He had fallen through one of the square holes that Grandpa used to toss hay down to the cattle. The pole was longer than the haychute and caught on the edges, bending like a bow but holding Jerp's weight.
He heard Grandpa yelling as if they were miles apart. He kicked his legs, trying to find purchase in the empty air. Crumbs of tobacco leaves trickled down the back of his shirt. His hands, toughened by a season in the fields, held onto the pole until his body stopped swaying.
"Hold on here, Jerp. You okay, boy?" Grandpa's voice came from somewhere above.
Jerp felt as if his arms had been ripped from his shoulder sockets, the way they had felt when he grabbed the electric fence to see how strong the shock was. He looked down at the barn floor fifteen feet below. The scarecrow boy was standing there, grinning like a turtle eating saw-briars even though its eyes were cold and dead.
"Lordamighty, it's a wonder you ain't broke your neck," Grandpa yelled. Boots drummed down the loft stairs, then the crib door banged shut. Then Grandpa was underneath him, telling him to let go. The scarecrow boy was gone.
Jerp relaxed his hands, and the balls of his feet drove into the dirt floor. Pain shot through his ankles. Grandpa caught him before he fell over.
"You sure you're okay?" Grandpa asked, holding Jerp's shoulders.
Jerp nodded numbly. Accidents happened on a farm. Timber fell on legs, snapping them like dry twigs. Horses kicked out blindly, causing concussions or worse. Plows and harrows sometimes turned more than red clay, sometimes making furrows in flesh and blood.
And accidents happened in the city. Gunmen drove by and filled the street with random hot lead. Drug dealers knifed rib cages because someone looked like someone else through angel-dusted eyes. Airliners sheared off rooftops and spread carnage like confetti. Misunderstood boys were labeled maladjusted and sent to juvenile hall where they learned nothing except how to be real criminals instead of amateurs.
"I'm sorry, Grandpa, I just lost my step," Jerp said as his wind returned. "I'm all right now. Let's get back to work."
Work was the answer. Work would keep evil away. Work would keep thoughts and daydreams and made-up monsters away. Work would make Grandpa happy.
"You sure?" Grandpa asked, and this time there was no threat in the words, only real concern and tenderness. Jerp nodded again and walked to the corncrib door, trying to hide his limp. They went back up to the loft and Grandpa lifted the pole that spanned the haychute.
He let out a liquid whistle and said, "Boy, lucky you fell just right. This thing mighta speared you like a frog on a gig."
The scarecrow boy could have made it happen that way, if it had wanted. But Jerp would work harder now.
They bundled tobacco the rest of the day, until the pile of sheaves was taller than Jerp. Grandpa complained about having a headache, and by the time they had cooked and eaten supper, the headache had turned into a fever. As night rose like a cliff made of coal, Jerp built a fire and Grandpa sat by the hearth, a shawl across his knees.
He looked miserable in his helplessness. "Jerp, I ain't up to doing chores tonight. You think you can handle them?" he said, his voice as chalky as his face.
"Sure, Grandpa." Jerp was anxious to make up for dropping that egg basket, forgetting to slop the hogs that day two weeks ago, and burning the cabbage bed by broadcasting too much fertilizer. "I know what to do."
"Don't forget to put up the cows."
Put up the cows. In the barn. With scarecrow boy riding herd.
"Something wrong, boy? You ain't afeared of the dark, are you?"
Dark wasn't bad. Dark was only black, suffocating stillness. Dark didn't walk. Dark didn't
smile
.
"No, of course you ain't. And remember to latch the gate when you're done," Grandpa said, his attention wandering back to the fire which reflected off his rheumy eyes.
Jerp put on his coat, his fingers shaking as he fumbled with the zipper. He took a flashlight from the ledge by the front door and went out into the night, under the black sky where stars were strewn like white jackstones. Crickets chirped across the low hills. Jerp's flashlight cut a weak circle in the darkness, and he followed the circle to the gate.
