Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Nicholes: Summer Ice

As Colebrook’s cemetery sexton, Saul Lorcas was allowed by law to conceal the Glock. It was an enabling thought. A thought that comforted him whenever he wondered what would happen if the reverend, who’d run off with his wife less than a year earlier, ever returned to the farm. It was also the thought that helped him to conclude the internal argument on whether punishment or reward came to killers of false prophets.

It was this he was thinking when the hail storm wedged in from the southeast of Colebrook and overtook him on the tractor. He was hauling hay from the north fourteen acres of orchard grass and had a quarter mile to go when ice rattled over the hood and wheel guards of the John Deere 4020. He hunched over the wheel as pellets stung his ears and neck and battered his head through the baseball cap. The wagon of stacked bales would be mostly ruined, but because his father would have made him do it, he backed into the corn crib while marble-sized stones beat paint off boards over the entrance.

He guarded his face with his arm, almost tipping over from the gusts, and scrambled along the gravel path toward the milk house office. His boots crunched into puddles of ice rocks at the office door. He ducked in, past blackened pikeperch heads on fish hooks and sun-bleached deer antlers mounted on the doorframe. Blood from his lip was hard to swallow.

One of his regular customers, Kate, was coming for two hundred bales. She bought a thousand every summer, but this year, whether he liked it or not, would be different. It was the first hay harvest after Barbara had disappeared, who left him only with cryptic e-mail messages directing him to “ask God” why she could no longer see him, their three adult children, or the grandchildren she used to babysit each week.

Saul had asked. Almost every night, and several times during the day, he’d pressed his forehead to his Bible and moaned. Nothing had come, and as ludicrous as he knew it was, this storm would confirm in his customer’s mind, and spread throughout the town, the metaphysical justification his wife’s leaving him implied: this land, and the filial piety he felt for it, was “interfering with his relationship with the Lord,” as his wife had said in her goodbye e-mail.

The ceiling of the milk house dipped low and enclosed everything in dankness, the old wood-burning stove, heaps of welding materials, work benches loaded with tools and coffee cans of nails. The chair he rested in creaked on a swivel. Over the years, his elbows had cracked the fake leather armrests and worn away the foam padding. His skin touched wood and the cool heads of carpenter nails. Out the door, slanting ice still shredded leaves from trees. It beat against the tool shed’s aluminum roof. Bad storms fixed farms, his father had always said, which meant they broke whatever was about to break anyway. He would have to paint the fences and barn doors. He’d have to unclog the farmhouse gutters. Acres of corn stalks smelling bitter green along his western acreage would snap to the ground. When he went to check the stalks, he knew, he would find one or two fawns battered to death. Their mothers would have nosed them beneath folds of undergrowth when they were too young to give off scent, too newly born to navigate woods. When they were hidden that way, coyotes couldn’t sniff them out.

The pounding hail eventually dwindled to rain. Clouds rent open for sun to cant through. Wind chilled his face while the sky whitened and leaves twirled down from the black oaks around the barns. His knees stiffened in the chair. He swung his shoulders for balance while walking, tipping almost sideways at every step, and might as well have had wooden medicine grinders for knee joints. He should have had them replaced years ago but hated the idea of the operation. That, conveniently, had also been part of the reverend’s words, the suspicion of modern medicine, of science. It had all been part of the campaign.

Approaching the farmhouse, Kate’s pickup swished over soaked asphalt, the horse trailer behind. Her wipers wagged full force.

She idled into the drive and stopped. It was as if she’d had second thoughts and was going to turn around. Saul waved his arm and looked up at the sky in a gesture he hoped would seem light-hearted. He could tell even through the distorting windshield that she was blushing.

His swollen knees jolted pain through his body, and he was on the verge of shouting at her to hurry. Instead he lowered his head and waved his arm, high in the air, and turned his body toward the corn crib around back. The truck brakes creaked. Kate reversed a few feet, enough to pinch the trailer tongue almost against the truck bumper. She couldn’t drive, and he knew it was because Barbara still seemed to be hanging on the edges of the farm, watching with her arms crossed around her stomach. Like Saul’s, Barbara’s body had needed operations, the removal of a benign lump from her neck, a hysterectomy that had tinged her face with a permanent rash even after two years. Barbara hadn’t been able to heave bales anymore, never could really (her hands small enough, almost, for one of them to fit into Saul’s mouth). Saul, though, had sometimes gotten her to dump grain into cow troughs or drive the John Deere while he stacked wagons.

