exodus. Sweat beaded under my collar, and I ran a finger over the back of my neck to collect it.
The potbellied man turned and noticed me. “Oh, sorry, buddy, didn’t see you there. You new in town?”
“Yup. My name’s Daniel.”
“Pleasure, Daniel. I’m Norman. You the one I’ve heard about, the one they hired over at the Shannons’?”
“Yep, that’s me.”
He seemed to approve. “Well, it’s good to meet you. And hey, when you’re around town, watch out for an old geezer named Sam Barts. Make sure he doesn’t sell you on any pyramid schemes.” He laughed again and offered one hand. I shook it, almost feeling like I shouldn’t, out of loyalty to Sam.
He waved at the kid and headed for the door. I paid for the gloves and followed him, returning to the Shannons.
* * *
The stream of spray paint starts to sputter just as I’m marking the last stalk of the night. I jam the can in my pocket and turn around. Every few feet, a stripe of paint is glowing, bobbing in the breeze. Waiting.
A set of curtains shift in one window of the house. Sam’s standing there, his face barely visible in the slowly graying predawn. He doesn’t see me at first, just stares out at his land. I raise my hand in one of those easy waves I’ve learned since leaving home. His face broadens a bit when he sees me, and he grins, wriggling one white hand. I turn to go. I’ll be back on the next good night.
Chapter Four
Molly
The town crawls by outside the windows of my truck. The neighbor’s bull is testing his limits again, nosing over the swirled barbed wire into the street. And there’s Joanna, out clipping sheets and underwear to her clothes-drying tree. She waves at me with such vigor that a few clothespins fall from her mouth. She’s still new here. Soon, she’ll learn to wave like everyone else, one hand paused briefly in midair.
I turn my head a little to avoid the rows of benignly beige plastic huts perched on the hill behind Jimmy Cadbury’s barn. Jimmy raises veal, has done so for years, and it used to kill me every time I went past his farm, picturing the calves shut up in those huts for all their short lives. Once, I started crying when Sam drove me past, and he caught up my hand, still smooth as a pearl then, and said, “I know. I sure as hell wouldn’t raise my calves like that. But they’ve got three kids in college, and there’s just no other way for them to repay their mortgage.” He kissed my knuckles and returned my hand so I could wipe my cheeks dry as he whistled.
After parking the truck, I step into the feed store, the air-conditioning raising every hair on my forearms. I wander through the aisles and brush my fingers over a display board hung with nylon ropes, sidestepping the lawn mower posed in the middle of the store. In the gardening row, I’m lost. Was it mulch or fertilizer Sam always said tomatoes need more of? I can never remember.
�
�Molly? What are you doing here?” It’s Allison Remy, her broad frame straddling the aisle.
“Allison, hi! I can’t believe I didn’t see you there earlier.”
“Oh, I know. I’m kind of hard to miss with this hair.” She fluffs up her curly red ponytail. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard her say this before.
“Well, I was just buying some fertilizer—Sam wants me to work on the garden again. You know how much I love that chore.” I bite the edge of my tongue, alarmed at the acid in my tone.
She doesn’t even blink. “Tell me about it. Every day, it’s something new, isn’t it? And, you know, lately, I’ve been even crazier than usual.” She raises her arm and wiggles the basket she’s carrying; it clanks with mysterious plumbing parts.
“Oh, of course. Your move.” I fuss with the hem of my shirt. Last year, Allison and her husband, Ben, realized that the going rate for corn wouldn’t cover both the mortgage payments on their farm and the hospital bills for Allison’s ailing mother. They’ve just moved to a brand-new trailer home at a dip in the road on the edge of town. I should have asked her earlier how the move was going, perhaps offered to help somehow.
Before I can say anything more, she says, “Yeah, our new place is just fine, you know, all things considered. I was actually thinking about getting some gardening supplies myself, see if I can’t do something about that awful weed bed we’ve got in our new backyard.” She fingers the handle of a spade hanging near her shoulder. Allison used to grow gorgeous, heavy-headed lilies and daffodils on their old front lawn. Every time I drove past their house, she’d be kneeling in her garden, elbow-deep in piles of weeds and mulch, her hair flashing in the sun.
“That sounds wonderful. Maybe you could give me a hand with my garden. Lord knows, I don’t have half your talent.”
