The station had signed off the air and now the empty, flickering screen was bleeding a numb stain of blue light into the darkness of the living room. The sound of rain on the roof, the gurgle of drain pipes discharging water from their throats masked the faint electrical buzz of the television set but did not disturb the two sleepers in the room.
Tonight was professional wrestling, scheduled after the late-night roundup of local news, sports, and weather. Daniel and his grandfather never missed it. The old man egged on the villains in their treachery and pretended to dismiss any possibility of fakery, or the fix. “You can’t tell me that one of those flying leaps off a turnbuckle down onto a man lying defenceless doesn’t do damage,” he would argue.
Daniel, still blind to instances of his grandfather’s irony, would attempt to reason with him. The old man got a kick out of seeing him so serious. “But that’s exactly my point. Don’t you see what I’m getting at? If it wasn’t fixed, if it wasn’t acting, somebody would get killed.”
“Maybe an ordinary man would. But we’re not dealing with ordinary men here. We’re talking blond negroes. Now a blond negro has already defied one law of nature. No reason he can’t do it a second time and survive somebody leaping down on him off a turnbuckle.”
It was really only the sport of arguing that kept them awake, not the wrestling, and after what had happened earlier that evening neither of them had had their hearts in arguing. So they had fallen asleep. Stretched out on the chesterfield Daniel lay closest to the source of light emitted by the television screen. The wavering blue light gave him the face of a boy sunk senseless in six feet of water. Across the room his grandfather slumped in an armchair, dressed incongruously in striped grey flannel pyjamas, plaid carpet slippers, and his straw fedora.
Because he had worn the hat to the supper table there had been a dust-up with Vera. She had understood it as a provocation. That was the word she had used. He hadn’t meant anything by it. He had simply forgot. He was still forgetting the hat even with them living in the house.
She had got on her high-horse, as only Vera could, and spoke of deliberate rudeness, his lack of consideration. He hadn’t had the slightest clue of what she was talking about when she started in on him. “All I ask is that we eat in a semi-civilized manner. You wear that goddamn dirty hat to the table as a provocation, don’t you? Admit it.”
“I don’t have nothing to admit.”
That had started the donnybrook. Hot-tempered as she’d always been, Vera flew off the handle after a couple of exchanges and made a snatch for the offending article, tried to pull off his hat. He had thrown up his arm and knocked her hand away. It was instinct.
“Keep your hands to yourself, girl,” he had warned her, with an old man’s angry dignity.
“Mother may have tolerated eating with a boor in a hat,” she said, “but I’ll be damned if I will.”
It was her daring to bring Martha into it, in the same breath with the hat. “Be damned then,” he said.
Wasn’t it just like her to refuse to take her meal at the table with him? And to insist the boy be her hostage in the living room, the both of them eating with plates on their laps? He knew Daniel hadn’t wanted to join her. She had had to call him twice, in that certain tone of voice, before he finally got up and reluctantly went into the other room with his glass of milk and plate. He was a good boy. He had told himself that it was as much for the boy as himself that he paraded around for the rest of the evening in the hat. He had wanted to show him that everybody didn’t have to wave the white flag where Vera was concerned. Where the hell did that girl get off, telling him what he could and couldn’t do in his own house? She had no business grabbing things from him as if he was a sugar-tit sucking baby. Making him eat alone. He supposed she thought that was some terrible punishment being denied her company for a supper. At least he had eaten in peace.
The old man had begun to stir in his sleep. His massive head, which hung down from his neck like one of the sunflowers in his garden heavy with seed and drooping on its stalk, wobbled. His hands twitched and fumbled on the arms of his chair, opening and closing. Faster and faster the fingers curled and straightened, curled and straightened, until suddenly they shot out rigid and with a sharp, wordless cry Monkman snapped forward in his chair, eyes wide.
He stared into the screen of the television, blue, cold as the ice of the dream from which he had just surfaced. He heard the sound of water trickling in his head. Awake, he was still half-suspended in the chill, watery dark of the dream. Then he realized that the sound of water in his head was the sound of rain, the first in over a month. He passed his hand clumsily over his face and smiled for the sake of the parched garden, smiled to remember it was summer and really there was no ice.
