A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  The finished bundles were stacked as high as the barn roof next to the thresher, which Darcy called the “groundhog”: a long and hideously noisy machine much less pleasant than the binders. The purpose of the thresher was to separate the wheat from the straw, and somewhere in its grinding mechanism of belts and pulleys this task was accomplished: Bone did not know how. The thing was, the groundhog had to be fed; the straw bales needed to be pitched into the thresher. This was a gargantuan task and could not be postponed, and this year there were not the usual hired men because the Darcys could not afford them. Bone and Deacon and Archie and the occasional neighbor did the pitching, feeding the maw of the thresher each day as it roared and coughed out blue clouds of noxious smoke.

  Bone worked from breakfast until dusk, pausing only for a huge noon meal of fried chicken Mrs. Darcy would bring out wearily, as depleted from her labors as the men from theirs, and spread on a long pineboard trestle. Deacon and Archie did their share; but Bone, working at his own pace, levering the big pitchfork silently until his hands were raw and his outsized wrists were trembling with exhaustion, did what Paul Darcy said was the work of two men—if not more. Darcy was so grateful that he took Bone and Archie and Deacon into the farmhouse kitchen one evening and fed them at the family table; there was chocolate cake that night to follow the fried chicken.

  Over coffee, Darcy asked each of them how they had come to be wandering the countryside.

  Deacon spoke of the work he had done in the Chicago Stockyards, how he had been married once and had a child—“but that broke up even before the Crash”—and how riding the boxcars was not a new thing for him. He had hopped his first freight when he’d come back from the war, he said, and had ridden them periodically since. “Now, of course, everybody’s doing it.” He spoke cheerfully and at length, but Bone saw the way his eyes wandered about the Darcys’ farmstead kitchen, lingering thoughtfully on the wooden shelves, the black belly of the coal stove, the rifle suspended on ornate J-hooks against one wall.

  Then it was Archie’s turn. Archie spoke haltingly of a childhood in Louisiana and his family’s unsuccessful migration to New York. Before the hard times he had worked as a delivery driver, cabbie, salesman, “anything that, you know, brings in a little money. Never been married or any of that. Only myself to look out for.”

  Then Darcy turned to Bone. Sweating-under the concerted gaze of the farmer and his wife, Bone said haltingly that he kept to himself, had pretty much always kept to himself, had been riding the trains as long as he could remember….

  “But surely,” Mrs. Darcy said, “There was something before that? I mean, nobody’s born a tramp—are they?”

  Paul Darcy quickly hushed his wife. “Meg, it’s none of our business. Bone helped save the harvest. That’s what matters.”

  “But I was,” Bone protested. “I was born that way. I was.”

  He thought about it that night, sleepless in the bunk bed that was too short to contain his outstretched legs and too narrow to support him unless he lay on his side. Where had he come from? Everything had an origin. He had learned that. Birds from eggs, leaves from trees, wheat from wheat, spiraling back to an unimaginable infinity. The only exception to this universal law, apparently, was Bone himself. Birds from eggs, he thought, leaves from trees, Bone from—what?

  Drifting out of consciousness he dreamed of a place that was not like any place he had ever seen, right colors and shapes that made only dreamsense, creatures of unbearable wholeness and purity adrift in a jeweled landscape. No such place existed, of course, but the dream of it made him inexplicably sad; he wanted to weep, although he could not.

  When he woke he felt soiled, ugly, inadequate. He thought, I am less than half of what I should be—and felt the Calling, that sweet high voice inside him, as achingly compulsive as the night cry of a train whistle, more insistent now but quieter, too, now easily buried beneath the quotidian sounds of the machinery, the farm animals, the hot far-traveling wind.

  By the end of that week they had finished the last of the threshing; the grain was ready to be trucked to the elevator in town and offered up for what the farmer Darcy said were “foreclosure prices”— twenty-four cents a bushel. The workload had eased and Deacon and Archie spent more time together, playing cards after dark by lantern-light, the sound of Deacon’s voice as relentless and oddly comforting as the ticking of a clock. Deacon talked about the Darcys more often. And Archie, often, was sullen and silent.

