Lineage(29)

“No! No! Stop! Shut it down!” Anthony cried without looking in Lance’s direction; instead, his eyes gaped wide at the back of the tractor and the bouncing lever. The yell snapped Lance out of his trance and his knees nearly buckled. The tractor shuddered and the throttle suddenly sped up as the PTO lever dropped like an executioner’s ax onto a block.

Lance watched as the heavy steel shaft spun into full action, the red paint shimmering in the sun. The beater bar snapped into motion, pulling Anthony’s pinned hand farther into the recesses of the machine. His feet left the ground as the tines grabbed clothing and flesh alike. Lance stared, unable to look away or move as the machine chugged inexorably in place. The packing arm plungered in and out, and a guttural scream tore from the inner workings of the baler. It was cut short by a stroke of the unyielding steel arm, but Lance also heard a resounding crack that could have only been his father’s skull fracturing into several pieces. Blood and tissue shot up through the gaps in the metal shroud like grisly party streamers, and still the machine worked on. Anthony’s limp legs disappeared into the maw of the baler, and soon red wetness appeared on the bales that exited onto the chute. The last thing Lance saw before the churning gears and shafts ran out of fodder to drive the alfalfa out was a shining rope of intestine and the white glare of bone poking from the top of the final bale.

Lance swallowed once, but it did nothing to stop the rush he felt erupting upward from his stomach. He leaned forward, hands on his shaking thighs, and vomited onto the wooden planking. The bright afternoon became a swimming world of color and shape, and then the horizon tipped, the trailer’s bed coming up to meet him.

The sun shone down on Lance’s form while the wind kissed the sweat away from his body. His eyes remained open as the tractor and baler worked through the afternoon and into the evening. At some point, when the shadows had slanted into long distorted likenesses of their objects, the tractor’s tank finally ran dry and it wound down into sputtering silence. Lance drew his legs close to his chest and floated again on the wind that pushed against his clothing and stirred the loose hay around him in a ballet. He was far away from the rough boards of the trailer that cut grooves into his skin and the sun that shone directly into his eyes from the west. He drifted above it all, and when the sun closed its red eye below the tree line, Lance did the same.



It was full dark when strong hands began shaking his shoulder and a voice said his name, drawing him out of a sleep so deep that it felt as if he were lost in a void without any of his senses. As they rushed back to him, he felt the coarse wood beneath his shoulder, along with discomfort in his hip and an arm that tingled and stung. He smelled the moist night air and he could hear crickets rasping out a rhythm that they could only keep time to. He tasted a sour dryness on his tongue as he tried to swallow with some difficulty, the muscles in his neck having abandoned their duties. And when he opened his eyes, Sheriff Dodd stood at the edge of the trailer, silhouetted in the light of the moon, which hung in the sky over the mottled field below. Lance knew it was the sheriff because he could see the badge on his left breast pocket reflecting in the low light. The man leaned forward and said his name again as he turned on a small flashlight, which made Lance’s pupils shrink painfully shut.

“Are you hurt, son?” the sheriff asked.

Lance tried to speak, but the dryness on his tongue and in his throat felt complete, the insides of his mouth coated with seamless concrete. When his words failed him, he shifted his head from side to side, rubbing his temple on the hay under his body. In a flash of color and sound, the memory of his father being dragged into the churning baler came back like a firework in his mind. Lance raised an arm and pointed urgently over the sheriff’s shoulder at the dark outline of the quiet machine.

“I know, son, I know. I saw. It’s okay. I’m just glad I came to look in on you tonight.” The sheriff leaned toward Lance and examined him with the flashlight. “Come on, son. You need water and you’re burnt to a crisp.”

The sheriff switched off the flashlight and stowed it away. Then, as gently as he could, he pulled Lance to his chest and lifted him off the trailer. Suddenly, Anthony’s words came tearing across the months since they had been said: I think he might like little boys like you. I think he’d like to touch you. For an instant as he felt himself being cradled in the sheriff’s arms, he worried that the man holding him was going to do something terrible to him here in the field in the darkness, with only the moon as a witness. Lance knew he would be helpless to stop him, his arms and legs hung limp and felt as if they’d been filled with Novocain. But instead of putting him on the ground to do unspeakable things to him, the sheriff simply walked at a steady pace across the uneven field. Lance slowly relaxed and felt his eyelids pulled down by an invisible force. He strained to make out the sheriff’s features in the dark, but to no avail, and the last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the moon’s face gazing down at him from the black blanket of the sky.