The Ploughmen: A Novel (6 page)

There was a long pause from Gload as though from his dark keep he might be reading the young man’s thoughts. His hand appeared to tip his ash into the bean can. Then he said, “Well, I must be boring too because I liked the farming. I liked it quite a little.” Into the light a blue billow rose and Millimaki watched it twist slowly toward the cracked and peeling ceiling invisible beyond the suspended fluorescents.

“Plowing, mostly. I had to get out of it when I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, but I’d done quite a little up to that time.” A hand appeared, tipped the ash, shifted the can a few inches nearer. “Had a favorite field, too.” Millimaki waited for him to go on but he did not. The cigarette glowed and Gload’s upshadowed face materialized from the darkness and vanished and smoke rolled out into the lighted corridor. Finally he said, “What about you, Deptee? One you come to like more than another one?”

He had never really thought about it, had merely gone where he’d been told and done what he’d been told and reveled in the earsplitting monotony and the reverie it provided. But now, surprisingly, seated in the dank corridor in the company of a killer, he saw his father’s arm extended, pointing like a weathervane east, west, north, as he named each day’s work—Schmidt section, McIver place, the Bluff parcel—patchwork rectangles delineated by spliced and respliced antique wire stapled to ancient cedar posts, acres that seemed miraculously to repel rain and to relegate his parents to a life of marginal poverty. He could recall them from the porch watching the gravid clouds veer and tack around them, christening the neighbors’ fields with rain while the wind at the storm’s fringe scoured the topsoil from their range and sent it aloft where it vanished into the heavens like an apparition.

One slanted parcel ran beneath a butte that had been a buffalo jump and the duckfoot plow each year turned up bones and teeth or an occasional arrowhead or scraping blade three hundred or five hundred or a thousand years old. From the rocky rims above they came thundering, to land broken and bellowing on the rocks below with their eyes rolling white and their tongues red in their red mouths and the women roamed among them with stone clubs and knives laughing in a welter of gore.

It had been a decade or more since he’d felt the big Minneapolis-Moline’s diesel rumble through his bones and thought about the buffalo cascading down screaming and he thought about that boy and about his loneliness. He said, “We had some winter wheat put in right under the butte. There was an old buffalo jump there and I used to think about them falling off of there when I was a kid.”

Millimaki shifted in his chair, crossed and uncrossed his legs. The old man waited. He had the advantage of seeing Millimaki clearly in the surgical light under which he sat and he observed reflected in the young man’s eyes a sudden distance more vast than the blank hallway down which he stared.

“Why, hell, don’t worry about it, kid. We’re just making talk.”

“I’d better do a walk-around,” Val said. “I’ll come back here in a bit.” He went down the aisle and out the sally door. In the office he stood and watched the clock, which seemed hardly to have changed since he’d last checked. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Minutes had become hours, hours become days. He watched the second hand creep slowly down the face to assure that the clock had not altogether frozen and the big hand with a savage click at last registered the minute.

He’d not had a chance to read the letter from his sister that had arrived the previous day and now he slipped it from among the meager contents of his lunch, where it had taken on the shape of an apple, and smoothed the pages atop his knee. Above him the jailer sat upon his high chair and seemed altogether lost in the book before him. A moth fluttered down brokenly from the sooty hanging globe light above the man’s head and it hovered near his face and alighted briefly on the book he held but he did not move. Millimaki stared at him for a moment then raised a hand and waved it in the air. Still he did not move and Millimaki realized he was asleep, his eyes protuberant and unwavering, gaudy with bruised flesh, eye-whites thatched with veins.

He opened the letter and read of his new niece and about life in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where his little sister’s husband was stationed, the letter chatty and loving and without substance. Though she was nineteen years old and a new mother, Millimaki still thought of her as a child. The words were written with large loops and backward slants, I’s dotted with hearts. In the end she sent her love and love from the infant he’d never seen and inscribed for him at the bottom of the page the X’s and O’s of a schoolgirl. So the PS she added hit him like a gut punch: “How old would Mom be now?”

