Soil (7 page)

Shoals wandered over. He gave Myla a tender look and then turned a scowl on the culprit sitting behind her.

“Ma'am, is that true? Did this boy stretch your shirt?”

The girl nodded and clutched the neck of her blouse.

Shoals stepped forward and loomed over the head-sunk Dawson boy. “That's no way to treat a lady, son. Didn't your daddy teach you that?”

The boy cowered in disgrace for his tribe.

“You wanna wind up like that old junkie, useless to the world? You gotta respect women so you can respect yourself. Think of every woman like your own mama and love her accordingly. Now what do you say to this sweet girl?”

The boy shrugged.

“Come on, now!”

Scotty leaned forward and issued a dribbling apology.

“Say it like a man who means what he says.”

“I'm sorry for twisting your shirt, Myla,” Scotty said with vigorous shame.

“That's more like it.” Shoals shook the boy's hand and patted the girl on the shoulder, crouched down to whisper his own tender condolence. He stood and stepped again before the class.

“Y'all think about what I said about using drugs, now. There's a lot more where that came from. I'll tell you the rest later at the assembly, a'ight?”

The kids babbled affirmatively and set the room abuzz with anticipation for the full session. Shoals turned to Sandy, who had come into the classroom and stood by her desk. She could feel his eyes under her shirt.

“Boy, them two.” He chuckled and nodded back to Myla and Scotty. “Wait till they discover what a powerful drug love can be.”

Sandy flushed pink and crossed her arms over her chest. She'd gone mute and felt as though she'd left her body and was pinned to the ceiling by spitballs.

“Speaking of which,” said Shoals. “I ran into your husband down around Silage Town. He didn't seem real put together. What's his poison?”

“Jay, you mean?” she stammered. “I don't know. What are you saying?”

“He seemed pretty reeled out on something. It's a good thing you took off when you did. Hard to watch a junkie take down his loved ones when he goes bad. An awful thing.”

Surely he was mistaken. Jay indulged in a little pot once in a while, drank a beer or two in the evening, a couple of bourbons for a special occasion. But he was no abuser. She opened her mouth to defend her husband.

“Well, gotta get ready for my show,” Shoals said and gripped her shoulder, gave her a few firm thumb strokes. “I'll drop by and see you sometime.”

The deputy turned and waved to the kids, rallying good-byes and basking in their excitement as he strutted toward the door.

His retreat sucked all the audacity from the room, releasing Sandy from her dumb trance. She gripped her desk and took a seat. She neither understood nor trusted the sway the deputy held over her. Also she was skeptical of his assessment of Jay. He wouldn't turn to hard drugs, would he? She'd spent the past two months angry at her husband, but what if there was something truly wrong with him? He'd lost his wife and child after all, not to speak of his father. He was so eager to make his stand against a cruel, dying world, yet he'd let it beat him before it even placed a square blow. As she tried to imagine what was happening to him out there all by himself, a flood of shame and regret washed through her. Her eyes welled, her chest pooled with a numbing coolness.

The children, meanwhile, were still reeling over the deputy's performance. Their appraisal crescendoed, and out of the clamor came Balivia's proud wail—

“Ooo, Miz Mize. That man
like
you!”

9

The night conspired without flaw or remorse. A waxing moon tucked itself away into clouds that had jammed in late that afternoon, and the overblown chatter of frogs and insects put up a wall of protective ambience. Even a swarm of early blackbirds had descended across the road and over the next neighboring hill, shrieking their late-day diversion.

Out behind the Mize house, over the hillside and down into the pasture, a modest campfire burned in a little hollow at the edge of the woods. A glowing dome tent had been erected a few yards away. There appeared nothing amiss at the campsite but a devilish stench, followed soon by erratic shadows lunging forward and back across the nylon wall of the tent. Faint whispers and curses from within, an occasional grunt and crackling of plastic. A silhouette advanced in violent, aggravated rhythm.

Finally Jay exploded from the tent, breathless, as if shot up from the sea, yanking his gas mask aside and gasping for air. He stumbled out dribbling yellow bile down his chin and onto his gore-streaked apron. The hatchet fell from his hand, and he peeled away pink rubber kitchen gloves.

He went toward the high grass on the bluff in search of better air, but there was no escaping the fetor that cinched the hollow. He took up the thermos of clean water and drank deeply. His flesh crawled with imagined infestation, flies and larvae that were nothing more than sweat. He shed his clothing and doused himself with water to chase the smell and taste away.

