Cicada (3 page)

“So, what’s the count gotten down to?” John Sayre asked his son.

Buckshot didn’t need his father to clarify. “Three days!”

“Ya don’t say? Well, enjoy ‘em while they last, ‘cause this summer I’m putting you to work. Time you learned money don’t grow on trees...least, not on this farm, it don’t.”

Frances stood over the stove, a wisp of her once-brunette hair a few years gone gray dangling into her eyes. Her mind had drifted off, but when she heard Buckshot moan at his father’s proclamation, she came to the boy’s defense once more.

“Timmy gets the first week off, John. That’s what we all agreed. Boy’s got to get some kind of vacation, after all.”

“Sure, fine. One week to giggle and spit. Then it’s time to get to business.”

“Rather stay in school for the summer,” Buckshot complained.

“The trouble them multiplication tables gave you, you near about had to,” Frances said with a scowl. “Besides, you should be proud that your daddy thinks you’re getting to be man enough to pitch in more. Don’t you think?” Frances added as she stepped back from the stove to catch a brief respite.

“I reckon.”

“So do I,” the senior Sayre said, leaning to rumple his son’s hair with the small bit of affection he could manage.

Buckshot sulked the rest of the way through his bowl of cereal as his parents discussed the sort of matters that children tend to ignore. Buckshot was no exception. Somewhere near the last spoonfuls of his breakfast, the conversation veered away from electric and water bills and weekly budgets and back to something the boy cared about.

“I was thinking of heading over to Wheedling either later today or tomorrow,” John said. “Them tractor parts should be in, an’ I got a few other things there about to tend to.”

Wheedling was the county seat, some two and a half hours drive southeast over rugged back roads that meandered like cattle trails.

“Wait fer Saturday, Daddy. I wanna go!” Buckshot pleaded.

“Sorry, Buckshot. No can do.”

“C’mon, Daddy....”

“Ain’t going on no pleasure cruise, son. Got business to tend to.”

From outside, the sound of more rumbling came, but it wasn’t thunder this time. Two sharp toots of the school bus horn confirmed this.

“Alright, give me some sugar and git.” Frances slid Timothy from his chair with one hand and passed him his brown paper sack lunch with the other. He planted a peck on her cheek. “And here, this here is for them art supplies we talked about,” she said, retrieving a quarter from her apron pocket.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Thanks, Mama! Bye, Daddy!”

John Sayre was wise to the two of them and shook his head in disbelief. Before he could comment, however, the boy dashed out the door, swinging the screen door wide and letting it go as he leapt down off the back steps. The spring on the door made a little metallic creak as it stretched to its limit before snapping the door back into the frame with a resounding crack.

“Jesus!” John Sayre barked in shock. “Stop slamming that goddamned screen door, boy!” he yelled after his son.

“Sorry,” a fleeting cry drifted back.

Frances spooned a heap of steaming eggs from the skillet on the stove and pushed the plate in front of her husband.

“Franny, I swear to God, if I have to remount that screen door one more time, I’m gonna flatten the boy’s head and use it to drive the screws.”

“I need to run into town this morning,” Frances said, finally taking a seat at the table with her own plate of eggs.

“What fer?” A fleck of yellow skipped onto the table from John’s mouth.

Frances passed him a napkin, which he immediately tucked into his lap.

“Whiskey and rifles,” she said, not missing a beat.

John paused in his meal and looked her in the eyes for a long moment. Even in the early hour, perspiration clung to each of them in little beads and rivulets while the smell of cooked eggs hung on the heavy air.

“Jars for canning, John. Or don’t you want jam come fall and winter?”

“Jus’ asking is all. Christ Almighty.”

John Sayre was born the third son to the son of a farmer. So it was safe to say that the business of working soil was in his blood as much as under his nails. As the youngest of the three sons of James and Molly Sayre, he wouldn’t have inherited his father’s homestead but for his brothers’ bad fortunes.

