by Joe Hill
“Did you want to pay me in ciggies?” the old woman asks. “It’ll spare me a trip to the Citgo after you buy my eggs.”
“I know most of the people round here. Where are you from?”
“The federal guv’mint!” says the old lady. “I am an undercover Eff Bee Eye agent, and I’m wearing a wire right this instant!” She cackles again. “I’m the oldest Eff Bee Eye agent in history. J. Edgar Hoover gave me my badge his own self, and the dress I’m wearing, too! We had the same taste in clothes.”
Beth inquires how much for a dozen quail eggs, and the old woman tells her four-eighty. Beth asks what tobacco honey tastes like, and the old woman says just like honey.
“Well, what’s special about it, then?”
“Eat enough and it will give you cancer,” says the old doll, keeping herself entertained.
Beth opens her hemp purse and produces a crumpled ten. “I need change.”
“Are you sure? Didn’t we just agree U.S. money is only worth what we imagine? How about I give you a dime and you imagine it was a dollar?”
“I don’t have that big an imagination,” Beth says.
“Now, that is unfortunate. The true survivalist—someone who has truly made survival their primary preoccupation—will find an imagination more handy than bullets or beans. The lack of one often leads to avoidable misfortune.”
“Do I have to pay extra for all the wisdom?” Beth asks. “Or is that on the house?”
The old woman lifts a metal cashbox from under the table and counts out Beth’s money. She offers it over with her great hungry grin. “Good conversation is even better than quail eggs, and sitting out here by myself so long, I worked up an appetite. I hope you didn’t find me too tiresome.”
While the ladies spar, Jack moves along the table of produce. He admires a few boxes of button-size wild strawberries and a carton of oily green peppers. He picks through a wooden box full of tiny envelopes of seeds. He pauses at one for “Candy Corn” with a doodle on it that shows an ear of corn with orange and yellow kernels.
“You can’t plant candy corn,” Jack says to himself.
The old lady replies as if he’d been talking to her. “You can plant anything. You can plant an idea. I used to live near a power plant—who knew you could grow one of them? Killers sometimes plant evidence to throw the police off the track.”
Jack shoots her a startled look, his heart hurrying in his chest, but if she meant anything by that last statement, there’s no telling it from her daffy smile and bright eyes. He picks through the seeds some more. Another envelope is marked “Rocket.” The doodle shows the tip of a missile sticking out of the ground.
“You can’t plant that either.”
“There’s rockets planted all over this country. Enough to kill everyone on the planet ten times over.”
The next envelope is marked “Mums.” The doodle shows a sunny golden flower with a smiling face peeking out of it. The flower wears a dress and holds a child’s hand.
“Twenty-five cents,” the old lady says. “Go on and grow yourself a mum. Grow yourself lots of ’em. All the mums you could ever need.”
“Come on, bud,” Beth says, carrying her purchase away in a brown paper bag, hugging it to her lovely bosom.
The old lady picks the envelope of mums out of the box and holds it out to him. “Prettiest mums you ever did see. Pretty and hardy. Give ’em something to drink, a little sun, a little love, and they’ll shoot up and love you right back, Jack.”
Jack’s shoulders jump in a nervous jerk of surprise. It alarms him to think she knows his name. But no—wait. She doesn’t (can’t) know it . . . she just liked the rhyme, “back” and “jack.” Any boy can be a bud or a mac or a jack.
He fishes a quarter out of the pocket of his bib overalls. She snatches it like a bird snapping a seed out of the dirt. She gazes avidly down at it, then turns it so he can see the raised image of President Washington.
“Why, it’s my portrait!” she caws. “A perfect likeness!”
“Jack!” Beth shouts. She’s at the truck, one foot on the running board. “Come on!”
Jack takes his envelope of mums and trots after her.
“Everything good must be paid for,” the old lady says. “And everything wicked, too . . . everything wicked, especially. Reaping time always comes round. The corn falls to the scythe, sure as water runs downhill! Ha-ha!” She claps her hands as if she has said something quite clever.
