In the morning it had moved. He did not know how it had moved—it had no arms or legs or other means of locomotion—but it was now definitely closer to the house. It was also bigger. Whereas yesterday it had been on the south side of his assembled boards, it was now well to the north, and it had increased its size by half. He was not sure he would be able to lift it now, even with Jack's help.
He stared at the potato for a while, looking for some sort of trail in the dirt, some sign that the potato had moved itself, but he saw nothing.
He went into the barn to get his tools.
He had finished the box and gate for the potato, putting it in place well before seven o'clock. It was eight o'clock before the first carload of people arrived. He was in the living room, making signs to post on telephone poles around town and on the highway, when a station wagon pulled into the drive. He walked out onto the porch and squinted against the sun.
"This where y'got that monster 'later?" a man called out. Several people laughed.
"This is it," the farmer said. "It's a buck a head to see it, though."
"A buck?" The man got out of the car. He looked vaguely familiar, but the farmer didn't know his name. "Jim Lowry said it was fifty cents."
"Nope." The farmer turned as if to go in the house.
"We'll still see it, though," the man said. "We came all this way, we might as well see what it's about."
The farmer smiled. He came off the porch, took a dollar each from the man, his brother, and three women, and led them out to the field. He should have come up with some kind of pitch, he thought, some sort of story to tell, like they did with that steer at the fair. He didn't want to just take the people's money, let them look at the potato and leave. He didn't want them to feel cheated. But he couldn't think of anything to say.
He opened the top of the box, swinging open the gate, and explained in a stilted, halting manner how he had found the potato. He might as well have saved his breath. None of the customers gave a damn about what he was saying. They didn't even pay any attention to him. They simply stared at the huge potato in awe, struck dumb by this marvel of nature. For that's how he referred to it. It was no longer an abomination, it was a marvel. A miracle. And the people treated it as such.
Two more cars pulled up soon after, and the farmer left the first group staring while he collected money from the newcomers.
After that, he stayed in the drive, collecting money as people arrived, pointing them in the right direction and allowing them to stay as long as they wanted. Customers came and went with regularity, but the spot next to the box was crowded all day, and by the time he hung a Closed sign on the gate before dark, he had over a hundred dollars in his pocket.
He went out to the field, repositioned the box, closed the gate, and retreated into the house.
It had been a profitable day.
***
Whispers. Low moans. Barely audible sounds of despair so forlorn that they brought upon him a deep dark depression, a loneliness so complete that he wept like a baby in his bed, staining the pillows with his tears.
He stood up after a while and wandered around the house. Every room seemed cheap and shabby, the wasted effort of a wasted life, and he fell into his chair before the TV, filled with utter hopelessness, lacking the energy to do anything but stare into the darkness.
In the morning, everything was fine. In the festive, almost carnival-like atmosphere of his exhibition, he felt rejuvenated, almost happy. Farmers who had not been out of their overalls in ten years showed up in their Sunday best, family in tow. Little Jimmy Hardsworth's lemonade stand, set up by the road at the head of the drive, was doing a thriving business, and there were more than a few repeat customers from the day before.
The strange sounds of the night before, the dark emotions, receded into the distance of memory.
He was kept busy all morning, taking money, talking to people with questions. The police came by with a town official, warning him that if this went on another day he would have to buy a business license, but he let them look at the potato and they were quiet after that. There was a lull around noon, and he left his spot near the head of the driveway and walked across the field to the small crowd gathered around the potato. Many of his crops had been trampled, he noticed. His rows had been flattened by scores of spectator feet. He'd have to take the day off tomorrow and take care of the farm before it went completely to hell.
Take the day off.
It was strange how he'd come to think of the exhibition as his work, of his farm as merely an annoyance he had to contend with. His former devotion to duty was gone, as were his plans for the farm.
He looked down at the potato. It had changed. It was bigger than it had been before, more misshapen. Had it looked like this the last time he'd seen it? He hadn't noticed. The potato was still pulsing, and its white skin looked shiny and slimy. He remembered the way it had felt when he'd lifted it, and he unconsciously wiped his hands on his jeans.
Why was it that he felt either repulsed or exhilarated when he was around the potato?
"It's sum'in, ain't it?" the man next to him said.
The farmer nodded. "Yeah, it is."
He could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the silence of the farm. It was some time before he noticed that it was not silence he was hearing—there was a strange, high-pitched keening sound riding upon the low breeze which fluttered the curtains.
He sat up in bed, back flat against the headboard. It was an unearthly sound, unlike anything he had ever heard, and he listened carefully. The noise rose and fell in even cadences, in a rhythm not unlike that of the pulsations of the potato. He turned his head to look out the window. He thought he could see a rounded object in the field, bluish white in the moonlight, and he remembered that he could not see it at all the night before.
