Chapter 12
Morning on the Swickard farm had been clear, but the clouds had moved in all that day, and now that night was falling, it looked like rain.
When her husband suggested they have their after-dinner coffee on the porch, Ruth told him he must’ve been kicked in the head by the mule.
But Bill could nearly always sweet-talk her, so here she was, in a rocker on the porch with a cup of strong black coffee in her hands and a blanket over her shoulders.
When the wind swept across the porch, she shivered, but aside from that, Bill had been right—the rain held off.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Bill asked, sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair beside her rocker. “A lovely night.”
Ruth rolled her eyes. “Let’s not get carried away, mister. Those clouds look angry to me.”
Bill reached out and took her hand. Ruth stopped rocking and just sat beside him, their entwined fingers making a bridge of their arms, stretched between the two chairs.
The last of the daylight had turned the thick clouds on the horizon a blurred indigo.
The final traces of gray daylight faded into darkness while they sat contentedly.
A shudder passed through Ruth, and she released his hand to pull the blanket tighter around her neck. It felt as if all warmth had just bled out of the air.
“Call for Benjy, would you?” she asked. “Pretty dark tonight, and that rain is coming.”
Bill sipped his coffee. She didn’t like to make him get up, but she was so cozy in her blanket she didn’t mind being selfish for once. He’d put a little brandy in his coffee, so she figured the falling temperature wasn’t likely to bother him much.
“Sweetheart?” she nudged.
One more sip, and Bill set his mug down on the porch and hoisted himself from the chair. “On my way.”
A hard life, there on the farm, but times like this made Ruth feel it was all worthwhile.
They were tired but content. Bill had washed up the dishes.
They had a warm bed to crawl into that wouldn’t creak much when he wrapped his strong arms around her tonight, after Benjy fell asleep.
She loved the quiet, the breeze, the songs of the night birds.
What more did they need out here, the three of them, than one another?
“Benjy?” Bill called, hands cupped around his mouth. He’d stepped down from the porch and started to walk toward the field. “Time to come in, son!”
For a moment, there came no reply. A tremor of concern passed through her. That was just the way of mothers, Ruth knew. Benjy was fine. This was their farm, their land, and he knew it as well as she and Bill did.
His father called for him again, scanning the field and then looking east and west for any sign of the boy.
The fullness of night seemed to have descended so quickly.
This wasn’t like Benjy, but he was growing up.
It would be in a young boy’s nature to adventure a bit, to test the boundaries of his world and his father’s rules.
“Benjy, goddamn it!” Bill called, not angry yet, but on the verge of it.
Ruth heard the sliver of fear inside that anger. She set down her coffee, concern growing, and pulled the blanket tightly around her throat as she rose from her rocker and stepped off the porch.
“Bill, honey,” she began.
They both heard the sound, turning together to the east. Footfalls struck the dirt, headed toward them, along with an excited huffing. In the dark, it might’ve been anyone, but the footfalls were quick and light, and a mother knew her son.
“Momma, Pop, you gotta come take a look at this,” Benjy said. His face gleamed.
The boy radiated excitement, practically bouncing where he stood, but Bill’s worry had turned to irritation.
“Where were you, son? You know the rules.”
Benjy shook his head impatiently. “Pop, just come and take a look, would you? If you wanna be mad at me, hold on for five minutes.”
The boy grabbed his mother’s hand and began to tug her along. Ruth let herself be guided, quietly pleased. Whatever had piqued Benjy’s interest, most boys would have wanted to impress their fathers, but Ruth and her son had a bond. They were allies, always.
“Bill?” Ruth called back to her husband.
He sighed, shaking his head. “I’m coming.”
Bill Swickard could be gruff, but it was mostly make-believe, trying to set boundaries for his boy, raise him right. Ruth loved the kind heart that beat in his chest. It was the reason she’d married him.
Benjy raced across the shorn autumn cornfield, sure-footed in the dark.
He knew where the wilted stalks were thickest, where the groundhogs had dug a hole back in September.
Her boy could have found his way to that oak tree with his eyes closed.
It had planted its roots into his heart, and Ruth knew that no matter what happened, she and Bill had to make the farm thrive.