The cows had come in on their own, following the twitching tail of the mare who was smart enough to know where food and shelter could be found. They were milling outside the pen, rubbing against the split locust rails. Jerp walked through the herd, grateful for the warmth the animals radiated. He lifted the latch and they spilled into the barnyard, annoying the sow into a round of grunting. Jerp slid back the barn door and the animals tottered inside. So far, so good.
But now he had to go to the hayloft. Now he had to go through the corncrib and up the stairs and across the loft that was littered with square black holes. Now he had to meet the scarecrow boy on its home turf.
He almost turned and ran back up the hill to the light and safety of the farmhouse, almost let his legs betray him by becoming a whirling windmill of fear. But then he pictured Grandpa asking if all the animals were put up and fed and the chores done proper. And Jerp heard the words that Grandpa had been waiting to say.
I was hoping to leave this farm to you, to let you carry on the tradition that your father abandoned. I was hoping someday the soil would lay claim to you, because busy hands touch no evil. But if the dirt's not in you, you can't plant there.
Jerp squinted in the moonlight that spilled into the barn. He kicked a horse chip across the ground. He took a pitchfork from the wall and walked to the corncrib. He would be part of the farm, not a big-city sissy.
Jerp banged the wooden handle on the door to warn the rats and the scarecrow boy that he was coming and had work to do. Taking a deep taste of air, he slammed the door open so hard that the sweet potatoes rolled around in their bins. He ran up the steps with one hand clenched around the pitchfork.
The haybales were stacked like bricks on the far end of the loft. He tiptoed through the tobacco that hung like long sleeping bats, around the hole he had fallen through earlier, and past the workbench. He was among the hay now, walking down an aisle between the silent stacks. Jerp turned the corner and there was scarecrow boy, sitting on a bale and grinning at him, a straw jabbed between its teeth.
Jerp held the pitchfork in front of him. If the scarecrow boy was stuffed with straw, Jerp was ready to pierce its flesh and shred its muscles and rake its insides out. If the boy had a ragball heart, Jerp would make the heart stop beating. Jerp's own heart was racing like that of a crow that had eaten poisoned corn.
The scarecrow boy looked at Jerp with eyes that were beyond life, eyes that neither flinched nor twinkled in the flashlight's glare. Eyes that were as black as good bottom soil, black as manure. Eyes that had seen drought and flood, lush and fallow fields, harvests both meager and bountiful. Eyes that were seeds, begging to be planted and given a chance to take root, to grow and bloom and go to seed, to spread on the winds and in the bellies of birds, to propagate among the loess and loam and alluvial soils of the world.
"You've been waiting for me," Jerp said. "Always."
The scarecrow boy nodded, its head wobbling on its shoulders like an apple tied to a kite.
Suddenly Jerp knew whose farm this was. It had never been recorded on a deed down at the county seat, but some laws were unwritten and universal. Rights of ownership went to the possessor.
And Jerp belonged here, belonged to the farm and to the scarecrow boy.
The scarecrow boy spread its musty arms as if to hug Jerp. Jerp let the flashlight drop to the floor as the scarecrow boy rose like smoke and drifted through the tines of the pitchfork. Jerp tried to draw back, but he felt as if he had a splintery stake up his spine. His arms went limp and he itched, he itched, his hands were dusty and his mouth was dry. The pitchfork fell onto the planks, but the clatter was muffled, as if he were hearing it through layers of cloth. Jerp tried to stretch the threads of his neck, but he could only stare straight ahead at the boy in front of him.
At the boy with the smile that curved like a blackberry thorn. At the boy who had stolen his face and meat and white bones. At the boy who was wearing his scuffed lace-up boots. At the boy who was looking down at his hands—
no, MY hands
, his cobwebbed mind screamed—as if the hands were a new pair of work gloves that needed to be broken in.
Then Jerp knew. He had forgotten to latch the gate behind him. Even though Grandpa had told him a thousand times. But Jerp had been so afraid. It wasn't his fault, was it?
