The man gazed at me. “Aster doesn’t live there anymore.”
“Yes, but the boys have taken it as some sort of den. Your Tom never told you?”
“Tom. What would he be telling me about?”
I cocked my head. “About the fight of course.”
“Who’s fighting?”
“It might have been Ray who started it. It might have been your own.”
“Tom signed up for the merchant marines. He left a month ago for training. It’ll be France next.”
I leaned back from the stink of his breath.
“What do you plan to do, Hess? Scout out my barn? Run your water through that?” His torch had dropped to the hay-covered floor. He tore off his gloves. Underneath, his fingers were the dark leather of summer, as were mine.
“I have been meaning to talk to you. We could help shore up your side as I did my own.”
“My southeast acres are mud.”
“They would not have been if you worked with us.”
His eyes flashed. I raised my palm.
“I know you are short on help, especially now with Tom gone.”
“You’ve got two,” he said.
I nodded.
“And not a one of them is going over there, is he?”
“Ray registered last week, just like the others. We are hoping he will hear nothing until after harvest. And Lee is too young.”
“That means no.”
“No. Not yet.”
“What I thought.” He lifted one leg after another from the bale, lowered the mask over his face. He fired the tank, his mask alight. His eyes behind it thought nothing of me and my two sons.
“Joseph!” A voice from outside. With his torch going, Elliot was deaf to it. I caught his arm. The voice called out a second time.
Elliot bounded after it and I followed. Mary stood on their front porch waving an envelope. On seeing me, she tightened her shawl and rushed over to meet us. “Julius!” she said. “We’ve got a letter from our Tom.” She seized my hand. The woman in the last month must have aged tenfold. Her hair had fallen loose, her eyes shadowed. She offered only a flicker of a smile. “Are your boys gone as well?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Lee is not of age.”
“Of age?” The woman released my hand. She eyed her husband and touched her fingers to her cheek. “Why, I don’t even know what that means.”
Elliot led her back to their porch. The letter she crushed in her grip. The rain swelled. She fell into his side as they hurried, covering the envelope with her shawl. I blinked against the rush. The rain soaked the roof of their house, the timbers dark. Elliot never looked back and Mary, she had not invited me in, no matter the weather. Now they shut the door between us.
I stumbled home. Far off, the reaper stood motionless in the field. No sign of Ray or Lee with it. The horses stirred, strapped to the machine. I hurried to unleash them. The younger and smaller of the two appeared skittish, the river at her side gaining. As I led the horses to the barn, the young one strayed, brushing the flank of the male as often as she could. In their stables, I settled them both.
Outside, I gazed at the house. No one was in the yard, not even at the windows. The rain had stopped, the clouds broken. A glare of sun struck the glass. Smoke rose from the back, though it was far too early for supper. I quickened my steps. In the kitchen, a confusion of voices. I tore open the door. Inside, my children crowded the table. Margrit hurried to the stove where a large pot of water boiled, her apron thick with flour and more.
“Father!”
Margrit looked up. “Oh God, Julius.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Ray,” cried Agnes. “Lee carried him in.”
My wife stood at the end of the table and rent a rag in half. Ray lay with his arm stretched over his head and bleeding. The flour from his mother’s baking clung to him. He kicked like a dog. The girls tried their best to hold his legs. Margrit grabbed hold of his arm and bound the rag tight, tearing off the end with her teeth. Lee hovered near the door. The front of his overalls were a bloody brown, his lips moving. “Thought Telly was all right. I thought she was.” Nan rushed from the stove with another rag and set to cleaning Ray’s arm. He swore at her. The rag turned dark.
“Julius,” Margrit called. “Ready the wagon. We have to take him to the doctor.”
“But what.?”
“Julius, now!”
Ray was lucky, the doctor said. A crushed hand, lost to the ropes of the reaper’s bullwheel, when he could have lost the arm. Yet how opposite of lucky such a hand was for a farmer or his son. Lee finished most of the work for the two of them. His older brother might milk a cow and carry wood. He could only just grip an ax. Yet the finer things were beyond him, the turning of a bolt or the tying of wire. The reaper stood in the barn under its heavy canvas. The ropes were twisted and stained, and Lee more than skittish with the horses. Ray rarely spoke to Lee now. I suppose this was a blessing. What spiteful things the boy might have said.
Throughout that fall and winter, I spent my evenings in the dugout. The door had long ago fallen into a heap at the threshold. The place smelled of earth and fur, some animal taken to sleeping in the corner. Still the roof held, the walls sturdy as stone. I braced myself on the wooden cot. It was nearly rotted through, only two planks to hold my weight. A discomfort, this. Yet I felt deserving of discomfort. My boys labored until dusk. Ray was more the stubborn in what work he could manage, and I was but an old man with little strength left to me and less the reason. Had the accident been a penance? For what crime? Nothing but a sliver of land. A muddy bank I wished to save from a relentless current. The whole of the harvest had been long, punishingly slow. Because of it, we had not the energy to channel the remains of the river. Nor the hands to have it finished. Even our Nan seemed less than willing to carry her share. Her mind was on letters, the war.
“They took her Carl,” explained Margrit.
“But the girl shouldn’t every minute be going on. ”
Margrit hushed me with a finger. “Don’t, Julius. Don’t you say it.”
The Elliot boy was sent home. We knew little what to make of it. Even in the coldest months, he stewed in the corral with their horses. I raised a hand to him across the fields. He stood with his face pressed against the fence.
Early into April, the snow lay frozen against the river-banks. We could not shake it. Our yard was polished with snow and ice, hard for walking. A new fall of snow drifted inside the dugout door. Only in sitting there as the sun set could I imagine that Margrit and I had just arrived. The land remained untouched, full of promise. Beyond the door, my wife arranged her ropes against the snakes.
A break in the gravel. “Who is it?”
“It’s Lee, pap.”
The boy crossed the threshold and sat on the far end of the cot. His breath showed white in the cold. He gripped his hands though he wore gloves. Together, we looked out over the fields. Soon enough, there would only be snow and whatever moonlight it threw back, if there was a moon at all. The howl of the dogs sounded near and far at once.
“Mrs. Elliot is sick,” said Lee at last.
“Sick?”
“She has a bad fever. The doctor says he’s seen fifteen cases like it.”
“Mary is a good woman. I am sure she will pull out.”
“I went to see Tom.”
“He injured?”
“Not to look at him.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“I think it injured him some, one way or another. He’s not telling.”
“I never thought much of the boy.”