The Harvest

by Scott Nicholson

  And when he returned, his lips chapped from the wind, Peggy would be all lovey-dovey and they'd actually get along for a few weeks, doing the horizontal hoedown at least every other night. But that was before he'd found out about Jimmy Morris, his loyal Lodge brother.

  Seems Jimmy had been wearing out his sheets whenever Sylvester was gone, riding his wife before Sylvester's truck exhaust had even dissolved over the driveway. And Peggy must have felt guilty, because after his camping trips, she had been doing all kinds of imaginative bedroom sports. Or maybe Jimmy had just taught an old dog some new tricks.

  To hell with them both.

  Sylvester felt the comforting weight of the .30-06 across his arm. A good gun was all a body needed, a long, true blue barrel and a worn woodstock. And some deep forest, which was getting harder to find since all the old local families had started selling off their land. Even his old man had peddled off pieces of the Mull birthright. The old farmstead had gone to seed, and if Sylvester ever did inherit a chunk of acreage, it would take years of work to get it yielding again.

  Besides, Chester was never going to die at this rate. All that damned moonshine must have mummified the bastard, because he didn't seem to be slowing down any. Chester didn't lift a finger around the farm, but he still managed to get down to the Save-a-Ton and load up on TV dinners and chewing tobacco.

  The last time Sylvester had visited him, a few weeks back when a late winter snowstorm had melted down enough for the farm road to be passable, the old man had been curled up under a blanket, his dog at his feet, and a jar of rotgut at his elbow, as happy as a rooster in a henhouse.

  A twig snapped in the distance, jerking Sylvester out of his reverie. His senses sharpened as if his ears had telescoped out and were swiveling back and forth like secret-agent radar dishes. Leaves shuffled somewhere to his left, about a hundred yards away, just over a ridge.

  Must be a big son of a bitch, judging from the racket.

  Sylvester peered at the edges of a laurel thicket. A deer couldn't get through there, the branches were too knotted together. And the top end of the ridge was too steep. Even a mountain buck couldn't climb those granite boulders that jutted from the earth like gray teeth, especially with rain still soaking the loam beneath the leaves.

  So it would have to come around the lower end of the laurel thicket, and Sylvester had a clear line of sight to the spot where it would most likely emerge. Now it was an enemy, as surely as the Japs or Injuns were in a John Wayne movie. It wanted to keep its meat attached to the bones, but Sylvester wanted to field dress it and slice it into steaks. It would die before it even knew it was hunted.

  The back of Sylvester's neck tingled and sweat popped out around his scalp line. It wasn't a nervous sweat. Sylvester was locked in. This was his reason to roll out of bed in the morning, his dope, his religion. He had something to kill.

  Sylvester wasn't complicated enough to try to understand why he gained so much pleasure from hunting. An anthropologist might have chalked it up to some primordial survival instinct still swirling in the genes at the base of the human backbone even after all these millennia. A psychologist might have decreed that Sylvester was still trying to measure up against the judgments of a harsh father-figure. A Mooser would have said that killing was more fun than a fart in an elevator.

  But Sylvester was untroubled by the many facets of the equation. Because the equation was simple: the hunter versus the hunted.

  He pressed the gunstock against his cheek and pulled back the safety. It slid smoothly and easily, loose from years of being lovingly oiled. Sylvester aimed down the barrel to the tiny wingtip of the sight and lined the gun up with the spot where the footfalls were headed. He breathed shallowly to hush the roar of his own blood in his ears and to steady his hands.

  He saw movement through the drizzle, a quiver of laurel branch, and his finger grew taut on the trigger. He knew the exact degree of pressure he could apply before the hammer fell, and he was halfway there. Then his eyes saw a spot of brown, a more reddish brown than the surrounding dead leaves and tree trunks. His finger notched to about three-quarters.

  Another step, just show me the white fur target on your chest, and I'll park your ass in the deep freezer back home.

  And suddenly the animal stepped into the clearing, and Sylvester's finger was squeezing out the last millimeters of the trigger's resistance when he saw that it wasn't a buck that had lurched between the trees.