The hail had damaged the farm worse than he’d thought. Bricks had thumped to the ground from the silo apex, and as he backed away from the tower and the bitter puff of eye-stinging fermented silage, he found the heavy steel barn doors bent open.

Kate managed to back the trailer up to the corn crib, then got out and walked toward him. She was pulling on gloves.

“Wasn’t even sprinkling in Orwell,” she said. “Was clustered all over Colebrook.”

Saul shrugged and held out his hands. He smiled at her and tried to catch her eyes. “Been my luck.” But she tightened the gloves on her fingers and lifted the swivel-latch to free the gate lever, so he gave up on politeness.

He heaved himself onto the tractor, stopping to sweep ice from the seat. It ricocheted off boards of the corn crib. Spent diesel blew blackish from the vertical exhaust pipe in front of him. A wind coming across acres of chilled earth hit his face. In the hay fields behind the corn crib, low grooves in the soil had cupped ice, and as the hail warmed, condensation rose.

Once he had put the tractor in park and climbed onto the hay wagon, he dug his bare fingers into the rained-on stack of sweet-smelling second cutting, the almost candied alfalfa and orchard grass. He dropped a bale when a farm cat, the one with the front leg missing, scrambled down and shot into a pile of fertilizer jugs behind the rake. Kate looked away (leaving him to laugh off the moment alone) at what she must’ve imagined was another damning sign. He settled his boots on the slicked wagon, turned, and slung the alfalfa into the open horse trailer. It boomed onto the floor. Hail stones rattled over boot-pulverized traces of horse manure.

All around him, as he loaded Kate’s trailer with hay, his fields disintegrated into waving ghost clouds.

Before marrying Barbara in 1976, when asked by old high school friends and poker buddies, he always said Barbara was a person who embraced her religion.

Thinking back to it now, he was able to pinpoint the day he first realized the change.

He had been weed-whacking the front ditch when someone in a rattling orange Escort had come slipping pamphlets into everyone’s mailbox. Unfamiliar cars like those usually meant someone selling a scam to isolated elderly folks, and Saul had made sure to stop working long enough to lift the goggles from his eyes and glare at the driver.

Not much later, Barbara had come down the driveway to get the mail. She’d been wearing sunglasses and waved at him. No cars or semis had been flying toward her, so she’d crossed the street and poked her hand into the box. Saul had killed the weed-whacker. The spindle had frozen. The nylon cutting cord had sliced into soil.

She’d held the paper with both hands and read it while crossing the road. At the edge, she’d turned her head toward him, then tore away as if breaking from a dream.

Before dinner, after he’d swept grass clippings from his jeans with a broom, he’d walked into the kitchen to find Barbara waiting at the table.

No food had been steaming on the counter or oven. A pamphlet had lain flattened on the table. On the front, the words "The Path" had gleamed in a starry night sky.

Barbara’s shoulders had collapsed inward, and she’d brought a hand up to hide her face.

Saul had swallowed, then glanced out toward the fields (almost time to mow hay). He’d eventually stretched his arm to lay fingers on her shoulder.

An ex-marine who’d enlisted just weeks before the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, Reverend Walt of The Path had no church. He gathered followers in private homes.

Saul and Barbara had first met him in a mansion two hours away in Strongsville. It was the most luxurious home Saul had ever seen or been in. He’d parked the pickup among sedans and minivans. Trees had leaned around the house, and vines had drooped down a ravine out back. He’d held Barbara’s hand and followed other people up stone steps from outside and into a glass-enclosed living room. The floor had been black-white swirls in shining marble tiles. When Saul had sunk into a leather couch beside Barbara, and all the strangers had smiled and asked names, it had felt like they’d been soaring on top of some mountain. The sky had blazed yellowish orange all around them.

