I got plenty. At 110 years old you can’t hide your life any longer.
My father folded the paper and stuffed it in the front pocket of his overalls. “Yeah, I’ll go talk to him. Today,” he assured Russell.
“Appreciated,” Russell said, his eyes exploring my father’s for signs of doubt in his ability to talk Met down from whatever soapbox he was squawking from now. My father nodded and that seemed to be enough for Russell because he broke his gaze, got back into his Model T, and puttered off in the direction of his farm.
“Dad?” I said.
He ran a rough hand over his scalp, quiet for a long while. The calluses on the pads of his fingers made an audible scratching noise through the thick cut of his hair, as if his thoughts were scratchy. Finally:
“Go clean yourself up. We gotta go have a talk with Mr. Rice.”
III
My father squinted out the windshield of our truck as we trundled up County Line K towards the Rice Farm. The windshield was tilted forward to let in some air but all it succeeded in doing was swirling around a cloud of dust so thick I was choking on it. The road was dirt and bumpy and bounced me around inside the cab. My father didn’t budge. He was a forceful man when he wanted to be, unable to be rocked or shaken. The world he stared at through the dusty film on the glass glowed a hazy orange. Radioactive wasn’t a term back then (probably in Metchel Rice’s mind it was) but that would be a good word to describe the miles between our farm and Metchel Rice’s.
“Met’s not so much the problem,” my father told me as he drove. “He’s just crazy enough to initiate the problem. The real problem’s with Hooney. For a commonwealth to operate it will need a governing board with a president, and Hooney’s the logical choice, which will give him the control of the money and worse put him one step closer to our farms. And he’s been eying the Rice Farm for a decade. If he gets his hands in Met’s dirt, before you know it, Hooney will be the next J.W. Goodmill.”
“Then Mr. Merk is right,” I said, piecing the logic together. A black ball was forming in my gut. Suddenly, all Metchel Rice’s rants haunted me, presenting me with a different and unfortunate future. “Met—”
“Mr. Rice,” my father corrected. “Just because he’s on the brink of making trouble, doesn’t mean you can disrespect him. Remember that. Mr. Rice is a hard worker, a good worker and less afraid to get his hands dirty than the rest of us. But he’s a scared worker, too.”
“Understood,” I said. I was scared. “But why would he do that, if he’s so scared of losing his farm to big businesses? Can’t he see he’s making it happen?”
“Because scared people have a tendency to make the monsters they’re most afraid of by acting like them.”
I thought about that while we drove on.
“What are you going to say to Mr. Rice, Dad?”
“I’m not sure.”
When we got to Metchel Rice’s farm, my father turned off the engine, got out, and slammed the door hard enough to rock the entire truck.
“Met?” my father called, “get on out here. We gotta talk.”
It was lunchtime, and Met had been in the house with his bony wife and ramble of skittish children, six in total, ages ranging from tiny, screaming skin bags to the larger, yodeling skeletons who helped Metchel Rice in the fields. I could hear them all bickering inside amidst the clatter of dishware, when Metchel stepped out the door. He let the screen slam shut behind him.
From deep inside the house, as if it had a voice all its own, I heard a scream: “Yur gonna bust that door right off its hinges, ya keep lettin it slam like that.”
Metchel’s wife. He ignored her.
I had gotten out of the car, thinking I’d follow my father up to the porch, as if I, too, shared the burden of this visit, but when I saw Metchel, I stayed behind the shield of the open side door and peered at the two men through the open window. My heart was racing and a river of sweat was pouring down my back and into the seat of my pants. Metchel glanced my way as he approached my father. His perpetually stern face pierced me. He dismissed me without even a nod. A moment later one of his kids appeared at the door and pushed his face into the screen to watch the action outside, mouth open.
The two men shook hands before my father slipped the flyer from his overalls and presented it to Metchel. They were too far away for me to hear their conversation, but I could tell Metchel wasn’t happy to see his flyer presented back at him. Years later I came to understand the feeling I saw on Metchel’s face was shame.
The little boy, I think his full name was Franklyn James, but everyone referred to him as Fraky because he was a wild, little thing, backed away into the shadow of the house. A temporary retreat because a moment later he bust out the screen door just like his father had done and let it slam shut behind him.
“Damn it!” Belinda Rice shouted inside. Fraky laughed, eying me, as if to say “Mothers. Whuddya gonna do?”
I sniggered and nodded to the boy then. In return, he hit me right in the eye with a sharp glint bouncing off a magnifying glass he carried in one cruddy fist.
For the most part, Metchel and my father ignored Fraky, but for once when Fraky tried to hit my father with the same sharp glare he’d directed at me, and Metchel backhanded the magnifying glass from Fraky’s hand without even looking. I thought Fraky would go bawling inside to Belinda, but the boy had the reserve of his father and collected the magnifying glass from the dirt, unfazed. Harnessing its cruelest potential, Franky caught a ray of sunlight and started blazing a smoking trail on the grass around my father’s boots, incinerating whatever little critters were in its path. My father was standing in a ring of fire. Smoke danced around his ankles.
Fraky lost interest and ventured away, pulling a smoking trail of earth with him. My father and Metchel debated, my father flapping the flyer and flicking the corner with his fingernail several times before Metchel ventured away, too, pulling his own trail of smoke with him.
When my father got back in the truck, I asked him how it went, certain the problem was squashed (my father had a way with Metchel Rice).