  “They’re childless,” Deacon said, “and with the harvest over there’s nobody within miles of here. The opportunity is perfect.”

  “No,” Archie said. “What you have in mind, that’s courting the worst sort of danger.”

  “In hard times,” Deacon said sagely, “taking risks is the only way to get ahead. You want to be a bindlestiff forever? Live out your life in some pasteboard Hoovertown? By God. How else do people get rich, if not by taking money from some other person? It’s cruel—of course it’s cruel—but it’s how the world operates, and you can’t argue with it> you might as well argue with rocks or water.”

  “But if we take the money,” Archie began without real hope, and Deacon interrupted:

  “They have land. They own this spread. We’re not hurting them as much by taking it as we are hurting ourselves by leaving it. Darcy could not have made his harvest without us—you heard him say so. We did the work and we deserve payment for it. In a way it is our money.”

  Bone listened with a pained incomprehension. He did not understand about money. The money came from the wheat, somehow, and the wheat was Darcy’s, wasn’t it? He guessed Deacon knew what he was talking about … but there was a bad feeling in the air, the steely odor of Archie’s fear and Deacon’s imperious needs.

  “People have seen us,” Archie said. “They know what we look like. We’ll get caught.”

  “Do they?” Deacon said. “Will we?”

  “The sheriff who brought us over,” Archie said, “the men Darcy had in for the wheat harvest—”

  “Look at yourself. Look at me! Think about it. We could be anybody. Any redball freight, there’s fifty guys who look just like us.”

  “But Bone—”

  “They see Bone. Exactly! Who was at the farm? Well, there was two guys—hoboes—and this geek. If they look for anybody, it won’t be for us.”

  Bone understood that Deacon was plotting a theft, that the Darcys would be the victims of it. The idea disturbed him, but he turned on his side and closed his eyes. Whatever was imminent, it could not be helped. He had parceled out his loyalty, he could not retrieve it now.

  “But the Darcys,” Archie said patiently, “they’ll know it wasn’t Bone who took the money.”

  “That,” Deacon said softly, “is another problem.”

  Archie took him aside the next evening at sunset. It had been a hot blue day, the wind stirring dust in the stubbled fields. The denuded earth was like scar tissue. The binders had done all their work, Bone knew; Darcy had cleaned them and oiled them and stored them under tarps, their sleek angles hidden for a season.

  “You have to understand about Deacon,” Archie said. “The kind of guy he is.”

  Bone liked Archie. He was fascinated by Archie’s wisp of beard and by the way he held Deacon’s mirror for him. Now, though, Archie was frowning, and Bone smelled the fear that had in recent days begun to cling to him. They leaned against a rail fence, Archie’s eyes furtive in his small face.

  “I been with him a long time,” Archie said. “He’s a decent man. Many a time I wouldn’t have eaten but for him. Full of plans, full of schemes. You know that.”

  Bone said nothing.

  “But he’s ambitious,” Archie said. “I’ve seen it happen before. It’s like shooting craps. The same thing. Get him started and he won’t be able to stop.”

  Archie’s hands trembled. Bone perceived the fear that was bottled inside the smaller man. The fear was infectious; it was like a fog, Bone thought, oily and clinging.

/>   “What he wants to do,” Archie said, “it scares me. I’m not stupid. It won’t end here. I know that. If it starts, Christ knows where it’ll stop. You understand?”

  But the words came too fast. Bone looked at Archie emptily. The sun had gone behind the farmhouse, shadows lengthened and darkened.