“Psycho bitch,” Beth says when the truck is moving again. “I ought to be glad she didn’t bite one of us.” She sees Jack turning the manila envelope over in one hand. “What’d you get? You buy yourself some flowers?”
“Dad said I could plant something for Bloom,” Jack says. He has taken to calling his mother by her first name, same as the others.
“Aw,” Beth says. “You are a darling. Can I help?”
He nods and is grateful when she puts an arm around him. She holds him all the way to Cordia Agricultural, where Jack climbs out to help Connor pile forty-pound sacks of ammonium nitrate into the flatbed. After Connor clangs the tailgate shut, Jack and Beth buy tarts from the quarter candy machine.
“Mm,” Beth says, crunching a tart in her small white teeth. “Sour. Love these. They taste like radioactivity. Like they ought to glow. Does that make sense?”
Jack nods, unable to reply. He’s sucking on a whole radioactive mouthful of sour tarts. The way the sugar makes his heart race, it’s easy to imagine that his bloodstream is nothing but sweet poison now.
5.
The greenhouse has a curved roof like an airplane hangar’s, only the walls are made of heavy-duty plastic. The world beyond seems blurred, a child’s watercolor of field and sky. Beth leads Jack to one of the plywood tables and finds a few cheap plastic flowerpots.
“Too bad we didn’t get these started a couple weeks ago,” Beth says. “We had frost on the ground yesterday morning, but I think Mr. Winter is gone for good now. The weather is turning, and mums need to get a good running start on spring. We’ll begin them inside, just to be safe, and in six weeks they’ll be big enough we can move them outside.”
Beth has an associate’s degree in agricultural science from the U of Iowa and knows what she’s talking about. She has seen to Jack’s education in biology and natural sciences for years. Bloom handled English and history and civics. His father is supposed to be doing that now, but they meet only a couple of times a week, when Hank isn’t busy with the farm or off visiting friends in the Patriot movement. Jack has to say he preferred Bloom’s reading list. They had Harry Potter and the Narnia books. For his father Jack is making his way through Behold a Pale Horse, which is less like a book, more like a collage of manifestos, rants, and confessions.
Even Connor gives Jack lessons. Connor taught Jack how to drive the F-150 through an obstacle course, how to assemble an AR-15 blindfolded, and how to make a pipe bomb. Connor’s lessons are obviously the best, but they are infrequent, as Jack’s cousin is often out of state doing “recon.” Reconnaissance of what, Jack asked Connor once. Connor got him in a headlock and said, “What you don’t know, you can’t tell, even during enhanced interrogation, like this.” And he twisted Jack’s nipple until Jack squealed.
Beth hefts a white plastic bag of soil, and Jack leaps to help her with it. They fill pots with earth as damp and black as crumbs of chocolate cake. Jack peels open the manila packet and sticks a finger in to dig out the seeds.
“Ouch!” he cries, and yanks his thumb back. For an instant he had an impression of being bitten by a small animal—a mouse—and bright red blood gleams around the edges of his thumbnail.
He shakes the seeds out into his palm, and who knows, maybe they did bite him. With his blood on them, they look like the teeth of a carnivore, stained from their last meal.
“What are you doing, Jack?” Beth says. “You want to water ’em, not bleed all over ’em.”
“‘The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time wi
th the blood of patriots,’” Jack intones ominously, and they both crack up, although Beth casts a shame-faced look around as she laughs. This solemnity is a favorite of Hank McCourt’s, and so naturally it is a giddy delight—and a kind of disloyalty—to make fun of it.
6.
Beth says the mums won’t be ready for the garden until early May, but two weeks after they put them in their pots Jack has a look at them and hurries to find her. Dawn is just pinking the sky, but it’s a rare day Beth isn’t awake by sunup. If she’s got her ears on, she should be able to hear him, even from the cottage at the end of the gravel lane. He crosses the front porch and descends to the dooryard. The big oak in the yard seems heavy with leaves, but when he hollers her name, the leaves erupt into the scarlet morning, a hundred sparrows taking off at once.
“Where’s the fire, bud?” Beth asks, and he turns on his bare heel. She’s already up at the farmhouse, peering at him with drowsy eyes through the bellied-out screen door.