The smile faded when he recalled what the boy had confessed to him. “Mom asked me to find out something from you,” Daniel had announced after Vera had gone to bed and they were alone with their wrestling.
“What’s she want to know now?”
“She wants to know where Uncle Earl is. She said you’d never tell her just to spite her, but she said you might tell me if I got around you right.” The boy looked painfully guilty. “I don’t know. It sounded like spying or something the way she wanted me to do it. I thought if I just came out and asked you straight – that would be better.”
“I don’t know where Earl is,” he had answered. “Tell your mother that.”
With the cold of the dream present in him, more than anything he wanted to talk, wanted to wake the boy. But that would not be fair. He has learned that dreams ought to stay dreams to the young. Nobody ought to show them different. And he cannot allow himself to become a beggar, going crawling to Vera. Having people in the house was supposed to make it easier, instead it had become harder.
Which left Stutz.
To avoid rousing the boy and questions he went as he was, turning on only the kitchen light to find a coat. He stood blinking under the unshaded bulb, wrinkled pyjama legs sagging beneath his overcoat, sockless feet sloppy in slippers, fedora tamped down until it bit his scalp. Then he stepped out into the rain. The abrupt passage from the glare of electric light to utter night left him blinded. It was only prudent to stand and wait for his eyes to adjust. Rain beat down on the stiff crown and brim of his hat, creating an unholy racket, like hail on a tin roof.
For the first time he considered what the hour might be. It had to be well past two. Stutz would be in bed. In his day Alec had knocked on his share of doors early in the morning but carrying a bottle had insured a welcome. What could he carry to Stutz who hated and despised bottles? Corn. Stutz went weak for corn on the cob. Alec had been promising him a feed of sweet corn as soon as it was ripe. Wouldn’t Stutz gawk when he opened his door to a man with his arms stacked with cobs? “Get the glue on your dentures, Stutz,” he’d say, “look what we got here!”
Even after his eyes started to allow for the darkness he couldn’t make out much with the sky overcast, the moon and stars cloaked in cloud. The corn patch had already grown above the height of a man and in among the stalks it was black as Lazarus’s tomb. He picked by feel, running his hands up the plants until they met with an ear to be pinched and measured and judged by his fingers as to plumpness and readiness for eating. Jesus wet work he swore it was, too, puddles standing between the rows and the gumbo sucking the slippers off his feet with every step he took, the long blades of the leaves laying a slash of damp on him wherever they brushed and all the while the rain pissing down for all she was worth. But at last his arms were full, his pyjama legs soddenly clinging to his legs, and he blundered out of the corn patch and into the road, bound for Stutz’s house. The journey had a fugitive, furtive air. Whenever he passed under a streetlight where the rain descended in gleaming, silver lines so straight they appeared to have been drawn with a ruler’s edge, Alec broke into an anxious shuffle and hunched low over his burden. What might people think if they recognized him toting corn through the streets in his sleeping costume?
Plenty of banging and hollering finally raised a light inside the house and, some time later, brought Mr. Stutz to the back door, his usual deliberate self.
“Aren’t you the drowned rat?” was his only remark as he swung wide the door. “Hurry up now and get yourself out of that.”
Inside, spilling water from the brim of his hat down onto a small braided rug that Stutz had steered him to, Alec pondered what it would take to rattle Mr. Stutz. It was evident from the careful way he was dressed – shirt buttoned to the collar, suspenders hooked – that he had been in no particular rush to learn the reason for all the commotion at his door so early in the morning. Everything in good time. Another thing, he hadn’t acknowledged the corn piled in Alec’s arms which was already scenting the kitchen with its sweet, green smell.
“This corn’s for you,” the old man said abruptly. “It’s picked fresh.”
Stutz began to scold him, ignoring the corn. “Look at you,” he said, fetching a tea-towel which had been neatly hung on the door of the woodstove to dry, “you’ve gone and got yourself wet feet. Kick them slippers off,” he ordered, going down on his knees, “and let me give those feet a rub with a warm, dry towel. An old fellow like you – why the cold can climb right up your legs and settle in your kidneys. A kidney complaint is no laughing matter your age. You catch cold in your kidneys, then where’ll you be?” he asked, vigorously towelling the blue-veined feet naked on the braided rug.
