Lineage (9 page)

The room grew darker and shadows wound around him as he lay on his bed hoping that someday this all would be a memory and not a reality he would be forced to wake up to. His tears began to run dry, and before the last shudder of despair shook his body, he had fallen asleep.

Chapter 3

“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”

—William Ernest Henley

The hay wagon shifted under Lance’s feet and forced him to stagger across the uneven planks that made up its decking. He caught his balance and walked back to his position directly behind the baler’s steel chute. The International Harvester’s red body wore scars and scrapes from the previous summer’s battles of baling their fifty acres, but the dents and dings did nothing to slow the workhorse down. The square bales kept inching their way out of the machine, pushed by the inevitable force of the unyielding packing ram.

Lance wiped his brow with the back of the rough rawhide glove he wore and looked up at the sun. It beat down onto the open field like a golden hammer on an anvil and soaked the light T-shirt that Lance wore with sweat. His hands were already cramping inside the gloves, which wasn’t a good sign at this point since they had only scooped up and baled a third of the windrows that lay on the already greening field. His back hurt from dragging and trying to stack the heavy bales on the wagon’s surface behind him. He could only make the rows three high; his strength had failed him when he tried to make a fourth, and his father had cursed loud enough to be heard over the chugging of the Case tractor that he rode ahead of the baler.

Lance cautiously looked up at his father. Anthony’s shirt also stuck to his skin, the interlaced lines of scars standing out against the wet fabric on his back, and Lance watched him, transfixed by the sight. His mind went back to the afternoon he had seen the ropy healings up close and he shivered in the heat of the late July sun. Anthony turned in the steel seat of the tractor and glared at Lance. The white line of scar that ran down his bottom lip shone in the light, but his eyes were two dead spots in his face.

“Grab that fucking bale, you
dumbshit
!” Anthony barked from his roost.

Lance lunged forward and barely caught the compressed alfalfa before it tipped and fell beneath the rolling trailer. He grasped the two lines of yellow twine and half
drug,
half carried the bale to the closest row and shoved it tight among its companions. Lance twisted back just in time to see his father spin around in the tractor’s seat and navigate the next turn. There was a brief break in the windrows and the bales halted to a stuttering stop in the chute. Lance let himself relax and drift as he balanced on the turning trailer. His mind slipped into a blank state and his eyes ceased to see the landscape around him. The last seven months had passed by him in much the same way.

After the night his stories had burned in the garbage barrel behind their house, a large part of him had given up. The amount of work he had lost crippled his ten-year-old mind. If his very creations could be taken away, what else could? His mother hadn’t come back either, not that he had expected her to. For a while the infantile hope that she would be there when he returned from school one afternoon remained, but soon that too disappeared, the last utterances of childhood finally tearing away and leaving behind the husk that he was becoming.

He hated the sheriff for some time after that day. He hated him just a shade less than his father, mostly when he lay awake at night and stared at the darkness of his ceiling. Times when he would have normally wrote something in his notebook. He had even seen Sheriff Dodd once since then. He was exiting the bus one morning in May and looked out across the fog-filled school parking lot. The sheriff was standing near his car, looking back at him through a haze of spring mist. Lance felt the urge to run to him then, to wrap his arms—
his hands—
around his waist—
around
his throat—
and squeeze. Instead he turned his head back toward the school’s doors, as though he had seen something obscene.

His father’s satisfaction at seeing how disturbed Lance had become lasted over a month.
The older man would sit across from him over the dinner Lance had made and just grin. The smile said anything and everything that his fists sometimes couldn’t. He had put a hot poker inside of Lance, directly where he’d been aiming, and it pleased him to no end.

“
Goddammit
!”

The yell brought Lance’s wandering mind back to the shimmying trailer strewn with the droppings of hay and the heat that pressed down on his shoulders like hot bricks.

A bale had fallen from the end of the chute and was lying under the wagon, directly below his feet. The tractor jerked to a stop, and he was horrified to see his father climbing down off the back of the machine. Without thinking, Lance jumped from the edge of the trailer and landed on the hard ground next to the front tire. Pain shot through the tops of both feet, but he paid no attention to it. He grabbed hold of the bale’s closest twine and hauled it out from beneath the planking. With grunting effort, he managed to heave the bale up and tip it onto the trailer’s edge. His body tensed for the fist he knew
was merely inches
from his back waiting to strike any second, but it didn’t come.

When he risked looking over to where he had last seen his father, he was surprised not to see him striding around the red vibrating machine to expel his wrath for his son’s lack of attention. Instead, Anthony was hunched over in front of the baler, his back barely visible as he yanked on something Lance couldn’t see. The Case still chugged away
amiably,
smoke puffing up the flap above the exhaust pipe in a rhythm that only machines can create. Lance climbed back into his place on the trailer’s bed and waited. He began to think that his father hadn’t seen the bale drop out unattended. Luck, it seemed, hadn’t completely forgotten him after all.

Anthony straightened up as if he had been shocked by a high-voltage wire and tore the worn baseball cap from his blond head. “Fuck! Bitch is jammed!
Fucking old wire!”

Lance stood on his tiptoes and tried to see what had his father so upset. On the top of one feeder bar, wrapped around a pickup tine, was an old strand of rusted baler wire. Lance had picked up several lengths of the stout wire from the fields in past years; the machines of prior farmers had utilized the more problematic binding material, but Lance had never seen a length that would be capable of stopping the harvester. His father’s eyes shot his way, and a moment later a pointed finger followed.

“Stay right the fuck there. Don’t you move until I tell
you.
Understand?” Anthony’s voice rang out hard and clear, like a blade of ice in the hot air. Lance nodded as his father bent again at the waist and began pulling at the twisted steel that had spun a rusted cobweb on the tines of the baler.

