WHAT DISTANT DEEPS OR SKIES
From The Aurelian
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Their lunch coolers and water jugs clacked with ice as they shuffled in slow procession along the aisle, Cal with the rest, to the front of the bus. He hopped to the gravel, raised his arms, and yawned. The air was cool and damp--five-thirty on a July morning, with a haze spreading low over the fields, this palpable sheet of fog like a gray tarpaulin. The red sun would by seven burn the mist away and leave to smolder those twin tyrants of midwestern summer, namely the heat and the humidity, which one’s getting you the worst, his mother always asked. And the corn was everywhere, without end over all of Illinois, which, did Cal’s imagination consider such things, likely supposed over all the world, leafy, green, misty like this in the morning.
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One by one they came off the bus and collapsed dramatically on the shoulder or they sprawled in the ditch full of weeds and orange flowers, unable or unwilling to shake the sleep which had come so easily in the hum of bus tires. They stretched and rolled over in the grass and gravel, groaned and twisted their tired young bodies in the dawn. Like accident victims dead or dying along the side of the road. Cal hurried past them to a solitary oak which rose like a monument, the only tree for miles. Kenny grinned as he went by.
THE SORGHUM molasses came in small metal drums which looked like paint cans and had to be opened like paint cans, and she kept the screwdriver in the kitchen drawer with her dull, mismatched silverware. Pancakes, hotcakes, flapjacks, the word always made him laugh, and it was their game to see how many he could eat, the smell of frying batter filling the farmhouse as he tore in circles about the rooms like a tiger, yelping, the book in his hands, rambunctious into late childhood. Later, as he grew quiet in the shadow of adolescence, the drawer opening or the sound of the screwdriver at the rim made his eyebrows jump and he would smile. He would lick the plate clean (a ritual likely neither encouraged nor discouraged) and implore her to read the story again, though by then he must have known it by heart, that surely at thirteen, at fourteen, he knew it by heart and it was only out of habit that he asked. They would sit close on the davenport, mother and child, though he was becoming a young man now, sixteen, seventeen, his limbs thickening into a man’s limbs, but he still followed the faded pages as they turned on her lap. It was only out of habit, she thought, for he had stopped paying attention before the end, distracted by a dog’s bark outside, or perhaps by the laughter from the television in the other room where his father sat.
She managed to teach him to make them, and he had learned because he wanted to. She explained that to the counselor.
“If you can get him interested he can do it,” she said. “He can learn. Can’t you, Cal?”
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Cal nodded.
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“He learned to make pancakes,” she said.
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She had watched him closely at first. She drew a bold line on the measuring cup in blue marker and separated the tablespoon from the others on the ring so he knew which was for the oil. Her husband shook his head at the thought of Cal using the gas stove, but she reminded Cal often and emphatically of the danger and not once was there a mishap. He could make them by himself and he did and he was proud and he carefully poured the thick sorghum from the drum as she had so as not to flood his plate.
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“He can learn,” she assured them at the co-op. “You just have to get him interested.”
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So it was he fried pancakes for them both in the mornings while his father was in the field or in the barn or in town and again those evenings the man left and she kept to her bed. Those evenings: he would bring the plate up the stairs and set it on her nightstand, some simple gift by which to break a silence which lay too much beyond his comprehension, and later would tromp up the stairs and retrieve it, finding it, invariably, untouched, the knife and fork stuck fast in congealed molasses, she unmoved, too (returned to him, she made no mention of these evenings, in no way acknowledged his presence the prior nights up there in her dark room, neither thanked him nor reassured him, which may have brought further distress had she not been so affable, so ready to sit and have breakfast and ask him pleasant questions about his upcoming day that he would remain largely unable to answer). But those nights he would wash her plate, and retire to the living room to sit alone in the center of the davenport, tapping his boots upon the linoleum which covered the planks, turning the pages. His finger circled the tigers’ gaping mouths, traced lines beneath the words as hers did, but more hastily, unassisted, and he would slap the pages over until he made it to the end, the jungle pictures flashing randomly, the story locked safe in some corner in him until the truck’s headlights flashed across the living room window and he quickly made off for bed.