For the tiniest fraction of a moment, he’s surprised to see her there. At this hour he would expect her to be padding around her cottage in her nightdress, helping Connor with his leg and performing her morning ablutions. But then she often serves all three of her men breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen, and perhaps she wanted to get a jump on the biscuits.
He plunges back across the porch, grabs her hand, and tows her toward the greenhouse. He has one look at her and doesn’t dare another. Her hair is mussed up from sleep, and in her fuzzy sweater and acid-washed jeans, she looks so gorgeous it makes him short of breath. He turns his gaze instead to her feet, which are white and clean and bare and dainty.
Her brow furrows when she sees the plants in their pots. The mums already have felty green ears tufting up out of the dirt, big as hands.
“Huh! Well, I wonder if that ol’ be-yotch ripped you off, kiddo.”
“They aren’t mums?”
“They look like ’em. But they haven’t had time to grow so much. Not in ten days. I don’t know if these are mums or salad, but I have dark suspicions. I suspect this stuff is crap. Do you want to keep our great garden experiment going or chuck ’em?”
He narrows one eye at her, as he has seen Connor do when he’s about to crack wise. “Lettuce consider. Do you carrot all what we do?”
She needs a minute to get that one. When she does, she raps his shoulder with one knuckle.
“I guess weed better move them outside then. Get it? Weed? Get it?”
“Mm-hm,” he says. “Did you walk up here in your bare feet? They must be cold.”
“Yeah. You know I’m always in a hurry to get up here and start another day of whipping your scrawny ass into shape. Speaking of. Let’s chuck some food into you, huh? These aren’t the only things shooting up around here.”
His heart is so light and his spirits so high that he’s annoyed with himself for wondering why there was no dirt or grass on her feet if she walked up from the cottage barefoot. It’s like a mouthful of sour milk—there’s nothing to do with a thought like that but spit it out.
7.
They pat the earth down around the plantings and then sit together on their knees in front of Bloom’s grave marker. The air is rich with the mineral scent of fresh-turned loam. Her headstone is rose marble and by some modern alchemy has a photograph printed right on it: a nineteen-year-old Bloom smiles demurely, eyes downcast, flowers in her hair, on her wedding day.
The breeze stirs the green leaves of what might or might not be mums, bunched together below her waist-high stone.
Jack is pleased with the effect and proud of the work they’ve done this morning and is taken off guard when he sees tears dripping off the end of Beth’s upturned nose. He puts an arm around her—a not entirely unselfish act.
Beth wipes her hands across her cheeks and snuffles in a delightfully unfeminine way. “I wish I could have her back. She didn’t just love you. She loved me, too, more than I ever deserved. If I loved her as well as she loved me, she’d still be alive.”
“No,” Jack says. “That isn’t true.”
“It is. I knew what would happen to her if she left us. I should’ve got on my knees in the dirt and begged your father to let her come back home. I knew she couldn’t be out there on her own, not with all the rotten stuff banging around inside her head. And I let her go anyway, and what kind of person does that make me?”
Jack puts both arms around her and squeezes. “Don’t be sad, Beth. You didn’t make her slip in the bath.”
Beth makes a sound somewhere between a sob and a croak and squeezes him back. Her whole lean body, with its wiry muscles shifting under the skin, shudders.
“Besides,” Jack says, “you helped with the flowers. You’re telling her how much she meant to you now, just by planting them with me. Nothing says good-bye better than flowers.”
8.
Jack wakes from restless, overheated dreams and discovers he is sick. There is a great feeling of weight, of heaviness, in his chest. He sits on the edge of the bed, in the dark of his bedroom, taking stock. He coughs, tentatively, and produces a gravelly rattle.
He needs to be watered, he thinks. No—he frowns. He needs water, not to be watered.
He crosses the cold plank floor in bare feet. At the doorway he thumps his breastbone with one fist and clears his throat and coughs again. He coughs brown flecks into one palm. Blood? He turns his hand this way and that in the gloom and decides he’s looking at dirt.
