Ashes (28 page)

"But what about—" Jerp knew he was going to
sound like a whimpering little city boy. He gulped and finished,
"What about breakfast?"

"We see to the animals first. You know that."
Grandpa juddered his head as he drew up to spit again. Jerp nodded
and turned, walking to the corncrib with feet as heavy as
International Harvesters. He heard Grandpa teasing the sow out in
the barnyard. Jerp put a trembling hand on the latch.

He turned the latch and the door creaked
open. Rats and their shadows scurried for the corners, their
rustling making them sound as big as bobcats. He looked under the
stairs that led to the hayloft, searching the darkness for
movement. At first he saw only rotted pieces of harness and a
broken cross-saw blade, its teeth reddened with age. Then he saw
the scarecrow sitting among the sun-bleached husks. A smile
stitched itself across the faded face. The scarecrow was looking at
Jerp as if one of them was a mirror, with eyes as flat as old
coins.

It was the boy in the barn, the one he had
tried to tell Grandpa about. The one he had seen many times from
his bedroom window, through the fog his breath had made on the
glass. The scarecrow boy that had swayed like a sheet on a
clothesline, its skin glowing sickly in the dark loft. The
scarecrow boy that had stared from the barn window as if knowing it
was being watched. The scarecrow boy that looked as if it were
waiting.

But it's not
real
, Jerp told himself as he reached down
to the grooved skin of the corn husks.
The
scarecrow boy is not there if you don't see it.

Jerp tried not to look under the stairs, even
though the sweat was coming now and his eyes strained toward the
corners of their sockets and the sunlight wasn't pouring fast
enough through the cracks between the siding planks.

Had it moved? No, it was only a pile of old
crumbling rags. Rotten cloth and straw never hurt nobody, just like
Grandpa had said. Even though Jerp had seen the scythe of its
smile. He gathered an armful of corn to his chest and ducked back,
slamming the crib door shut with his foot and elbowing the latch
into place.

Jerp's heart hammered in his
ears as he shucked the corn and rubbed the grains loose with his
thumbs. The kernels fell like golden teeth, and the chickens
gathered around his feet, pecking at the grommets of his boots. He
was trying to tell himself he
hadn't
seen the boy in the barn. That
the scarecrow boy
wasn't
wearing a ragged flannel shirt and jeans with holes in the
knees. It
didn't
have skin as white as raw milk and eyes that glimmered with a
hunger that even biscuits and hamfat gravy wouldn't ease, nor was
its hair as black as a crow nor its teeth as green as stained
copper. It
hadn't
sat there through the frozen night, chattering until whatever
served as its bones worked themselves loose.

It had to be a straw puppet, tossed in the
corner until growing season. Only weeds and fabric. Only a
scarecrow. But Grandpa didn't use scarecrows.

"Scarecrows are for the birds," Grandpa had
said. He used pie pans on strings and shotgun blasts and bait laced
with battery acid to drive away the magpies and crows. He said
every scarecrow he'd ever put out had been covered in droppings by
the end of the afternoon. As far as Grandpa was concerned, all a
scarecrow did was provide a shady picnic area for the little
thieves.

Jerp wasn't going to think
about the scarecrow boy in the barn. He had more chores to do, and
he didn't want Grandpa to give him the
look
, the one where he raised one
white eyebrow and furrowed his forehead and twitched the corner of
his mouth a little. It was a look of disappointment, his wordless
way of saying
Jerp, you've come up short,
can't cut the mustard, maybe you really oughta be in Atlanta with
your parents, where you can be just another big-city sissy and
everybody can call you "Jerald."

Jerp would rather run through a barn full of
thin, silent scarecrow boys than to have Grandpa give him the
look.

So Jerp pretended to forget the scarecrow boy
as he curried the mare and turned it out for the day, then gathered
the eggs that the game hens had squirreled away in their dusty
nests. He checked on the two boars to see if they had enough water
and dumped a bucketful of mashed grain and sorghum into their
trough. Grandpa didn't name any of the animals. He said he didn't
think it was right that people gave names to things that they were
going to eat.