KENNY PICKED Cal up in the mornings. Cal’s mother always gave him gas money. Today Cal was slow coming to the door, and Kenny honked a second time from the gravel drive. Cal emerged from the doorway and stood looking out at the car. He went back inside and closed the door. Kenny sounded the horn a third time, and Cal came out with his water jug.
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“C’mon, Callie. We’ll miss the bus.”
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Cal dropped into the passenger side and shut the door so softly Kenny had him do it again. They backed out onto the blacktop. Kenny spit tobacco into an empty soda can and wedged the can between his bucket seat and the handbrake. “Eat your pancakes today?”
Cal nodded.
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“Eat em a little faster tomorrow. We still got to pick up Theo. Bus leaves the courthouse at one, two, three, four, five, Callie.” He showed him five fingers. “But don’t worry about it, buddy,” he said. “We’ll make it in time.”
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“We will make it okay,” Cal said.
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“No problemo, muchacho.” They drove in silence. “You got any money for me today?”
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Cal dug thirty-six cents from his pocket and held it out to Kenny. Kenny shook his head but threw it in the ashtray. When they collected Theo, Cal got in the backseat. Theo turned on the radio, and they headed for the courthouse, where the buses were.
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“Did you bring them magazines?” Kenny asked.
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Theo pulled them from his duffel. He handed one back to Cal.
FR. GOECKNER had tried to ease their burden with the basket, and she was grateful. Goeckner was a round man: his head was an oval of soft curves, and his thick neck spilled into sloping shoulders from which draped his vestments. It was his mouth which captivated Cal, a round mouth making an O and snapping shut, and the singing that came from it made Cal want to sing, and sometimes he would, starting with a perfectly rounded mouth like Fr. Goeckner’s, and lowly he would begin moaning along with the priest in round ohs and ahs, even raising his arms like the priest’s so that she would have to grab his near hand and lower it to her side, hushing him gently.
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She began taking him to morning mass when he stopped attending school.
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“We just don’t have the resources,” the principal explained. “Perhaps the co-op.”
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At the co-op he learned to mend patio furniture, weaving nylon bands around aluminum skeletons, and there he learned to lace his boots, and there they volunteered him to move furniture into Sr. Anne’s shelter on Clark Street. After a few months of this, his father insisted he start working back home around the farm, but the man’s patience was tried within a matter of weeks, so he surrendered him again to the co-op. It was not apparent that Cal preferred one place to the other, and the woman would not argue with her husband’s decisions.
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However varied his days, she gave his mornings regularity: six a.m., wake, dress, and flapjacks; eight a.m., morning mass with Fr. Goeckner. Cal had become so accustomed to the routine that he would wake on his own, dress, and be started on the batter by the time she made it into the kitchen, laudable for any boy his age, she felt. She’d watch him busy himself about the counter, his very deliberate moves, everything in the sequence she had shown him, the bowls and plates arranged exactly the same as that first day, and she watched out her kitchen window to the fields where her husband idled in the morning hours, walking the fences before going for coffee in town or for a talk at the bank. Or maybe he would be driving his truck away from them again, toward the flat line of the Illinois horizon. Gone sometimes from dawn to dusk–sometimes longer–he no longer burdened her with the excuses.
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For all these things she prayed at Fr. Goeckner’s morning mass, mostly prayed for Cal beside her though, continuing her private petition while the congregation murmured litany and her son raised his arms like the pastor, his cheeks taut and his lips protruding, pursed into a tight circle. She prayed for him and she prayed for her husband, and she thought that in some small way her prayers were answered when the co-op called and asked if it was okay for Cal to join the crews for four or five weeks, to go out to the fields, to go out to the fields with young people his age and detassel corn.
LATE JULY and they wore long-sleeved shirts and jeans, lace-up boots and gimmie caps. “’Cause it’s what the Seed Man gimmie,” Kenny explained, creasing his bill into an A frame. His said Bo-Jac. He flipped Cal’s red co-op cap down over his eyes. “Get the Seed Man to give you a seed cap, Callie. Just ask him.” He turned around in his seat and laughed with Theo. “He don’t get it. He don’t know what’s goin on. You aint used to the big bus yet, are you?”