His first impression of something remotely close to this had occurred about the age of six or seven—men squatting around a fallen deer brought
down by his father or maybe an uncle or cousin; the men casually ripping into its belly with a knife, fetching up the sack of dark organs, disentangling the greasy handfuls from the sheath that contained them like plastic wrap; the shock of seeing this creature, which he'd only just admired for its fleet and agile body as it scrambled and flew from the wail of their guns, now without a flinch of life left in it, being dragged, jerked, hoisted, and bled, and the molten puddles of blood, brilliant red to black, swirling in the dirt as if his dad was changing oil under the truck. He'd known the mystery of this sudden gulf between the living and the dead, and when he asked his dad later
where did the deer go?
, his dad's answer, and all the church school stories that followed, could not adequately explain what he'd seen in those woods.

So who'd cleaned up the mess on the patio, he wondered, his father's skull and brains? Did the coroner do that, or was it hired out, some firm who specialized in suicide cleanups? He'd never truly grieved for his father, maybe because he couldn't stop visualizing the act itself—his father's half-blown-off face, his mother's horrible surprise, the hot tub's roiling pink water. The shock wasn't that it was unimaginable but that it was too imaginable. As if it had happened to him as well.

He stood and walked back, the smell of it under his skin, permanent in his head. Something like ripe garbage or rancid fat or burnt coffee. He stopped at the tent flap to muster the will, reapplied the gas mask and pulled on the gloves, found the hatchet in the grass, and ducked inside.

He reemerged from the tent some while later, calmer and more workmanlike, back and forth carrying plastic buckets. He placed them near the campfire, the wet contents shimmering. From one bucket a bone jutted up like a stick of gnawed wood.

He walked to the bluff and bathed his arms and face, scrubbed the gloves and hatchet, put on a fresh T-shirt and shorts, and tied a bandanna around his nose and mouth.

Pulling the man from the muddy field and hacking him to bits were just the beginning. Now he had to reduce the body to its finest elements and disperse them back into the world. To properly incinerate the remains,
he'd have to generate as much heat inside the metal drum as possible. He'd punched draft holes around the top and bottom of the barrel, ensuring a nice flow of oxygen. To retain every degree of hot energy, he'd pulled duct insulation out of the attic and wound it around the inside of the drum, screwing it into place with pliable sheet metal.

If the drum was the oven, then his roasting pan was a five-gallon beer keg he'd found in the woods, probably discarded years ago by renters. He sawed off the head and filed the rim down to make a smooth open-top receptacle. He'd spent the evening shearing the bones from their stubborn cinches of ligaments and muscles, all fastened together with a sticky collagen that enveloped him like a spider's web, and now he crouched over the campfire in Neanderthal mode, throwing them on one and two at a time, turning them with grilling tongs. The smoke smelled like burning dung. He seared the bones quickly, his eyes watering even behind goggles, and the bandanna plastered across his face did little to buffer the stink. When they were ready, he took a boning knife and pared off the blackened muscle and cracklins into a bucket. At last he pitched the scorched bones into the keg. He managed to fit them all—the humeri and ulnae and radii; femurs sawed into quarters; severed spine, collapsed rib cage; detached cranium and mandible; two feet but only one hand, the other one gone missing, whether lost in the field or left in the boat, perhaps a preexisting condition. This troubled him faintly, but he moved on to the old crawfish-boil rig—a propane tank, burner, and forty-two-quart stockpot, tall enough to accommodate all the brown lumps, fatty sacks, and stinking ropes he'd spent the night unraveling. There was about half a tank of propane left to keep a fire burning under the slop. Enough, he hoped, to cook them down and render them unrecognizable as human remains.

The trick was getting the open-mouth beer keg full of bones upside down in the bottom of the drum without spilling. It took a few tries, but he managed it at last. He set the drum upright on bricks to get some air flowing underneath, and then he poured in bags of pre-collected kindling—twigs, wood chips, hacked-up branches, shredded books and boxes—packed all the way
to the top, forming a dense combustible layer around the keg. He pulled up a few shovelfuls of embers from the campfire and sprinkled them over the kindling and waited for a blaze to take hold. The twigs smoldered awhile and finally came alight. When the fire could stand on its own, he fastened the lid down and secured it with the bolt ring. He'd prepared a hole in the center of the lid and now placed a flue pipe over it and stood back skeptically as white smoke chugged from the top. It resembled a moonshine still or some backwoods meth cooker, certainly nothing lawful.

