Dust to Dust Read online

  Dust to Dust

  By P.S. Nielson

  The corn field swayed, sighing in the breeze, as if sucking in the last warmth of the September sun. Sam lifted his tan seed cap from his head, the brim of it turned brown with an honest day’s sweat. In tandem he grabbed a rumpled red hanky from his back pocket. The hat in his hand tapped the side of his leg as he lifted the wilted bandanna and wiped his bristly, balding head, sunburned face and neck. Steely gray hairs tangled his eyebrows and highlighted the reluctant hair around his ears. He looked older than his forty-three years, just as his dad and grandpa Sampson had, too. Farming did that to a man.

  He felt a great deal of pride in the green expanse before him. Two hundred and forty-seven acres of supple, strong corn stocks stretched to the south of him. The weathered red barn, outbuilding, and house were behind him, with nothing to interrupt his vision, his creation, of sorts. He smiled a bit at the thought and wondered for about the fiftieth time that day what Stacy would say concerning that smile, concerning his attitude in general, when it came to these fields. Really, he knew what she would say, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe she and the boys were gone for good over such a stupid, silly argument. She would tell him to burn it all. To take a torch and light those living green stalks on fire until nothing was left but smoking, broken stubble, all the good gone from them. And that was the gist of his argument; the goodness that lived in these fields, that fed hungry bellies and put money in the bank for the boys and the two of them. He shook his head. He couldn’t fathom her irrational delusions about this crop.

  Late last April the battle had begun. It was hard to put a finger on exactly when the real disagreement started, but corn planting had certainly been the jump-off spot. Toby and Josh were both in school. Stacy had come out to the field with a hamper of cold chicken left over from last night’s supper, a loaf of white bread, still warm from the oven, sliced thick and spread with honey-butter. A half-gallon jug of tea in her other hand jangled with ice as she picked her way over the newly-turned earth. Sizable clods of rich, damp brown dirt, gave way beneath her feet, making her gait a little wobbly, a little clumsy. Grinning down at her, Sam took the basket and decanter from her outstretched hands, then grasped her forearms in his callused hands and hefted her up into the cab of the John Deer.

  Stacy plunked down on the gear-shift cover, the flesh of her arms quivering to the beat of the idling engine. He still thought of her as beautiful, even though the past twenty years had painted age onto her face and figure. The first two years of their marriage had been like an extended honeymoon. They worked hard and played just as hard, especially after first snow, when the farm demanded less of them. On a whim, the two of them might take off to the city, catch the latest flic, then drive two hours in the dark back to the house. Or they might decide to see what adventure the old Jeep could produce for them, constructing muddy roads of their own up South-fork Canyon, tires spinning until mud clods bombed down on them. Once, they had gotten so stuck they had had to spend the night huddled on the back seat, both of them stuffed into the single sleeping bag they’d found in the back. They dined on crackers, jerky, and pink peppermints; laughing like kids, and spewing crumbs which made them laugh still harder, their minty breath rising around them like circling specters.

  Sam smiled at the memory, his focus on the field blurring for a minute or two. The month of April had been drier than usual. He remembered how the plowing had made the air thick with russet dust. By the time he had pulled Stacy into the tractor with him she was covered with a fine brown film of grime. They had eaten their fill of the basket's contents, and nearly finished off the tea when the engine revved up violently. It had startled Sam into hiccups, until he saw the sly smile playing around Stacy's mouth. Her foot slid back to the front of the engine cover, as her smile became a full-blown belly laugh. He had grabbed her shoulders in a mockingly punitive way, joining in her delight at scaring the be-jeepers out of him. He pulled her to him, at the same time grabbing the gear shift behind her and hitting the accelerator. The sudden lurch of the tractor threw her into his embrace and brought a little-girl squeal from her. “Now who's laughing?” he teased, “Who's the man? Come on, who's the man? Admit it!”

  “You!” she giggled into his neck, “You're the man...you're my man!”

  “That's right, woman! And don't you forget it!” he laughed, as he ruffled her hair.

  She pulled back, ready with a quick comeback, no doubt, but her face went blank, her eyes focused intently out the back window. Fear re-arranged her eyebrows and mouth. He geared into park without hitting the break, jerking them forward, then slamming them together against the back of the seat.

  “Stacy, honey, what is it?”

  Her grip on his shoulders became painful, insistent. Without moving her gaze from the window, she pulled his chin around, forcing him to twist until he could see the field behind them. Plumes of dust billowed into the air, separating them from the world. Sam felt tremors seism through her, her breathing shallow and fast. His throat tightened with the first contractions of panic, not understanding the cause of this rush of fear was even more distressing.

  “What? What do you see, sweetheart?” he asked, his voice over-loud.

  She turned her head toward him slightly, just enough to whisper close to his ear, “There Sam, the dust, the dust is…”Her voice trailed off.

  He grabbed her face in both of his hands and tried to turn her toward him, to get her to focus on him for a minute.

  Resisting him she wailed, “Look! Look at the dust!”

  Her voice scaled into hysteria, her nails biting into the back of his hands as she tried to break his hold.

  He twisted further around, trying to hang on to Stacy at the same time, and then he saw.