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Kerry Ann pulled Cal’s cap out of his eyes. “Shut up Kenny. Cal’ll pound you to squish. Right, Callie?”
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Cal found this funny. He bopped Kenny’s shoulders with his fists. Someone near the front of the bus hollered for them to shut the hell up.
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“I know it,” Kenny grinned. “Ow. I know he will.” He sank down in his seat, and the bus hummed on in the morning darkness. Most everyone was asleep.
“ALRIGHT, Cal. Now you try. Raise it up.” His father put his hand beneath the barrel and helped Cal raise it and keep it steady. Cal’s face twisted as he looked through the sight. “Relax a little bit,” the man said.
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“I’m relax.”
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“Relax.” His father slowly took his hand away from beneath the barrel. “Hold her steady and squeeze the trigger.”
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Cal blinked and the gun bobbed a bit. He realigned it. He held his breath to keep it steady.
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“Squeeze the trigger now.”
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The report cracked across the field and came back to them from the grove. The rusted gas can fell from the fencepost and into the tiger lilies with a clank. Cal lowered the gun.
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“There you go. First shot.” His father smiled and reached for the gun. “First shot, you got her. Not many boys could say that.” They walked over to the weeds, and his father jerked the can up to inspect it. “See that?” He spun the can before Cal’s eyes and pointed to the new holes, making sure Cal recognized which were his. The man set the can back on the fencepost. “Want to try it again?”
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Cal took the gun back.
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“Beats fixing chairs, don’t it?”
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Cal laughed. “Yeah. I like it better.”
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“I bet. Alright.” They took ten paces. “Alright. Keep it steady.”
THE MEXICAN KIDS came quietly off the bus from Chicago. They stood in a group apart from the rest like they always did. None of them had boots. They wore tennis shoes or sandals, and this made Kenny shake his head. “Why don’t they never wear boots?” he asked Kerry Ann, and she shrugged. “They’re gonna wish they wore boots. Even Cal’s got sense enough to wear boots.”
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The two buses faced each other on the county blacktop, and the drivers got out to talk over styrofoam cups of coffee. The Seed Man called Kenny and the other crew leaders over by the oak tree. In one hand he held a necktie, and his shoes shined. He pointed to the rows of corn on one side of the road, and the crew leaders looked. Then he pointed to the rows on the other, and they looked again. The Seed Man gripped Kenny’s shoulder before he got into his car and drove away. The bus drivers got back into their buses and drove away, too.
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Kenny snapped one of the tiger lilies from the ground and chewed on it as he sauntered over to his crew. “We get four Mexicans today,” he said. Theo nodded. “We got from here,” his hand swept down the road, “to there.” He gestured with both hands at the cornfield. “And everything in between. Skip the bull rows, right?”
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They struggled to raise themselves out of the ditch. Kenny looked at his ten. He was crew leader because he was one of the oldest at sixteen and he’d been detasseling since he was twelve. Kerry Ann had been doing it since she was twelve, too, but she was a girl, and Kenny was pretty sure the Seed Man didn’t let girls be crew leaders. “Theo,” Kenny called, “you help Cal get started. Point him in the right direction. I’ll go grab our Mexicans.”
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The day grew to ninety-six degrees and there was no wind within the rows and each of them walked alone between two long lines of corn, nearly invisible to the rest, plucking tassels on either side with both hands and dropping them to the dirt. Kenny didn’t mind having Cal on his crew because Cal was like the Mexicans, he was fast and he never tired. The others, the ones from town, complained a lot and were so slow getting done that he and Theo and Cal were often helping with their rows at the end of the day before the bus came. The Seed Man told Kenny he could fire the slow ones. Kenny sometimes thought about firing Kerry Ann, not because she was slow. “Just because,” he told Theo.
