Lineage(28)

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 f*ck 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.