Perhaps being a mother herself now set her thinking of the woman she’d hardly known—who could only be a shadow in her memory, a flicker of a face in profile, a hand in the tangle of her hair, a fragrance vaguely haunting. He both pitied and envied her. Her memories were fleeting and phantasmal, almost a dream of a mother, and so there was little to cherish. But she did not carry, either, the pain of loss.

Millimaki counted the years—their mother would be sixty years old, a middle-aged woman. But he never thought of her as any older than she was the day she died. When he thought of his parents together the picture that appeared was one more of father and daughter—one frozen in time, the other, dead now, too, worn and gray, beaten, his face hard and cracked as trace reins.

And then from this picture, another—his mother on the porch with one hand to her mouth, another to her throat as the rain blackened the sky to the east or south, watching like someone marooned as a ship beyond signal fire or semaphore plows doggedly on toward a far foreign shoreline, lush and safe.

The jailer in his catatonia stared down unblinkingly. Millimaki imagined the man’s eyes drying in their abysmal sockets and clattering out atop the desk. When he consulted his wristwatch he found that ten minutes had passed. Above his head the second hand on the wall clock crept glacially down, its ticks in the silence loud as bell tolls.

As though it were a monologue he had been uttering for hours into the dark without seam or interruption, almost before Millimaki had taken his chair John Gload began to talk again about farming. He told the young deputy that many nights, to combat sleeplessness, as a kind of self-trickery, he revisited a favorite field. He paused to light a cigarette from the smoldering butt of the last, which he dropped into the bean can. He stared after it as if it were of great interest to him. Then he corrected himself, said no, that’s not quite exactly right, it wasn’t tricking himself but tricking the insomnia, which he imagined as a palpable thing, a kind of shade or haunt that bent over him in his repose, passing rattling hand bones in the air above him to ward off the visitation of sweet slumber. It’s common knowledge that every child can sleep, he said. That they hadn’t learned how not to. But he had learned to hoodwink the leaning shape, to leave it standing bewildered above whatever bed he’d made or been given, by becoming once again John Gload the child, Gload the farmboy, whistling from the tractor seat in the sunshine of innocence on a brilliant day in a season that never changed in a year that could never be again.

“Not but twelve years old, running a John Deere 3020 and a thirteen-foot duckfoot,” he said. “Eight foot of disk and drills.” He said it wasn’t a particularly good field, in fact being much of it a sidehill it was rocky and dry and for that reason he found it gratifying that it could raise up anything at all. It had been put into barley but it wasn’t the satisfaction of any crop that seemed his anodyne but the clear remembrance of the view from the tractor seat as he rounded the field and in a kind of somnolent monotone, an echo perhaps of the monotony of the plowing itself, he described for the younger man, in panorama, what he could see yet—sandstone bluffs bewigged with ancient sage, the stone chimney of a honyocker’s cabin standing amid a rubble of rust-colored timbers, the pale green of a river bottom and then, on another turn, much farther, a serrated line which seemed some days mountains within a day’s easy walk and on others a mere brushstroke of blue on blue that may well have been a cloudbank or was perhaps nothing at all, a phantasm. Bluffs, chimney, bottomland, mountains—a strange soporific concocted out of days and months and years with duckfoot, disk and drill a half century before.

The field lay in the bed of some primordial sink or pothole, and on the outer passes, the tractor and plow rode perilously on the incline of the bowl and he was forced to put one foot against the fender to maintain balance, riding with a foot braced there and leaning uphill, as though his small weight would be the critical counterbalance against disaster. Beyond the outermost furrows was a den of foxes, the dark aperture facing south, and the young kits in those first warm days of spring would lie atop the mounded dirt and watch Gload unalarmed, when he came close lying low to the ground and then as though attached by invisible wires to the passing machine sit bolt upright when he had gone past, their outsized ears swiveling, small black noses sorting out the scent of a man, the scent of this other creature roaring and chugging and darkening the air with its perse breath.