Jerp tried to open his mouth, to scream, to tell the boy to get out of his skin, but Jerp's tongue was an old sock. He strained to flap the rags of his arms, but he felt himself falling into the loose hay. He choked on the cotton and chaff and sweetly sick odor of his own dry-rot. And still he
saw
, with eyes that were tickled by tobacco dust and stung by tears that would never fall.
Jerp watched as the boy now wearing Jerp's clothes bent to lift the pitchfork. The boy tried out its stolen skin, stretched its face into new smiles. Then the boy who had borrowed Jerp's body stepped between the haybales and was gone. Minutes or years later, the barn door slid open.
Jerp tried his limbs and found they worked, but they were much too light and boneless. He dragged himself to the window and pressed his sawdust head against the chickenwire. Jerp looked out over the moist fields that would now and always beckon him, he listened to the breezes that would laugh till the cows came home, he sniffed the meadows that would haunt his endless days. He wondered how long it would be before the next season of change. Already he ached from waiting.
Jerp looked down into the barnyard and saw the boy who wore his flesh walking toward the farmhouse, the pitchfork glinting under the moon, perhaps on his way to punish someone who had shirked the evening chores.
The boy remembered to latch the gate.
###
LUMINOSITY
Born half in darkness, half in hazy light, Kate started out different and stayed different.
Even in ninth grade, when all the girls had grown strange shapes and the boys had started sweating.
Even in a world where ordinary girls were all the rage, when you had to have three silver rings in your ear and another one in a secret, pierced place somewhere beneath your clothes. Somewhere to keep the boys guessing and sweating.
And somewhere for the other girls to wonder about, just in case their rings weren't in as cool a place.
But Kate wore no rings. Kate was brighter than silver, though her eyes were brown. She was so different, she had never dyed her hair. She was so different, she was a princess who had never kissed a frog in hopes of turning him into a prince.
Well, never kissed a frog if you didn’t count Jeremy as a frog. Because Kate had just kissed Jeremy. Under the moon. A moon she had built, looked up and said, "Give me a moon," and there it was, white and blue and cold, and there was Jeremy, big and cute and maybe his eyes were saying hello.
And the night was black and purple, a sprinkle of salt marking stars in the sky, Jeremy, lips, oh God, she couldn't breathe, this was so corny.
Because she didn't want to kiss a guy. Who cared if Jeremy was a junior? She was fourteen and happy. She was out of it. She didn't even own a cell phone.
Kate was the luckiest girl in the world, because she only owned the moon.
"Come on," Jeremy said.
Kate shook her head. Her back was against the bricks of the old movie theater, the streetlights as distant as the bright pinprick of Jupiter.
Jeremy's breath was sardines. "Are you going to kiss me or not? Don't tell me you dragged me all the way out here for this?"
"I just want to talk," she said.
"Talk? I can talk with any girl. And do even more with some of them."
"Jeremy. Don't pressure me."
"Pressure you?" He kissed her again, his tongue like a frog's going after a bug. He pulled away and held Kate at arm's length. Under the moon, his eyes were as dark as beetles.
"I need a little time," she said.
"I'll give you all the time you need," Jeremy said, putting his arms around Kate and pulling her against him. She tried to go soft against his muscles. He was strong. He usually got his way with things.
"Not like this," she said, but his hand was already on her bra strap.
She looked past Jeremy's shoulder at the moon. A moon she had built from dreams and wishes. A moon so far away, yet all in her head at the same time. Kate the moonbeam queen, Mom had called her.
Because she made the moon rise. When all the girls in her class were asleep, she closed her eyes and became far too awake and thought about the moon on its invisible string. She pulled the string and out came the moon, in different sizes every night without fail, except one night every four weeks when Kate was allowed to sleep.
Tonight the moon was easy, a small sliver, just past new.
And it would grow each night, swelling in inches and pounds and light, ever fatter and heavier, until by the full moon Kate would be dragging, with so much on her shoulders. Maybe not the weight of the world, but at least the weight of the moon.