“Try and leave some skin on,” said Monkman, resentful at being spoken to in this way. “And don’t forget I’m standing here with an armful of corn.”
“You can put it in the sink when I’m finished,” said Mr. Stutz, grunting like a shoeshine boy. “Right now I’m trying to work some colour into these feet of yours. They’re white as snow, bless me.”
While Stutz chafed his feet, Alec stared down at the creases crosshatching the back of his neck. It occurred to him that Stutz wasn’t a young man anymore either. Time flies, as the man said. Yet he could remember as if it were yesterday the afternoon almost fifteen years ago that Mr. Stutz presented himself without warning at the garage and laid a claim on the job. He had acted as if it was his for the taking. It was in the week before Christmas, in the twilight of a short winter’s day threatening storm, that this large man carrying a cheap suitcase had appeared in the back of the shop, his shoulders dusted with snow. Earl and he had looked up from the bucket where they were rinsing gaskets, expecting that the man was a traveller who had hit the ditch and wanted a tow. Instead, he said he had come to take the job advertised in The Western Producer. He could start Monday.
At first he had been leery about Mr. Stutz. Stutz was fairly young, looked fit, and wanted a job that nobody else had bothered to apply for. Immediately he had suspected a conscript on the run. Also, his last name, Stutz, sounded German. He had asked him point-blank, “You ain’t by any chance dodging your call-up, are you? Because I don’t want no involvement with the bulls.”
“Not me,” said Stutz, “I only got one eye. The left one’s glass.”
So he had read it as cockiness. But cocky or not he had had to hire him with a war on and a labour shortage. It took him a week or two before he changed his mind and gave it another name than cocky. Sincerity. Yes, there had been something about the bugger. He had introduced himself as Mr. Stutz and it stuck. In the back of the garage on that snowy afternoon he hadn’t troubled to try and sell himself, only waited unruffled and patient for his answer, suitcase hanging on the end of his arm. Take me, or leave me, his face said.
It was Earl, always deathly shy around strangers, who had helped him decide. He spoke to the man. He said, “It was me wrote out the ad for the paper. Dad says I write a clearer hand than him.” Earl had seemed to be laying a claim for some of the credit in bringing the stranger to Connaught.
Suddenly Monkman heard himself saying what he had only meant to think. “Earl’s been on my mind a lot lately. I think it’s because of Vera’s boy.”
Mr. Stutz rose, groaning, from his knees. “I can take that corn off your hands now,” he said.
As the ears thudded on the sink bottom, Alec suggested, “If you got a pot of water on the boil now we could strip a few ears and have them at the pink of perfection.”
Mr. Stutz was the only man capable of discomforting Alec Monkman with a single glance. He discomforted him now. “It’s three o’clock,” he said severely. “I eat corn at three o’clock and it’d have me up and on the toilet before six.”
“Corn was intolerant of Earl the same. But he couldn’t stay away from it or tomatoes. Tomatoes were the hives though. All summer long his mother used to have to watch him. He’d steal corn out of the garden; he’d sneak out with the salt shaker and eat tomatoes warm off the vines. Ate the corn raw and nearly shit himself silly. The boy never had a trace of sense.”
“Now you go easy,” warned Stutz, “or you’ll work yourself into a state again. Remember what I told you before? You got to accept your part in it, Alec, but nobody can say how big that part is. And your part isn’t all of it neither.”
Monkman did not appear to notice what was being said to him. “Vera wants to know where he is. She’s set the boy to spying on me.”
“You know what I think. I’ve told my opinion before.”
“And if I told her, what then? That girl’s flint. I always meant to – when we settled our differences. But I can’t even get forgiveness where I don’t see I done any wrong. You tell me what I did that was so terrible? Asked her to stop at home and take care of her brother. Most girls would have jumped at the chance of such an easy life, keeping house for a man and a boy. She didn’t have enough work to keep her busy half the day, always smoking cigarettes and drinking Cokes with her friends in the Chinaman’s. That’s suffering? Most girls that age would have been beside themselves to be free as a bird, a regular allowance to spend as they liked – plus what she stole from housekeeping. The way she milked me she could have been rich as a princess in a few years.
