Chapter 5.
In the twilight Ray pulled out another clump of dirt and stalks and muttered, "Let's hope that'll be the last plug tonight."
Back in the cab, he threw his gloves on the floor and turned up the radio again, catching the football announcer mentioning a touchdown, followed by the name Jacob Marak.
"Damn, missed it."
He started moving forward in the rows again, listening closely for the announcer to repeat the game highlights. Levers flipped between his fingers automatically. Picking corn was as routine as mowing lawn to Ray after forty-two years of harvests. He still felt like a kid when he could reach into the wagon and pull out handfuls of the dusty grain, smell it, and feel the cold of it running through his fingers. He could not resist touching it like a rich man his gold.
For once Ray felt comfortable, as if things, life, had worked out for him. And instead of yearning in his prayers he could speak to Him plainly. For so long, he could not muster true gratitude in his heart, until this year. After he stopped hunting an elusive peace, it came out of the woods to him, came up to him and touched his hand. A calm among the nettles in his soul. With success, he guarded against joy, fearing that the whole of it could slip away much more quickly than it had slowly settled upon him, like a bird landing that quickly took flight again on a whim. The earth had given him much, blessings from the heavens. In the will and testimony that Ray was preparing, his ashes were to be spread upon the Marak fields back home – not the Masterson fields. Renee's father Ben Masterson had already been plowed under, literally, several times on these same acres that Ray picked that night. Ben's ashes, by his wish, were scattered on the land. Ray would request the same burial, taking literally the verse: By the sweat of your face shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground from which you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you will return. He intended the land to keep him, so long as his soul escaped in the right direction and his sons plowed the land after him in his name. Marak.
Looking at his crops, or walking the draw in the valley, or following cattle in the upturned slope of pasture, these knobby juttings of his corner of the world were as personal as the scars on his body, as the memories of his childhood, as the unspoken desires that he kept to himself.
From the cab of the combine he looked down on the Masterson fields with different feelings than he felt of the Marak farm. This land was investment property, cultivating no emotion even as the years began to stack up. Here he did not cut his teeth as a wailing baby, chase steers, shovel manure and pitch straw, raise livestock and split wood.
After several swaths back and forth, he turned the combine toward the empty wagons. He stopped and dismounted the combine, leaving it running, so that he might turn one of the gravity boxes by hand. Since Judd Blanks had taken the tractor home, Ray had to turn the wagons the hard way.
Picking up the wagon tongue, he tugged on the steel. The wheels slowly started down the slope of the field driveway and quickly built up speed. A good way to get run over. He turned the tongue and the box followed him, like leading a bull by the ring in the nose, following him from the momentum of its own weight and when the wagon stopped it faced the road, in the right direction - or close enough. The tongue clanged on the ground when he dropped it. He climbed the combine ladder again and drove alongside the wagon, extending the unloading augur. Once again he climbed down the ladder, then climbed the ladder of the wagon, where corn dust blew into his mouth while the augur pushed out the chaff from the last load. The corn started to drop, slapping the metal of the wagon and spreading to the bottom in a bountiful sound. The falling corn then started to gush and he reached his hand under the golden waterfall to grab a handful of the plenty, a year complete, planted, now harvested, and what he would not feed his cattle, the remaining corn was already contracted on the market.
Aches and pains nagged him. Each climb of a ladder and jump to the ground pinched his lower back. An ankle break from years ago acted up in the weather and lack of sleep made worse the flaws in his joints. The foot caused pain from ankle to knee, the knee aggravated the hip, the hip forced a limp and unevenness in the spine. These pains and ten other aches – a recurring pinched nerve in his neck, a cyst on his wrist, a headache from a bad molar – made him sleep hard each night only to wake up older each day. At four in the morning when he woke, his hinges and sockets made popcorn sounds in the hallway, cracking until he reached his coveralls in the mudroom on his way to milk the cows in the dark. But to live any other way was impossible. His aging back already started bowing closer to the earth with each autumn's harvest.
The last bushel fell into the wagon until it wore a golden crown. Back in the combine, Ray set his course toward the rows and caught the score of the game on the radio. The announcer said, "Immaculate will advance to the quarterfinals, and play Westbranch next Friday." The corn would be finished by then, Ray hoped, if the rain and snow held off. The timing of planting and reaping always conflicted with the events of life. When Ethan had been born, between oats and corn, Ray barely reached the hospital in time. That was twenty years ago.
His eyes started to get heavy and he doubted that he would finish the field that night. A few more swaths. But if he did a few more swaths he might as well finish the field. Maybe the weatherman was wrong, as usual. But the ache in his ankle, which followed the barometric pressure, agreed with the meteorologist. Rain clouds approached in the dark, with wisps already crossing the moon's face.
