Lineage(125)

“You led me here. You showed me the house and the story,” Lance said. The pieces were forming a picture, and he was afraid of what it was beginning to look like.

“Just gave you enough to whet your appetite,” Anthony said. “A few things slipped through, like that boy my momma killed and that pretty girl you’re after. You took it from there. Came runnin’ like a starving dog.”

Lance looked past his father’s grinning face and saw Erwin rocking back and forth in anticipation, the permanent smile carved by his own hand and a malevolence that transcended time in the blue depths of his eyes.

“Why?” Lance asked.

Anthony threw back his head and laughed. It was a bass mocking sound that belied the ghost’s thin frame. It bubbled up from a fathomless place, as if his father’s body were playing host to a depth deeper than any cavern on earth. His laughter subsided and his burning stare came back to Lance.

“Well, that’s the question of all questions, isn’t it, boy? Why? Because it just is. Things just are and we can’t change them. We do what’s inside of us, and everything else be damned. You can’t change what you are, so why try. My father embraced it. Took me a while, but then I did too.” Anthony leaned closer to Lance and stared into one eye, and then the other. “I’ve been waiting in the dark for all these years. Waiting for the chance to even things out. To kill the man that killed me.”

Lance blinked. The words rebounded inside his head until he was able to speak. “No one killed you. It was an accident.”

Anthony’s white face became more skull-like as anger tightened it on the frame beneath the skin. “You don’t remember, boy. Let me show you.”

Before Lance could recoil, his father’s cold hand had grasped his face and he was falling. His vision faded into blackness, and he feared the ghost had blinded him somehow. But then his sight began to lighten and he felt a shifting beneath his feet.

“Stay right the f*ck there. Don’t you move until I tell you. Understand?” His father’s voice rang out, and then Lance could see Anthony bend out of sight behind the baler’s surface.

Lance was standing on the hay wagon again and he could feel the sun on his head and neck. I’m going to drift off now, he thought. I remember this. I imagined I was flying in the clouds, and when I open my eyes, he’ll be pinned. But instead, the vision remained constant and he felt himself easing down to the bed of the trailer. Then his feet were on the ground, the stubble of the cut hay snapping beneath his shoes. He didn’t remember this. He heard his father cuss as he wrestled the rusted wire from the baler’s forks. Lance was moving around the end of the big machine now, and he could see his father pulling and wrenching, his back to the tractor. The Case chugged away in rhythm with his heart as he neared it, and he felt the steel, warmed by the sun, beneath his hands. He turned and looked at this father, bent over the baler’s open maw, oblivious that his son now stood on the tractor’s platform behind him. Lance felt the lever in his hand and looked down at his fingers clenched around the handle. He watched his father reach deep into the baler and grasp the last looping snarl of wire there. He pushed down and heard the tractor’s motor labor as the PTO shaft spun into life. The baler’s beater bar jumped into action and rolled his father’s hand tight within the wire. Lance pulled up on the lever and watched as his father swore and turned toward him. This isn’t what happened, Lance thought, as Anthony’s bulging eyes found him and widened as they saw his hand draped over the lever.

“No! No! Stop! Shut it down!” His father’s scream echoed in his ears, and he felt his hand reach for something.

He looked over and saw that his fingers had landed on the Case’s throttle. He shoved it open and the tractor’s engine roared behind him. The PTO lever was in his hand again, and his father was furiously yanking at his snagged appendage. Anthony’s eyes narrowed in hatred through the heat of the day and the fumes from the engine. There was no pleading there, but something else. Something like a promise. I’ll get you.

Lance’s arm shoved downward and the shaft adjoining the two machines spun fully into life. The beater bar turned and sucked his father off his feet and out of sight. A scream met Lance’s ears so piercing that he felt his eardrums flutter with its strength, and then he realized he was screaming as he felt his father’s icy fingers release his face.

His vision exploded into spots of pulsing light, which ebbed into his view of the room and the two ghosts still standing before him. His breathing came out in hitching gasps, and he shook his head to clear it of what he had seen.