“And I wouldn’t have asked her to do it but for Earl. He needed somebody after his mother passed away. Him going on about hearing Martha moving around the house when he was alone; I figured that for wishful thinking out of loneliness. So I wanted her there at home for him because he was high-strung, high-strung from a baby up. He always showed it.
“And now she wants to know where he is? Did she ever think she’s got no right? Because she walked out on her brother, didn’t she? I’m not just talking about the Army and the war, but after, too. Because didn’t she disappear on him? After the war he never got a letter from her. You think that didn’t upset him? You’re goddamn right it did. No letter until the one she sent to announce she’d got married and that one was too late, he never got it. So sure he was upset. People disappearing on him left and right – his mother, his sister. No wonder he hung on my heels like a stray pup, probably afraid I was going to vanish into thin air on him, too, I suppose. You remember how that was, Stutz? We couldn’t turn ourselves around without bumping into him or tripping over him. He wouldn’t let us out of his sight.”
“His company was no trouble. He was always a pleasant boy.”
“Sure he was a pleasant boy. But you wasn’t the one responsible for him was you? You didn’t have to get him to some point of usefulness, did you?”
“That’s true. It wasn’t me who was responsible.”
“I mean, how long was I supposed to let him continue on that way? Isn’t it natural for a boy his age to want his independence? Instead, he had to trail around after us. Christ, he could’ve been taken for simple. It had to stop. The boy had to make himself suitable, had to find his place. And I tried him every place, didn’t I, Stutz? I gave him his chances, didn’t I?”
“Alec, nobody could ever say you didn’t have his interests at heart.”
“The boy graduated high school and he couldn’t meet the train on time with the dray. He run the projector fine if I was there to watch him but as soon as I left he burned the film on the bulb, or didn’t thread it right, or ripped it to ribbons. All he wanted to do was hang around the garage with us. The boy finished school and all he wanted to do was pass his father tools. He’d have been content to pass me tools the rest of his life if I’d have let him.”
“He done a beautiful job with the garden though. He made you a beautiful garden, Alec.”
Briefly, Monkman’s face lit with pleasure at the praise of his son. “By Jesus, yes,” he agreed. “Earl could garden. That’s what gave me the idea for the farm. A grown man can’t be a gardener but he can be a farmer, can’t he? What’s a farm but a big fuck of a garden? Make him a farmer, I thought.”
He had determined to see it done. A farmer needed a farm, so Alec had bought one; the farm he still owned and Marker rented. It had been a weedy half-section the bank had foreclosed on early in the thirties and since then had installed a series of improvident tenants on. When Alec had made them an offer the bankers had been quick to accept and rid themselves of a load of care and trouble. Alec bought cheap, the way he seemed to get whatever he wanted now that his luck had changed. He had to take a mortgage on the theatre but that didn’t cause him to lose any sleep. Cattle and grain prices were strong and Alec believed that the farm could pay for itself. Along with the 320 acres of land came an assortment of ramshackle, second-hand implements and a small house that was in decline but still reasonably comfortable. Only one thing more was necessary. In the spring Monkman engaged a hired man named Dover to help work the place and teach Earl farming. Nevertheless, when he proposed his plan to Earl, his son had resisted.
“I don’t know if I want to be a farmer.”
“Of course you don’t – until you give her a whirl, give her a try. That’s all I’m asking – that you try.”
“What if you need me here in town?”
“What would I need you for? Stutz and I will manage. What I want to see is you managing too, on your own.”
All he wanted was his son to learn self-reliance, that was what was behind the exiling of Earl. He explained it to him at length, so that the boy would know why he demanded it of him.
“The time has come for you to show you can stand on your own two feet. Dover’s going to take you to the farm and see you stick to it. Don’t come making your way back to town every couple of days because you’re homesick, either. Maybe I’ll just put it to you this way. Don’t bother showing your face around here again until you’ve raised a crop. I mean it, Earl. If somebody has to come to town for groceries, or fuel, or parts, or whatever, let it be Dover. By September we’ll have you weaned of this nonsense and a man. I think me and Mr. Stutz ought to stay clear, too. No visits until you’ve finished your work, done the job you’ve been put out there to do. But the day you’ve got a crop ready to cut, send us word, Earl, and we’ll be there to admire what you done with bells on, me and Mr. Stutz. None gladder to offer you congratulations and shake your hand. That’s going to be my dessert the end of summer, to see the crop my boy raised.”
