The Field (Part One)

by William P. Simmons

Corn was meant for planting. Corn needed harvesting.

Robert stared out at the withered husks behind the farm. He was barefoot, and he shivered. The house hadn’t yet traded the bone-chilling touch of night for the easy, gentle warmth of morning, so he stomped his feet and watched the corn for movement. He was just seeing things, he told himself. The window glass, thick with grime, was simply distorting his view. Sure. That was it. But for a moment, he’d spotted something moving behind the rows. Something that was maneuvering slowly toward their house.

Corn doesn’t think!

Corn doesn’t move!

Robert shook his head, closed his eyes, opened them. The corn was still. A crow hovered over the field, screeched, thought better of landing, and took off over the peeling barn’s cracked weathervane, a fluttering piece of midnight against a cloudless sky. Already the wind was rising. Robert listened to it through the poor insulation and reluctantly admitted the truth--the stalks had moved closer.

* * *

It was a small farm. A one-story, faded red house his father’s father had built, where they slept and ate and canned pickled meats and vegetables for the winter. And beside it, a few yards past a few rusty cages housing a poor assortment of chickens that didn’t lay and pigs more bone than meat, leaned the teetering memory of a milking barn. They still had half a dozen malnourished cows, but Robert didn’t like to touch them.

Robert sat at the dirty wooden table and ate a bowl of cereal. He felt the field watching, its whispering stalks staring like so many distorted straw faces.

He ate mechanically, without tasting the soggy cornflake supper he’d poured for himself. The milk was curdled so he made toast and scarfed some cookies left over from their last trip to town. His father wasn’t eating tonight. Already passed out, he’d stayed up just long enough for Family Feud.

Throughout the day Robert had wanted to tell him about the field. Something’s wrong, Dad. I know it sounds crazy but there’s something in the corn . . . or maybe it’s the corn itself . . . I don’t know what it is but it’s there and I can feel it and don’t look at me that way but it’s coming down the hill and soon it’s going to be here, Dad, and what are we going to do then?
Of course, he’d lacked the nerve to say anything. These days it was wiser to just stay out of his old man’s way. Especially when you smelled the sour-sweet tang of cider on his breath.
Robert didn’t see why his father couldn’t notice how close the corn had gotten. How thick and tall it looked, even though it was dying. How could he not see?

Robert stared through the rolling mist licking over the un-harvested crop and mumbled,
“It’s all in your head,” waited a bit and repeated the phrase, but it didn’t help. His father was always telling him he was too imaginative. His father didn’t look at him when he spoke anymore.

“Head up in the damn clouds,” he’d tell Robert. “Dreaming while other folks--working folks--have all the responsibility! Just like your moth–” And then he would stop and look everywhere and nowhere all at once, and Robert wouldn’t know what to say to make it better.

Robert felt the warmth of tears and realized how incredibly lonely he felt. He missed his mother and the sound of his father’s voice late at night when he had spoken softly, patiently. He missed knowing that everything was sane and safe and routine in a world ruled by the turn of seasons and rise of market prices. Back when corn had been nothing but corn, and had stayed where it belonged. When stalks had grown thick and fat and ripe and never, ever moved without the help of the wind. He missed those late summers when he had helped cut the juicy, firm stalks and packed them into wooden crates for the oil-belching trucks that drove them to larger villages. And he missed setting up the little roadside stand with his mother, who had occasionally allowed him to handle the wooden cash-box.

“Across the state,” his father had once bragged after supper on an evening he’d been deep in his cups. “Our corn is eaten across the whole damn state!” His smile was fresh as autumn sky and twice as large. His eyes were blue and proud and loving.

Robert mourned that last, good summer before his mother had caught the chill, ordered to bed by a doctor who hadn’t liked kids and who had snuck glances at his watch when he thought no one was watching.

Robert remembered just how she had looked the morning he’d kissed her clammy forehead before going down to the barn to help with the milking, following his old man back to the house for lunch, checking in on her before washing up. Although her eyes had been wide open, they saw nothing.