"What's good for the goose is good for the
gander," Grandpa had said, without bothering to explain what that
meant. Jerp thought that maybe he meant everything died just the
same.

Death was part of life on the farm.
Thanksgiving brought a blessing to all but the turkey. Hens who
went barren because their eggs were stolen soon steamed on the
table, stunted legs in the air. Hogs and cattle found a hundred
different uses in the kitchen, baked, broiled, fried, or
barbecued.

"God bless this bounty on our table," Grandpa
said before each meal. Jerp thought maybe he should do the prayers
while the animals were still alive. The way he had done for
Grandma.

Jerp had peeked once during the dinner
prayer, and saw Grandpa looking out the window to the barn at the
same moment he added the part that went, "And, please, dear Lord,
spare us from evil."

Jerp shivered with the
memory of that word,
evil
, and the way Grandpa's voice had
cracked just a little as he said it. Jerp put away the currying
brush and feed bucket, but the chill continued down his spine.
Because he heard a soughing, scratchy sound from the hayloft above.
He looked up just as a few strands of straw fell through the cracks
in the floorboards. He hurried out of the barn, careful to latch
the gate just as he had promised Grandma before she
died.

Jerp had sat with her one night, when her
spark of life was fading rapidly. She looked at him with burning,
fevered eyes, looked past and through him to the window, to the
long shadows of the barn.

"There’s a season for ever thing," she had
gurgled. “The gate...”

Jerp thought she meant the Pearly Gates. He
waited for her to say more. But she closed her eyes to the
lamplight and slept.

Now Grandma was dead but the scarecrow boy
was alive. Last year's piglet had grown plump and earned its place
in the kitchen while the scarecrow boy still had its own moldy
bristles. The cornfield was a dry graveyard, with not a morsel for
the birds to scavenge, but the scarecrow boy still played silent
sentinel. In seasons of change, seasons of slaughter, seasons of
harvest, the scarecrow boy had patiently held its ground.

As Jerp reached the farmhouse at the top of a
slight rise of meadow, Jerp turned and looked back at the barn. It
sagged silently to one side, making a crooked face. The two loading
bays of the loft were deep eyes and the barn entrance was a hungry
mouth with a hay-strewn tongue and stall-posts for teeth. In a high
lonely window, Jerp saw the scarecrow boy staring back at him
through the chickenwire screen. Jerp's heart clenched as he went
inside the farmhouse.

Grandpa was pouring milk into a gallon glass
jar so he could tell when the cream was separated.

"Grandpa, do barns have souls?" Jerp asked.
Skyscrapers didn't have souls, airports didn't have souls, but
maybe barns were different.

Grandpa turned and gave a
look that wasn't
the
look, but it was a look that could be its cousin, one that
said
I swear to Thee, what'll you think of
next? A boy who dawdles in daydreams ain't much good on a
farm.

"Barns have animals and haybales and feedbags
and potato barrels and a mighty load of cow patties. But I don't
know about souls. That's for them who breathe on God's green earth,
and them that's gone on to heaven," Grandpa said, his voice as
smoky as a brushfire in an orchard.

"Don't animals go to heaven, too? And if they
do, won't God need barns to put them in when the nights get cold?
And won't God need somebody to watch over the livestock and the
gardens?"

Grandpa finished straining the milk through
cheesecloth and screwed the lid tight on the jar. "No need for food
where people don't need to eat, Jerp. Up there, the Lord provides.
Here, we have to help ourselves."

He said it in a way that
Jerp thought meant
No wonder you couldn't
stay out of trouble back home, what with these kinds of darn-fool
notions.
But he only added, "Now, how about
some scrambled eggs before we work up some tobacco?"

