A Hidden Place (10 page)

Archie shuffled the cards, shuffled them again.

“Just forget about leaving here,” Deacon said. “We don’t leave for a while yet.”

Bone retreated into the bunk. He was not sure how long he could stay here. A little longer, maybe. If Deacon wanted it. He closed his eyes against the glare of the lamp and listened to the moth-flutter of the playing cards. Inside him, the voice was more intense.

It was July, and the wheat needed taking in.

Bone had never been so close to wheat. It was a new thing to him, strange in its immensity. One day in that long fatiguing first week Paul Darcy stood with him gazing at the wheat that filled the horizon: wheat, he said, was like a child, nine months of cultivation and this terrible laboring at the birth. “It wears you out,” Darcy said.

The wheat was as high as Bone’s waist. The stalks of it stood up strangely, the scaled wheat-heads dangling at the top like insect husks. The wheat was a golden color, as if it had absorbed some quality of the sunlight, and it spoke to itself in hushed whispers. Bone, like Deacon and Archie, had fallen quickly into the routine of the harvest. They were up before dawn to eat, Mrs. Darcy serving up huge meals of griddle cakes and eggs. Then the work began in earnest. The Darcy farm had been, in past years, prosperous, and Darcy owned two gasoline-powered binders, spidery machines striped blue and ivory beneath their skin of oil and dust. The binders cut the harvest wheat at the ground and compressed the stalks into sheaves; the sheaves were carried up a ramp to a canvas cradle and bound there into bundles. On dry days both machines worked flawlessly, but when the fields were wet, the damp straw eeled into the gears until the gasoline engines screamed in protest. Several of Darcy’s neighbors had joined in the harvest and Bone, pausing among these other men, liked to watch the binders dance their slow, gracile dance between the barn and the fallow ground.

The finished bundles were stacked as high as the barn roof next to the thresher, which Darcy called the “groundhog”: a long and hideously noisy machine much less pleasant than the binders. The purpose of the thresher was to separate the wheat from the straw, and somewhere in its grinding mechanism of belts and pulleys this task was accomplished: Bone did not know how. The thing was, the groundhog had to be fed; the straw bales needed to be pitched into the thresher. This was a gargantuan task and could not be postponed, and this year there were not the usual hired men because the Darcys could not afford them. Bone and Deacon and Archie and the occasional neighbor did the pitching, feeding the maw of the thresher each day as it roared and coughed out blue clouds of noxious smoke.

Bone worked from breakfast until dusk, pausing only for a huge noon meal of fried chicken Mrs. Darcy would bring out wearily, as depleted from her labors as the men from theirs, and spread on a long pineboard trestle. Deacon and Archie did their share; but Bone, working at his own pace, levering the big pitchfork silently until his hands were raw and his outsized wrists were trembling with exhaustion, did what Paul Darcy said was the work of two men—if not more. Darcy was so grateful that he took Bone and Archie and Deacon into the farmhouse kitchen one evening and fed them at the family table; there was chocolate cake that night to follow the fried chicken.

Over coffee, Darcy asked each of them how they had come to be wandering the countryside.

Deacon spoke of the work he had done in the Chicago Stockyards, how he had been married once and had a child—“but that broke up even before the Crash”—and how riding the boxcars was not a new thing for him. He had hopped his first freight when he’d come back from the war, he said, and had ridden them periodically since. “Now, of course, everybody’s doing it.” He spoke cheerfully and at length, but Bone saw the way his eyes wandered about the Darcys’ farmstead kitchen, lingering thoughtfully on the wooden shelves, the black belly of the coal stove, the rifle suspended on ornate J-hooks against one wall.

Then it was Archie’s turn. Archie spoke haltingly of a childhood in Louisiana and his family’s unsuccessful migration to New York. Before the hard times he had worked as a delivery driver, cabbie, salesman, “anything that, you know, brings in a little money. Never been married or any of that. Only myself to look out for.”

Then Darcy turned to Bone. Sweating-under the concerted gaze of the farmer and his wife, Bone said haltingly that he kept to himself, had pretty much always kept to himself, had been riding the trains as long as he could remember….

“But surely,” Mrs. Darcy said, “There was something
before
that? I mean, nobody’s
born
a tramp—are they?”

