The Fifteen Wonders of Daniel Green

by Erica Boyce

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Erica Boyce

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Lauren Harms

  Cover images © Diana Nault/Shutterstock, S_Photo/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious and are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60563-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Boyce, Erica, author.

  Title: The fifteen wonders of Daniel Green / Erica Boyce.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033571 | (trade pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3602.O92494 F54 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033571

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Author’s Note

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my parents, who told me I could,

  and for Chris, who told me I should.

  Chapter One

  Daniel

  Most people don’t bother to think about crop circles until one shows up in their neighborhood.

  And even those people assume the formation was built in one night, all perfect and symmetrical, the only mystery being who or what put it there. They don’t know about the weeks of planning, the drafting and redrafting late at night. They don’t know about me.

  In the trunk of my car back at the Shannons’ farm, there are four pressers—wooden boards with a rope strung through the two ends like a swing. I wiggle my hand into my pocket to touch the plans folded up there, stuffed between Claire’s old bracelet and the newspaper clipping from the first project we worked on together: “Stranger than Fiction: Formation Proof of Life on Other Planets?” I pull out the plans and flick them open, glance over them. I nod to myself, once. Perfect.

  I’ve done a lot of these by now, but never one like this. This one is exactly right for my last circle. Steep incline from the field to the road, so the circle can be seen by passersby. Plenty of brush along the edges where I can hide if necessary. Small town, word traveling fast. And once it’s done, I’ll find a place near Claire, maybe go to night school and work in a sunny coffee shop. Fifteen circles in seven years isn’t going to break any records necessarily, but it’s not bad. It’s enough.

  This circle started the same as any other: someone found Lionel’s email, either through word of mouth or in some dark corner of the internet. Lionel, as the leader of our group of circlers, assigned the new project to me, and after exchanging a few emails, I called the client and heard a low voice on the other end asking if I was the real deal. A lot of guys use me to get their faces on local news shows. Twice, I even helped with some very weird revenge schemes. But this one was different. I knew it right from the moment he said, “Well, to tell you the truth, my town is in trouble.”

  Now, every farmer I’d ever met up until then hated to admit to trouble, especially to an outsider. It’s hard enough for them even to ask for a new farmhand. Circlers usually find cover jobs working on a nearby farm to build trust in the town while they scheme over their plans at night, sometimes staying for months post-reveal to avoid suspicion. And every time I show up at a farmer’s door offering sturdy muscles and not much else, I’m met with a lot of sizing up and crossed arms, even though they were the ones who posted the help-wanted ads to begin with.

  So I knew I had to meet this guy who told me right off the bat what he needed from me.

  By the time I drove past the crunchy farmers markets in southern Vermont and into this stretch of dead fields and collapsed barn roofs, my legs were rubbery from pressing the gas pedal.

  “You must be Daniel Green,” a woman called through the screen. “Please, come in.” Her bony hands waved me into her house. “Sam? Sam, Daniel is here!”

  Before I could take in the house and all its rough wood, there was a man, gray and skinny, with his arms unavoidably around me. It took me a few seconds to realize that it must be Sam Barts in the slightly droopy flesh.

  “Sam. It’s, uh, nice to meet you.”

  “Oh, Daniel, you have no idea.” He pu
shed me into an armchair so cushioned, I worried I’d never find my way out again. I sat up to perch on its edge.

  “Here, have some apple cider. It was pressed just down the road.” There was a cool glass in my hand, and Sam’s wife had come and gone again before I could say anything.

  I took a sip, the sweetness clinging to my throat, and rearranged a doily on the table next to me to set the cider on it. “So. What is it exactly that you want in that field?”

  “All business, I see. I like it.” He cleared his throat, crossed his hands over his belly, and half disappeared into the couch across from me. “Well, like I said on the phone, Munsen is in trouble. None of the young folks want to stick around anymore, and us old-timers are having a hard time keeping up with all the day-to-day stuff that goes into this work. We get some kids coming through to work as farmhands for a season or a year, but they’re gone in a flash soon as their time’s up. Pretty soon, this whole town is gonna die off, unless we can do something to draw kids into this profession. Something’s got to give. Now, my daughter sent me this article from…what was it, the Boston Globe?”