His father had stopped working the fields after the funeral. And now, moving into autumn, the corn had shed its healthy golden skins for runny black and dirty green husks.

Robert again looked out into the rows of blackened, waving stalks. He shivered. Was something staring back? Something that was waiting for him to turn off the light? Maybe the things that had taken Besse?

“Robert?” He didn’t notice the shadow spilling over him. “Robert!” His father slammed the table. Robert jumped. The old man held a half empty bottle. His hands shook. Were they really the same fingers that had once rocked him to sleep? The same hands that had wrapped around his mother as she stood behind the stove? Could this be the same house they had all lived in, once so brightly lit, smelling of fresh baked bread and boiling stew? “Why?” the old man asked.
Robert warily met the old man’s sunken, drunk eyes. “Why the do you have to look so much like her?”

It isn’t my fault she died! Robert wanted to scream. She left me too!

And what else? What else would you tell your old man, Robbie-boy? Would you tell him how corn is grown to be cut? Would you tell him to look at it very closely? Or are you afraid he’ll see faces too?

Robert stared at his shoes. He made a note to sweep the floor. Outside, wind beat against the walls. Beneath the rasping of his father’s breathing Robert could almost make out something whispering. Several things all at once. Maybe corn . . .

“What good are you?”

Please stop! Robert thought.

“What good was your mother?”

Robert looked up at a man who had somehow forgotten him. Eyes once the color of chiseled sky were fading, tired and glazed. Hesitantly, softly, tired of the silence and fear, Robert kept his face firm. “We could cut it down tomorrow, Dad.” Whispering. “The corn.” He trembled as he spoke. He half expected the old man to hit him. “Th…there’s still time . . . we could go out in the morning and fix the tractor, cut it that way.”

Silence.

“Can we? Can we just do that?”

His father stopped drinking. “What?” Hard-knot eyes narrowed. Liver-spotted hands twitched. “What did you say?” His face flashed crimson. His mouth dropped thin, broken lines of spittle.

“Why let it go to waste?” Robert said hurriedly. “Why not – ”

“Leave it alone,” his father said. “You have no say. You’re no more good to me than that crop! No better than your mother.” He swayed and moved his lips as though to find where the words were hiding. “ Just died on me. Left me!”

Robert pretended his father wasn’t weeping. It was impossible. Grown ups weren’t supposed to cry, they were supposed to fix things!

Something thumped the walls and they both jumped. Robert imagined stalks of corn beating the door. He froze when he saw a glint of hesitancy in the old man’s eyes. He tried to move beside him--wanted the closeness of another body--but couldn’t move. He was rooted to the spot, a sliver of ice moving through his chest and arms and legs.

“I was in the fields, trying to make a living, that’s why I wasn’t there,” his father looked down at him, shaking. “Someone had to, didn’t they? ”

The wind cried outside the chimney as Robert watched him open and close his mouth, as though he had something else to say, but couldn’t find the words.

Panting, eyes watery, the old man slumped in a beat-up wicker chair and sat staring at the gathering pools of shadow near the corners.
Robert stood in the corner, one thought whirling through his mind. Corn was meant to be harvested.

When the old man lifted his head, Robert flinched. The hate was unquestionable. “No,” his father said, “you have no say at all.” He grabbed his bottle and lumbered by Robert, stumbled past the broken wall-clock, and faded into the dark hallway.

Robert spent that night listening to the wind, watching corn husks dance beneath the moonlight.

* * *

Robert woke with the new day.

Sunshine bled the world.

The sky was smeared robin’s egg blue, thin slivers of night still dissolving.

Creeping down the hall, past his father’s door, Robert entered the kitchen. He forced himself to approach the sink, where stacked dishes were crusted with last night’s potatoes and meat droppings, remains of the quick supper he’d made for his father and the woman.

Forgetting to breathe, Robert looked out the window.

The field looked back

A million secret eyes hungered for him. There was no doubt. The field had crept further down the hill. He could tell by the way the spaces between the stalks were wider, showing more of the murky, corn-husk-faced shadows running between them.

