The Harvest

by Scott Nicholson

  "None, ma'am. I donated the labor and materials."

  She searched his face for smugness and found none. She hoped she never had to run against him. He might prove to be cleverer than he looked. But she was sure she could find something on him, if it came to that. His ex-wife, for instance.

  "Very good, Mr. Lemly. So we have everything in place. I'd like to personally thank the committee for all its hard work, and I'm confident that this year's Blossomfest will be the best ever."

  She looked at Dennis Thorne to make sure he had gotten that last bit on tape. Patterson was looking at him, too. Dennis held his microphone in the air as wooden applause scrabbled across the council chambers.

  "This meeting is adjourned," Virginia said, rising between the North Carolina and United States flags that flanked her like bodyguards. She watched as her subjects spilled from the room into the cool night air.

  ###

  The kids were in bed. Tamara had tucked them in, although Kevin was starting to get a little squeamish about the good-night kisses. She had read Ginger The Butter Battle Book.

  How true that was. If people wouldn't worry about how other people buttered their bread, the world wouldn't be so out of whack. Dr. Seuss was way ahead of his time.

  "Mommy, what does ‘out of whack’ mean?" Ginger asked as Tamara was turning off the light.

  "It means not sensible, not neat and orderly. Where did you hear that?" Tamara asked.

  "I don't know. I just thought of it."

  Coincidence. She probably heard it at school.

  Tamara kissed Ginger on the nose. "And you're going to be all out of whack tomorrow if you don't get some sleep."

  She went into the living room and collected an armful of papers, then sat on the couch beside Robert, who was watching basketball.

  "Damn those cheaters," he said, his carotid artery swelling in rage.

  "Calm down, honey. It's only a game."

  "Only a game? Only a game?" He ran a hand through his dark hair, which was beginning to show the first signs of silver. "It's the Tarheels playing. Down by six with a minute left. And the Antichrist forces of St. John's are holding the ball."

  Tamara almost made a remark about Robert living out a gladiatorial macho instinct by proxy, but she let it pass. There was enough friction between them lately that an innocent quip might flare into a free-for-all. Robert leaned back and took a drink of his chocolate milk. Tamara looked at him out of the corners of her eyes..

  He pumped his fist as the Tarheels nailed a jumper.

  Maybe if the Tarheels win, he'll be in a good mood. Maybe tonight. The Gloomies are away on vacation, even if they’re keeping in touch via long distance.

  She looked at her work and the words swam without meaning. She needed a rest. From psychology. From thinking. From shu-shaaa. She put her books aside and leaned her head on Robert's shoulder.

  She watched as the Tarheels made what the announcer called a "trey," and her head fell to the sofa cushion as Robert leaned forward. She put a hand on his knee and rubbed his thigh as a skinny Carolina player hit a pair of free throws.

  “Comeback City, baby!” the announcer shouted.

  The crowd roared as if they were at a Nazi rally. Tamara pictured that much excitement taking place as a library opened its doors or a community theater dropped the final curtain on a staging of Our Town. The suspension of disbelief was too much of a stretch. The final horn sounded on the television set and Robert was airborne, pumping his arms just like Kevin did when excited.

  "The Redmen are Deadmen," Robert said, imitating the announcer. "Aw, baby!"

  Tamara watched him pace excitedly for a minute as the sportscasters droned nasally about tournament brackets and Sweet Sixteens and Final Fours and seeds. Sports had its own secret language, just as psychology and academia and religion did. Just another competitive belief system, only the score was much clearer in sports.

  Everyone needs their buzzwords. Even would-be clairvoyants need names for their Gloomies. Names like Shu-shaaa.

  Later, in bed, Robert touched her, his palms still moist from the tension of watching the game. "How did your day go, honey?"

  She smiled against the dark pillow. "Fine. No Gloomies."

  "I'm glad."

  "So, are you excited about Blossomfest?"

  "I'm agonna buy me a Rebel flag ashtray, and maybe one of ‘em little wooden outhouses, you know the kind, what's got the hillbilly with the corncob pecker."