The hope was to achieve pyrolysis, whereby the insulated barrel fire cooked off all the water and hydrocarbons and leftover flesh from the bones in the keg. When the noxious gases escaped into the drum, they should combust and burn off clean as carbon dioxide and water vapor. It took a few nervous minutes with the contraption blowing a tall narrow plume of dirty smoke before it settled into an even burn, and only a wavy vapor and a wisp of steam every now and then emerged from the vessel. Even though he'd seen it performed, he couldn't believe it was actually working.

He sat in a lawn chair and admired his homemade stove, which did its work in relative silence, just quietly thrumming and pinging, popping now and then. A dark ring moved down the cylinder as the fire burned within. This and the occasional puff of dark smoke were the only evidence of the mysterious alchemy taking place within.

Hypnotized by the slow process, he dozed for a while, only to be awakened by the chattering cook pot. A cloud of vomitous steam erupted when he lifted the lid to stir and adjust the heat. He put in several handfuls of onion, rosemary, sage, and thyme to cover the stink, but the herbs did nothing to erase the sinful aroma, only identified it as something unfit for consumption.

At this point, his guilt was unquestionable. If someone wandered into camp with a common phone camera, it would be the sensation of the year. “Redneck Cannibal Massacre Caught on Video.” He would be cast in the national lore along with school shooters, child abductors, and serial killers, the most reviled symptoms of a society gone amuck.

The horrible exertion of his chore had taken its toll on his body, and he could barely will himself to move. He just sat there in his lawn chair with this crude metamorphosis all around him, holding a murderer's remorse. If he could last until morning, he knew that, as with any successful experiment, the moral ambiguities of night would give way to the scientific certainty of day.

10

The rattling Maxima shot out of the school parking lot, across the highway and down through the residential neighborhoods, around the ball field to the little shitbox rental where Sandy and Jacob had spent the past month and a half. Sandy left the car running while she ran inside to get the dog and briefly considered changing clothes, something a bit more modest, but there wasn't time. She clipped the dog on the leash, led him into the backseat of the car, and aimed south of town.

They made jarring stop-and-go progress through the shortcuts and backstreets and stoplights and four-ways of Madrid, which had become a city crammed into a village. Ever since the university's football team started winning games and the rich alumni returned, the town could hardly accommodate all the traffic. The new coffee shops and bars and boutiques downtown were great, but the outskirts had become nearly impenetrable with strip malls, condos, big-box stores, quik-stops. It was increasingly difficult these days for Sandy to find her place in the ever-shifting landscape of her hometown.

Near the middle of town she passed the old Nutt Street sign, a little tilted among the otherwise straight-arrow neighborhoods. She glanced down the way but couldn't make out their old house. The new owners had overhauled the garden and taken out much of the landscaping and painted over the brick. Selling it was surely the worst mistake they'd ever made. Jacob barely remembered living there, even though they had photos and videos of Jay twisting them up in the hammock, chasing them around the baby pool with a rubber crocodile, launching sparkly firecracker disks all along the sidewalk. She
missed their bohemian friends and the back-porch acoustic jams, cooking for writers and architects and professors. Such a perfect little life. They'd probably still be together if they'd never moved.

By the time she hit the city limits, she'd already lost fifteen minutes. The traffic cleared, and she flicked on her hazards and plunged over the foothills, taking the curves too fast. She'd driven each mile a thousand times and could run them all blind by now.

The first time she'd come out here with Jay to see the farm, she thought she'd seen the rest of her life. Sure, the house had no charm. It stunk of mildew and twenty years of tenant sweat. Repairs had been made hastily, quick fixes already undone, and the outside looked like a junkyard filled with the unhaulable waste of decades. But she embraced the potential. She imagined the glassed-in farm tower, the solar panels and windmills, the row of dogtrot barracks where students and colleagues would stay while they learned Jay's science and helped shape his vision. She never told her husband because it seemed so fanciful, but she harbored her own idea about developing a new township around his farm. Maybe they'd section off some of the property or acquire more and encourage friends to build. She saw a little commissary or fish house with a stage for live music. A pond, nature trails, corn mazes for the kids. Start from scratch and bring the city life they loved to the wide sensible country. Maybe one day she'd even be mayor of this place. Mizeville, or something more poetic.

As she came out of the hills and into the straightaway, the dog panted and simpered in the backseat. She invited him up front and let down the window a couple of inches to give him a snootful of breeze. The smell of water and woodsmoke spilled in, a whiff of clean mud from rutted pastures. The dead crops were fallen together in the fields, some of it blanched in heaps of sunlight like rotten gold. She passed familiar old shacks and brick homes and yards of old cars, silver propane tanks and trampolines and spray-painted tire planters. She used to make this drive twice a day and didn't realize how much she missed it.