He dropped his eyes to the sink, turned on the faucet, and squeezed the last drip of detergent over the dishes. He wouldn’t look. He would ignore the corn.

He yelped when he rammed his elbow into a cast iron pan. Inside it, a thick wedge of grease clung up the sides. A spot of salt pork stood in jellied fat. He felt the disorder in the house clinging to him–like corn--and thought again of his mother.

Death didn’t make any sense. It took without giving, and that made it hateful.

Robert realized he was probably standing in the same spot she once had, her soft, soap-lathered hands washing dishes and preparing breakfast, saving a warm smile just for him.

She would have believed him about the field. She had believed him about everything.

He closed his eyes and tried to lose himself in the soothing drizzle of tap water . . .

Once more he was running to the table to swallow her thick, buttery pancakes and feel soap-softened fingers ruffling his hair. Everyone seated themselves around the table for a giant breakfast because they needed energy for the day’s work. Eggs. Meat. Syrup drenched over cereals and pancakes and potatoes, something he and his father liked to do if only because she thought it was disgusting. Smiling. Laughter. Hot coffee for the adults, milk and juice for him. The sound of her voice so simple and right, laughing and playing where she belonged, where she would always be . . .

Robert opened his eyes, blinked, and stepped away from the sink. It felt wrong standing in her spot.

He recalled the morning his uncles and father had led his mother’s coffin into the earth. The cemetery hadn’t been dreary or rainy or spooky–nothing at all like the movies they showed at the Grand on Saturdays. In fact, the sun shone brightly, and a gentle breeze blew though the trees, and everyone looked ridiculous in stiff, black suits and long, thick dresses. It had been, then, among the headstones, and all his mother’s relatives and friends, that he had realized it:

This is real . . .

(You betcha, fella. Just like the corn, Robert . . . and it’s coming )

Goodbyes were for real.

Corn needed picking . . .

And dying was for real, too.

No more lips to brush his cheek at night, no more arms to tuck him in. No more soft words to soothe away nightmares. And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

Robert tucked the memories away, and busied himself with the dishes.

He put coffee on, and worked until his mind screamed for him to look outside the glass again.

Yes, he thought. Yes . . . The corn had moved. There was no denying it.

October wind blew through the crack in the window, a warning breath carrying the smell of moist, wet earth and burning leaves.

He strained to hear a cowbell. Heard nothing.

“Breakfast!” his father groaned.

Robert dropped a dish.

His father sneered, sitting at the table in his underwear. The woman who drew up a chair was little different from the others his father brought from town. Blonde hair wiggled above a sharp forehead, a contrast to her fat, dull cheeks. By the way she stared at him as she rubbed his father’s back, Robert knew she didn’t like children. Didn’t like him because he was a living memory of the dead, a tie to his old man and the woman who had once belonged here, laughing and crying and struggling with the rest of them.

Robert cut a wedge of butter into a big cast iron pan, melted it, cracked four eggs in, and waited for the toast to come up. He wasn’t eating.

Outside, the rows of corn waved.

Behind him, his father and the woman whispered.

He turned as they kissed.

His father’s face had once been strong and fiercely alive. Now, loose, alcohol-fed skin hung over narrow bone. This is what had become of a man who had worked too hard, and too long, who had baked in the summer sun and withered in the cruel Northern winters. The man didn’t even bother to look at his son as he returned the stranger’s kiss.

After Robert served their food on cracked plates, he ran outside. The woman’s high, shrill laughter followed.

Holding a Cum Laude Honors Degree in English from Suco college at Oneonta, William P. Simmons is a 28-year-old author, poet, editor, reviewer, and journalist specializing in dark and fantastic fiction.As a journalist, William has spoken with some of the finest authors in the speculative field, including Ramsey Campbell, Graham Masterton, Ramsey Campbell and Barry Hoffman.His first collection of short fiction, Becoming October, from which "The Field" is being reprinted, will be available this October from the award winning Flesh&Blood Press William lives in the North County with his wife, Valarie, and daughter, Bonnie Lee Simmons.