It was getting closer.
He shivered, and he closed his eyes against the fear.
But the high-pitched whines were soothing, comforting, and they lulled him gently to sleep.
***
When he awoke, he went outside before showering or eating breakfast, and walked out to the field. Was it closer to the house? He couldn't be sure. But he remembered the keening sounds of the night before, and a field of goose-bumps popped up on his arms. The potato definitely looked more misshapen than it had before, its boundaries more irregular. If it was closer, he thought, so was the box he had built around it. Everything had been moved.
But that wasn't possible.
He walked back to the house, ate, showered, dressed, and went to the foot of the drive where he put up a chain between the two flanking trees and hung a sign which read: Closed for the Day.
There were chores to be done, crops to be watered, animals to be fed, work to be completed.
But he did none of these things. He sat alone on a small bucket next to the potato, staring at it, hypnotized by its pulsations, as the sun rose slowly to its peak, and then dipped into the west.
Murial was lying beside him, not moving, not talking, not even touching him, but he could feel her warm body next to his and it felt right and good. He was happy, and he reached over and laid a hand on her breast. "Murial," he said. "I love you."
And then he knew it was a dream, even though he was still in it, because he had never said those words to her, not in the entire thirty-three years they had been married. It was not that he had not loved her, it was that he didn't know how to tell her. The dream faded into reality, the room around him growing dark and old, the bed growing large and cold. He was left with only a memory of that momentary happiness, a memory which taunted him and tortured him and made the reality of the present seem lonelier and emptier than even he had thought it could seem.
Something had happened to him recently. Depression had graduated to despair, and the tentative peace he had made with his life had all but vanished. The utter hopelessness which had been gr
adually pressing in on him since Murial's death had enveloped him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.
His mind sought out the potato, though he lacked even the energy to look out the window to where it lay in the field. He thought of its strangely shifting form, its white slimy skin, its even pulsations, and he realized that just thinking of the object made him feel a little better.
What was it?
That was the question he had been asking himself ever since he'd found the potato. He wasn't stupid. He knew it wasn't a normal tuber. But neither did he believe that it was a monster or a being from outer space or some other such movie nonsense.
He didn't know what it was, but he knew that it had been affecting his life ever since he'd discovered it, and he was almost certain that it had been responsible for the emotional roller coaster he'd been riding the past few days.
He pushed aside the covers and stood up, looking out the window toward the field. Residual bad feelings fled from him, and he could almost see them flying toward the potato as if they were tangible, being absorbed by that slimy white skin. The potato offered no warmth, but it was a vacuum for the cold. He received no good feelings from it, but it seemed to absorb his negative feelings, leaving him free from depression, hopelessness, despair.
He stared out the window and thought he saw something moving out in the field, blue in the light of the moon.
***
The box was still in the field, but the potato was lying on the gravel in front of the house. In the open, freed from the box, freed from shoots and other encumbrances, it had an almost oval shape, and its pulsing movements were quicker, more lively.
The farmer stared at the potato, unsure of what to do. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had been half hoping that the potato would die, that his life would return to normal. He enjoyed the celebrity, but the potato scared him.
He should have killed it the first day.
Now he knew that he would not be able to do it, no matter what happened.
"Hey!" Jack Phelps came around the side of the house from the back. "You open today? I saw some potential customers driving back and forth along the road, waiting."
The farmer nodded tiredly. "I'm open."
Jack and his wife invited him to dinner, and the farmer accepted. It had been a long time since he'd had a real meal, a meal cooked by a woman, and it sounded good. He also felt that he could use some company.
But none of the talk was about crops or weather or neighbors the way it used to be. The only thing Jack and Myra wanted to talk about was the potato. The farmer tried to steer the conversation in another direction, but he soon gave up, and they talked about the strange object. Myra called it a creature from hell, and though Jack tried to laugh it off and turn it into a joke, he did not disagree with her.
When he returned from the Phelps's it was after midnight. The farmer pulled into the dirt yard in front of the house and cut the headlights, turning off the ignition. With the lights off, the house was little more than a dark hulking shape blocking out a portion of the starlit sky. He sat un-moving, hearing nothing save the ticking of the pickup's engine as it cooled. He stared at the dark house for a few moments longer, then got out of the pickup and clomped up the porch steps, walking through the open door into the house.
The open door?
There was a trail of dirt on the floor, winding in a meandering arc through the living room into the hall, but he hardly noticed it. He was filled with an unfamiliar emotion, an almost pleasant feeling he had not experienced since Murial died. He did not bother to turn on the house lights but went into the dark bathroom, washed his face, brushed his teeth, and got into his pajamas.
The potato was waiting in his bed.