“No more laws,” Walt had announced from a recliner. He’d then leaned forward, his eyes watery. He’d tightened his lips and looked over the people.

After Saul unlaced and pried his feet from his boots, he slid Kate’s check for three hundred dollars onto the kitchen table, then lumbered down the hall toward the bathroom to shower.

Freezing water stung his body. He hadn’t reached for soap or moved when the phone rang. He slammed off the water. It probably wasn’t her. He knew that, but still, even after all these months, he listened.

The machine picked up, and a man’s recorded voice announced it was a courtesy call about charges on Barbara Lorcas’s credit card. Saul had received similar calls before, from the trustee’s office where they had both been elected to local government, the increasingly less immediate family members who called to ask what was going on, old friends or acquaintances who hadn’t spoken to them in years suddenly finding interest. She’s on vacation, he’d lied at first, though after a couple of months, he’d started telling the truth. She’s gone. And someone would ask, What do you mean, gone? and he would lift his shoulders and, half-laughing, say it again. Just like I said. Gone.

He wrapped a towel around his waist and padded into the kitchen. Grit and food crumbs pricked his feet as he neared the freezer. Frosting beer mugs clinked when he opened the door. He lifted one that depicted an orange Cleveland Browns helmet and jiggled a frozen pizza from ice encrustations. After putting it into the oven and taking a Rolling Rock from the fridge, he plopped down at the head of the kitchen table, at his usual seat.

Just a square foot remained in front of him. Newspapers he’d only glanced at heaped beside a stack of envelopes, letters addressed to Barbara he’d piled there. The hope was, if she did someday return, she’d find this gesture of his—a gesture of patience, perhaps, or forgiveness. Though that wasn’t quite right. It signaled some desire to bury these nightmare months because, as his father and all the men from his youth had taught him (old soldiers most of them, sons of Russian or Lithuanian immigrants), talking was not much more than staking up dead bodies and calling them gods. Especially now, after all he’d staked upon towers of verbiage from his old reverend, the way his father had lived, which was according to dumb, simple habit—a life governed by crop rotations and the spring-signaling chrysalis of moths—it all seemed suddenly sacrosanct. He often thought it was a good thing his father, a man who’d lived without dividing the world into names, was already dead.

The oven was smoking. He jumped from his seat and hurried over. Heat blasted his face as a steam cloud unfurled. He fumbled inside drawers for oven mitts, and after finding one and a frayed rag, he reached into the heat to withdraw the sizzling pizza. The mitt was too thin and his fingers burned.

While the food cooled and his fingers throbbed, he stepped over to the answering machine and hit the play button. It was the fraud protection office at the bank wanting to verify charges. The towel around his waist came undone and crumpled to the floor. He let it lie and stomped over to the kitchen table, to the stack of letters he’d erected for Barbara. He thumbed through until finding the most recently issued statement. His face burned at the thought of ripping it open.

The mug of beer fizzed within reach, so he lifted it to his lips and gulped. Ice peeled off the handle and melted on his hand. Burps stung in his nostrils while he folded down the bank statement to learn what he’d ignored for so long. $14,943.76 was the balance. The account was just a little over fifty dollars from being drained.

The phone rang again. When he answered, it was a secretary at the trustee’s office relaying a complaint about a burial urn in the graveyard behind Saul’s western fields. The sister of the cremated woman had called and said Saul had dug the hole in the wrong place. Saul had to dig a new hole two feet closer to the headstone.

“Now,” he said, shuffling toward the pizza, “I drilled exactly where the woman told me.”

The secretary, a girl no older than twenty, said she had nothing to do with it. She was just giving the message.

“It’s all right,” he said, and sighed. He dropped the bank statement on the counter and rummaged in the silverware drawer for a fork. He cut into the pizza crust. “Everything’s changeable,” but the girl didn’t answer. She’d already hung up.

Saul set the phone down and bit wolfishly into a slice of his dinner. He stopped chewing and opened his mouth. The partially chewed clump of cheese and bread plopped onto the counter. The middle was still frozen.