There were times when the temptation had been very great to disregard his own rules, jump in the truck, and pay Earl a visit. He missed the boy a good deal, missed his presence in the house, found himself still glancing over his shoulder to locate him when he stepped back to survey a piece of work finished in the garage. However, he curbed his desire and relied on what Dover would report when the hired man made his trips to town. The difficulty was Dover wasn’t much of a talker. This was the result of having lived most of his life as a hired man in the midst of families he longed to be a part of, yet upon whom he had no right to lay any claims of affection. It had been a queer twilight sort of existence and it had taught him that what was not his to receive, was not his to give either. He grew to be a frighteningly detached and disinterested man. A lank sixty year old who became drier and sparer with every passing season that brought him nearer to the end of his working days, he volunteered nothing to anybody. An employer had once characterized him as the sort of fellow who wouldn’t warn you if you were about to step backwards off a cliff because it wasn’t any of his business, what you wanted to do. “Mind your own business,” was Dover’s practical motto. In his travels over the years, in and out of dozens of farmhouses, Dover had encountered his share of peculiar situations and peculiar types. He had learned to pretend, along with the rest of the family, that whatever was going on was perfectly normal and usual. Living alone on the farm with the boy caused him no grief. He was a quiet, polite, clean boy. If Monkman wanted to ask questions he would answer them but he wouldn’t draw conclusions for him.
“So how’s my boy? You turning him into a farmer?”
“Getting there, getting there,” Dover would allow, sliding his eyes from one thing to another in the shop, never looking Monkman directly in the face.
“And Earl’s working? He’s working hard?” Laughing, “Tell him if he isn’t, he’ll have to dig the toe of my boot out of his arse.”
“No complaints there,” Dover had said slowly, “but the boy seems to have work and weather confused. Seems to think that just hard work’ll allow him to take his crop off a month earlier than anybody else. I tell him it doesn’t quite work that way, you can’t trick the seasons. I tell him save your hurry for what can be hurried, growing can’t. But he doesn’t listen to me when I give him the facts.”
“Oh, he just wants to prove himself,” Alec had said, feeling a flutter of gratification. “Wants to show his old man what he can do.”
“Pity the horses then,” Dover had remarked dryly.
“How’s that, ‘Pity the horses’?”
If it hadn’t been for the sake of the beasts, Dover wouldn’t have complained. “He’s been driving the horses too hard, won’t give them their rest. Yesterday night he didn’t come in for supper. I held it until nine and then I went out to the field to see if he’d had an accident. He was still working. I took the horses away on him, unhitched them from the harrows and took the lines out of his hands. He didn’t want to give them up even though they were played-out, stumbling. I said to him, ‘Work yourself as you please, but these poor dumb creatures aren’t volunteers. They need rest and feed.’ ”
“That was the thing to do,” Alec had hurriedly approved, “that was right. You got to remember he’s a town boy and it’s all new to him. It’s just that he doesn’t know horses, hasn’t had the experience. Now Earl, he’d be the last boy to ever willingly mistreat an animal; he was born with a heart of gold. It was all ignorance on his part with the horses, I’m sure.”
After that, Dover had kept his peace until the end of July when he suggested to his employer that Earl might benefit from a visit home. “Maybe you ought to ask your boy home for a Sunday dinner. He don’t seem to care for my cooking and he can’t keep working the way he’s been if he don’t eat. I can’t seem to force hardly anything into him.”
“It won’t be long now,” Alec had said. “In a couple of more weeks the crop’ll be ready and I’ll give him a dinner he won’t soon forget. The boy and I had an agreement. A little rough cooking’s not going to harm him. Tell him to eat what’s on his plate.”
In the third week of August the hired man arrived in town with the news that the crop was ready to cut. For days Alec had been anxiously awaiting the announcement, knowing the time was drawing near. He felt a great spill of relief. His gentle boy had done it. They both had weathered it. Now it was over.
Nevertheless, Alec allowed none of this relief and excitement to be betrayed to the man who stood drab and still in the garage, waiting for orders as he had all his life.