Paul Darcy quickly hushed his wife. “Meg, it’s none of our business. Bone helped save the harvest. That’s what matters.”

“But I was,” Bone protested. “I was born that way. I was.”

He thought about it that night, sleepless in the bunk bed that was too short to contain his outstretched legs and too narrow to support him unless he lay on his side. Where
had
he come from? Everything had an origin. He had learned that. Birds from eggs, leaves from trees, wheat from wheat, spiraling back to an unimaginable infinity. The only exception to this universal law, apparently, was Bone himself. Birds from eggs, he thought, leaves from trees, Bone from—what?

Drifting out of consciousness he dreamed of a place that was not like any place he had ever seen, right colors and shapes that made only dreamsense, creatures of unbearable wholeness and purity adrift in a jeweled landscape. No such place existed, of course, but the dream of it made him inexplicably sad; he wanted to weep, although he could not.

When he woke he felt soiled, ugly, inadequate. He thought,
I am less than half of what I should be
—and felt the Calling, that sweet high voice inside him, as achingly compulsive as the night cry of a train whistle, more insistent now but quieter, too, now easily buried beneath the quotidian sounds of the machinery, the farm animals, the hot far-traveling wind.

By the end of that week they had finished the last of the threshing; the grain was ready to be trucked to the elevator in town and offered up for what the farmer Darcy said were “foreclosure prices”— twenty-four cents a bushel. The workload had eased and Deacon and Archie spent more time together, playing cards after dark by lantern-light, the sound of Deacon’s voice as relentless and oddly comforting as the ticking of a clock. Deacon talked about the Darcys more often. And Archie, often, was sullen and silent.

“They’re childless,” Deacon said, “and with the harvest over there’s nobody within miles of here. The opportunity is perfect.”

“No,” Archie said. “What you have in mind, that’s courting the worst sort of danger.”

“In hard times,” Deacon said sagely, “taking risks is the only way to get ahead. You want to be a bindlestiff forever? Live out your life in some pasteboard Hoovertown? By God. How else do people
get
rich, if not by taking money from some other person? It’s cruel—of course it’s cruel—but it’s how the world operates, and you can’t argue with it> you might as well argue with rocks or water.”

“But if we take the money,” Archie began without real hope, and Deacon interrupted:

“They have land. They own this spread. We’re not hurting them as much by taking it as we are hurting ourselves by leaving it. Darcy could not have made his harvest without us—you heard him say so. We did the work and we deserve payment for it. In a way it
is
our money.”

Bone listened with a pained incomprehension. He did not understand about money. The money came from the wheat, somehow, and the wheat was Darcy’s, wasn’t it? He guessed Deacon knew what he was talking about … but there was a bad feeling in the air, the steely odor of Archie’s fear and Deacon’s imperious needs.

“People have seen us,” Archie said. “They know what we look like. We’ll get caught.”

“Do they?” Deacon said. “Will we?”

“The sheriff who brought us over,” Archie said, “the men Darcy had in for the wheat harvest—”

“Look at yourself. Look at me! Think about it. We could be anybody. Any redball freight, there’s fifty guys who look just like us.”

“But Bone—”

“They see
Bone.
Exactly! Who was at the farm? Well, there was two guys—hoboes—and this
geek.
If they look for anybody, it won’t be for us.”

Bone understood that Deacon was plotting a theft, that the Darcys would be the victims of it. The idea disturbed him, but he turned on his side and closed his eyes. Whatever was imminent, it could not be helped. He had parceled out his loyalty, he could not retrieve it now.

“But the Darcys,” Archie said patiently, “they’ll know it wasn’t Bone who took the money.”

“That,” Deacon said softly, “is another problem.”

Archie took him aside the next evening at sunset. It had been a hot blue day, the wind stirring dust in the stubbled fields. The denuded earth was like scar tissue. The binders had done all their work, Bone knew; Darcy had cleaned them and oiled them and stored them under tarps, their sleek angles hidden for a season.

“You have to understand about Deacon,” Archie said. “The kind of guy he is.”

Bone liked Archie. He was fascinated by Archie’s wisp of beard and by the way he held Deacon’s mirror for him. Now, though, Archie was frowning, and Bone smelled the fear that had in recent days begun to cling to him. They leaned against a rail fence, Archie’s eyes furtive in his small face.