It was too late to be doing it, but he’d only be driving through his property, then across Fee Road and into the cemetery, where the nearest neighbors were separated from it by what the town knew as the machine graveyard: an acre of rusted combines, rakes, cultipackers, and tractor motors. That family lived in a trailer by a mud-bottom pond too far away to hear Saul digging.

The pistol was clean. He’d rubbed down the polymer body before snapping it into the black nylon shoulder harness. It bumped against his ribs. Coyotes in a big enough pack attacked a single person. They would have whiffed fawn carcasses in the fields, so it was better to carry it with him.

He walked from his front door and crunched over the limestone driveway to reach the ’99 Chevy extended cab—ten years old that summer. It was the same truck he had loaded his old man into. On all those trips to the Cleveland Clinic for his father’s dialysis treatments, Barbara had sat in the middle. He wondered if all that time had been so gruesome that it had been part of the reason she’d left.

Or maybe it was that his old man, at least in his final months, had resembled hers?

Just a year after they’d married, back in '77, they’d turned a corner in a department store and Barbara had gasped, “God, that’s him.” She had cried after the first time they’d had sex and, calming down, told him about Bill. He used to try to get her alone, she’d said, in the garage or basement bathroom. Abuse, Saul learned, was an old, wheelchair-bound man. His fingers crackled plastic wrap around men’s tube socks.

Saul drove behind the barns and along his hay fields. The headlights attracted flitting moths, and in all directions, fireflies flickered. He bumped down the path that wound along the creek, known as the Colebrook crick . Barbara’s stepfather, he thought—that’s where all this had started.

Checking in meant praying, asking for guidance, which, as the reverend became their sole counselor, meant asking Walt. Barbara had done it, he remembered, when their youngest child, their daughter Jasmine out in Los Angeles, had called to say her boyfriend had gotten her pregnant. Saul hadn’t been sure what other choice there’d been besides supporting her. Barbara had huddled against the hallway wall, where the tangled kitchen phone cord had reached, and murmured for hours on the phone with Walt.

On smaller issues, such as which airline to take and on what date to visit their oldest kid, their son Ishmael, a PhD candidate in Seattle studying Hydrology, Barbara would also consult Walt.

“Walt says American Airlines,” Barbara had said at dinner one evening, so they’d booked their tickets online that night.

In the end, the reverend had gained almost total control, so that when their oldest daughter, Zee, who lived five miles away with two young boys and a lawyer husband everyone loved, had invited Barbara to go with her and the boys to Walmart in Ashtabula, Barbara had said she first needed to check in. Afterward, she’d called Zee back to tell her that, no, the boys were supposed to go with their mother alone.

And it occurred to Saul, now that he was thinking about it, that the last weeks of Barbara refusing to have sex with him had been another of Walt’s edicts.

Crickets chirped all around him, and frogs croaked. He had to roll his windows up to keep out the deer flies. The headlights lit up the tire-packed dirt path. A quarter mile farther on, with leaves and trunks exploding red whenever he tapped the brake, he left the woods and drove over exhausted hay fields he would someday use for corn. Corn simply exploded from old earth. The soil was saturated with nitrates.

Just one summer before, Walt had driven the 4020 over these fields. The tractor’s PTO had powered the baler, and attached to the baler had been the wagon where Saul had balanced and stacked thousands of bales.

As he’d worked, starting at the end of the wagon and working his way toward the chute that wobbled on chains, foot room had dwindled until he’d stood with his steel-toe boots hanging off planks.

“You’re on the edge, brother!” Walt had sometimes shouted, turning around in the vibrating tractor seat and smiling.

They’d shot groundhogs together in those fields. It was just after Saul had fitted a scope to the .22, and when a groundhog’s head had popped from a mound in the hay, Saul had whispered, “There’s one,” and offered the rifle up to Walt.

“No,” Walt had said. He’d held out his hands, palms up, as if to prove he wasn’t carrying a weapon. “I don’t shoot.”

Reverend Walt had come to live with them. It would be the last summer Barbara would live as Saul’s wife. Walt had needed a place to stay, and why wouldn’t Saul provide one? It was Walt who’d wed his boy Ishmael, also his daughter Zee. It was Walt who’d given the eulogy at his dad’s funeral.