  She laughed, surprised that she was surprised by it. Laughter sounded strangely out of place, the way their bedroom had been lately.

  Robert spooned against the warm flannel of her nightgown. The night was a little damp and chilly, but she mostly wore the gown so that Robert could take it off. She hoped.

  "Listen, honey. I know I've been a little distant lately,” he said. "Been worried about work and stuff, wondering if we did the right thing moving here."

  "Robert, we've been over that enough. You like the station. I know it's not as demanding as a big-market FM, but it's just as important to the audience. And the kids really love it here."

  "But what about you? I just feel so selfish, pulling you away from Carolina just when things were starting to happen for you."

  "Things can happen at Westridge, too."

  "Are you sure you're happy?"

  She turned to him, close enough to feel his breath in her hair. Twin sparkles were all she could see of his eyes.

  "Honey, I'm doing fine," she said. "I told you that. And you know I'm honest with you, and I trust that you're always honest with me."

  There was a long heavy pause. Tamara was afraid that Robert still didn't believe her.

  "Honey," he said. "There's something I've been meaning to tell you—”

  SHU-SHAAA.

  The Gloomies washed over her in a gray-red tide, pounding the cliffs of her mind. She sat bolt upright and listened to the dark world outside.

  Crickets. A chuckling chipmunk. A dog barking down the street. There—a snapping twig.

  "Something's outside, Robert."

  "Honey, it's the middle of the night. Things don't move at this time of night in Windshake. It's against the laws of nature up here."

  "Robert, you know me."

  Robert sighed heavily and rolled out of bed. He leaned his face against the window and looked out into the woods that lined the backyard.

  Robert turned and Tamara saw the black outline of his arms raise against the dim moonlit backdrop.

  "Nothing there, honey," he said, the mattress squeaking as he slid under the covers.

  "The Gloomies are back."

  "I know," Robert muttered. "Do the bastards ever leave?"

  Tamara was stung. Tears welled in her eyes. Then her pain turned to anger. The son of a bitch would not make her cry.

  "You could be a little more sympathetic," she said. Her voice was cold. Her body was cold. Her heart was cold, like a shriveled dead star collapsing under the tired weight of its own gravity.

  "I've been sympathetic,” Robert said. “For years. Your father's dead and you can't bring him back.”

  "But it was my fault."

  "No. You just had a dream. You happened to have a dream that he was hurtling through the dark in a metal tube and then it exploded into fire." Robert’s voice was flat, as if reciting an overly familiar line.

  "But nobody believed me."

  "It was just a dream."

  "But see what happened?"

  "Your father died in a car crash the next morning."

  The tears tried to come back. She fought them and lost. "I tried to make him stay home," she said, her throat aching. "But he just tweaked one of my pigtails and laughed and said that he'd be fine. Only he wasn't fine. He was dead, ripped to pieces by metal and glass."

  "And by bad luck. Fate. Coincidence. God's will, or whatever. It could have happened on any day, or never at all."

  "But the dream."

  "Premonition. You know it's fairly common. You're the psyc
hologist, after all."

  Tamara thought he said "psychologist" with the trace of a sneer.

  "But what about the other times? When Kevin broke his leg?"

  "We can't stop living every time you have a bad dream."

  Tamara pressed her face into the pillow, drying her tears. She was afraid that the tethers were broken, that whatever connected her to Robert had snapped its mooring, that she and he were tumbling apart like lost astronauts, drifting into a nebulous gray territory. She was alone, at the mercy of the Gloomies.

  The inside of her brain tingled, an itch that was beyond scratching. She wasn’t sure whether she had slipped into sleep and suffered a bad dream or if shu-shaaa was talking to her again. All she knew was that the noise was loud, a scream, as if the source of the signal had been turned up to ten and a half.

  She wrapped the pillow around her head, thinking of the kids, psychological theories, her failing marriage, anything but the vibrations that shook the walls of her skull.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Sylvester staggered against a garbage can, spilling refuse on the sidewalk. He couldn’t flow as quickly without sunlight, but he was determined. He left the paved street for the quieter glory of the forest.