  In that same micro-second, although it seemed to stretch out so long it felt like minutes, Sylvester pushed up with his left hand as the roar of the igniting charge filled his ears. Sylvester's mind collected several observations in that slow-motion instant: the smell of the gunpowder, harsh and cloying; the slight kick of the gun butt against his shoulder, like that of a baby jackass; the mist lifting as if someone had sucked it up with a king-sized vacuum cleaner; and the sound of the bullet whistling through the treetops overhead, carving a slice in the sky before digging into the mountainside somewhere hundreds of yards away.

  The sweat was back on his scalp line, and this time it was nervous sweat. He'd almost shot somebody.

  He leaned his rifle against the stand and looked at the figure that stumbled between the trees. Whoever it was didn't seem to have heard the shot. Sylvester’s hands trembled. He looked down at them as if they were someone else's.

  He stepped from the stand and looked down the ridge. The figure staggered and fell.

  Sweet holy hell. I didn't shoot the son of a bitch, did I?

  Tears of panic tried to collect in the corners of his eyes, but he blinked them away. He ran toward the fallen heap of flesh, hopping down the ridge, slipping on the rotten rug of leaves. They'd lock him up, sure as hell. Never give him another hunting license. Kick him out of the Lodge, maybe.

  The huddled form was rising, wobbly but still alive. "Praise to Thee," Sylvester muttered to the wet gray sky, not really giving a good goddamn whether or not anybody was up there to hear him.

  He saw that it was a man he'd almost shot, a short man whose dark hair hung in wet mop strings. His back was to Sylvester, but he looked familiar. Those square ears jutting out from under a red ball cap gave him away as surely as if he'd handed Sylvester a picture ID.

  "Ralph," Sylvester hollered, reaching to touch the man on the shoulder.

  Ralph Bumgarner was as dumb as a hitching post, but even he knew better than to stagger around in the woods in a deerskin jacket. With a white wool collar to boot. Must be drunker than a Republican judge.

  "I almost shot you, you crazy fool," Sylvester said, and his words almost flew back down his throat.

  Because Ralph had turned.

  Because Ralph's eyes were glowing green, the color of lime Jell-O, but shiny, as if a Coleman lantern was burning inside the cavity of his skull.

  Because Ralph's face was ashen, pale, and dead, his flesh bulging against his skin like white mud in a Ziplock baggie.

  Because Ralph planted his hands on Sylvester's shoulders and pulled him closer, and Sylvester's bones felt as if they had turned to Jell-O themselves, because he couldn't run.

  Because Ralph opened his mouth as if he were going to plant a big soul kiss, and Sylvester got the feeling that there was a lot more to it than homosexual attraction.

  Because Ralph's breath was maggoty and putrid, blowing from the black swamp of his gums, promising a French that was a hundred times ranker than the ones he'd gotten from the Titusville whores.

  Because Ralph's tongue was in his mouth, slick as a slug but with the scaly texture of a dead trout, and a flood of cold slime gushed into Sylvester’s throat.

  Because the slime was changing him, joining and separating his cells, breaking him down, altering his metabolism.

  Because Sylvester felt himself dying but had a feeling that simply dying and getting it over with would have been the best thing that ever happened.

  Because now he was dead.

  And ready to hunt.

  CHAPTER FOUR
>
  James Washington Wallace rolled out of bed, uncoiling like a rusty spring.

  His six-foot-three-inch body had fought another losing round with the five-foot-eight-inch mattress. High sunlight burned through the curtains. He dressed and went to check on his aunt. She was watching television.

  On the screen, Oprah Winfrey was chatting with Richard Simmons. Richard actually had on a suit and tie instead of his pastel tank top and peppermint shorts, and the audience was uncomfortably quiet. They didn't know what to make of his new, dry-cleaned image. They preferred the sweaty, chipper aerobics machine they had come to know and love.

  "How are you feeling today, Aunt Mayzie?" James asked, rubbing the back of his neck.

  "I'm fine, honey.” Her voice was rich and ancient, the kind that smoothed troubled waters. "Ain’t so weak today, and I had a bowl of oatmeal and a banana."

  "Why didn't you let me get breakfast for you?"