Aside from Walt asking to be the all-time tractor driver, the harvest months had gone as well as any summer, until the night Walt had insisted on the conclave in the farmhouse basement.

Walt was about a foot shorter, and unlike Saul’s wild blond curls, which he never combed and let grow scraggly as he had since his college football days, Walt combed his gray-brown hair straight forward, clipped across his forehead. Walt wasn’t a weakling. He’d withstood hours of tractor driving under midday sunlight for seven, eight hours a day, several hay-baling days in a row, but still his body sagged down like Saul’s did, nipple skin forming small boobs and stomach skin folding over his belt line, all this without the underlying wiriness of a farmer’s tendon and muscle that Saul had developed over decades.

The basement was a kind of Lorcas family shrine. Photos of his son and daughters, of his granddaughters and grandsons. Far in one corner, by the fireplace, were the photos of the old family, including his great grandfather’s photo. It had survived the passing over the Atlantic back in 1917. He was wearing the Russian soldier’s black leather boots and grayish coat.

That was how, sitting across from him, Walt had begun. He’d used the usual tone of dreamy, triumphant optimism.

“It’s time for extrication, pilgrim. Comprehensive severance from the City of Destruction.”

Walt’s neck was rising up in reddish bumps. The color spread to his face. Veins wriggled through the whites of his eyes. “Sign the farm over to me. Unload the burden. It’s broken your body, brother.” He pointed at Saul’s knees, then opened his hands and shrugged. “And, it’s damn near broken your marriage.”

If Walt, all along, had known what Saul would say, he also must’ve known that packing up and driving off in the night would shake Barbara enough for her, just one month later, to do her own late-night disappearing act.

The graveyard gate was never locked. Not that it mattered. One thing he’d learned from being township sexton was that, after somebody was buried, family members might never come again. Or if they did, then maybe once.

He drove the truck along the drive, past rows of black-white shining marble. On the north side lay the oldest graves. Pale stones tinged with moss bore dates chiseled as early as 1845.

On the opposite end of the yard lay the plot where he had to dig the new hole for the burial urn. He reversed the truck, turning so that his low beams cast grainy yellow. It lit up the circle of hardening soil he’d spread over with seed a few days earlier. He got out and took the auger from the truck bed. Crouching down, he yanked the starter cord. The motor huffed over and spit exhaust. He tugged again, and when it turned and vibrated in his hands, he suspended the drill over the spot where they would rebury the ashes. The drill caught earth and sank.

As he was working, the truck headlights lit up the eyes of a prowling coyote. He threw one hand to the holster under his left arm, but the animal changed its mind and crept off, sniffing the ground on the other side of the graveyard fence. Without thinking, Saul let his hand go back to the auger trigger. The drill seized earth and plunged. He hit the switch to reverse and lifted. He shouted and dropped to one knee at the grave. He looked carefully, expecting the worst, but no ashes, no gray-black soot had smeared together with shiny north Ohio clay.

It was only after he’d driven from that second hole, gaping before the headstone, that he let himself meditate on what he’d almost done. If he’d breached the urn at night like that, which he was sure he hadn’t, it would be the end for him in Colebrook. He’d be immediately released from the board of trustees. He’d lose all customers and, after the story hit the papers, would receive hate mail and threatening calls, because every person who ever lived deserved proper burial.

That Sunday, the sun rose behind the line of black oaks and blazed over the farmhouse. The barn’s aluminum roofing glimmered, glaring in the dents from the hail. Leaves, weighed with dew, caked the driveway and the lawn he still hadn’t raked after falling ice had smashed the tree limbs bare. Sunshine thinned condensation beading on the Chevy windshield and morning air chilled his lungs.

Before he’d left the farmhouse, he’d thrown on a white shirt with a collar. The top button couldn’t reach around his neck any longer. He’d put on a solid blue tie and, fishing in the closet among camouflage hunting jackets and campfire-scented flannels, had withdrawn a sports coat. Leather elbow patches had crackled as if they would rip when he bent his arms.

Sitting in the truck, he unsnapped the pistol from the harness and placed it on his leg. He, too, deserved proper burial. Though Bunyan’s Pilgrim had left his wife behind in the City of Destruction, with his absence eventually encouraging her to follow him to the Celestial City, Saul would be following his wife.