He had known it would be there, and he felt neither panic nor exhilaration. There was only a calm acceptance. In the dark, the blanketed form looked almost like Murial, and he saw two lumps protruding upward which looked remarkably like breasts.
He got into bed and pulled the other half of the blanket over himself, snuggling close to the potato. The pulsations of the object mirrored the beating of his own heart.
He put his arms around the potato. "I love you," he said.
He hugged the potato tighter, crawling on top of it, and as his arms and legs sank into the soft slimy flesh, he realized that the potato was not cold at all.
The Murmurous Haunt of Flies
I'm not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase "the murmurous haunt of flies" leaped out at me while we were reading John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.
Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother's chicken ranch in the small farming community of Ramona, California. She'd died years before, and I hadn't been there in a long time, but I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere— because of the chickens—and I recalled seeing flypaper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story.
***
"Stay away," my grandpa told me. "It is a haunted place, strange with secrets."
He had lived on the farm all his life, was born on the farm and would die on the farm. He knew what he was talking about. And as we sat in the old kitchen, chairs pushed up against the now-unused icebox, we grew afraid. I suddenly felt a wave of cold pass through me, though the temperature in the farmhouse was well over ninety degrees, and I saw multiple ripples of gooseflesh cascade down Jan's bare arms. Neither of us exactly believed the tale, but we were ur-banites, out of our element, and we respected the knowledge and opinions of the locals. We knew enough to know we knew nothing.
He struggled out of his chair and, one hand on his gimp leg, hobbled over to the screen door. The fine mesh of the screen was ripped in several places, from human accidents and feline determination, and a small covey of flies was traveling back and forth, in and out of the house. He stood there for a minute, not speaking, then beckoned us over. "Come here. I want to show it to you."
Jan and I put the front legs of our chairs back down on the wooden floor and moved over to the screen. I could smell my grandpa's medication as I stood next to him—a sickeningly acrid odor of Vicks, vitamin Bl, and rubbing alcohol. He looked suddenly small, shrunken somehow, as though he had withered over the years, and I could see his scalp through the wispy strands of hair he combed back over his head. He was going to die, I suddenly realized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for all time.
I was going to miss him.
He touched my shoulder lightly with his right hand while his left pointed across the meadow. "It's over there," he said. "You see the barn?"
I followed his finger. A large, square, dilapidated structure of rotting, unpainted boards arose from the tall grasses beyond the chicken coops. I remembered playing there as a kid, when it was all new and freshly painted; playing hide-and-go-seek with my brother and my cousins, hiding in the secret loft behind the hay-baler, endless summer afternoons of sweaty searching. This was not the barn I once knew. I nodded, smiling, though I didn't feel happy.
His finger moved across the horizon, passing from the barn to a small cluster of shacks on the hillside to the west. "See those buildings there to the right of the barn?" Again I nodded. "On the hill?" I continued nodding. "That's it."
Jan was squinting against the afternoon sun, her hand perched above her eyes like a makeshift visor. "Which one is it? I see a couple buildings there."
My grandpa was already starting back across the floor. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Just stay away from the whole area." He sat down once again in his chair at the foot of the kitchen table. A sharp flash of pain registered on his face as he bent his gimp leg to sit down.
We, too, r
eturned to our chairs. And we talked away the rest of the afternoon
.
Jan awoke screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, the acne cream on her face and her sleep-spiked hair giving her the appearance of a shrieking harpy. I hugged her close, pulling her to my chest and murmuring reassurances. "It's okay," I said softly, stroking her hair. "It's all right."
She stopped crying after a few minutes and sat up, facing me. She tried to smile. "That was some nightmare."
I smiled back. "So I gathered. Tell me about it."
"It was about the bathhouse," she said, pulling the covers up around her chin and snuggling closer. "And I don't want you to take this wrong, but your grandfather was in it." Her eyes looked out the bedroom window as she spoke, and she gazed into the darkness toward the group of buildings on the hillside. "I was just sleeping here, in this bed, with you, when I woke up. I heard some kind of noise, and I looked on the floor, and there was your grandfather. He was crawling along the ground, looking up at me and smiling." She shivered. "I tried to wake you up, but you were dead asleep. I kept shaking you and yelling, but you wouldn't budge. Then your grandfather grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down on the floor with him. I was screaming and kicking and fighting, but he had a hold on me, and he started pulling me out of the room. 'We're going to the bathhouse,' he told me. 'We're going to take a bath.'
"Then I woke up."
"That's horrible," I said.
"I know." She laid her head against my chest, running her fingers through my curly chest hair.
We fell asleep in that position.
The day dawned early, just as I'd known it would. Sunlight was streaming through the window with full force by six o'clock. Sunrise always seemed to come earlier on the farm than in the city for some reason. That was one thing I remembered from my childhood.
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