Jack sways down the staircase. He feels pressure building in his chest, another cough getting ready to explode. He hears voices, but they’re muffled, as if his ears are crammed with earth.
At the foot of the steps, he bends over and grips his knees to cough his hardest cough—and something snags halfway up his throat. He tries to suck a breath and can’t, and suddenly he’s suffocating. Something tough and fibrous has caught in his gullet. He opens his mouth and sticks a finger in to force himself to gag and finds wiry threads sticking out of his throat. He grips them between thumb and forefinger and pulls. He makes watery, sick, choking sounds as he hauls out what appears to be a root: brown, hairy, dusty. He pulls and pulls, and it goes on and on, and then suddenly the last of it is out—the stem of a plant with a few greenish pods at one end and a string of his spit hanging off it.
Jack tosses it aside in revulsion, turns, and flies toward the kitchen. He is in a panic to find help and desperate to get the taste of soil out of his mouth, and as is often the way in dreams, he runs through parts of the house that don’t exist. He runs through a room where the floorboards have been removed to show the dirt beneath. Someone has been digging graves here. He runs through a room where Beth reclines naked in a claw-footed tub, soaping one pink leg in the steam. She’s not using a bar of soap but a flower of soap. A geranium, Jack thinks, the idea landing with a bewildering occult force. A geranium! She asks if he wants to get in with her, but he keeps running. He slaps through the swinging kitchen door and rushes to the sink and throws on the tap. The faucet leaps, jerks, doesn’t produce anything—and then begins to bubble rusty-colored water. He stares. The water darkens and deepens in color, becoming viscous. It stinks not of blood but of fresh-turned earth.
“Wash your face,” his mother says gently, and takes him by the hair and shoves his head into it.
Cold water wakes him.
He sways at the sink in the kitchen, catching clean, fresh, icy water in the bowl of his cupped hands and then splashing it into his own face. With each handful of water, he rinses away a little more of the night terrors. When he’s in the middle of one, it feels as true as life—truer, in some ways, more compelling. But they melt as fast as snowflakes against bare skin. He drinks right from the tap, and by the time he stands straight and wipes his mouth, his heart is no longer racing and he feels sleepy and untroubled. He knows he’s been night wandering because he can’t remember coming downstairs, but he recalls almost nothing of his confused fantasies except Beth roasting her naked body pink in a hot bath
. The clock on the oven reports it is just three minutes after 1:00 A.M.
As Jack fills a glass of water—he is still thirsty, his throat feels dusty somehow, and he wonders if he’s been in the backyard eating dirt again—low male voices in the dining room catch his attention: his father and Connor. They have not heard him shuffling around. Jack crosses the dark expanse of the kitchen to the swinging door, which gapes open, held ajar by an antique doorstop, a cast-iron ear of corn. Jack is about to say hello, then shuts his mouth. He remains in the darkness of the kitchen, peering silently at his father and his cousin.
Hank’s laptop is open, and the screen shows an image of the federal building in Oklahoma City, after Timothy McVeigh’s bomb collapsed the whole front of the structure. Jack has heard his father say, more than once, that Oklahoma City was the first move in a long game, but when Jack asks what game and who’s playing, his father only pats him on the head and smiles fondly.
Hank has a hand on his nephew’s shoulders. Connor leans over the table, his back to the kitchen. They’re looking at maps. One is a printout of an urban area. Another is a hand-drawn diagram of a building.
“—is the easiest way to get a pass to enter the garage. Park on level A-1, leave the keys in it, and walk.”
“ATF is the top floor?”
Hank’s right hand makes little circles on Connor’s back. “And there’s an IRS office in the same building, on four. A small one, but still tasty—like the cherry on a sundae.”
Connor thinks it over. Suddenly he laughs and lifts his chin. His face is almost in profile, and his eyes are shining with excitement, and his mouth is open slightly. Jack sees something, a quality of his cousin he has never before observed, but which he supposes was always there: stupidity.
“Can you imagine!” Connor says, and claps his hands—bang! “There’ll be pieces of them falling three states away. It’ll be raining chunks.”
“There’ll be pieces of them knocked into orbit,” Hank agrees.