A gust of air picked up across the field and ruffled the hair on Lance’s head. He closed his eyes and imagined drifting with the wind. He rose up above himself and the trailer. He could see the grass and hay below him, the farms and patchwork squares of fields. Silence pervaded as he floated there above the ground, seeing everything from a bird’s-eye view. He felt no fear and his body held no feeling. He was vapor, he was rain. He drifted. He was falling. His hands tightened into fists as a sound began to crawl across his eardrums.
Alien and harsh—the grinding of gears.
A yelled curse.
Lance opened his eyes.

The trailer still vibrated beneath his feet and the wind still blew across the field, but now there was movement where there shouldn’t be any. The power-takeoff shaft and the heavy flywheel on the baler had begun to spin. Lance looked up and saw the lever near the steering wheel of the Case that engaged the baler jumping up and down as if it were attached to an unseen string. The beater bar of the baler had rotated swiftly when the PTO engaged. Lance watched in awe as his father struggled desperately to free his pinned hand from beneath the wire he had been trying to remove. His eyes were bulging in their sockets, and Lance could see rivulets of sweat coursing down his father’s narrow face.

“No! No! Stop! Shut it down!” Anthony cried without looking in Lance’s direction; instead, his eyes gaped wide at the back of the tractor and the bouncing lever. The yell snapped Lance out of his trance and his knees nearly buckled. The tractor shuddered and the throttle suddenly sped up as the PTO lever dropped like an executioner’s ax onto a block.

Lance watched as the heavy steel shaft spun into full action, the red paint shimmering in the sun. The beater bar snapped into motion, pulling Anthony’s pinned hand farther into the recesses of the machine. His feet left the ground as the tines grabbed clothing and flesh alike. Lance stared, unable to look away or move as the machine chugged inexorably in place. The packing arm
plungered
in and out, and a guttural scream tore from the inner workings of the baler. It was cut short by a stroke of the unyielding steel arm, but Lance also heard a resounding crack that could have only been his father’s skull fracturing into several pieces. Blood and tissue shot up through the gaps in the metal shroud like grisly party streamers, and still the machine worked on. Anthony’s limp legs disappeared into the maw of the baler, and soon red wetness appeared on the bales that exited onto the chute. The last thing Lance saw before the churning gears and shafts ran out of fodder to drive the alfalfa out was a shining rope of intestine and the white glare of bone poking from the top of the final bale.  

Lance swallowed once, but it did nothing to stop the rush he felt erupting upward from his stomach. He leaned forward, hands on his shaking thighs, and vomited onto the wooden planking. The bright afternoon became a swimming world of color and shape, and then the horizon tipped, the trailer’s bed coming up to meet him.

The sun shone down on Lance’s form while the wind kissed the sweat away from his body. His eyes remained open as the tractor and baler worked through the afternoon and into the evening. At some point, when the shadows had slanted into long distorted likenesses of their objects, the tractor’s tank finally ran dry and it wound down into sputtering silence. Lance drew his legs close to his chest and floated again on the wind that pushed against his clothing and stirred the loose hay around him in a ballet. He was far away from the rough boards of the trailer that cut grooves into his skin and the sun that shone directly into his eyes from the west. He drifted above it all, and when the sun closed its red eye below the tree line, Lance did the same.

It was full dark when strong hands began shaking his shoulder and a voice said his name, drawing him out of a sleep so deep that it felt as if he were lost in a void without any of his senses. As they rushed back to him, he felt the coarse wood beneath his shoulder, along with discomfort in his hip and an arm that tingled and stung. He smelled the moist night air and he could hear crickets rasping out a rhythm that they could only keep time to. He tasted a sour dryness on his tongue as he tried to swallow with some difficulty, the muscles in his neck having abandoned their duties. And when he opened his eyes, Sheriff Dodd stood at the edge of the trailer, silhouetted in the light of the moon, which hung in the sky over the mottled field below. Lance knew it was the sheriff because he could see the badge on his left breast pocket reflecting in the low light. The man leaned forward and said his name again as he turned on a small flashlight, which made Lance’s pupils shrink painfully shut.

“Are you hurt, son?” the sheriff asked.

Lance tried to speak, but the dryness on his tongue and in his throat felt complete, the insides of his mouth coated with seamless concrete. When his words failed him, he shifted his head from side to side, rubbing his temple on the hay under his body. In a flash of color and sound, the memory of his father being dragged into the churning baler came back like a firework in his mind. Lance raised an arm and pointed urgently over the sheriff’s shoulder at the dark outline of the quiet machine.

“I know, son, I know. I saw. It’s okay. I’m just glad I came to look in on you tonight.” The sheriff leaned toward Lance and examined him with the flashlight. “Come on, son. You need water and you’re burnt to a crisp.”

The sheriff switched off the flashlight and stowed it away. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled Lance to his chest and lifted him off the trailer. Suddenly, Anthony’s words came tearing across the months since they had been said:
I think he might like little boys like you. I think he’d like to touch you.
For an instant as he felt himself being cradled in the sheriff’s arms, he worried that the man holding him was going to do something terrible to him here in the field in the darkness, with only the moon as a witness. Lance knew he would be helpless to stop him, his arms and legs hung limp and felt as if they’d been filled with Novocain. But instead of putting him on the ground to do unspeakable things to him, the sheriff simply walked at a steady pace across the uneven field. Lance slowly relaxed and felt his eyelids pulled down by an invisible force. He strained to make out the sheriff’s features in the dark, but to no avail, and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the moon’s face gazing down at him from the black blanket of the sky.