The rows ahead tumbled under the combine head. The gathering chains mesmerized him. To watch them made him dizzy. He adjusted the steering wheel slightly as he nearly missed the edge row. He turned around, stiffly from the pinch in his neck, double-checking that no corn still stood behind him, since it bothered him to leave a single stalk in the field. He had missed a few plants. A dozen or so. He shook his head at his error. Hardly worth turning back for twelve plants, but driving by the field all winter, those plants standing in the snow...yes, he would go back to get those few.
Watching the chains again, he suddenly looked up, sensing an odd shadow in the field. A movement in the rows. A deer, or a raccoon. It will get out of the way, he thought. Continuing forward he tried to see the animal, expecting it to run out into the shaved part of the field. Deer season. He should have brought his gun and made easy work of it this year, like Hector Baum was rumored to do each fall, shooting his doe from the combine ladder. A face looked up at him from the field, not the face of an animal, but of a child.
Ray jumped in his seat so that his head hit the ceiling while his foot simultaneously reached for the pedals.
"Stop!" he yelled at the machine, jerking the wheel, shifting gears and stepping down the clutch. He disengaged the head, but the child in the corn appeared too close. A little girl in the rows shook with fear, facing the fenders, sobbing in fear. Ray's arms wrenched on the wheel until he bent the top half of the steering wheel over, toward him. The combine balked in halting, inching onward until the girl in a little black shirt and blue jeans came between the fender points. A few more feet and the chains would devour her and carry her upward with the same impartiality of a weed or stalk. The girl crouched into a ball, falling to her knees, putting her hands over her head, and Ray shouted at the controls, "God damn you." He pulled the key out of the starter and the entire machine coughed and kicked and Ray heard the engine began its sputtering halt, its bucking shutdown routine.
Without waiting for the engine to kill, Ray threw open the door and slid down the ladder's handrail, bashing his ankle in the landing. In a running limp, he circled the combine, stepping onto the first fender with his good foot and leaping toward the crouching child. When he landed he felt his foot cave in again but managed to seize the girl by the shoulders and he pulled her to his chest, leaning backward with her so that if anything was crushed from the last kick of the combine it would be him, not her, and when the kick c
ame the fender point struck below the knee on his other leg, gashing his calf enough that he shouted and called the machine a grade-A cocksucker first-class.
He groaned and said, "Little girl, what in the hell are you doing out here?"
The shaking of the girl caused Ray to clutch her tightly. She could not speak. Could not unball herself even in his arms. The lights of the combine shined upon them and suddenly a figure appeared, facing him, striking a sense of fear and wonder in Ray. "Who's there? Who else is out here?" He began to shake, seeing a faceless figure in the darkness. The figure swooped onto him and pulled Rhea from his arms.
Kathy Werther knelt on her bare legs in the field beside Ray, clutching the girl in her arms and sobbing hard enough that she could hardly take a breath. "Thank God," Kathy said. "My baby."
Ray's pants moistened with blood and he sat up to measure the damage, pulling back the denim, shifting his leg into the light. A good bleeder. With all the blood, he expected more pain, just as he had when he cut the tip of his pinky finger off in 1989. A familiar and horrible throb in his ankle started. The swelling had already begun from a new sprain. Veins around his foot trembled, tingled. The boot needed to come off, he knew that from the last time, before his expanding foot would be stuck inside the leather.
Kathy stood up without saying a word and carried Rhea away from the combine. Seeing the bare skin of her smooth legs startled Ray, and caused him to forget the pain for a second. Only when Kathy opened the door of the car did he notice headlights beaming from the Cadillac. Ray rolled to his side.
In a moment, Kathy returned and wrapped a child's blanket around his bloody leg. She helped him to his feet.
"Is the girl all right?" he asked.
Kathy nodded, and said, "You need to see a doctor. We can call the ambulance from the house."
"Renee. We'll call Renee."
"It's bleeding."
"Not deep. I'll worry about it."
"I'll help you to the car, if I can."
"I should turn the lights off on the combine," he said, but stopped when Kathy wailed and covered her mouth. A fever in her blocked all consolation.
Ray leaned back and gazed up at the sky, unable to understand what just happened any more than he could fathom the stars. The battery would die if he left the lights on. Better say a prayer. God knows if he'd killed that little girl how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys would have been needed for reconciliation. Renee could come back and turn the combine lights off later. The battery. The field would have to wait. Just be glad everybody's in one piece. One hundred forty acres left to pick.