His eldest brother, Samuel, he didn’t remember at all, since Sam had perished before John’s birth, the victim of a drunken doctor’s misdiagnosis. The bloodshot physician had proclaimed the youngest Sayre’s illness to be “slap cheek fever,” so named because the child’s cheeks took on the appearance of having been slapped, and “nothing more than a mild infection of no consequence.” Within three nights, however, the boy had gone from raging with fever to stiffening with the chill of death. He’d been just five years old and the loss nearly drove Molly to the grave as well.

But she was of solid stock and persevered, and a little more than two years later she gave birth to her second child, another boy whom they named Walter. The following year Walter was blessed with a brother to be named John.

Walter and John Sayre were brothers in the finest sense of the word. They were fast friends throughout their childhood, best friends who did everything together. When they fought—which was seldom—they did so with fervor, and when they made up—which was always—no grudge was held and they were thick as thieves once more. If one was insulted or injured in either word or deed by an outsider to the family, they both took offense. All through their school days, no bully picked a fight with either one, since to do so would mean a beef with both. Sadly, no girl ever came between the Sayre brothers either, only because Walter passed on before the two reached an age where such a thing would’ve been possible.

Walter was taken from life in a hunting accident, or more accurately, an accident that occurred while hunting, since it might have happened even if no hunting had been involved. His last was a picturesque fall day near the close of September, when the air was cool but without a nip to it quite yet. The leaves were still green, and would be for a few weeks more, although their number was teased by the kind of wind that would soon fell them with the coming season.

The boys, Walter, just sixteen in age, and John, one full year younger, halfheartedly still-hunted for squirrel, but the limb rats—as the locals called them—were too cunning to be had by the brothers’ lack of effort. The Sayre boys didn’t care about all the ones getting away, though. They were content instead to doze on and off as they relaxed barefoot along the bank of a small stream, letting the languid day slip by with their shotgun breeches open wider than their eyes.

As night began to tuck the sun away, the two finally agreed to call it a day. With just those words they pulled on their boots and rose from their idleness to go home. The bank along the stream was short but steep, and the stream that gave birth to it was shallow but wide. They followed atop the lip of the bank, joking and joshing as they made their way.

To this day in his life, John Sayre would say he couldn’t recall what was said in jest that provoked what he did next, but he’d never forgotten his actions. With a playful shove—and it had been playful, not even with the intent to topple his brother as it did, John swore—he sent his brother Walter tripping over the edge of the bank, down towards the stream. The fall wasn’t far or treacherous in any fashion, save one. As Walter tumbled down the little slope, he crashed into a clump of brush and that was when all hell broke loose.

Walter had pitched heel over head onto a hive of yellow jackets. The wasps reacted to his transgression as could be expected, falling on him relentlessly.

“Get in the water!” John shouted. He might have laughed at first, he said later, the whole thing seeming a bit comical at the time.
At first
.

But Walter was too disoriented to immediately follow his little brother’s directions. Somewhere between the fifteenth sting and John’s fourth scream, however, Walter gathered his senses and splashed into the water. As he did, he finally dropped his shotgun, a .410 gauge loaded with birdshot. It went off in the concussion as if refusing to be left out of all the excitement. The accidental shot was inconsequential, luckily, and the wasps remained the two boys’ only concern.

If the stream had been any deeper than just up to his calves, Walter might have been able to escape anymore of the angry yellow jackets’ wrath. Then again, considering his massive allergic reaction to their venom, had the stream been any deeper, Walter likely would have drowned. Regardless, all of that was moot, since, by the time the wasps had finished with him, Walter’s throat was already swollen shut with the onset of anaphylaxis. As John held his brother and wailed to the beautiful shifting hues of the evening September sky, Walter suffocated to death in the stream that locals would go on to call Sayre Creek in his memory.

Frances Sayre knew the story of how her husband’s older brother died. John had told her of that day—in the nervous voice that comes from such confessions—just as he’d told most of his close friends and family. It wasn’t something he spoke of very often though, and in its handful of retellings there was one detail that he never once admitted to anyone. He never shared that he’d given his brother the shove that sent him into the wasps’ nest. From the first time he cried with his parents, to the last he’d spoke of it over the previous year’s Christmas dinner when he’d recounted that day to his son, Buckshot, John Sayre simply stated that Walter had lost his footing somehow as he walked along the bank.