“Not good,” he said, and my concern escalated into panic. “Metchel Rice is a smart man gone stupid with fear.”
As my father backed away, he tossed Metchel a wave. Metchel waved right back. Gentlemen farmers. Tradition ran deep in Midwest farm country back then. So did home correction because Metchel grabbed Fraky by the collar on his way back to the house and hauled him inside. The door slammed shut with a springy slap, and even over the clanking engine of my father’s truck, I heard Belinda scream her iron tongue off.
My mother always said Belinda Rice was as God-fearing as any but could lick the red off the Devil’s pitchfork. That and she made good rhubarb pie, fresh from her kitchen garden.
My father grimaced out the windshield the entire ride home. The glare on his face equal to that of the sun’s, burning. He reminded me of Metchel Rice. He gripped the steering wheel hard and drove like he were trying to peel the dirt off the road. A worm of dust a mile long raced after us.
“Dad?” I said. He rounded a bend, we swayed, and he ignored me. My father’s eyes reminded me of Fraky’s magnifying glass. Under ballooned perspective, everything looked cracked and frayed and marred. There was green for miles beyond our windshield, and I think my father saw all if going up in smoke.
That’s when I decided to burn down Metchel Rice’s farm.
IV
The newspaper at the time (a one-sheet linen rag called the Pilgrimer) named the fire that claimed Metchel Rice’s farm THE GREAT RICE BURN. The headline appeared in a gothic text so large it left imprints on your eyes when you looked away so everything you saw for a few minutes flashed tragedy. I found a thrill in letters that imposing.
The night we came home from Metchel Rice’s farm, my mother and father argued until the moon rose. After the house was quiet, and I was certain my parents were asleep (or maybe not asleep but staring blankly at the ceiling in their bedroom, minds on dark matters)
, I crept out the house and into the barn where my father stored a 30 gallon drum of motor oil. I siphoned a few gallons from the bottom into a milk pail and walked two hours to Metchel Rice’s farm. I drained a trail of it along the weedy edge of his west field where the corn was infested with stalk borer and was stunted and dry.
I lit the oil, and the ground erupted in a snake of fire. It hissed and snapped and struck. It squeezed the air out from around me, and I backed away. I thought about Belinda’s scorching tongue and argued she and Metchel and Fraky and the whole family had this coming for putting us all in danger. A strong westerly wind kicked up and ignited the corn into a blazing fence. Another gust caught the fire and started the spread. The wind pushing on the flames sounded like Hooooooooney.
V
Little Fraky Rice was blamed for the fire. Arson forensics was about a million years away, but so far as anyone could figure it, Fraky started a smolder with his magnifying glass earlier that day and the wind that night did the rest.
Metchel Rice lost a total of 130 acres of his 175. That combined with other property damage (his barn, smokehouse, and millhouse) made the loss catastrophic. After the fire died, Russell Merk said he saw Metchel wandering his fields in soil that looked like dust. Another windstorm that night carried the ruins of Metchel Rice’s farm across the county. I woke the next morning to a window covered in grime of Metchel Rice’s farm. The world outside looked dirty and fogged.
Metchel Rice sold his farm to George Hooney, after all, bridging the gap everyone feared. He and his family moved a year later and no one heard from them again. My father tried for several years to ward off Hooney’s growing empire, but our land, too, was claimed by the shaping wind of free enterprise. My father sold the farm, and I went off to school where I found journalism and decided I’d tell other’s stories as a way of hiding my own. Really, I was searching for people like me: The Guilty. My future had never seemed so uncertain, and the cloud of Metchel Rice’s farm followed me wherever I went no different than the roil of road dust had followed my father’s truck that day. And if I ever stopped suddenly to think about it, I was consumed.
Perhaps my longevity was my curse. Time to reflect changes a man. Prison tries to accomplish this. And fails. Guilt, however, turns your insides to dust. You won’t read about the fire of Metchel Rice’s farm, and I won’t be asked about it tomorrow (though I’m afraid it could slip from my mouth like drool). The fire was lost to the annals of time, erased by war, depression, terrorism, and like everything else, all news turns to dust. But it will be there, behind me with all my other headlines.
THE GREAT RICE BURN
Now, I don’t know what to make of my life. I know what other people make of my life. I’m about to turn 110. Everybody thinks, Here’s a man who’s done something right. “What’s your secret?” they ask me. I never know how to answer that question. I only know what not to make of my life.
It’s not the years that mature you but what happens in those years. And I sometimes think that I matured about all I ever was going to in the year I burned down Metchel Rice’s farm, both eternally stunted and wiser by my actions. See?
I hear the front door open downstairs, the rattle of keys, and I know that Hope has arrived.
DING
About Author
BENJAM WAVERLY is a pseudonym for a former literary publicist. He currently lives with his wife in the Midwest, where he works as a journalist and photographer.
Email Benjam Waverly: mailto:[email protected]
Follow Benjam Waverly on Twitter: @BenjamWaverly
Red Crow Media
This story is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Trademarks and brand names are used without permission and fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by Benjam Waverly
No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.
All rights reserved.
CREDITS
COVER BY BENJAM WAVERLY
COVER DESIGN BY BENJAM WAVERLY
Additional Credits:
EPS Vector Flaming Heart Wings by Art Selectory / Vector Open Stock
Location and LICENSE
Table of Contents
More About The Ages
Also By Benjam Waverly
I
II
III
IV
V
DING
About Author
CREDITS
The Ages Page 2