“I been with him a long time,” Archie said. “He’s a decent man. Many a time I wouldn’t have eaten but for him. Full of plans, full of schemes. You know that.”

Bone said nothing.

“But he’s ambitious,” Archie said. “I’ve seen it happen before. It’s like shooting craps. The same thing. Get him started and he won’t be able to stop.”

Archie’s hands trembled. Bone perceived the fear that was bottled inside the smaller man. The fear was infectious; it was like a fog, Bone thought, oily and clinging.

“What he wants to do,” Archie said, “it scares me. I’m not stupid. It won’t end here. I know that. If it starts, Christ knows where it’ll stop. You understand?”

But the words came too fast. Bone looked at Archie emptily. The sun had gone behind the farmhouse, shadows lengthened and darkened.

“In a way,” Archie said, “I think it started back in California, back during that raid, when you killed those farmers, when you knocked down that scissor-bill like, I don’t know, some kind of crazy man, throwing those big goddamn fists around … you didn’t see his
eyes,
Bone, how they lit up, like for the first time in all his life he saw some guy with a club or a uniform get kayoed. For the first time, understand, it wasn’t
him on
the ground, it was the
other guy,
and I think that made him a little crazy, crazy with the wanting of it. …” Archie paused, swiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Every time he looks at you, that’s what he sees.”

“It’s not my fault,” Bone managed. “It’s in him.”

“Deep in him. You draw it out.”

“Look at me,” Bone said. “What do you see?”

Archie gazed at him. Bone felt the smaller man’s confusion.

“There’s no harm in you,” Archie relented, almost tearful now. “I never said that! But, Bone, listen, we have to stop him! If we don’t, these people, the Darcys, they won’t just get robbed, they might get something worse, they might get hurt—killed, maybe—I mean, I’ve seen the way he looks at them, the way he looks at this spread, and he’s working hard at hating ‘em, hating ‘em for what they got, hoarding up envy like sour bile inside him—”

But the words fled comprehension. There was only the fear clinging to Archie like a bad smell. Bone wished there was something he could do. But he could not control Deacon.

Deacon looks at me, Bone thought, and what he sees is Deacon: Deacon killing that scissorbill, Deacon with his big fists clenched.

And Archie looks at me, he thought, and sees Archie—Archie trembling, Archie wanting to help, Archie helpless.

He might have said something, might have tried to explain … but the smaller man’s fear crested like a wave over him, and the words became dim and elusive.

Frightened, Bone turned and fled to the barn.

That night in his bunk he dreamed again of the Jeweled World and woke before the cock’s crow, shivering in the darkness. The Calling was plaintive in him and it blended, somehow, into the howl of a distant train.
So close now. So close.

He could not delay any longer.

He stood next to Deacon that morning, soaping himself at the wooden trough. Bone washed clumsily. His naked body was huge and strange, sinews and joints oddly linked, only approximately human. Deacon and Archie had long since ceased to remark on it, but this morning he was painfully aware of his own peculiarity. He longed to know what he meant, what he
was . .
. and knew that the only answer was in the Calling.

“Tonight,” he told Deacon. “I leave tonight. I can’t stay any longer.”

Deacon ceased toweling his face and gave Bone a long thoughtful look.

“All right,” he said. “Okay. Tonight it is.”

The sky was livid with dawn.

By midmorning an overcast had moved in. The gray clouds hung from horizon to horizon all through that day, thinning but never breaking, and when they were darkest a hard rain came down. Deacon, Archie, and Bone were confined to the hired men’s quarters. The gloom was so intense that their lantern did little to penetrate it.

Bone was aware of the silence between Archie and Deacon, the way they moved around each other like nervous cats. There was no poker tonight, no debate. Only the sound of the rain drumming on the sod roof.

Archie stood up impulsively not long before darkness set in for the night. He stretched, shot a glance at Deacon, said, “This fuckin’ place!” and ducked through the door in the direction of the outhouse.

Deacon, seated on his bunk, watched the other man go. As soon as Archie was hidden by the rain he stood up.

“I’ll be out for a bit,” he told Bone. “You stay here. You hear me? Stay put.”

“Deacon—”

“Shut up.”