  The oaks throbbed, their mighty limbs rich with sap. He merged with the ash and poplar, the hickory and laurel, and reveled in the generous sharing of the thorns and nettles as they tore at his flesh. In the jungle of his mind, among his tangled synapses where the seratonin oozed, he was aware of the parent channeling nature’s energy through him. He was a vessel.

  Something in the house stirred. His fingers found the Earth, his dead heart hummed a night song. The air hung thick around his head. He swatted away the confusion, but the vibration tickled and pricked him.

  Tah-mah-raa.

  Sound.

  Meant.

  Nothing.

  He passed the dark, hushed house with its sleeping bioenergy units. He would return for them, or other children would follow and do the work. All would be harvested for the greater good of the parent. First he had an ache, a longing, an inner instinct that compelled him forward, just as a sapling’s leaves were driven to reach for the brilliance of the sun.

  A dim shape stirred within him, an image, a memory. The memory became a symbol in the swampy nitrate soup of his brain. The human remnant of Sylvester recognized the symbol.

  He tried the symbol on his fibrous tongue:

  Peg-gheeee.

  ###

  At first, Chester had thought it was old Don Oscar, walking out of the woods like he sometimes did when he got a wild hair up his ass, coming out of the evening shadows like a cow at feeding time. Chester's old failing eyes followed Don Oscar as the figure rolled over the fence into the sow's lot.

  He wondered why the hell Don Oscar wanted to mess around in that black swampy gom. Then the sow had started squealing like somebody had clipped its ears. Chester pulled his bony hind end out of the rocker and peered into the hog pen. He saw Don Oscar wrestling with the sow.

  Then the sow went quiet and Don Oscar climbed over the fence and went after the chickens. But the chickens high-stepped across the matted grass as if the flames of hell were licking at their tail feathers. Don Oscar moved after them as if he was up to his knees in cow shit, wading instead of walking. And Boomer, who knew Don Oscar's sour-mash scent, brayed to beat the band, sounding so deeply that Chester's papery eardrums rattled.

  Chester stepped forward, knocking over the jar of moonshine that rested between his boots. He hoped Don Oscar had brought some more along, as payback for coming over and scaring the death out of a fellow. Chester stopped at the edge of the porch, leaning on the locust railing as he called out. "Don Oscar, what are you stirring up the livestock for?"

  Don Oscar turned at the sound of the voice, awkwardly but fluidly, and Chester got his first good look at his old friend. His friend was in there somewhere, because the wide bald head was still shining and the round cheeks were swollen with a shit-eating grin. But the eyes were all wrong.

  The eyes were too deep and bright and green and empty. Boomer bounded off the porch, limping a little, and closed on Don Oscar. Boomer's hackles were up and his tail was low to the ground as he crouched to attack. Chester knew that Boomer was getting the same uneasy signal that Chester was getting, only the hound's instinct was truer. And the signal was that Don Oscar had turned, changed from a goofy bootlegger into something contrary.

  "Chesh-sher, it's shu-shaaa," the turned bootlegger said, but the words were all slobbery, as if Don Oscar's mouth was a mush of rotten persimmons.

  Whatever the change was, it didn't look so wonderful to Chester. "What in hell happened to you?"

  "Shu-shaaa," Don Oscar said, spreading his soggy arms wide.

  Don Oscar was always going on about science, especially when it came to brewing shine. But it looked to Chester like science had fucked up good this time.

  Boomer growled again and leaped at Don Oscar's trousers. The hound’s teeth locked and he worried at the corduroy fabric, twisting his dense furrowed head back and forth. Don Oscar lowered his arms and knelt, embracing the old hound. Boomer jerked his head back, a patch of cloth and dripping, pulpy meat clenched between his jaws. The stuff that dribbled like blood from Don Oscar's wound was the color of antifreeze.

  Don Oscar lifted Boomer's face to his and throated the dog's snout. Don Oscar's eyes brightened, as if he was stealing Boomer's breath to recharge his own batteries. Then Don Oscar let the dog loll heavily to the ground. The hound lay still in the dirt, bits of straw and leaves stuck to his fur.

