Clay

They lived alone. He worked and she finished the work, cooking bland and meager food with the pitiful stock he harvested. Always there was the field. It grew of thick and ugly soil, pliant as mud, and long had she feared it. It had taken the husband, as he died in its choking rows, corn pollen ground into his pores, arthritic and old.

She had lived for a time after that, content with his death, but now the old unease was upon her once more.

Without the moon to soften the edges of the claustrophobic field, she grew sick. The sun nourished the field, or what it hosted. By noon her guts churned and boiled, and she lay curled in the filthy wooden shack and sobbed all day while he drank whiskey like water and swore as he stacked tallow-tinted sheaves against each other, his skin boiling with runny perspiration in the autumn heat. Flies buzzed around her and on her.

By evening she had recovered enough to think again, ignoring the unseasonable shriek of cicadas, the dead leaves blown under the door to molder. The nights were growing long again and rimed with frost. It would grow dormant, or strike.

She judged the time right. She warned him of the magnetism of the field, and how the dogs had circled it before they died, too wily to draw closer and too weak to run. She told him of crow-pecked dirt and the lack of crows later in the day, and of the way larvae died there before hatching.

He spoke harshly and chastised her. He was forty-seven, and too old for a mother’s caution. He ordered her to bed and put the chain across the door, resting his father’s ancient shotgun across his chest and staring at her to ensure she would not try to splash kerosene on the rancid crops still in the field, or attack the fruit grown atrophied and wooden in the orchard.

She slept, and dreamed of nothing. Wrinkles deepened on her waxy face.

When she woke up his bed was empty. She looked through the greasy pane of glass and saw him running headlong along the old trail, almost in the fields. Gasping prayers, she burst out after him into the miasma of rotting corn and mosquito-scent.

Crop stubble crackled weakly against her boots as she rushed into the field with hands clenched. Puddles of rain, filmed solid with algae, slid noxiously beneath her feet and almost knocked her to the greedy wet ground. She yelled for him in a voice splintered with anxiety, until it broke with panic and she could only croak past the tears.

The sky yawned vacuous overhead, burning with the cold, weak blue of predawn. It gave her enough to see her son fall where no dead cornstalks blocked his tread and no scrawny vines sprawled. He stumbled on the clay, turned, and fell backward, and she ran to help. Then coughed bile through mouth and nose at what she saw.

His arms stuck from the soil like another crop. Nothing else showed. Bare flesh with hands upraised for succor, shy of the elbows. Then the heavy earth, invulnerable to shovel, or pick, or bare hands beat bloody against the uncaring ground.

In time the arms rotted, exposed to the elements. His skin blackened and came loose from the muscle, and beyond that she could not witness more. It pained her heart and stomach too much to stand going in the cold clay field.

The second worst of it was when the arms crumbled while the body beneath remained unseen, inviolate only in memory. His fingers fell open and curled, heavy and black with sour juices. Then they wrinkled, and then, split.

The worst was just after winter, when the arms moved to throw off the dirt like blankets and let what was beneath stand.