“Tell Earl that me and Mr. Stutz’ll be out after work,” Alec said. Already he was planning. He would take a bottle with him to the farm so that the three of them, Earl, Dover, and himself could pass it back and forth among them as they looked with satisfaction on the crop and what had been accomplished. The start of the celebration. Had Earl and he ever had a drink, man to man?
Dover shuffled his boots on the oil-stained cement. “Earl’ll expect you sooner,” he said apologetically. “To tell the truth, the boy is a little like the convict standing waiting for the prison gate to open. He’s got it in mind I’ll bring you straight back with me. He kind of made me promise.”
Alec was torn. He wanted to succumb, throw up everything and go to his boy, but it would have ruined the sense of occasion. It would have felt too slapdash and hasty and undignified. Besides, Stutz wasn’t in and he wanted him to share in Earl’s success. The answer he gave Dover was abrupt. “I’ve things to do. Tell Earl we’ll be out after supper.”
When Stutz suggested they break off unloading a box car of coal at six o’clock because if they didn’t, the light would be gone before they reached the farm, Alec balked as he had with Dover. He felt, obscurely, that to abandon the job unfinished would be admission of a weak and shameful lack of control on his part. He insisted they complete the work, sure there was time to spare.
There wasn’t. Mr. Stutz was proved correct. As they pulled out of Connaught it was necessary to switch on the headlights of the truck. In the west the sky was a sheet of cold ash from which was wrung some pale colour – a few streaks of salmon and gold cloud captured between the decisive black line of the horizon and the leaden weight of sombre grey sky above. When Alec and Mr. Stutz finally bumped into the farmyard, the lights behind the clouds had gone out and night had truly fallen, dense, dark, still.
The memory of stillness awakened Alec to the stillness now in Stutz’s kitchen. He realized that neither he nor Stutz had spoken for many minutes. Stutz sat with his hands on his knees, waiting patiently for him to resume speaking. Alec dredged his mind, striving to recall what his last words about Earl had been. Turning him into a farmer, he thought.
He lifted his eyes from the floor to Stutz’s impassive face. “You remember the night we drove out to see Earl’s wheat?” he asked. Somehow it was less of a question than a declaration of preoccupation.
“Yes,” said Stutz, “I do. Same as you.”
It was Dover who had greeted them swinging a kerosene lamp from side to side, sweeping back the night and lighting himself the broadest possible path.
“Where’s Earl?” Alec had immediately demanded, unable any longer to restrain his eagerness.
“Earl? I believe Earl’s deserted his post. Maybe you seen the kitchen chair by the farm gate when you drove up? No? Well, he carried a chair down there after I come back from town this morning and ever since he’s been sitting there, waiting on you. Didn’t take my word that you wouldn’t be here until after supper. Just sat there with the sun beating down on him – damnedest thing. I coaxed but he wouldn’t come into the house to take a meal. Was afraid he’d miss you, I guess. It’s the only day he hasn’t done any work since he’s been here. And then, after all that waiting, he spots your lights on the approach and up he gets and makes off that way,” Dover had said, indicating direction with the lantern, the light flaring yellow-white on his face as he lifted his arm, “towards his wheat.”
Alec had not been able to disguise his surprise. “He’s been sitting out all day? Down by the gate?”
“Down by the gate since eleven o’clock this morning. As I say, I tried to get him in but he wouldn’t budge.”
“And what did he have to say for himself?”
“What does he ever have to say for himself? Nothing, that’s what. He didn’t bother about me more than he would a fly.”
“Maybe,” Alec had speculated uneasily, “maybe he took off for the field and we’re supposed to follow. Maybe he wants to show off the crop. Notwithstanding…”
“Notwithstanding it’s dark,” Mr. Stutz had said, completing his thought for him.
So the three of them had set off to find Earl, Dover lighting the way with his lamp, Mr. Stutz and Alec on either side of him shouting Earl! to the darkness and giving anxious pause for an answer. None came. Each interval of waiting was silent except for the sound of breathing, the dry whisper of dusty grass brushing boots and pants cuffs, the burble of the whisky bottle shaken in Alec’s coat pocket. Each time they shouted his name and received no reply their pace quickened.
“When I first seen it, I had no idea what it was,” said Mr. Stutz, shifting on his chair. “No clue at all.”
