‘I don’t know,’ said Spallner, ‘except that there’s a universal law about accidents. Crowds gather. They always gather. And like you and me, people have wondered year after year, why they gathered so quickly, and how? I know the answer. Here it is!’
He flung the clippings down. ‘It frightens me.’
‘These people—mightn’t they be thrill-hunters, perverted sensationalists with a carnal lust for blood and morbidity?’
Spallner shrugged. ‘Does that explain their being at all the accidents? Notice, they stick to certain territories. A Brentwood accident will bring out one group. A Huntington Park another. But there’s a norm for faces, a certain percentage appear at each wreck.’
Morgan said. ‘They’re not all the same faces, are they?’
‘Naturally not. Accidents draw normal people, too, in the course of time. But these, I find, are always the first ones there.’
‘Who are they? What do they want? You keep hinting and never telling. Good Lord, you must have some idea. You’ve scared yourself and now you’ve got me jumping.’
‘I’ve tried getting to them, but someone always trips me up. I’m always too late. They slip into the crowd and vanish. The crowd seems to offer protection to some of its members. They see me coming.’
‘Sounds like some sort of clique.’
‘They have one thing in common, they always show up together. At a fire or an explosion or on the sidelines of a war, at any public demonstration of this thing called death. Vultures, hyenas, or saints, I don’t know which they are, I just don’t know. But I’m going to the police with it, this evening. It’s gone on long enough. One of them shifted that woman’s body today. They shouldn’t have touched her. It killed her.’
He placed the clippings in a briefcase. Morgan got up and slipped into his coat. Spallner clicked the briefcase shut. ‘Or, I just happened to think…’
‘What?’
‘Maybe they wanted her dead.’
‘Why?’
‘Who knows. Come along?’
‘Sorry. It’s late. See you tomorrow. Luck.’ They went out together. ‘Give my regards to the cops. Think they’ll believe you?
’ ‘Oh, they’ll believe me all right. Good night.’
Spallner took it slow driving downtown.
‘I want to get there,’ he told himself, ‘alive.’
He was rather shocked, but not surprised, somehow, when the truck came rolling out of an alley straight at him. He was just congratulating himself on his keen sense of observation and talking out what he would say to the police in his mind, when the truck smashed into his car. It wasn’t really his car, that was the disheartening thing about it. In a preoccupied mood he was tossed first this way and then that way, while he thought, What a shame, Morgan has gone and lent me his extra car for a few days until my other car is fixed, and now here I go again. The windshield hammered back into his face. He was forced back and forth in several lightning jerks. Then all motion stopped and all noise stopped and only pain filled him up.
He heard their feet running and running and running. He fumbled with the car door. It clicked. He fell out upon the pavement drunkenly and lay, ear to the asphalt, listening to them coming. It was like a great rainstorm, with many drops, heavy and light and medium, touching the earth. He waited a few seconds and listened to their coming and their arrival. Then, weakly, expectantly, he rolled his head up and looked.
The crowd was there.
He could smell their breaths, the mingled odors of many people sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by. They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum. His head was bleeding very badly. He tried to move and he realized something was wrong with his spine. He hadn’t felt much at the impact, but his spine was hurt. He didn’t dare move.
He couldn’t speak. Opening his mouth, nothing came out but a gagging.
Someone said. ‘Give me a hand. We’ll roll him over and lift him into a more comfortable position.’
Spallner’s brain burst apart.
No! Don’t move me!
‘We’ll move him,’ said the voice, casually.
You idiots, you’ll kill me, don’t!
But he could not say any of this out loud. He could only think it.
Hands took hold of him. They started to lift him. He cried out and nausea choked him up. They straightened him out into a ramrod of agony. Two men did it. One of them was thin, bright, pale, alert, a young man. The other man was very old and had a wrinkled upper lip.
He had seen their faces before.
A familiar voice said, ‘Is—is he dead?’
Another voice, a memorable voice, responded, ‘No. Not yet. But he will be dead before the ambulance arrives.’
It was all a very silly, mad plot. Like every accident. He squealed hysterically at the solid wall of faces. They were all around him, these judges and jurors with the faces he had seen before. Through his pain he counted their faces.
The freckled boy. The old man with the wrinkled upper lip.
The red-haired, red-cheeked woman. An old woman with a mole on her chin.
I know what you’re here for, he thought. You’re here just as you’re at all accidents. To make certain the right ones live and the right ones die. That’s why you lifted me. You knew it would kill. You knew I’d live if you left me alone.
And that’s the way it’s been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn’t know it was dangerous to move a hurt man. You didn’t mean to hurt him.