A lot of local kids, farmers’ children especially, couldn’t wait to leave home, but Ruth had a feeling about Benjy.
He would stick it out. Hard work never frightened him, and this place had become a part of him. Ruth felt lucky, and proud.
The night deepened and the moon brightened as they hastened across the cornfield. Ruth glanced at Bill and saw him shake his head as he ran, chuckling to himself. Benjy’s excitement made both of her men sweet.
“Boy’s got a lot of energy at the end of the day,” she said.
“Nice to be young.”
“We’re still young, honey.”
“Tell that to my back,” Bill muttered.
Benjy reached the tree well ahead of them. “Careful! The ground’s all broken up!”
They slowed to a walk. Ruth wished they’d thought to bring a flashlight.
As they approached the oak, she saw that Benjy’s words didn’t quite describe what had happened to the field around the base of the tree.
The ground had split open both north and south of the oak, producing a fissure on either side, but the level of the ground around that crack in the earth had also risen—or the rest of the farm had sunk a little.
And it wasn’t just the ground. The tree had split in two, not from any lightning bolt but from whatever violent underground upheaval had taken place.
Droplets of rain began to fall.
“I’ll be damned,” Bill said, slightly bent as he began investigating the fissure.
“I told ya!” Benjy crowed. His hands flapped as he gestured around him. “I mean, look at it.”
Ruth gazed sadly at the oak, surprised that Benjy didn’t seem to share her grief.
They’d had so many wonderful hours climbing that tree, picnicking beneath it, playing make-believe.
But he was more fascinated by the method of its destruction than disappointed by the fact of it.
Perhaps it would strike him later what had been lost, but she didn’t want to put her sadness on him. Maybe his approach was best.
“What do you suppose caused it, Bill?” she said.
“Don’t you guys get it?” Benjy cried. “There’s something underneath! You can even see it!”
Fat drops of rain, cold as ice, touched her neck and cheeks and hands.
Ruth walked around the oak from one side and Bill from the other, careful of the broken ground.
For the first time, she noticed the smell of turned earth, but beneath that odor lay another.
She thought of her grandmother’s house, and the summer rats had built a nest in the kitchen wall and died there.
This stink wasn’t as strong as that had been, but the memory combined with the lingering trace in the air made her recoil.
Her stomach turned sour, and she halted her steps.
“What is it?” Bill asked.
“You don’t smell it?”
“It smells disgusting!” Benjy announced happily. It was all part of the excitement for him.
Ruth laughed. “Boys.”
But the laugh, and her smile, were false. The odor had punctured her happiness, and she felt off balance and wary.
She spoke her husband’s name, but perhaps too quietly, because Bill didn’t seem to hear. He reached the fissure that led out from the north side of the tree and crouched.
“Ruth, come and take a look at this. What do you make of it?” he said.
Her feet wouldn’t move any closer. Ruth had to shake off the wariness that had taken hold, but somehow she could only watch Bill, not wanting to be any nearer.
Only when Benjy beckoned her, urging her on with the bobbing of his head, did she succeed.
Benjy stood on one side of the fissure and Bill on the other, and Ruth spotted the thing that had drawn their attention before she’d even reached them.
It gleamed in the dark, blue and white like marble or maybe mother-of-pearl.
Beads of rain landed and then slid across its surface.
“What the hell is that?” she whispered, surprised to find her voice making words.
Near the base of the oak where the ground had heaved and split, something had emerged, pushing up from below like the largest poison mushroom in the world.
What she could see jutted up from the hump in the field by about six inches, but in the furrow down in the dirt, it appeared at least three feet long.
Part of the thing appeared to be thick roots from the oak that merged with it. Again she thought of a mushroom.
Bill reached down to touch it.
“Don’t,” Ruth said.
He flinched at the urgency in her voice and glanced up, his fingers less than a foot from the surface of the thing. “Some kinda root or fungus, I guess.”
“Don’t touch it. Leave it till morning and we’ll get Russ Bornstein out here.” Bornstein was another farmer, but he’d studied botany.
Benjy walked over to the ruined tree and put one hand on the bark, leaning over to look down at the thing. “You think it’s poisonous?”
“Get back from there,” Bill told him. “Your momma’s right. We’ll have another look in the morning, and after this storm passes.”