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The corn was at head level now. At its zenith, it would tower near seven feet. Sunup to sundown for four weeks they ripped tassels from the tops of cornstalks and tried to recall (or simply forgot) what the Seed Man had told them about cross-pollination and why their jobs were important. The bus moved them to a different field almost every day. It dropped them off in the morning and picked them up just nigh of sundown, and it was the crew leaders who took charge in the absence of adults, the crew leaders and the heat and the humidity did.
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Lunchbreak found them around a pond in the heart of the cornfield. Various crews were emerging from the corn to sit about the stagnant water, mosquitoes and dragonflies flitting at the pond’s surface, and the surrounding ground damp yet from a storm recently passed.
Theo hung his shirt on stiff cornstalk. “Cal, didn’t you bring you a lunch today?”
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Cal had his water jug but no lunch cooler. He shook his head no.
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Kenny appeared from the field, zipping his fly. “How’s it going, assbrains?”
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“Hot today,” said Kerry Ann. She opened a lunch pail and tossed an apple to Cal.
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“Yup,” said Kenny. “Never fails.” He circled the pond looking to make lunch trades with the other detasselers. When he came to the Mexicans, he asked them if they were okay, if they had enough water. They listened to him and said they were fine. Todos estamos bien. He asked one of them about the truck on his t-shirt, but the kid just shrugged. Kenny sat down on a rotted log between Theo and Cal and started unwrapping his sandwiches. “Get out them magazines, Theo. Let’s see em.”
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Theo put a dip in and handed a magazine to Kenny. Kenny folded it over so he could look at it in one hand while he ate with the other. “My word.” He grinned and shook his head. “You know what that is, Callie?”
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Cal nodded at the photograph and laughed.
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“Yeah, Callie knows what it is. Look at him, Theo. Look. He knows.”
THE MAN sat alone in the darkness of the kitchen, illuminated only by the barn’s humming vaporlight, which shone pale as a moonbeam through the window and through the bottle on the table. He could hear the rattle and clack of the four o’clock freight rolling two miles off, and he knew that in a matter of minutes he’d hear the boy moving upstairs.
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Yesterday, she had sat still on the bed when he threw open the door to the room that was no longer his, and the way she had looked at him was enough that she never needed to say a word. She showed him the same plaintive face she had shown him since the year the boy was born, her eyes darkening like the sea, his failures counted like waves. She never yelled. She was not a yelling kind of woman. In those eyes was a devastating look which bound him more than any priest’s words or any bank man’s note, and he despised her for speaking with them, and he hated himself for that, for letting her get to him. He had come to her with the intention of telling her he would not ever be coming back, how would she like that, and without words her eyes told him what kind of husband he was and what kind of father. She sat on the bed and stared implacably out the window at the low sun falling off the edge of the world, staining the entire sea of soybeans purple in its descent and she did not respond to any question or accusation he put to her and as his words hung in the stuffy room he heard them all ringing false and knew that the guilt lay not in her but in himself and his own negligence and poor deceptions.
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He could devise no other way to confront her silence, and he lifted the gun.
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When the boy came home an hour later, he gave him a glass of milk and the styrofoam box, which held the remainder of the truckstop chicken his Montrose woman hadn’t eaten. He leaned against the refrigerator with his arms across his chest and watched the boy eat, noticing the cuts and scrapes the stalks had left on him. When the boy was finished, he sent him straight away to wash for bed.
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“Where is Mom?” the boy asked.
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“She aint feelin well,” the man told him. “You go on, go to bed. And keep quiet up there.” The man got the bottle of bourbon he had bought for Christmas, sat down at the table, filled the boy’s empty milk glass, and listened to a repeat of the market reports drone from the radio atop the refrigerator, the reports at some point eliding into a pre-recorded music show he barely heard until the boots thumped down the dark stairs for breakfast and Cal instinctively flipped on the light.
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The man watched his son with tired eyes and hated for a moment that his presence here should startle the boy so. Cal lurched into motion, began pulling the eggs and the milk from the refrigerator. The man watched his son wordlessly line up the mixing bowl and two plates on the counter. He watched him crack eggshells. The boy filled the measuring cup to the blue line with pancake mix. He measured out a teaspoon of oil. He ignited the burner on the gas stove and the blue flames jumped to life.