  “In a way,” Archie said, “I think it started back in California, back during that raid, when you killed those farmers, when you knocked down that scissor-bill like, I don’t know, some kind of crazy man, throwing those big goddamn fists around … you didn’t see his eyes, Bone, how they lit up, like for the first time in all his life he saw some guy with a club or a uniform get kayoed. For the first time, understand, it wasn’t him on the ground, it was the other guy, and I think that made him a little crazy, crazy with the wanting of it. …” Archie paused, swiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. “Every time he looks at you, that’s what he sees.”

  “It’s not my fault,” Bone managed. “It’s in him.”

  “Deep in him. You draw it out.”

  “Look at me,” Bone said. “What do you see?”

  Archie gazed at him. Bone felt the smaller man’s confusion.

  “There’s no harm in you,” Archie relented, almost tearful now. “I never said that! But, Bone, listen, we have to stop him! If we don’t, these people, the Darcys, they won’t just get robbed, they might get something worse, they might get hurt—killed, maybe—I mean, I’ve seen the way he looks at them, the way he looks at this spread, and he’s working hard at hating ‘em, hating ‘em for what they got, hoarding up envy like sour bile inside him—”

  But the words fled comprehension. There was only the fear clinging to Archie like a bad smell. Bone wished there was something he could do. But he could not control Deacon.

  Deacon looks at me, Bone thought, and what he sees is Deacon: Deacon killing that scissorbill, Deacon with his big fists clenched.

  And Archie looks at me, he thought, and sees Archie—Archie trembling, Archie wanting to help, Archie helpless.

  He might have said something, might have tried to explain … but the smaller man’s fear crested like a wave over him, and the words became dim and elusive.

  Frightened, Bone turned and fled to the barn.

  That night in his bunk he dreamed again of the Jeweled World and woke before the cock’s crow, shivering in the darkness. The Calling was plaintive in him and it blended, somehow, into the howl of a distant train. So close now. So close.

  He could not delay any longer.

  He stood next to Deacon that morning, soaping himself at the wooden trough. Bone washed clumsily. His naked body was huge and strange, sinews and joints oddly linked, only approximately human. Deacon and Archie had long since ceased to remark on it, but this morning he was painfully aware of his own peculiarity. He longed to know what he meant, what he was . . . and knew that the only answer was in the Calling.

  “Tonight,” he told Deacon. “I leave tonight. I can’t stay any longer.”

  Deacon ceased toweling his face and gave Bone a long thoughtful look.

  “All right,” he said. “Okay. Tonight it is.”

  The sky was livid with dawn.

  By midmorning an overcast had moved in. The gray clouds hung from horizon to horizon all through that day, thinning but never breaking, and when they were darkest a hard rain came down. Deacon, Archie, and Bone were confined to the hired men’s quarters. The gloom was so intense that their lantern did little to penetrate it.

  Bone was aware of the silence between Archie and Deacon, the way they moved around each other like nervous cats. There was no poker tonight, no debate. Only the sound of the rain drumming on the sod roof.

  Archie stood up impulsively not long before darkness set in for the night. He stretched, shot a glance at Deacon, said, “This fuckin’ place!” and ducked through the door in the direction of the outhouse.

  Deacon, seated on his bunk, watched the other man go. As soon as Archie was hidden by the rain he stood up.

  “I’ll be out for a bit,” he told Bone. “You stay here. You hear me? Stay put.”

  “Deacon—”

  “Shut up.”

  Bone recoiled from the force of Deacon’s voice.

  “Shut up,” Deacon whispered fiercely, “and stay put, and that’s all I want to hear from you.”

  Bone sat still.

  Deacon moved out into the rain as Archie had, but in a different direction: toward the farmhouse.

  Bone was still waiting—gazing at the rain, his knees pulled up, rocking in rhythm with the Calling inside him—when Archie came back, staring at Deacon’s empty bunk. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and turned almost tearfully to Bone. “Where is he? Oh, Christ! Did he go out? Did he go there?”

  Bone pointed toward the farmhouse—a dark shape in the rain through the door.

