Lineage(27)

“NO!” The word came again unannounced from Lance’s lips, and he felt the ground tilt. The flames in the barrel shot up higher for an instant like a cannibal raising its head from a feast. Lance realized his hand was reaching out toward the barrel, past his father, as though he might will the notebook out of the fire, whole and untouched. He let his arm fall to his side and felt tears begin to squeeze onto the ledges of his eyes. All his words were gone. All his stories were burning. His poems. His thoughts. The feelings that wanted to spew out of him night and day, transcribed there on the pages, were blackening and curling. They would soon be light enough to float on the heat. They would alight out of the inferno and glide away on the night setting in and he would never see them again.

Lance blinked until the tears flooded from his eyes and he was once again able to see clearly. His father still stood near the barrel. The shadows were deep on his battered face and the bruises and cuts now looked like inky pools on Anthony’s light skin. A new feeling began to churn within Lance, and boiled over into a flooding warmth in his chest. It was like a pilot light of blue flame had been lit there, perhaps waiting for the right fuel source to ignite something so deep within him. At that moment Lance knew he could kill his father if given the chance. If a gun had appeared within his hand, he would have pulled the trigger without thinking. A knife, and he would have gladly run it through his heart.

Instead of any retribution, Lance turned away from the sneering figure before him and waded through the snow to the house. He shut the door behind him and took off his outside clothes, putting each item away carefully. He walked down the hall to his room, where he again put another barrier behind him. Without undressing further, he lay down on his bed and began to weep openly. The tears he cried were again for his mother and his excuse for an existence up to this point. But they were also for the creation he had lost, the words gone forever. He knew that he could never recreate everything the notebook had held, not exactly. Nor could he recall everything he had written, no matter how hard he racked his brain to retrieve the titles and first lines.

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 f*cking 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.