He looked at them, above him, and he was curious as a man under deep water looking up at people on a bridge. Who are you? Where do you come from and how do you get here so soon? You’re the crowd that’s always in the way, using up good air that a dying man’s lungs are in need of, using up space he should be using to lie in, alone. Tramping on people to make sure they die, that’s you. I know all of you.
It was like a polite monologue. They said nothing. Faces. The old man. The red-haired woman.
Someone picked up his briefcase. ‘Whose is this?’
It’s mine! It’s evidence against all of you!
Eyes, inverted over him. Shiny eyes under tousled hair or under hats.
Faces.
Somewhere—a siren. The ambulance was coming.
But, looking at the faces, the construction, the cast, the form of the faces, Spallner saw it was too late. He read it in their faces. They knew.
He tried to speak. A little bit got out:
‘It—looks like I’ll—be joining up with you. I—guess I’ll be a member of your—group—now.’
He closed his eyes then, and waited for the coroner.
The Scythe
Quite suddenly there was no more road. It ran down the valley like any other road, between slopes of barren, stony ground and live oak trees, and then past a broad field of wheat standing alone in the wilderness. It came up beside the small white house that belonged to the wheat field and then just faded out, as though there was no more use for it.
It didn’t matter much, because just there the last of the gas was gone. Drew Erickson braked the ancient car to a stop and sat there, not speaking, staring at his big, rough farmer’s hands.
Molly spoke, without moving where she lay in the corner beside him. ‘We must of took the wrong fork back yonder.’
Drew nodded.
Molly’s lips were almost as white as her face. Only they were dry, where her skin was damp with sweat. Her voice was flat with no expression in it.
‘Drew,’ she said. ‘Drew, what are we a-goin to do now?’
Drew stared at his hands. A farmer’s hands, with the farm blown out from under them by the dry, hungry wind that never got enough good loam to eat.
The kids in the back seat woke up and pried themselves out of the dusty litter of bundles and bedding. They poked their heads
over the back of the seat and said:
‘What are we stoppin’ for, Pa? Are we gonna eat now. Pa? Pa, we’re awful hungry. Can we eat now, Pa?’
Drew closed his eyes. He hated the sight of his hands.
Molly’s fingers touched his wrist. Very light, very soft. ‘Drew, maybe in the house there they’d spare us somethin’ to eat?’
A white line showed around his mouth. ‘Beggin’,’ he said harshly. ‘Ain’t none of us ever begged before. Ain’t none of us ever goin’ to.’
Molly’s hand tightened on his wrist. He turned and saw her eyes. He saw the eyes of Susie and little Drew, looking at him. Slowly all the stiffness went out of his neck and his back. His face got loose and blank, shapeless like a thing that has been beaten too hard and too long. He got out of the car and went up the path to the house. He walked uncertainly, like a man who is sick, or nearly blind.
The door of the house was open. Drew knocked three times. There was nothing inside but silence, and a white window curtain moving in the slow, hot air.
He knew it before he went in. He knew there was death in the house. It was that kind of silence.
He went through a small, clean living room and down a little hall. He wasn’t thinking anything. He was past thinking. He was going toward the kitchen, unquestioning, like an animal.
Then he looked through an open door and saw the dead man.
He was an old man, lying out on a clean white bed. He hadn’t been dead long; not long enough to lose the last quiet look of peace. He must have known he was going to die, because he wore his grave clothes—an old black suit, brushed and neat, and a clean white shirt and a black tie.
A scythe leaned against the wall beside the bed. Between the old man’s hands there was a blade of wheat, still fresh. A ripe blade, golden and heavy in the tassel.
Drew went into the bedroom, walking soft. There was a coldness on him. He took off his broken, dusty hat and stood by the bed, looking down.
The paper lay open on the pillow beside the old man’s head. It was meant to be read. Maybe a request for burial, or to call a relative. Drew scowled over the words, moving his pale, dry lips.
To him who stands beside me at my death bed:
Being of sound mind, and alone in the world as it has been decreed, I, John Buhr, do give and bequeath this farm, with all pertaining to it, to the man who is to come. Whatever his name or origin shall be, it will not matter. The farm is his, and the wheat; the scythe, and the task ordained thereto. Let him take them freely, and without question—and remember that I, John Buhr, am only the giver, not the ordainer. To which I set my hand and seal this third day of April, 1938.
[Signed] John Buhr, Kyrie eleison!
Drew walked back through the house and opened the screen door. He said. ‘Molly, you come in. Kids, you stay in the car.’
Molly came inside. He took her to the bedroom. She looked at the will, the scythe, the wheat field moving in a hot wind outside the window. Her white face tightened up and she bit her lips and held on to him. ‘It’s too good to be true. There must be some trick to it.’