  Chester was about to go for his gun. The thirty-caliber was hanging on two wooden pegs in the living room, and a loaded shotgun leaned in the corner. But Don Oscar moved closer to the door, and even as slowly as the monstrous form was moving, Chester didn't want to risk touching those starchy, rubbery arms or getting anywhere near the bad wind of Don Oscar's rotten breath.

  Chester ducked under the railing and ran helter-skelter to the fallen feed shed, then doubled back to the barn, his heart aching like a fist clenched around a razor blade. He opened the door to the corncrib, wishing he'd taken the trouble to oil the hinges sometime during the last twenty years. But he never figured a squeak would be a matter of life or death.

  He wrestled his way underneath some dangling scraps of rotten harness. Bars of light spilled between gaps in the plank siding. The dust of dead corn husks spiraled in the sharp sunbeams, and Chester was afraid he was going to sneeze.

  He held his breath, wiggled his nose, and strained his ears. He heard leather rustling against chestnut, bridle straps still swinging from his passage. Rats scurried in the bowels of the corncrib, their dinner disturbed. The tin roof rattled and popped as the metal contracted against the cooler evening air. Chester heard none of the watery sounds like the ones Don Oscar had made as he walked.

  Chester climbed the rickety stairs to the hayloft and closed the trap door. The door had no latch, so Chester nudged an old gray hay bale over it. He fell into a pile of loose hay, his bones aching from the effort. Then he tried to gather his breath, though his lungs felt as ragged as his long-john shirt.

  That was when Boomer barked.

  Good boy. Now you can show that deformed bastard who's boss in this neck of the woods.

  Boomer barked again, only this time it was more of a marshy, slushy yelp. The bark bore too much resemblance to the way Don Oscar had talked. Chester crawled across the floor, his bony knees catching on nail heads and splinters. He looked through the siding at the farmyard below.

  Boomer still looked like Boomer, only his eyes were green now. The damp dot of a nose lifted into the air and quivered, and Chester hoped Boomer's sense of smell had gone to hell along with his vision, or else the hound might seek out his loving master.

  Don Oscar must have gone around the house, because Chester could hear chickens squawking in the backyard. Then Boomer dropped his tail and headed into the dusky forest, the way he did when he was going o
ut to roust night owls and raccoons.

  Chester waited as the sun slid down like dying hope. He felt naked and vulnerable and his throat was clogged with straw chaff. He would have traded his soul for his rifle and a quart of corn liquor. He was debating making a run for the farmhouse when Boomer padded back across the yard and climbed onto the porch, his ears drooping toward the ground. The dog's toenails clicked on the pine planks as he disappeared through the open farmhouse door. Another hour passed before Chester saw the headlights.

  ###

  DeWalt stepped into the dark living room of the Mull farmhouse, blinking as his pupils expanded. The room smelled of animal hair and gunpowder, wood smoke and corn husks. DeWalt slid the soles of his boots across the uneven plank floor, probing for obstructions. He knew from previous visits that an old horsehair settee lurked somewhere underfoot, and in the middle of the room stood a walnut highboy that would fetch ten grand in a New York antique shop.

  "Chester," he called. Dust stirred from the air draft of his voice.

  A door creaked upstairs. He ran his hand along the walls. Chester had nailed linoleum sheets over the siding in an attempt to cover the cracks in the walls. The house had been built before insulation had become common. DeWalt was surprised that a fire wasn't burning in the potbellied stove.

  DeWalt walked to the end of the room, using the wall to guide him to the stairs. His fingertips glided over the smooth surface of a mirror, then over the splintery, rough-cut window frame. The window had been boarded over, so the light of the moon didn't penetrate. He passed the window and bumped his head on an outcrop of wooden coat pegs.

  Then his boot thumped into the hollow riser of the stairs. He'd never been up to the second floor. A piece of fabric hung in front of him and he brushed it aside like a cobweb. Running his hand along the wall, he found a light switch. He flipped it once, then again.