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“Cal.”
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“Where is Mom?”
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“She aint feelin well yet. Come here, Cal.”
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The boy started around the counter, stopped, and returned to the stove to extinguish the burner. He looked briefly up the stairwell.
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“Why?”
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“What do you say we go shoot the gun today? Look at me. You want to shoot the gun today?” The man looked into the boy’s face and produced the rifle from beneath the table. With one hand, he gently laid it on top. “Let’s go shoot the gun today. Just you and me.”
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The boy started back for the stove.
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“Cal.”
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He stopped.
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“Come here.”
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He returned, murmuring, bumping into the table.
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“Tuck your pockets in,” the man said. Still seated, he handed him the gun. “Take a few steps back.” He gestured with his hand. “Go on. You gotta practice keeping it steady, is what… Look through the sight, Cal.”
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Cal raised the gun and squinted against the steel. He waved the barrel from the clock on the wall slowly over to the radio, then at the television through the doorway.
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The man swallowed. “If I’m going to take you deer hunting,” he said. He heard his boy breathing, almost panting as he beaded the telephone, the breadbox. He aimed at other things the man could not discern, and, in a moment, the man realized here was a boy who was holding a gun as he had seen other people hold guns, who was not really aiming at anything at all. “Cal, look at me.” He drew a shaky finger to himself. “You line it up right here now.” Slowly he tapped at a button on his shirt. “Right here,” he said. “Okay.” His eyes were half-closed and wet. “Keep it steady.”
TROTTING THROUGH the corn, flinging tassels to the ground, he could see the end of his row, and he moved even faster, breathing heavily. His shirt was wet and salty, and he itched inside his jeans. When he exited the corn into the clearing near the road he let himself go slack and hunched over there with his hands on his knees. Far-off conversations burbled in the field, laughter, the music from a transistor radio. He held his breath, and he made a mouth like an O and began to hum. He was hungry, and his eyes stung with sweat.
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There was movement from a nearby patch of the orange flowers, and, mind interrupted by deer and tigers, he crept toward the tall weeds, brushing a fly from his cheek, slowing himself, murmuring still through dry lips. A spot of flesh flashed among the foxtails, soft and curved, bent in the weeds. He shoved a hand to his mouth to keep himself from giggling, as if to stop the giggles from falling out, and when she turned and discovered him, he sprang hollering through the underbrush, laughing. He was upon her in the sticky weeds which scraped her thighs and he brought her to the ground with more laughter as she pounded shoulder and flank with her fists. She could smell him and she could feel how heavy he was. She cried out once more before she heard the shouts of them coming, their bodies snapping and swishing through the corn.
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They ripped Cal from her and threw him down.
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Kenny turned his head as Kerry Ann pulled at her jeans. He looked back at the crowd forming along the edge of the field, the Mexicans, too, all standing together in silence. Theo and another kid stood next to Cal and kept pushing him back to the ground every time he tried to stand. Cal began to whimper. He rolled over onto his belly and squirmed in the dirt. It clung to his wet chin and about his mouth.
When he tried to push himself off the ground a boot pressed him squarely in the back.
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Kerry Ann stuffed her hair into her cap and pulled it low on her brow. Her face was red. She set off in the opposite direction. “He’s got a screwdriver,” she said.
"Screwdriver? Did he jab you with it?"
"No." She turned sideways and with a step disappeared into the husks.
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Cal squeezed his eyes shut as he convulsed beneath Theo’s foot. They rolled him over and pulled him to his feet. Kenny paced off to the side, fitfully shucking a green ear. Beneath the husk was a slimy white film. He swore and threw the cob hard at Cal and it bounced off Cal’s chest and landed at his feet. Everyone else was still. The tiger lilies bobbed on a hot breeze, which bore, briefly, the effluvium of a nearby hog farm, and the grasshoppers fizzed like bottle rockets through the buttery sound of Spanish, and Cal fell from their grip, wracked with sobbing. He stretched a dirty hand for the tool Theo kicked away.