There are three statues now. William planted a scrap of Misty’s shirt and it grew almost immediately, bronze and tangled, something that might be a heart or a pair of lungs, something internal, something that would be slick with blood if it were anywhere else but here, in the field.
“The green one,” he says, and she says, “I don’t see it,” even though she isn’t even looking at the statue, but at the curve of her own eye in the mirror.
Days pass and William and Misty play together like they always have, at the creek and in the woods. They find a thicket of blackberry bushes and dig out a hole beneath it. It is cooler under the thicket, dim with golden light crisscrossing their faces, and they can pluck berries from over their heads any time they want. They can eat until they’re full, and they do, until the berries are gone and the thicket grows hot under the sun.
Some days it’s like nothing has changed. Like there are no statues growing in the field and no crowd of people growing around the statues. Like there is no barn, either. Like William knows nothing about the color of Misty’s skin under her shirt and how it’s different from the rest of her, different from anything he’s ever seen before.
The man who took William’s mother dancing, the miner, is gone. This man is a mechanic. Blond, not brown. He wears a heavy gold cross around his neck.
William’s mother says, “He’s right in the next room.”
“Come on, he’s asleep,” the man says.
“You don’t know that. He could be listening.”
“Then we’ll be quiet.”
“I don’t—”
“Shhh. You’ll wake him.”
The man in the next room, the mechanic, laughs. And maybe if he didn’t laugh, things would have been different, but he did, and they aren’t, and William lays in bed and listens to the sound they make, this man and his mother, and he tries to imagine what it looks like from their side of the wall.
William goes to the barn and waits for her. When she doesn’t come, William goes to the yard and waits for her there. Misty said she would meet him. She promised. William waits until his hands get cold, and then he walks home, feeling tired and hungry and something else. Something like anger, only smaller and meaner. Something with neat rows of teeth that fit behind his own so he feels both like himself and not himself.
William walks around the trailer, not wanting to go back inside, not wanting to sleep. Earl is sitting by the field in a lawn chair with a cooler and a bottle of beer.
William says, “Hello.”
“’lo.” Earl looks at him with bloodshot eyes. “What you doing up?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither. Have a seat.”
William sits on the grass next to Earl. They look at the field, where many things have grown, so many things that there is little room left for much else. Copper things and bronze things and hulking stone things and shallow golden things that bend and dip into other things, so you can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
“You ever drank?” Earl asks.
“No.”
“Good,” Earl says. “Don’t never start.” He takes a long drink and William watches the skin of Earl’s neck moving like there is a hand inside of his throat that reaches up to his mouth and pulls the alcohol down, its fingers unwinding against the back of Earl’s tongue, the tips of its bitten nails reaching out to catch the scant inch of light that appears as Earl’s mouth opens and then closes again.
“Have you seen Misty today?” William asks.
“I ain’t seen a soul since that lady from the news this morning. It was the damnedest thing. She said some people up at the college wanted to do some soil tests. Water tests, too. They want to know what’s going on,” he says, and his voice is hoarse. “I told them to come on down, they can do whatever they want so long as they pay me for it and they don’t scratch up any of the growings.” He finishes his beer, reaches in the cooler for another. He pops the top on the arm of his chair. He says, “You want to know a secret?”
William shakes his head.
Earl says, “I didn’t plant nothing. Not a damn thing.”
“I know,” William says.
“People keeps asking me how I got it to grow. They think I’m welding them myself, even if it don’t make any damn sense.”
“Misty thinks they’re ugly.”
“They don’t want to believe nothing I say, but it ain’t me. It never was me.”
“I thought they was pretty at first, but now I ain’t so sure. You think she thinks I’m ugly?” William asks.
The lamps Earl installed over the field start to flicker and buzz. The statues glow under the light, letting it glint off their hard edges and soft edges like sun on water. Even as they watch, something begins to grow. It starts near the back of the field. It twists up slowly, three strong bars of bronze that grow straight and narrow, until some meet in the middle while others keep growing and curving. It’s hard to tell what the statue will be before it’s finished, but William still guesses: a blue gill, a seashell, a broken back.
“Maybe it’s God,” Earl says.
“Maybe.”
Earl says, “Don’t you never start drinking,” as he lets another empty bottle fall.
William doesn’t move, and Earl doesn’t say another word. The bronze braids itself into a bridge with heavy slats and a thick rail, where a hand might hold as its body walked across, staring down at the spaces between the boards, at the earth so far below. The bridge stops halfway, at the very peak of its curve, where it should fall to the other side of the field, but it doesn’t. It doesn’t.
William takes Misty back to the barn. It’s midmorning and her mother is grocery shopping and Penny is with a friend and there is only Misty left, sitting on the front porch with her legs kicking over the edge. This time, William tells her to undo his pants. When she won’t, he undoes them himself, and he takes her hand and lays it against him. He does the same thing to her. It is just like the first time, except now he is being touched. Now she is the one who starts. Now they are both the same.
William’s mother makes dinner. She puts on a white blouse and dark jeans. She gives him a radio. A present, she says, from Paul.
“Who’s Paul?”
“You’ll get to meet him soon. He’s real nice. It’s impossible not to like him. He’s just got that way about him, you know?”
She puts more food on William’s plate than he has seen in weeks, maybe in his whole life. Green beans and corn-on-the-cob, mashed potatoes, roast beef, and rolls, the kind that you pull apart from the can and fold into little shapes. William eats three before he touches the rest of his plate.
“This is good, Mama. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, baby.”
She smooths his hair across his forehead and tries to tuck it behind his ear, the way she likes to see it, but it isn’t quite long enough. She barely eats, taking from William’s plate as she washes dishes and wipes counters and checks the phone.
“I feel like I ain’t hardly got to see you with all the extra shifts I’ve been covering,” she says. “It’ll pay off come Christmas though, just you wait.” She sits on the edge of her seat and smiles. She picks at a thread on the plastic tablecloth and the more she pulls on the thread, the more the plastic comes apart. “Then you’re always outside playing with those girls every time I come home. I checked on you in bed the other night and you weren’t there.” She keeps pulling and pulling at the string. “Where was you?”
“I don’t know. Sleepwalking, maybe.”
“That don’t sound like you.”
“Do we have any more beans?”
“I just worry, is all. You’re ten now. It might not seem too old to you, but you’re getting to be of age and I don’t want you making decisions like I did. I don’t want you to end up in a place like me, grown before you’re ready.”