Sometimes, mostly at night while waiting for sleep to take him or perhaps as he rested against his shovel snatching breaths of air pungent with the manure he cleaned from the stalls of the barn, John would catch his chest tightening in grief and guilt. He knew Walter’s death was his secret to take to the grave. By the age of forty-one he’d buried the truth for far too long to dredge it back up or pull himself from beneath the shame of it. And, as the weight crushed him a little more each time he thought on it, he often worried that not only would he take that burden into the earth, but that it’d be the very thing to put him there when it eventually proved too heavy for his heart to bear any longer.

The dog day cicada was the given name to the particular insect that the residents of Melby considered to be just another nuisance to which they were helpless. The swarm was suffered upon them during the warmer months of the year. That specific brood of cicada earned its alliterative canine moniker because they arrived during the summer months, emerging from the earth fewer in number and more spread out over the calendar than their periodical brethren that would befall, plague-like upon Melby, but once each thirteen years. In regions to the north, for reasons little understood by man, there were cicadas that further delayed their appearance by an additional four years, arriving instead in seventeen year cycles.

The dog day cicada primarily came to adulthood in late May around Melby, only to be preyed upon by creatures both great and small, of the sky, earth, and waters. From the solitary wasp that lined its nest with cicada nymphs to feed its young, to man, who poisoned them to preserve his agricultural labors from their blight, the cicada knew many enemies.

There even existed a fungus,
Massospora cicadina
, which thinned their numbers by infecting the young insects as they emerged from the soil following their nymph gestation. After years spent buried in the earth siphoning nourishment from the roots of trees in their parasitic struggle towards maturity, the nymphs would sense en masse when the time had come to wean themselves from the roots. In a great migration to the surface, some unfortunates burrowed through the awaiting fungus. Such defiled cicada might reach the surface, but they would never reach adulthood. Ravaged by inevitable consumption, their decomposing remains would go on to spread even more spores back into the earth. In places where
Massospora
had gained a foothold, the womb of Mother Earth would be completely inhospitable over time to any subsequent generations of cicada.

“No single creature has dominion over God’s good Earth, Frances,” Joshua Lee Scott intoned in his practiced sing-song voice. His pitch was slightly lilted as if he spoke to a child. “Not the birds in the air, neither the fish in the sea, nor even man...even in all his glory. None save God have dominion.”

Minister Scott had been in the Sayre kitchen for nearly half an hour. He’d worn out his welcome some twenty-five minutes long gone by.

“That is so true. So true. Well,” Frances said, wiping her palms on her pleats in a gesture of finality and shifting in her chair as if to rise, “it has certainly been a break in my routine to have you stop by, Minister Scott.”

“Frances, Frances, Frances,” the young, patently obtuse man went on before pausing with the grave look of concern he’d cultivated for so long in front of his dressing mirror that it had become overly-rehearsed and lost all its gravity, “we’ve known each other a good time.”

It was hardly the truth, but something a fool such as Joshua Scott could be expected to say, nonetheless. They’d known of one another for most of the years of Joshua’s life, but up until the past year they had hardly spoken to one another.

Frances would have nodded or murmured some acknowledgement to his point, except that to do so would only encourage the man. Encouragement was the last thing she wanted to offer. He lifted a forefinger to the tip of his nose and drew in an audible breath.

“So...I trust we can be frank,” he said.

Another pause elicited a raised eyebrow from Frances.
Who was this man and what was he trying to get at?

“I fear I sense a faltering in your family’s faith, Mrs. Sayre.”

With that, the camel’s knees buckled as Joshua Lee Scott had loaded his final straw.

“Joshua, how old are you?”

“Pardon?”

“Twenty-three...four?”

“I will turn twenty-six come this Decem—”

“Twenty-six years is an awful long time to be an ignorant bore, wouldn’t you agree?”