Haystack

Harper’s mother carves crucifixes from the rough, striated boughs of their cottonwood tree. She stains them with onion skins to sell at the market each Sunday. Stripping the skins of last harvest’s rejects, gone bad from too much sun when the surrounding soil recedes, she sits on the bottom-most stair of the back porch overseeing the low-lying sprawl of their farmland. Her mouth is pursed because there’s no one to talk to and God didn’t give her a voice for singing. Pa’s been in the burn since early morning and Harper is at school, his sisters too. Inside she boils water in a large pot, bringing the skins to a simmer and leaving them to suffuse for an hour while she tidies the house. Afterwards she strains the soggy muck in the kitchen sink before filling her dye bath and submerging the crosses for three days to take on color.

In the early morning Harper carries crates of crosses to their car, a faded yellow station wagon, and waits in the backseat while Ma fixes her hat in the mirror by the front door. The cabin reeks of onions, faint but nauseating. Tendrils of stink curl over the seat from the rear and occupy Harper’s nostrils. Ma falls into the driver’s seat and they take off down the long, dirt drive for market. She glances at Harper in the rear-view mirror.

“Say your prayers this morning?”

“Yes, ma.”

“Any leftover homework?”

Summer holidays started last week and Harper spends it in a frenzy, flying through homework so he can enjoy the rest of the holidays capering about the farm before school starts up again. He doesn’t think he did too well but his eldest sister Leanna tells him it’s the effort that counts. Pa says so too.

“No, ma.”

As they pull in to the market Harper watches the world transform into swirls of color, sees homemade goods in knives and framed watercolors laid out on tablecloths, secondhand ephemera and fresh produce. Ma tells Harper he’s free to roam but must be back by four o’clock. He’s given four pennies to use on sweets.

She warns, “No more than you can hold in y’ hand.”

He makes them last the day through, sucking for minutes at a time before tucking them into a wad of tissue in his pocket to have for later. In the past he’s saved enough money to buy small trinkets, statuettes, books but Ma tells him that he can’t take them with him in the afterlife. They’re a burden on his heavenly body. He often wonders why his sisters’ powder and paint and jewelry are so different. He eyes model airplanes with longing. By the time he’s due back, Ma sells twenty crosses, a good effort.

“Have a good time?” She busies her hands with packing.

“Yes, ma.”

Harper loads their wagon while Ma waits in the driver’s seat with the engine running so they don’t dawdle, so Harper doesn’t dwell on the families sharing double-scoop ice-creams on the verdant field of grass.

On Tuesday afternoon he helps Pa and their cowhands build a haystack in the grassy field. The stalks have been cut and dried and they gather the grass together, pricking the hay into shape with pitchforks. Harper climbs the wooden ladder to the top when they’re done and sees the land dip and roll in the distance where the sun meets the horizon.

Pa says, “It won’t rain for a while, coming up to Hallows Eve.”

Ma is in earshot and tells them she doesn’t want them celebrating Devil’s Night.

Pa says, “It’s only a bit of fun.”

Each year Leanna goes to a party in town with her school friends to celebrate the macabre holiday. Ma doesn’t like it but Leanna brings up marriage before Ma gets very far and eventually she gives up, goes quiet. Harper wishes he was old enough to say it, too.

During the day Harper snoozes on the haystack, dreaming of sisters’ laughter and sleeps through the last call to come inside for the night. When he wakes it’s pitch dark and he hears a faint rustling from beneath. Suddenly he’s jostled around; several sharp nudges to his rump have him squirming away in fright. The hay convulses before spitting out of a bundle of something Harper can’t make sense of. There’s a puff of dusty air and a decidedly human sneeze follows.

“W-what the hell!”

Harper covers his mouth, willing the words to redraw in his throat like a vacuum cleaner does dirty boot treads. Ma says he shouldn’t use blasphemous words and pulls the tongue of anyone who does so in her company.

Before him the lump unfurls, unearthing a flash of something pale. Slowly the shape is revealed, a person, a boy spotted with champagne colored chaff. It clings to his raggedy clothes and the boy rolls over, his eyes open, golden brown staring at Harper.

He squeaks, “Anyone else in there with you?”

The boy shakes his head and stands abruptly. Harper hears pops and cracks like Pa’s back at day’s end.

“Aren’t you cold?”

The boy shakes his head again.

“You can come inside where it’s warm...”

He slides down the stack until his feet touch ground, thinking the boy will follow. Instead he sees the boy tearing viciously at the stack, gouging great chunks with small hands.

“What’re you doin’ that for?”

“I’m building a scarecrow.”

The boy grabs Harper’s jacket, twists him around until it comes off and he begins stuffing hay inside. The arms fill out and he buttons the chest closed. He follows the boy to the barn where they find a torn bucket hat and a spare pair of trousers from the time Pa taught Harper how to milk a cow and the creature, startled by overeager hands, kicked, knocking the milk pail on Pa’s lap.

Harper asks, “What’s your name?”

The boy stops working, hands frozen. A moment passes before he continues.

When he does he grunts, “Chuc.”