The Glock was cool and smelled of oil. With one hand, he opened the glove compartment and shut the pistol inside, where it would stay, no matter how things turned out this morning. He fit the key into the truck ignition and fired up the engine, and something rattled in the truck bed behind him. It was the auger jiggling beside the gas can. His chest burned and his knees were hardening up.

Because his eye had drifted too close to the rifle scope, the recoil when he’d fired had sliced him just above the brow. Dirt had leapt behind the groundhog. The animal had dashed underground, and Walt had nearly tipped to his knees. “What a rookie mistake,” he’d bellowed.

Dabbing blood with his fingers, Saul had looked up: the reverend, ex-marine, knew a thing or two about rifles.

Clenching both fists and bending toward the steering wheel, Saul hammered his legs once before throwing his hands toward the dangling keys. He worked loose a tiny copper key, jammed it into the glove compartment lock, and kicked open the driver’s side door. He limped into the milk house office, where he placed the key onto an oily rag on the workbench.

Each house lining the street stood two or three stories, stone facades and copper or old-fashioned slate roofing. He passed a mail truck coasting along the ditch. The driver stuffed envelopes into boxes.

Crabapple trees lined the driveway of the house he wanted. They dropped apples that rotted in on themselves and yellowed the grass. They popped under his tires. Closer to the house clustered the black oaks. The air cooled and smelled of bitter undergrowth and beds of fallen leaves layering the ravined woods out back. No cars clogged the drive this time.

It was hard to breathe, and for a moment, he gripped the gear shift and stepped on the brake pedal to reverse. But he couldn’t. It was too late.

He shifted in the seat, shaking the whole truck, and fumbled for the door latch. He groaned, moving his legs from under the wheel and dash. His boots dangled out, and he skidded down to the asphalt and the burning ache in his knees splintered through his abdomen. His whole body lurched forward as he stumbled, swinging his shoulders back and forth.

Stone steps wound up to the door. He couldn’t climb them. His knees wouldn’t bend.

With his hands on his legs, he managed to mount a cut in the earth walling in the driveway and headed around the side of the house.

Chilly air wafted from the woods while heat radiated up from the grass. Birds twittered. Something moved behind the house.

A woman was kneeling in a plot of tilled soil and digging with a hand trowel. She wore sunglasses. They made her head look tiny because she’d also pulled her hair back in a tight, girl-like ponytail. She wore a T -shirt and jeans cuffed up past her ankles. She squatted, barefoot.

Saul shrank. He couldn’t move but watched and hoped, even after she stopped digging and looked up, that she wouldn’t notice. Light off her glasses, some silver band of the lenses, glared back a flash of sunlight as she jumped and faced him. She hesitated, then ran across the yard toward the back of the house.

I’m not your father, he thought of shouting. A door closed on its air-compressed hinge and rested, cracked open, until someone threw out a hand to yank it closed. Walt clicked the latch lock with his thumb. And just as Saul would’ve killed the coyote had it slunk under an opening in the graveyard fence, he would later think that Walt would have been justified if he’d seen his own threat through.

The reverend stood inside the house, shirtless as he’d gone while driving the tractor the summer before, and aimed a rifle at Saul’s chest. He wouldn’t fire, though what he was doing with Barbara was a kind of homicide. Saul, holding up his hands, hobbled away. With his knees that way, it was an excruciating walk back to the truck, and once he’d hauled himself back into the driver’s seat, his hands were quivering too much for him to get the keys from his pocket.

What they had back there, what they were doing, it was about arresting the end, with more than hidden keys stashed in oily rags or thumb-triggered door locks. Barbara, seeking burial, had found it here. Before driving away, he checked the glove compartment, but only once. This was his first visit. It was also his last. He knew the rules.

Justin Nicholes is the author of Ash Dogs (Another Sky), a Finalist in the First Novel category in the 2009 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. His stories have appeared in Karamu, SLAB, Slice, and The Medulla Review. He is a senior fiction editor at Our Stories and currently resides and studies kung fu in the Henan province of China. He recently completed two novels.