  “It was the New York Times.” His wife was leaning in a doorway nearby. Buckling laminate flooring and a smudged white refrigerator filled the space behind her.

  “Oh, that’s right. Well, anyway, this article, it talked about the dying family farm and what communities across the country are doing to support new farmers—charity programs and all that.” He flapped his hand, dismissive. “But none of that will do us any good unless we can get folks coming up to Vermont in the first place to think about starting their lives here.” His eyes drifted away. His wife started to twist a dish towel like she was trying to wrench it into pieces.

  “Um, so,” I said, “the crop circle.”

  “Yes. Well.” He slipped to the edge of his seat so our knees hovered near each other. “It’s like this. Kids nowadays love to hunt down the newest, weirdest thing they can find on the internet. So what I’m thinking is that maybe you could shape that field out there into something like a great, big ‘MUNSEN FOREVER,’ you know, something that will spread online and make people come see our little town. You think you could do that?” His hands fell from where they’d been framing his masterpiece in the air in front of his face. His wife stopped twisting her towel.

  His vision was a long shot. People don’t generally travel more than twenty minutes to see these things. And I’d have to work on his design ideas, make it something more mysterious and less obvious. But I couldn’t resist the pull of his field. It was a circler’s dream.

  “I’d be happy to,” I said.

  * * *

  In the two weeks since then, I’ve been working my cover job on the Shannons’ farm nearby while waiting for a bright night like this. The Shannons posted a listing for some help back in the spring—probably from the town library, since their only computer has a dial-up connection so slow, you could milk all their cows before a page loads. I got in touch with them as soon as Lionel gave me Sam’s name. So in a few hours, at 5:00 a.m., I’ll be sitting at the Shannons’ round kitchen table eating cornflakes. Connie Shannon will sit with me, shooting the shit until I finish eating and she heads off to Rutland to buy groceries.

  But for now, I’m standing here in the middle of Sam’s cornfield, the tops of the stalks towering over me. I walk through the field, getting a feel for its bends and hills. My feet sink into the dirt. Ears of corn thunk against my arms. An eighteen-wheeler rattles past on the nearby road, probably carrying fertilizer or Coke. I glance back at the house. Its paint is peeling, big strips of it dipping into the edge of the weedy garden. In a few hours, Sam will be stirring, and I’ll be leaving. I breathe in, the air thick with the scent of cow manure, and take one last look at the stars. No matter where I go, they’re there with me, shining so brightly, I swear that if I stared at them long enough—to the point of dizziness, I mean—I could taste them, sharp and spicy.

  I give myself a second to imagine the explanations that Munsen will settle on. Some towns have true believers who yell from the roadside that they’ve always known there’s life on other planets. Their neighbors laugh it off at first, but when the field owners look into the news camera, just like we’ve coached them, and insist that they have no idea what happened, everyone falls silent and wonders: What if?

  Other times, the general consensus is that they’re man-made, and the only question is who made them. After all, a few rogue circlers have done interviews on YouTube with their voices distorted and their faces concealed, so it’s possible to find proof that our group exists if you know where to look. The group’s fine with that, since we do need someone to spread the word.

  What matters is your name, your identity. No one can know you’re a part of the circlers. Because without a name and someone specific to blame, the man-made idea could be written off as another crackpot theory, something dreamed up by the accuser after another late night in front of the computer. And then, that one question—but who?—is enough to bring people together, giddy with the mystery, a beaten-down farm town suddenly alive again. And, okay, it’s a rush to hear those whispers and know that the guy no one looks twice at is the one behind it all.

  But if you’re caught, if anyone finds out who exactly the circler was, the whole story becomes just a blip on the news channels about some practical joker who’s not from around here. You could never make another circle again. You’re out of the circlers automatically—unceremoniously dumped. Any new town you go to will probably find you out with just one Google. And then your new circles will be selfish, just displays for you and your ten minutes of fame. Transparent egos like that are not welcome in the circlers.