  The spiraling, air-borne earth seemed to churn itself into distorted, humanoid figures, skeletal and horrifying. They coiled into each other, creating bizarre, other-worldly images over and over again. They wrung the black from the soil until they were animations of darkness, the dust white around their hideous materializations, their mouths gaping into nothingness. Sam watched the macabre dance, comprehension trying to fight its way to the fore, to untangle the images his eyes were seeing. Stacy was a crumpled heap in his arms, her face empty, her eyes rolled back into her head. It was then the whistling began, shrill and penetrating. The sound escalated with the gyrations of the atrocities until it was a living thing, singing curses and destruction with every shrieked lyric. The vile apparitions and the screams thrashed into a deafening chorus of madness, spinning, spinning, spinning until all light, all thought was woven into a cavernous, hellacious singular phantasm. The grotesque figure became an empty death mask of a face, with an endless yawning mouth from which nothing could escape. The tractor shook violently as it climbed up and over the cab, devouring the machine. The shaking intensified, rattling Sam from the seat and into a black oblivion.

  When he had come to, he found himself slumped protectively over Stacy, both of them on the floor of the cab. The bright afternoon sun sparkled on the windows. The serene purr of the idling engine was accompanied with the chirrup of a flock of birds that had claimed the elderberry bushes marking the east boarder of his land. He shook Stacy gently. She sat up slowly, as if in a daze, her face streaky with dust, like fingers had scratched a path down her cheeks. Her eyes asked him what had happened, but he had no answers. He pulled her into his arms, rocking her slowly as she sobbed. Tiny eddies of dust swirled playfully in the air around them.

  Part Two

  Toby was born several months into Sam and Stacy’s third year, and then eighteen months later came Josh. Life shifted gears, so to speak, and the adults had to grow up. Not that fun times stopped, far from it, but the themes changed. Life was mapped
with cheering wobbly baby steps, then yelling encouragement at ball games, hunting trips into the Henry Mountain, battles with braces, driving lessons, and dating. The years had sprinted by, and now, just as Toby was starting into his senior year, this paranoid foolishness of Stacy’s had disrupted their comfortable lives. Sam couldn’t, for the life of him, believe she was serious about this nonsense. She refused to back down or get help from her doctor, insisting it was his problem, which he wasn’t willing to admit, even though he had seen the evil with his own eyes. He had tried to explain to her that the incident had been an hallucination. Its cause not some possessed bits of dust, but a gas leak in the carburetor that had seeped into the cab of the tractor. They had breathed in the toxic fumes as they shared lunch, and then experienced a dream-like manifestation. Nothing jump-out-and-get-you spooky about that, beyond the horrors of a pounding 24 hour headache both of them had had to suffer through. Stacy refused to see the truth of it, preferring the drama of her version about what had happened. Sam shook his head, thinking about how exaggerated and over-blown her account had become.

  The nightmares were the straw that broke the camel’s back, not hers, but his, according to Stacy. Hardly a morning went by after the incident that she didn’t accuse him of keeping her awake with his crying and screaming. She related in detail, how he thrashed about, to the point of bruising her legs and ribs, and she described bitterly how he had battled with unseen phantoms through-out the night. If it were true he had no memory of the dreams, not one of them. He awoke refreshed and renewed every day, while Stacy on the other hand, became more and more despondent and edgy. It seemed to Sam that all she wanted to do was rehash what had happened in the field and beg him time after time after time to plow the young, summer-green corn under. It was as if she were asking him to mutilate and bury a beloved, living child. He reached a point where he would simply turn and walk away when she started in on all that hogwash. He loved her, but he was fed up with it, with her lies and accusations. Even with that, her leaving had come as a shock. It was just something he had never let himself think, even on her worst days. And his boys! He didn’t know what she had told them to make them believe her wild ravings, but it had worked, whatever it was.

  Just before Stacy and the boys left, things had gotten pretty ugly. She had screamed at him, tears raining down her scarlet cheeks, her eyes too big for her face, inflamed with fear and passion. She had accused him of loving the filthy fields more than them, of being willing to sacrifice them to the corn. His confusion left him standing silent and alone as the car pulled out, spitting gravel along the side of the weathered gray fence and onto his shoes.

  That had been almost two weeks ago. Sam was a patient man and he knew it wouldn’t be much longer now until Stacy called him, begging to bring the boys back home and make things right. He had attempted to keep the house tidy for her, but house work had never been one of his strong points. The dust had collected along the edges of the front room shelves and found its way into closets and cupboards. He had swept the kitchen floor just yesterday, but this morning it looked like a pack of dogs had tumbled about in there, leaving dirt and dust swirling in their wake. After a quick breakfast he had half-heartedly swept again, stirring up fists of dust that clung to his jeans, climbing to his chest. Sam made his way to the fields just as the new day was breaking fiery red and violet in the east. He loved to stand and survey his wealth of corn, to irrigate and fertilize and wonder at the beauty of his crop. He should have harvested last month, but the corn continued to grow, full and green, and he had decided to delay cutting. It was almost as if the corn wanted him to wait, whispering to him to be patient, to watch until the time was right. He could hear the singing beginning even now, as he walked into the rows of towering stalks, his arms stretched out to stroke them on either side. Eddies of kicked-up earth circled around him, filtering intimate particles of dust into his ears and mouth, settling into his hair and stroking his flesh. He felt the rustle of living things, their roots deep beneath him, drinking in the darkness of buried places. He sensed their impatience and smiled at their eagerness.

 

 

  P.S. Nielson, Dust to Dust

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