She'd begun teaching last year just to bring in a steady check while the
farm was getting up. Each day she would come barreling home like this to see what progress had been made. Often there were people there working with Jay. Builders raising the greenhouse or their neighbor Hatcher helping lay the irrigation pipes. Their contributions lent the project a sense of legitimacy and progression.

In the late afternoons and on weekends, she worked with them. She enjoyed being with her husband and sharing in the labor. He taught her to build compost and the importance of double-digging the beds. They raised seedlings under grow lamps set up in the dining room. They concocted liquid fertilizers by steeping compost in water like tea, studying a dropper's worth under the microscope and charting each potion's effect on the tender young plants. She began to see the value in this meticulous effort, and for a while it seemed they were growing something significant together.

When the shocking rift opened between them, it was like an earthquake that upends a village in a matter of seconds. Nothing could be taken for granted, she knew that now. There had been tremors, which she'd mostly ignored, but then Jay's father died that winter. Jay didn't want Jacob to attend the funeral, and so she stayed behind with him. Why hadn't she asked her dad to watch Jacob while she went to stand by her husband? She'd lost a parent and knew that devastation herself. It was nothing to suffer alone.

After the funeral Jay was a different person. At first, she found him brooding and withdrawn. He labored in his field without joy, as if it were penance. At night he holed up in his mudroom office, reading books on end-time prophecies, mass extinctions, and societal breakdown. She noticed him becoming more manic and tortured. She'd come home in the afternoon to find him sitting in front of the TV watching paranoid news shows, taking furious notes, and shouting back at the hosts. Once she stole a glance at his papers and found schematics for a network of underground bunkers behind the house and under the pasture. It looked like an ant farm drafted out in floor plans, little caverns connected by crawl spaces, each family member assigned a burrow. Had he moved them out here to set up a sanctuary for some vague doomsday notion, or was he building tunnels and hatches to stash arms for
the inevitable uprising he'd been studying? Suddenly all of his obsessions, which she'd laughingly dismissed as quirks of his personality, had taken a serious turn.

She thought,
He no longer sees our life for what it is. Because his heart is broken, and he can't see through the darkness
. She gently encouraged him to visit a psychiatrist, an offer he bitterly dismissed. But there was something else, a sprawling new hubris, that diminished her sympathy for him and enraged her as he relegated her to the role of pioneer wife, just someone to cook and to clean and to be there with open legs when he came home sweaty and lustful from the fields. Here he was—mad artist, rough-hewn settler, and know-it-all prophet rolled into one—sliding off his rocker.

She could have stood a battle of wills, but she despaired for what it was doing to Jacob. A separation seemed unavoidable. Just temporary, a break from their overstressed life. She believed that a couple of weeks apart, an absence among fond hearts, would bring everything back into proper perspective.

But the relief of that absence nudged her toward greater independence. Two weeks became two months, and how was it that she'd only just made the decision to see him? And why was it all on her? He hadn't tried to reconcile their damaged marriage, hadn't even called to see where they were or how they were doing. The longer he remained silent, the more resolute she became. It was a clean break, or a standoff. She used their new routine in town as a buffer against the fact that her life had come unraveled, that she didn't know how to help her mentally unstable husband.

She'd watched his bank account drain, the utility and phone cutoffs, and waited in vain for him to respond. It shamed her to suppress her mounting dread. The past three days, she'd been sick worrying what had gone wrong, what had become of him. It was almost a relief to hear Danny's preposterous accusation. At least he'd been seen alive. Could it be true? Given all that he'd been through in the past several months, it wasn't a stretch to imagine Jay's self-destruction, or even a legitimate accident. He'd been killing himself with work the whole spring and summer anyway.

At the Grinder's Switch turnoff to Tockawah Bottom, Sandy was stopped
by an ominous orange road sign set up in the turn.
ROAD CLOSED TO THRU TRAFFIC
. She idled in the intersection. Could he be reached?

She checked the dash clock. Thirty minutes had elapsed, and the assembly would start in thirty more. How could she have allowed herself so little time to confront the colossal mess of her life? Even if she found Jay, she would have to turn right around and come back. Just enough time to make things worse.

As she grew nearer to their former home, the realization struck—that she might arrive to find not her husband but his decomposing remains. It was in his genetic makeup—as it was in her son's now too—this potential to take his own life. It was nothing she understood or had ever considered. But when the world falls suddenly all around us, she wondered, can we truly be blamed for lacking the strength to keep from snapping in two?