Drew said, ‘Our luck’s changin’, that’s all. We’ll have work to do, stuff to eat, somethin’ over our heads to keep rain off.’ He touched the scythe. It gleamed like a half-moon. Words were scratched on its blade: WHO WIELDS ME—WIELDS THE WORLD! It didn’t mean much to him, right at that moment.
‘Drew,’ Molly asked, staring at the old man’s clasped hands, ‘why—why’s he holdin’ that wheat-stalk so hard in his fingers?’
Just then the heavy silence was broken by the sound of the kids scrambling up the front porch. Molly gasped.
They lived in the house. They buried the old man on a hill and said some words over him, and came back down and swept the house and unloaded the car and had something to eat, because there was food, lots of it, in the kitchen; and they did nothing for three days but fix the house and look at the land and lie in the good beds, and then look at one another in surprise that all this was happening this way, and their stomachs were full and there was even a cigar for him to smoke in the evenings.
There was a small barn behind the house and in the barn a bull and three cows; and there was a well-house, a spring-house, under some big trees that kept it cool. And inside the well-house were big sides of beef and bacon and pork and mutton, enough to feed a family five times their size for a year, two years, maybe three. There was a churn and a box of cheese there, and big metal cans for the milk.
On the fourth morning Drew Erickson lay in bed looking at the scythe, and he knew it was time for him to work because there was ripe grain in the long field: he had seen it with his eyes, and he did not want to get soft. Three days’ sitting were enough for any man. He roused himself in the first fresh smell of dawn and took the scythe and held it before him as he walked out into the field. He held it up in his hands and swung it down.
It was a big field of grain. Too big for one man to tend, and yet one man had tended it.
At the end of the first day of work, he walked in with the scythe riding his shoulder quietly, and there was a look on his face of a puzzled man. It was a wheat field the like of which he had never seen. It ripened only in separate clusters, each set off from the others. Wheat shouldn’t do that. He didn’t tell Molly. Nor did he tell her the other things about the field. About how, for instance, the wheat rotted within a few hours after he cut it down. Wheat shouldn’t do that, either. He was not greatly worried. After all, there was food at hand.
The next morning the wheat he had left rotting, cut down, had taken hold and come up again in little green sprouts, with tiny roots, all born again.
Drew Erickson rubbed his chin, wondered what and why and how it acted that way, and what good it would be to him—he couldn’t sell it. A couple of times during the day he walked far up in the hills to where the old man’s grave was, just to be sure the old man was there, maybe with some notion he might get an idea there about the field. He looked down and saw how much land he owned. The wheat stretched three miles in one direction toward the mountains, and was about two acres wide, patches of it in seedlings, patches of it golden, patches of it green, patches of it fresh-cut by his hand. But the old man said nothing concerning this; there were a lot of stones and dirt in his face now. The grave was in the sun and the wind and silence. So Drew Erickson walked back down to use the scythe, curious, enjoying it because it seemed important. He didn’t know just why, but it was. Very, very important.
He couldn’t just let the wheat stand. There were always new patches of it ripened, and in his figuring out loud to no one in particular he said, ‘If I cut the wheat for the next ten years, just as it ripens up, I don’t think I’ll pass the same spot twice. Such a damn big field.’ He shook his head. ‘That wheat ripens just so. Never too much of it so I can’t cut all the ripe stuff each day. That leaves nothin’ but green grain. And the next mornin’, sure enough, another patch of ripe stuff…’
It was damned foolish to cut the grain when it rotted as quick as it fell. At the end of the week he decided to let it go a few days.
He lay in bed late, just listening to the silence in the house that wasn’t anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily.
He got up, dressed, and ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn’t going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, walked about the back yard a little and then came back in and asked Molly what he had gone out to do.
‘Milk the cows,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and went out again. He found the cows waiting and full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the spring-house, but thought of other things. The wheat. The scythe.
All through the morning he sat on the back porch rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew and one for Susie, and then he churned some of the milk into butter and drew off the buttermilk, but the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn’t hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat
and the wind bending and tipping and ruffling it. His arms flexed, his fingers, resting on his knee as he sat again on the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette and got mad at the mixings and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms.
He heard the wind whisper in the field.
By one o’clock he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut.
‘Damn it to hell!’
He strode into the bedroom, took the scythe down off its wall-pegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn’t ache. The third arm was returned to him. He was intact again.
It was instinct. Illogical as lightning striking and not hurting. Each day the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did, that was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then, whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it was an ordinary-enough wheat field, really, wasn’t it? Almost.
The days loped away like gentle horses.
Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head.
One noon. Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn’t yell at them. He just looked very concerned and locked the scythe up after that, when it wasn’t being used.
He never missed a day, scything.
Up. Down. Up, down, and across. Back and up and down and across. Cutting. Up. Down.