  "‘Cause I didn't want to wait ‘til I was nothing but skin and bones. I believe you could sleep right through Joshua blowing his trumpet."

  James looked sheepishly at Aunt Mayzie. Her right leg, or rather the scarred stump of it below her knee, was propped on a vinyl settee. A crutch leaned against the table beside her recliner, and her empty bowl sat on the sofa, flakes of oatmeal congealing around its rim. She held a coffee mug in her creased hands.

  "You didn't put sugar in that, did you?" James asked.

  "No, Mister Boss Man. Between you and that Dr. Wheatley, I'm guaranteed not to have another ounce of joy in this world."

  "But I'll bet it's not decaf."

  "Now, the caffeine gets the old heart ticking of a morning. Ain't no harm in it. Plus, if it kills me, it'll kill me off slow, and something else is bound to get me before then."

  In James's opinion, the most dangerous harm was the slow, silent kind. Like the poison of racism. It wasn't the gap-toothed redneck poking his shotgun out the window of his Chevy pickup, it was the white-collar white saying Sorry, but your—er—qualifications don't suit our needs at this time.

  From a historian’s position at the Smithsonian Institute to a dishwashing gig at Buddy’s Grill, James knew all about how life could change. He was the only one in the family able to come live with Aunt Matzie, even if it meant putting his own life on hold.

  James ran his dark hand over the peeling paint of the doorjamb. He wondered if this would be a good time to suggest that Aunt Mayzie consider moving into a good northern assisted-care home, one of those clean places with a satellite dish and a sauna and a fitness gym. Northerners weren't totally open-minded, but at least they'd freed their niggers once upon a time without having a gun held to their heads. But she'd never leave here, and he knew why, from the stories Momma had told him.

  Mayzie and her husband moved to Windshake forty years ago, fresh from between the honeymoon sheets, to take jobs at the new sock factory. Had settled in this house, filled it with love and a baby and linen curtains. But the baby had died of what they now called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, only back then they called it “baby just up and died.” Uncle Theodore had followed their baby to heaven three years later in a factory accident, when the cotton press had grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into its iron jaws.

  Mayzie had gotten some money from the factory, enough to pay off the house. Black lives were cheap, especially back then, but housing was cheap in those days as well. So Aunt Mayzie had kept working at the factory and tending her marigold beds and became a local fixture as the "town nigger." The Civil Rights turmoil bypassed Windshake, as had most everything else. Then her diabetes had taken a turn for the worse and she had retired to her little house with her television set, tabby cat, and the ghost of her right foot.

  Now she was a part of the house. She was the house. The framing studs were her bones, the rafters her ribs, the slate siding tiles her skin. Her nerves were lined on the shelf, in a collection of animal salt shakers and miniature teapots. Her lungs were the screen doors, opened during the summer to let in the mountain breeze. Her eyes were the windows, watching as the forsythia bloomed and bluejays scrapped and dandelions filled the cracks in the sidewalk and Old Man Thompson doddered by to deliver her mail. And her heart was the photograph on the mantel, a cracked black-and-white portrait of a smiling young Theo holding a round-cheeked infant.

  "Looks like the rain has done passed on," Aunt Mayzie said, looking out the window over her corner of Windshake. "And look yonder, the crocuses are starting to poke up.”

  "Maybe spring's finally getting here. It sure took its own sweet time. Hard to believe this is the South. I thought it was supposed to be scorching down here."

  "The mountains is a land unto itself. And the bad makes you appreciate the good. It's going to be the kind of day makes you forget all that snow.”

  "Yes, ma’am." James watched the wind press against the stubby balsam shrubs that lined the walkway. "Maybe we can go for a walk after I get off work."

  "Walk, nothing. I got an appointment with Dr. Wheatley today. I ain't got to walk nowhere when I got to walk somewhere."

  "You didn't tell me."

  "I most certainly did. Last night. But you had your eyes glued on that basketball game like they was giving away money.”

  "Georgetown was playing, Aunt Mayzie. I've got to keep up with my old school. What's this appointment for? Something wrong?"