Pa’s trousers smell faintly of spoiled milk as they wrestle clumps of hay inside. When they’ve crammed every last stitch of straw and closed off the ends to keep the doll from sifting out, Chuc says, “What a handsome young scarecrow.”

Harper watches him admire the drooping effigy.

“We should go inside.”

“But we just woke up!”

Chuc frolics curiously around the farm and Harper follows. He falls into step behind the strange boy as he peers inside the misted windows of the cowhands shack, skipping along the side of the wooden cow pen, past the slumbering cattle.

He asks, “Which way to town?”

Harper points towards the dirt drive and the boy sets off.

“But you’ll get blisters walking all that way!”

Chuc laughs into the wind. Harper watches until he disappears around the corner and Harper heads back towards the house. Inside he passes Ma in the hallway shadowed with dim, early morning light.

She says, “Good mornin’, good mornin’, good mornin’.”

“Morning ma.”

Ma does just about everything in threes. Pa says she’s always been 'funny that way' and people in town bow their heads together and whisper. His little sister’s started to do it too and Pa’s attempts to stop her only seem to make it worse.

Harper falls heavily on his mattress and sleeps past breakfast through to lunch. When he wakes, he hears his sisters’ excited chatter from the kitchen. They’re crowded around the window looking out over the field.

“What’s that in the yard?”

Ma joins them. “You girls do that?”

Outside the farm is slowly waking up, the gears turn in Pa’s truck, cattle shuffle around the field, blurring together, swapping spots. There the Scarecrow hangs by his shirttails on a crude crucifix in the middle of the field. The girls skip outside and gather around the scarecrow. Ma refuses to set foot outside.

Harper runs into Chuc two days later. He’s pricking the haystack absentmindedly where rough winds loosen the mound in a few places. When he goes to return the pitchfork to the shed, there Chuc is, sitting on the dirt watching the metal gleam in his hand.

“Uh...” Harper frowns. “Hi.”

From then on the boys strike up a moonlit, midnight hour friendship. Chuc visits the farm at night and Harper thinks he must be shy, so he doesn’t ask about it. In fact he likes having a friend all for himself. Ma and Pa haven’t asked him why he goes out to the field at night but Harper thinks he’d tell them, “I watch the stars on the stack.”

And that’s what they do. Under the bluish glow of the moon Chuc tells Harper about the places he’s been, all over the country he thinks, and plots what they should do on Devil’s Night. Condensation from dewy stalks of hay dampens their clothes as they discuss costumes and face paint and how to terrorize small children, walk away with the heaviest sacks of candy. Harper feels a flutter of excitement building in his chest. Three days before Halloween Harper overhears his parent’s hushed conversation in the kitchen. He loiters in the doorway, eavesdropping.

“Something’s killin’ the cows.”

He peeks around the corner, sees distress drawing his parent’s faces into twisted shapes and Harper knows something is terribly wrong.

He asks, “What happened?”

Pa goes to the window. “Something’s killing the animals, Harpy.”

He asks, “Wild dog?”

Pa shakes his head.

That night when everyone is settled in bed, the cowhands sleeping heavily in their shack adjacent to the homestead, the boys meet by the haystack. It takes a moment for Harper to build up the courage to ask.

“Did you do it?”

Chuc eyes the slip of skin on Harper’s neck, silent.

He asks again, “Did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Did you kill our animals?”

Chuc shrugs, hands hidden in his pockets.

“Tell me did you do it!”

Harper’s shouting wakes the cows and they begin to wriggle and grunt and huff and Chuc looks nervous. Just as he jumps up and lunges at Harper, his hands stained red, Harper thrusts a crucifix in the boy’s face and immediately he recoils. He dives into the straw, swallowed whole and Harper almost expects the stack to burp. He follows Chuc inside, closing his eyes reflexively and searches blindly with his hands. It’s hard to breathe through the humid air. He spends minutes searching but for naught. The boy is gone.

Harper climbs down, walking around the base, prodding occasionally with the toe of his shoe but the haystack remains motionless. Rain breaks overhead, coming down heavy and begins soaking the hay, weighing it down, separating the stalks. It melts before Harper’s eyes, spreading out over the dirt and for a crazy second he thinks it might drown him. A torrent of sodden chaff assaults him, sucks him under and then recedes, leaving him breathless. As he wades and kicks through the puddle of soaked straw he finds no sign of Chuc.

Chill air raises goosebumps on his skin, the rain soaks through his shirt and pants and he retreats inside where it’s warm. He climbs the stairs uncaring of shifting, squealing wood and finds the walls of his bedroom obscured by his mother’s crucifixes. He doesn’t remember when she put them up. When he wakes in the morning, doesn’t remember his dreams.

He watches Pa tidy the ground where the haystack once stood. His sisters are playing underneath the cottonwood tree, climbing the many jagged branches. He hears Ma walking through the house, coming down the stairs, out the front door, down the porch steps, finally breaching the invisible boundary line. She looks over her shoulder as if she can feel Harper watching.

She asks, “Say your prayers this mornin’ Harpy?”

“Yes, ma.”