UnWrecked Press presents: Free Fiction Friday

This week’s Free Fiction Friday story from UnWrecked Press is “What the Land Takes.”

UPDATE: Now that the free week is over, you can read the rest of this story by downloading an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords. Then you can read it on your laptop, desktop, Kindle, iPad, Nook, iPhone, or whatever device you use to read ebooks.

This is a story about loss and faith, and the lengths a person will go to save his land…

What the Land Takes

“I was three when the power takeoff assassinated my older brother. Like a hit man for the thirsty ground, the machine snagged my brother’s coat sleeve and ripped his eleven-year-old body from the ground. He spun like a top until all I could see was his blood in the air, forming a wall.”

This was one of the first stories my former neighbor told me, five weeks into the growing season a half-dozen years back.

“I sat on the ground not five feet away, unable to breathe. The blood of my big brother Jimmy—the boy I adored, even if he acted like my enemy half of the time, and called me dumbshit names like Froggy—his blood hung there in front of me, ripped from his skin by the spinning machine. The steaming wall of his blood hung there next to the idling tractor for what felt like an hour.

“Then the hot blood flew through the air and splashed onto me, burning me. I never screamed once, not even when Daddy came out of the barn and found me sitting there in the black dirt, all of three years old, holding a rectangle of wet fabric, all that was left of Jimmy’s heavy winter coat.”

My cans of beer went fast that night, the thirtieth anniversary of his big brother Jimmy’s death, but not as fast as my neighbor’s mugs of whiskey. We toasted his death, and my neighbor cursed his murderer, a killer without a face or a voice.

* * * * *

My neighbor used to live on the northern side of the corn and soybean fields, in a big white clapboard house on a farm that hadn’t seen a plow since the turn of the new century. Even while he was still living there, his fields were in the process of being reclaimed by rabid ditchweed, his house and barns floating on a sea of wild grass and rye, all his livestock long dead.

My neighbor was once a farmer, but when I knew him he was just a drinker and a talker. In that order. What he drank was cheap whiskey from the bottom shelf at the Pack ‘N’ Save in town, and what he talked about was how the land takes. How it takes and takes.

“It takes”—he’d explain in his low, slow voice—”our blood, especially that of our innocent children. And in return it gives us healthy crops, fat livestock, and peaceful towns free of crime. Simple lives, stained every few years with loss.”

Here he’d pause and take a long pull on his chipped mug full of Kessler’s. He exhaled a breath like diesel exhaust before he continued.

“People from other towns in other states probably wonder about the number of car wrecks, the farming accidents, the suicides in barns, but I’ll bet they never friggin’ ask about ‘em. It’s the land: it takes them away from us, and good working folk that we are, we absorb the pain and put it way deep inside us and harness the loss as best we can so we can continue. On the surface you could never tell that the piled-up years of devastation and heartache has hurt us so deeply.

“Greedy, the land took everything from me. You know this.”

And I would nod and drink my beer, brought over from my place in my dad’s slowly disintegrating Styrofoam cooler. I could stuff a twelve-pack in there along with a tray of ice cubes, and when it was empty, I’d sling it wet on my shoulder and walk home and try to sleep in my stale bachelor’s farmhouse, with its rooms full of old, unused furniture.

I was just a single guy who knew my neighbor needed a friendly ear, and I had two to spare. I’d be back over the next night, after the milking and the feeding and spraying and all the other endless chores of my day were done.

Then, almost two years ago, at the start of a rainy spring, things started getting weird. About once a week, my neighbor would leave late at night, after one of our talks had gotten him riled up. Most nights I’d be too pissed to do anything about it, and so I’d just let him go. But in what would turn out to be my neighbor’s last month here, I started following him.

I followed him across an eight-mile grid of ruler-straight gravel roads until we ended up at the sportsman’s fishing pond out in the countryside. He’d brought his canoe in the bed of his old, rattle-down truck, and a dozen sticks of dynamite.

Still reeling from all my beer, I watched him load the canoe with his sticks of dynamite and drag it to the edge of the twelve-acre pond. In minutes he was stretched out on his back in the middle of the water, as if his canoe had become a portable, lidless coffin. The moon was full enough to light him up in the water, but not bright enough to show me hunkered down behind the pussy willows at the edge of the pond.

I sat back and waited and watched everything in my vision dance. I listened to the whispers of the land bounce off the water surrounding me. I didn’t dare look away my neighbor, though I ached to fall back and stare instead at the stars as slowly marched past me. Heartless mosquitoes flew into my ears and eyes in a series of buzzing bombing runs.

While I just heard whispers on the wind and the splash and gurgle of the water, I imagined my neighbor hearing voices. He’d told me about the times he heard the land talking. Maybe it was, and I was just too damn ignorant to understand the language.

I closed my eyes, just for a second, and the suck of mud and splash of pond water and hiss of wind converged:

“Who… is next?”

Like a voice—hundreds of voices?—coming from under the pond, the clotted voices dripped into my ears like dew.

“Who will… sacrifice?”

I pressed my lips together, tempted badly to answer the land. But that way led to madness. I was just drunk, imagining shit.

“Who?”

I wanted to tell that voice that some of us escaped, people like my older sister, who moved to a city to the east after college. We lost most of our best people that way, leaving the town with the under-educated, the workers, the drinkers, the oblivious ones who don’t look for the connections in events the way I do. I missed her, but she was mostly dead to me anyway—too far away, never visiting. Coming back hurt too much, she always said, back when we used to talk.

“No,” my neighbor said at last, before I could speak. Just one little word, repeated. “No.”

At some point I’d ended up flat on my back, holding my breath. The land spoke again to my neighbor its mud-choked voice:

“Move. Go elsewhere, dry little man…” The grass crackled and hissed. “We don’t need you here.”

But the land didn’t understand, I thought. We’ve sunk our roots here. This was our home. We just want to live here and continue on like our ancestors. To survive.

As if following the land’s orders, I heard my neighbor splashing around in the canoe. I looked up and saw him paddling back toward the muddy of the pond shore. I rolled to my feet and stagger-ran back to my car before he saw me there.

He’s letting us down, I thought, the wind pouring in through my open windows as I downshifted on a gravelly straightaway. He didn’t rise to the land’s challenge. We were all betrayed.

* * * * *

“I knew my neighbor Marty for over thirty years before he shot himself in the face in his hay loft. Good guy, worked hard, loved to play cards, follow college football, and drink whiskey sours. We went to Catholic elementary school together, watching a few more nuns retire as we advanced each grade until they were all gone by the time we moved on to the public middle school and then high school, where we both squeaked by with diplomas.

“His eleven-year-old son found him in the barn. I could never forgive Marty for that.

“Like most others, Marty’s farm had been faltering in the past few years. I’d been living on my family’s land all my life, but I’d had to give up farming two years ago myself. I guess my brother’s blood only went so far in the uneven calculations of the greedy land.

“Far as I knew, Marty had never lost anyone in his life, so he and his family were due for some bloodletting. I hate to say it, but my theory fit his profile: when his bachelor brother took over the farm the next year, the corn shot up and the next month the cows gave out more milk than they had all summer. You couldn’t walk ten feet into his wheat fields without getting lost.

“After that, I took to sleeping in my truck most nights, preferring the quiet and the chill of the outdoors to the echoes and numbness in my empty house. The voices weren’t so loud out there. At least, not at first.”

* * * * *

Read the rest as an ebook at Amazon and Smashwords.