  "Just a checkup, is all. Anyways, my appointment's at three o’clock and I know you can't get off work. And I don't even want you to ask. I done fine for myself for thirty years, and I hope to do for at least a few more, the Good Lord willing."

  Yes, but for most of those years, you had two good feet and one strong heart. And you can't use my Honda because you never learned how to drive. Always a walker, you were. A mile to the factory, half mile to the Save-a-Ton, two miles to church. Three miles to catch the Greyhound for the annual family visit. Miles and miles put on those wide black feet, their experience now halved.

  "Let me set you up with a cab, then." James put his hands on his hips. He felt ridiculous trying to stare down the woman who could stare down his own mother.

  "Ain't setting foot in a car with that fool Maynard. Keeps a bottle under the seat and a cinder block on the gas pedal. No, I reckon a little stretch ain't gonna do me no harm."

  James pictured Aunt Mayzie crutching down the sidewalk, wearing the purple velour coat James had gotten her for Christmas, a diaphanous red scarf knotted under her chin. Nodding to the white folks, stopping once in a while to rest her armpits, wearing the submissive smile that had hardened on her face like lava turned to obsidian.

  "It's only a few blocks, James. Now you go on and don't worry about me. You're going to be late for work."

  James glanced at his Timex. He'd have to run, and he hated to sweat. The steam from the Tin Man was bad enough. He had to be cool. Not like one of those shuffling gangsta stereotypes that populated the rap videos. No, cool like Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver and Colin Powell.

  "You sure you'll be okay?" James asked, his dark brow crinkling.

  "I ain't helpless yet, James, even if you seem in an awful hurry to get me that way."

  She turned her attention back to Oprah. James looked at the television. Now there was an African-American who knew how to rake in the bucks. Oprah's stardom had jumped the bounds of racism, even though she had awful taste in literature. Like Bill Cosby and Michael Jordan, she'd never be thought of as a nigger.

  All you had to do was get rich and famous, and you were accepted. Well, at minimum wage plus a quarter, he'd be accepted in seven centuries or so.

  He bent down and kissed Aunt Mayzie's cheek. "Call if you need anything, you hear?"

  "Old Buddy'd love that, wouldn't he? ‘Don't pay you to talk, boy,’" she growled, trying to imitate the cook. Her laughter rattled the faded wallpaper.

  James smiled despite himself. He was a chronic worrier with a streak of paranoia, that was all. The sun was out and the birds were mating and springtime
was almost here and Aunt Mayzie was far from defeated. And Georgetown had advanced another round in the tournament. Even living in a white town, things weren't so bad.

  "You take care on your way, Aunt Mayzie," he said at the door. "Love you. Bye, now."

  James stepped into the sunshine and the breeze and the white eyes of Windshake.

  ###

  "Where's Sylvester?"

  "Like I would know." Peggy Mull pulled the phone away from her mouth so she could draw on her cigarette. She huffed out the smoke in a long, sighing trail. "Bryson's called and asked how he was feeling and to see if he was up to coming in after lunch. That's two days in a row he's missed."

  "Reckon where he is?"

  "Probably off in the woods somewhere, stroking that rifle of his. Anyways, I told them he wasn't even able to get out of bed. If his sorry ass loses that job, I'll be up shit creek with a toilet brush for a paddle."

  "There's ways to get money. Don't you worry your pretty head none."

  "And what's that supposed to mean?"

  "Nothing,” Jimmy Morris said at the other end of the line. “If Sylvester's off hunting, how about if I come over? You said yourself he usually stays till the sun drops."

  "I don't know, Jimmy. I think he's starting to suspect something. It's hard to keep a secret in a damn trailer park."

  Peggy knew that firsthand. Old Paul Crosley next door had noticed Jimmy's comings and goings, and Peggy had had to serve him a helping of home-baked panty pie to keep his wrinkled mouth shut. Not that Peggy minded much. She just hated to feel obligated.

  "Peg, you know what you do to me. Just your voice is driving me nuts."

  Peggy pushed away the pile of dirty dishes that covered the cracked Formica counter. Thank the Lord peanut butter doesn't mold. Probably the oil in it. But I’ll have to take a hammer and chisel to those egg yellows. Maybe tomorrow.