“You took hold of me by the shoulder and pointed,” recalled Alec. “You asked, ‘What’s that there?’ ”
“And you said, ‘Fireflies.’ ”
“That’s what I took it for. It’s what it resembled to me, sparking on and off like that.”
“I knew it couldn’t be fireflies. Not so late in summer. Not so big and bright at a distance.”
“I didn’t think of the time of the year. It looked like fireflies to me. Flickering, blinking like that.”
“I suppose the breeze was blowing them out. He was in the open, on higher ground, and there you always catch a breeze.”
“And with us calling out, he knew we were near. He could hear us coming.”
“Sure he could. And see us, too, when we came to the fence and Dover held the lamp up over his head to cast a beam far as possible.”
“He’d have made us out, all three crowded underneath the lantern. Would have seen our faces, too. He wasn’t more than a hundred yards off.”
“A hundred yards off,” echoed the old man, “striking matches in a bone-dry crop.”
The small patch of brightness had taken hold so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that neither mind nor eye could comprehend it. For an instant the three of them had only been able to recognize a glow of agitation, something shuddering and vibrating like a swarm of bees in the black distance.
Mr. Stutz put the name to it. “Fire,” he said.
All three men strained forward at the word, the top wire of the fence squealing and bending as they leaned upon it tensely. A wind had fluttered up behind their bowed backs and ran past them out into the field and night. It was like the long drawing of a sick, fretful breath. Alec heard the dark mass of grain rattle and shiver and sensed the heads of the wheat dipping and plunging before it, the wave rippling out to break upon the fire. It rooted him to the spot.
And when that wave dashed itself against the flames, the fire popped explosively, like a flare on a night battlefield, and there stood Earl waist-deep in the wheat, awash in a hot yellow, shaking light, smoke rising from the grain surrounding him like morning mist steaming up from a marsh.
“I never seen anything catch so fast in my life,” said Mr. Stutz. “I wonder that the heat of it didn’t make him run for it.”
“I wonder,” said Monkman.
Because Earl did not run, even though the heat caused him to flinch, to turn away his face toward the three men hanging on the fence. The boy might have been blind or deaf. He gave no sign he saw them there, beckoning desperately, or heard the two of them shouting Run! while the third gripped the strand of wire and stared. Earl did not move, except to draw up his shoulders against the searing heat which pounded his back and caused him to wobble as he stood his ground. Plunged to his hips in the crop, shrinking into himself, he had looked very small to Mr. Stutz and Dover, smaller still to his father. Perhaps the great flapping curtain of greasy smoke which had gone roaring up into the sky at his back had made him seem more so – a poor, lost actor without lines to speak, made to occupy and hold a stage with nothing but his face, his hands, his eloquent silence.
In scarcely a minute the curtain had risen to such a height as to overwhelm him, a drapery of grey and white smoke flecked red and orange with bits of burning awns and chaff. The three men’s eyes followed it as it climbed into the night sky, swaying and billowing, blowing and sinking, its hem ragged, licked with fire. Their eyes were still on it when they felt the air tug about them as the blaze made of itself a firestorm, a whirlwind. The sudden convulsion ripped the curtain to rags and sparks, a violent updraught flung a spray of sparks higher and higher until they showered down about Earl and spattered the crop with more dark red poppies of fire.
Like his son, Monkman did not move. Did not move when the wire sagged and shrieked under his hands as Mr. Stutz flung himself over it. Did not move as in a fiery, smoky dream he watched Stutz run heavily forward, lurching as he panted through the wheat and over the hidden stones which twisted his ankles and wrung his knees, beating on to where Earl waited, face tight and gleaming, ringed by a dozen new patches of fire whose edges were running together and offering up a thin blue haze.
“I never lifted a hand to help, did I?” said Alec to Stutz. “It wasn’t me that went into the fire. It was you.”
“I told you before,” said Mr. Stutz, “it was shock. Thinking he was going to burn put you in shock.”
“He saw me stand at the fence,” the old man muttered. “That’s what he took away with him, me at the fence.”
“He didn’t take anything away with him,” Mr. Stutz assured him. “Don’t forget I was there. The boy had nothing in his mind. He had nothing whatsoever in his mind.”
“It’s not then I’m speaking of,” said Monkman.