Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner
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marked the end of one season and the beginning of another. The field stood open again and would till next spring, its fortress reduced to rubble and stocked away for feed. As he pulled into the McKellar driveway to turn around it seemed like the last chance for something, that she might be in there to hear the truck’s engine rattling the cups in the cupboard. He had not seen her since that day he drew her milk.
At the barnyard they gathered on Elmer’s parched lawn and waited for Blair to roll up with the chopper. They could hear his tractor coming in the distance. Carrie came out with reheated pizza, bought earlier that day in anticipation of ending the task, and an iceless cooler of some generic cola, and Jack was not too tired to curse their frugality in a low voice. They lay themselves out on the lawn in a ragged picnic, suns and planets wheeling brightly overhead. Seth stretched out on his back and fed himself from above. Roydn sat cross legged and hunched over, his back curved in the moonlight. He sniffed a few times, his head bending farther toward his open crotch to determine if it was indeed from there that the dark stench came. No one spoke. There were sounds of guzzling throats and stifled burps, long tired sighs, and then a noise atop the front step of the house and Jack turned to see the boy, Edward Elmer, crouching in front of the door in his pajamas like a misplaced lawn gnome. Carrie turned and said, Go back to bed, Edward. Go tell Daddy to put you back to bed.
The boy rose and went inside without a sound. Blair chugged up, bringing dust with him, and killed the tractor. He left the tractor in the middle of the lane and walked over stiffly. His face was haggard and dusty. He managed a foolish smile for them all and said something foolish, but had no appetite for the pizza. They all parted in a feeling of silent congratulations at the job done, and as the two men entered the farmhouse they found it empty. Jack sat down at the kitchen table to wait. When Blair did not return he walked into the hallway and through the darkness saw the shape of his grandfather standing by the bed with his back toward him, staring downward, his arms hanging at his sides.
Despite the hopeful whispers he heard, the body of the deceased did not look good, it did not look peaceful. It was a corpse, less alive than the dirt it would be buried under. The force that had made it something more was fled, drawn from its nostrils by the perpetual breeze. The eyelids were the colors of bruises, the cheeks sunken, the skin waxy and pale, the lipstick, applied by the hand of a dark artist, flawless. Blair stood alone at the coffin, staring into it as he had into the bed a few nights before, studying its contents. He reached his hand inside and rested it on the remains and before Jack could turn his head for what he saw coming he bent and kissed them. When Jack looked back Blair’s shoulders were buckling, a physical change taking place like a mountain shaken by earth tremors and sliding. The wail that came from the old man’s throat made the joints of the wooden pews buzz and the silence that followed as he pulled in wind was stricken and terrible. He sobbed, his body heaving with the force, and then it was over. He stabbed his eyes with a blunt finger and thumb and turned them red-rimmed upon the gathered. Bleary of face and small-eyed like an aggrieved beast, those two points of red misery searching the congregation for what, Jack?
The day was bright and blustery and ringing with autumnal tones as they carried the body out of the chapel after the service and the procession made its way out of town, west across the tracks, past the co-op. For the number of deaths visited upon the town its cemetery was meager, a small rectangle, not seventy yards long and not fifty across. It sat on a high knoll, the town beneath and the river beyond, and for the sharp curve of the earth you could not see the whole of it anywhere you stood. It had been planted with oaks, which had been watered well and were grand trees. They seemed larger than the cemetery itself and stretched their arms over the ground. Their limbs moved in the wind and the noise rushed around the group. Windbeaten gravestones stuck up like crooked teeth in the grass, some old and thin from when the first settlers had perished as they coaxed crops from the land. There were more attendant than were buried here.
Heber and Seth left after the burial service, seeming uncomfortable in their suits among the woeful tenor, and Jack walked away from the departing group to his parents’ graves. He looked down at their single gravestone and turned and leaned against it. He watched the people and listened to the trees sigh. He had not been to a funeral since his parents’. Even at age fourteen it had seemed a sick thing to display a corpse, or a pair of them, in front of a congregation. There was nothing wrong with the service then, or the one this day, nothing wrong but the corpse at the front of the chapel. It was a dread thing that drew the eye repeatedly to it like a dark smudge in a photograph.
Rebekah stood at the open grave and now she left her mother’s side and walked toward him. Not a few heads turned to watch her walk. She wore a black dress just past her knees with a black shawl over her shoulders and she stepped across the yellowing grass with her feet arched in spiked heels and her slim calves flexing with each step. Her dress moved in the breeze. Her beauty fit the day, raw with sincerity, cold with solemnity. Dark strands of hair blew across her face and she brushed them away. Her large eyes were lightened like shallow puddles in sunlight.
—I’m sorry for your loss, she said.
—We knew it was coming.
His tie lifted in the breeze. She reached to tuck it into his suit coat and her hand moved up to his neck for a warm moment before it fell to pull her shawl tighter around her shoulders. It was a quick, sure action, done naturally and without thought. The licking wind stole the warmth of her hand from his neck, and as she turned and leaned against the gravestone with him he looked to the layout of his small world, fields of harvested crops, the little cluster of his town, the simple homes. Autumn had come on fully, turning the leaves before felling them, and the land itself was bright with death. The leaves on the oaks would soon be yellow. Stripes of cottonwoods already yellowed in the small creek beds that led down from the mountains. The scrub oak in the foothills would become red and were also turning. Vast fields of wheat stubble lay ready to be burned, some fields already scorched black and plowed under. Oblique light slanted across the land. Balls Murphy’s old backhoe, which he ran on the side as the town’s gravedigger, sat in the bordering grass and sagebrush, covered in faded yellow paint bubbled and chipped and revealing spots of dark rusted metal. The landscape, the cemetery, and the girl lent a strange beauty to this death. He felt little emotion, no urge to weep. He had braced himself for a wind and received a breeze. Though he had certainly loved the woman in her time, that love had cleared like smoke, and there had been time since to prepare for this and it was no surprise. It occurred to him that things might come out, even that evening. He imagined that those things had been settled firmly and cleanly sometime in the past and that this day when the old woman was put in the ground would be the day his future at the farm would be revealed. It would be momentous if it came out in the immediate wake of the burial, it would seem his mantle, magnifying the drama of the passing, honoring it even, and he did not know how he would respond. He did not know if he would be able to think clearly should it come that way. The emotion of the moment might suade him in a direction he was not sure he wanted to go. Did he want the farm? To stay here alone in this town and work a lonesome and obscure life out in the same fields, gathering milk twice a day, beating his life out upon this ground—this was the natural course of things, the path that would unroll before him in some laissez-faire of fate were he only not to interfere. Was this the future he had envisioned for himself? This farm was both a boon and a curse, then. The boon was the curse. But the dignity of having that option should not be denied him. He should be given it if only to reject it, if that was what he chose, a small matter of human dignity and a symbol of gratitude. Human dignity among the eternal and ubiquitous odor of cow shit and fermenting corn silage. If he were given his right share this would be his living, his life, and how long could he last at that. With this girl could he do it? Even with her here now he viewed the world differently, even this death. The town was changed for the presence of her spirit and this change beat in his blood. He tried to envision her as a dairyfarmer’s wife and could not. He tried to picture her living out her life in this town and could not. These unwelcome revelations crossed him like shadows as she leaned beside him on the gravestone. He saw Blair sitting him down at the kitchen table after milking and feeding were done, telling him, Son, you’ve worked hard for this farm. Here you go. He placed Rebekah in this future and it was a dream. He blinked his stinging eyes, his mind full of the vision, and Rebekah turned him away from the departing group. With an arm around his waist she walked with him