Burn Our Bodies Down(33)

“And the corn?” I want to ask in a way that won’t hurt her, but I don’t know where the mines are in her the way I do with Mom. I decide to try something broad. “It wasn’t always like this, was it?”

Gram doesn’t answer right away. It seems like an easy silence, but then I spot the white strain of her knuckles as she grips the steering wheel.

“Fairhaven’s been running a long time,” she says finally. “Things come and go. Money, family. It’ll be good again.”

Will it? She has no farmhands, no machines, no nothing. Whatever she’s living on must be from generations back. Something she had that nobody else in Phalene did, and when Fairhaven dried up, she kept on. The town couldn’t.

It’s not long before we’ve gotten where we’re going, and Gram brakes, dust catching us through the open windows. The corn presses in so close I can’t see the sprawl of the fields, and here, this far back, it seems a little healthier, a little more alive. The grove I saw from the porch must be nearby, if I’m picturing the farm right.

But up ahead, that’s what I’m staring at. The line between Nielsen land and Miller land. It’s clear as anything, and would be without the low, ramshackle fence that runs down the middle of the ditch separating the two. On our side, the corn is cracked and golden. On the other, drifting, green.

I open my mouth, then close it again. What am I supposed to ask Gram? How’d you mess it up so badly when they didn’t? What’s wrong with us that isn’t wrong with them? She wouldn’t answer, no matter how right I’d be to ask.

There’s a buffer on the Miller side of the fence, between the ditch and the crops. A stretch of maybe a hundred yards that’s just long grass and weeds. I can see the Nielsen sickness bleeding into it, the creep of brown grass and parched earth, but it’s gone, back to normal by the time the Miller corn starts.

I’m staring, but Gram’s clearly used to it. She gets out, comes around the front of the truck, flipping off the Miller crops absently, like she’s done it a thousand times and will do it a thousand more. Tess, the Millers, with land they bought off my grandmother, watching as she falls to pieces.

Gram raps her knuckles against the truck door as she passes, and I get out, follow her around to the flatbed. It’s empty, lined with a blue plastic tarp that Gram seems to have fixed in place with a nail gun and a handful of frail-looking zip ties.

“We’re doing what out here, exactly?” I ask.

She pulls the bucket out of the flatbed and slings it over her arm, waving me with her as she makes for the back field. “You made it just in time for the harvest,” she says.

Harvest. What must it have looked like those years back, when Fairhaven belonged to the people in those pictures I saw hanging in the dining room? How much of the town would have been here, working, living off what the Nielsens paid them?

And now it’s me and Gram.

There are no rows left in these fields. Nothing like what I can see of the Miller crops, where paths run between each furrow, as neatly kept as anything out here is. Gram’s plantings have spilled from their beds, have crept under the earth to wind around each other, choking off the roots, breaking the stalks in half. I cringe as we pick our way through, try to keep the leaves from touching me. It’s too much like the fire. The dry, papery brush, the slicing of the sky. I want to work at Gram, to get her to tell me what I already know, but I can barely keep myself halfway together.

“All right,” Gram says, when we’ve only gone in a few steps. I swallow hard, grateful I can still see the truck from here. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

She sets down the bucket and runs her hands up the stalk of the nearest plant. This one is just barely green, the velvet tassels starting to brown in the sun. The plant’s bearing an ear, but it’s small, nothing like what I expected. It could fit in the palm of Gram’s hand. She doesn’t seem bothered, though. She plucks it off the stalk, the husk making a terrible squeaking sound as it shifts.

“Open that up,” she says, handing it to me.

I shrink from it, but Gram’s watching me with her steady, dark eyes. Watching, and waiting, and if I’m not the girl she wants me to be, I don’t think I’ll be able to stay here very long.

Carefully, I start to peel the husk away. It’s thin, each layer nearly translucent as I drop it to the ground, leaving the ear underneath. Soon it’s bare, held loosely in my palm. Kernels blushing pink, same as the water from the kitchen sink, and crumpled, lined up like baby teeth. It’s not how it should be. None of it is. Especially not the fact that the ear is two ears, two offshoots from the same plant, curled around each other in a helix.

I stare at it, at the rot spreading where the split cobs are pressed against each other. With my thumbnail, I bear down on one of the kernels. The film of it is clear—it’s whatever is inside that’s giving it that color.

It pops. Something pink and liquid spills out, pale and thin and cold under my nail.

I drop the corn, stumble a step back. The spiraled ear cradled in the dirt. What the hell is happening here?

“That’s what I thought,” Gram says. Just like at the station. So calm. Nothing ever surprises her. “This plot’s no good.”

I press my hands to my face. I feel like I’ve gone numb. “Are they all like that?” I manage.