  Archie staggered as if from a physical blow. He looked suddenly small, Bone thought. Small and old. His grief was like a dark aura. “Oh, Christ, Bone— come on, come with me, we gotta stop him, stop him before it’s too late!”

  The demand was so heartfelt that Bone did not question it. He ran behind Archie into the rain. He was cold and wet instantly, water slicking his stubble hair, running past the collar of his pea coat into his tom checked shirt and down the knobs of his spine. They reached the farmhouse, and Bone pressed up against a kitchen window. Condensation frosted the glass; he could not see inside; but one wet pane gave him back his own reflection, sunken-eyed, pale, and huge. The kitchen was dark. Archie shouted: “Bone! Bone, the door’s locked! Knock it down, for God’s sake, he’s inside there, Bone—”

  But then a light flashed twice in the darkness, the noise of it ringing painfully in Bone’s eardrums. It was Darcy’s big shotgun, Bone guessed. The one that had hung on the wall. And in the eerie silence that followed there was only the drumming of the rain, the rattle of a fallen copper kettle from the kitchen, and the wail of Archie’s weeping.

  Digging the hole, Bone thought about death.

  The darkness was absolute, though the rain had tapered to a drizzle. He worked methodically with the Darcys’ broad-bladed shovel, fighting the wet ground and the mulch that littered the wheatfield, turning up the rich dark soil. The night wind on his wet clothes made him tremble, and Bone gritted his teeth and drove the shovel savagely into the resistant earth. He smelled of his work.

  Death was not such a bad thing, Bone thought. He had wondered, at times, if it was not in fact death that was Calling him, whether that elusive sweetness might not be the sweetness of release from this misshapen body. In some way it might be … but he had been offered death many times and had never accepted. The body resisted. There was an incompleteness about it.

  Too, he had seen death often enough among the railway tramps and it was not attractive. There was a kind of shamefulness about a human body after death, Bone thought, the limpness, like a child’s costly doll too casually discarded. To Bone, the dead always seemed insulted: subject to indignities, and passively sullen.

  Bone had made the hole shallow but wide. It looked less like a grave than like some kind of crater, broadly dish-shaped, now filling with black water. Bone guessed it was good enough and when he stood up and turned toward the farmhouse he saw the halo of Archie’s lantern bobbing toward him across the denuded wheatfield. Archie had stopped weeping, but his face was set in a rictus of grief, his eyes heavy-lidded and bruised-looking.

  “It’ll do,” Archie said. He looked at Bone. “Come help me.”

  They moved back through the darkness to the Darcy farmhouse. A single kitchen lantern was burning, and Bone navigated through a gloom of shadows. “Here,” Archie said tonelessly. He put his hands under Paul Darcy’s shoulders. Bone took the feet, spreading the legs until he was able to grasp the body under the knees. This was death, all right. Always the same, Bone thought, that rag-doll pout, as if the farmer were holding his breath to protest the injustice of it. Bone looked without curiosity at the broa
d red stain across Darcy’s midsection. They lifted up the body and carried it into the wheatfield, to the hole Bone had gouged there.

  The body looked up at them from the hole. Archie, breathing in gasps, poured a spadeful of earth over Darcy’s face, as if he could not bear that silent recrimination. There was something prudish in the gesture, and Archie straightened hastily, shaking his head. “One more,” he said.

  This one was more difficult even for Bone. The Darcy woman lay at the opposite end of the kitchen, spreadeagled next to the iron stove (the stove Deacon had called a “puffin’ belly”), and though her wound was similar to her husband’s the expression on her face was even more reproachful. Maybe the indignity was worse for a woman: this nasty business of lifting and burying. By the time they reached the grave Archie was weeping again, a dry weeping that seemed to come from deep inside the cavity of his chest. Mrs. Darcy lay in the shallow hole in her yellow print dress, and Bone saw that the rain had made her expression quizzical, as if she were surprised to be here, staring so fixedly up at the night. Bone suppressed an urge to apologize.