  Then there’s the contest. Anyone who makes fifteen circles without getting caught—that’s me, after this one—can become a leader and start their own regional branch alongside Lionel’s national crew. Rumor is that the leaders meet annually in London, where there’s a meet-and-greet with the godfathers of circle making, twinkly eyed old guys who started it all.

  To be honest, I don’t really care about the contest. Meeting agendas and airplanes both make me twitch. But Claire wanted to win it, badly. She’d never been to London, and on certain nights, she’d get all loopy about it, talking in this terrible fake Cockney accent. Insisting that we’d get there. And then I started to want it, too, just for her sake. I still haven’t let go of that, I guess.

  I find a spot a few yards back from the road. This will be the beginning. I grab a can of spray paint from my pocket, where it’s been dragging down the waistband of my jeans. We don’t usually use spray paint on these jobs, instead relying on someone else to spot the next stalk that needs pressing. But I started using it a while back so that I could work on my own, and now I’ve found it makes the circles truer than I could ever do with a spotter.

  The stream of paint flares from my fingers midway down the stalk in front of me. Far enough down that it can’t be seen by passing cars but close enough to the tassel that I can see it when I peer from the roadside. The hiss of the paint sends lightning down my spine. In a few weeks, this field will become something miraculous. People will come from all over to see it, and they’ll stand by the side of the road with their mouths hanging open. They’ll shake their heads, and then they’ll laugh like they haven’t in years, childlike, enchanted.

  Chapter Two

  Molly

  He’s dying, my husband. It’s the first thing I think every morning, when the sound of his movement wakes me up. All I can do is bury my face in his pillow and breathe and breathe and breathe his air.

  Today, I decide instead to visit the storefront that wasn’t, that could not be. I climb into the truck and stare out at the fields for a moment. The farm is beautiful at this hour, before the fog has lifted and you start remembering all the ways it has betrayed you. Sam has left a string of footprints on his path toward the fields, dark in the dew-silvered grass. He pauses
to give me a wave, and I blow him a kiss, my lips popping against my palm, though I doubt he can see the motion through the windshield. I put the truck into reverse and pull away.

  There was a time when I would’ve joined him and trudged to the barn to help him with the milking. Sam had to sell all eighty-two cows the first time he became too ill to go out every morning and evening to tend to them. The day he sold them, he was silent all afternoon, sitting leaned over the computer, and I rerouted my chores to avoid him. He came into the kitchen at dinnertime, clutching a pile of papers. “Did you know,” he said, “that the United States loses 37.6 billion dollars’ worth of productivity every year to soil erosion?”

  Before I had a chance to say no, I didn’t know, he announced that he was spending our money from the cows on a cover-cropping system that would allow him to plant rye in among the corn and soybeans. The roots of the rye, he explained, would grip the soil, preventing it from washing away down the creek at the back of our property. The system was expensive and labor-intensive, this much I knew, but before I told him so, I looked at his puffy eyes and thought better of it.

  This morning, I barely manage to maneuver the truck into a parking space before my fingers are fumbling at the glove box. The cigarettes are tucked into a ziplock bag, hidden between the truck’s registration and its last inspection report, the red carton winking wickedly at me. I breathe in the smoke and imagine it burning my lungs and throat clean, starting anew. I’ve left the window cranked down so I can crane my neck out when I blow. When Sam asks, I’ll insist it’s a brushfire he’s smelling, or residual smoke from some neighbor who just insisted on giving me a hug. I’ll know from the furrow flicked into his brow that he sees right through this small secret of mine, but he won’t say anything.

  There are other secrets. I’ll tell him I’m flying out to visit Maggie and will go see our son instead. And then there’s this: every week or two, I sit here, in a city twenty minutes away, staring at this dusty, empty shop window with the For Lease sign curling at the edges. I picture the bakery I could build here, with a door painted bright blue and the gleaming glass case holding loaves of bread dusted with flour. I would have Sam paint me a sign on one of the boards from our barn and hang it above the lintel.