And he told the deputy that the gulls began to arrive. They appeared first as minute white tufts against the green of the river trees and he turned and made a pass going away and then suddenly they were among the furrows behind the plow, as though like the soldiers of myth they sprang from the ground itself. He wondered how they found him and thought they may have followed the dust cloud or perhaps like wolves or hounds on a blood scent they could smell the new-turned earth. He threw the tractor into neutral and sat watching as the birds gorged themselves on tiny infant mice he had exposed from under small rocks and glistening worms as long as garter snakes, and crickets and partridge nestlings and even above the pothering of the engine he could hear the gulls scream. There seemed to be no communion among them. They fought over every mouthful, the most successful of them gagging down pieces that would have choked a hyena and in the chaos of screeches there were times it seemed they would set upon one another until one gruesome bird remained, engorged and wallowing through the furrows unable even to raise his bloodied wings to fly.

In the end he told Millimaki that that was how he was able to sleep, when he did sleep. He revisited the field as he lay in whatever darkness waiting for the blessing of that oblivion. In the memory he did not know if it was the same day or simply a day each time that was similar but the sun was bright overhead and unobscured and the den of foxes sat erect and regarded him with the same black eyes and like Harpies the seagulls came planing over the rim of the hills. The gulls were the only things that ruined the picture for him, with their rapacious mouths and their screaming, but they were as much a part of the memory as the plow or the field and he could not parse them out. He tried but they would not go and in the end if he could not sleep it was because of them.

“I close my eyes and put my foot on that one step and even that I can see plain as anything under my boot and then I just ride round and round. It don’t always work but it works better than anything else,” Gload said. His hand came down and he stubbed out another cigarette. His chair squawked as he rose and then all of him was in darkness. “I believe I’ll try it right now.” Shortly from his own chair beyond the cage bars Millimaki heard the slight musical complaint of the cot’s metal latticework and the rustle of clothes or bedding. All along the corridor a chorus of liquid snores, bizarre snatches of dialogue from the fevered drama of mens’ nightmares. Often the names of women, slurred and lubricious pleas for that sweet thing. Hushed fervent promises of violent lovely torment. Millimaki listened, the midnight congress between men and their ghosts in this place as conventional as a heartbeat. He held his wrist up toward the light to read his watch and was amazed to see that an hour had passed.

John Gload said, “Good night, Valentine. You might try my little trick next time you can’t sleep. In that field under the butte or wherever.” He had never told the old man his Christian name. He stood up and stared into Gload’s cage and then went slowly down the hallway, his shadow pooled about his boots.

John Gload counted the slow receding footfalls that had for him in that durance become the tickings of a clock, the regular mesh of gear on gear marking the order of time. He closed his eyes. But in a short time he realized that the gulls that night were particularly active, swarming behind his eyelids in a maelstrom of soiled feathers and beaks stained with gore. So he lay in the plot of darkness now allotted him in the world thinking about the woman who waited for him at home.

THREE

The morning following the night on the dam they drove east six hours to Rapid City to exchange for currency what they had earned from their labors: a trunkload of antique glassware. The young gay man they had kidnapped and murdered had inherited much of the collection and had added to it over a decade, never dreaming the seashell plates and fluted glasses so lovingly arrayed about his dead mother’s house where he lived yet would be the vehicles of his own death.

They drove the bright spring day in near total silence, the kid sleepy and still pouting from Gload having stuck a gun in his ear and the cold and quiet atmosphere suited the old man.

In Roundup they stopped to eat and the kid, revitalized at the prospect of food, flirted with the waitress. She was a girl of nineteen or twenty and White stared after her stout bare legs as she walked away.

He said, “How’d you like to have those clamped around yer ass?” Gload looked up from his paper briefly and looked back. “She’d about buck you off and that’s no shit,” the kid said.

When the girl came back with their platters, Sid looked up at her. Above her left breast was a tag with the name Jessy laboriously printed in childish block letters.

“Jessy,” Sid said. “Hey, now, what’s the name of the other one?” The girl set the plates down and looked over her shoulder.