They had a filling breakfast, then went back
to the barn. Grandpa opened the door to the corncrib and started up
the stairs. Jerp peeked in from the doorway, hoping that Grandpa
had seen the scarecrow boy while at the same time hoping the
scarecrow boy didn't really exist. Daylight was now breaking
through the window and flooding the corncrib, and a thousand specks
of dust were spinning in the air. Then Jerp remembered that the
scarecrow boy had been upstairs, where Grandpa was now. Jerp heard
Grandpa's boots moving across the hayloft floor, causing needles of
hay to fall to the packed ground below. Jerp held his breath and
hurried up the stairs.

One side of the loft was filled with dried
tobacco stalks, speared on poles and hung upside down. The smell of
the burley leaf was heady and sweet. Grandpa sat at the makeshift
workbench he had made from a piece of plywood and two haybales. He
pulled the lower leaves from one of the stalks until he had as much
as his hand could hold, then wound a leaf around one end until the
tobacco fanned out like a peacock's tail. He tossed the tied bundle
into a wide basket, continuing the routine that had occupied them
for the past week.

"Tops for cigarettes, bottoms for cigars,"
Grandpa said, motioning for Jerp to sit down. They bundled in
silence for a while, the air around them thick as snuff. When they
finished the pile, Jerp went to take another pole from the rack.
Each pole held about ten stalks of tobacco and had been too heavy
for Jerp to lift back when the leaves were green and sticky and
full of grasshoppers. But now the stalks had dried and Jerp could
lift them by reaching from his tiptoes and sliding until the pole
fell down into his arms.

Jerp put his hands between a row of stalks
and parted them like curtains, trying to see how much more they had
to do before they could load up the bed of the red Chevy truck and
drive to the warehouse in town. His hands were already cracked and
rough and his fingers ached. He looked down the long rows that
meant days’ more work. Something crackled among the brown leaves.
The scarecrow boy was standing among the stalks, staring at Jerp
with eyes as dark and unreflecting as tobacco juice.

Jerp froze, his hands gripping two stalks as
if they were prison bars. The scarecrow boy didn't say a word, but
its mouth turned up in a smile, stretching its pale skin even
tighter across the limp bones of its face. It motioned for Jerp to
step forward, slowly waving one flanneled arm. The scarecrow boy's
fingers wiggled stiffly, like white artificial worms.

Jerp could only shake his head back and
forth. His throat felt like a boar's head had been shoved in it. He
sucked for air and drew only dust. Suddenly his limbs unlocked and
he ran to Grandpa.

"What is it now, boy?"
Grandpa said, and didn't say, but didn't have to,
I thought you were finally learning how to work,
finally getting some use out of those hands God gave you, hands you
were wasting on piano keys and poetry and shoplifting, hands that
couldn't make a tough enough fist to keep the bullies
away.

Jerp said nothing, just looked at the
knot-holed floor.

"We're wasting good
daylight," Grandpa said, and Jerp heard between the words,
They burn them lights twenty-four hours a day in
the city, but out here we work at God's pace. Out here we ain't got
time for made-up monsters and scary stories.Busy hands touch no
evil.

Jerp swallowed a fistful of grainy air.

"Well, sit down and I'll get
it myself," Grandpa said, and he really meant
And this weekend, it's back to the fancy boarding school that
my son spends a fortune on, the school where the teachers make too
much money to complain about a no-account troublemaker like you.
And from now on, you can eat ham that's wrapped in
cellophane.

"No, Grandpa, I'll bring it," he burst out,
hoping his voice didn't sound as airless as it felt. "I just wanted
to let you know that we're almost finished and we'll soon get it to
market."

Grandpa nearly smiled, showing the yellowed
stumps of his few remaining teeth before he caught himself. "Good
boy. What ye sow, so shall ye reap," he said, trying to quote from
a book he had never learned to read.

Jerp went back among the tobacco and closed
his eyes and hauled down a pole. He was carrying it to the
workbench when suddenly he was hurtling into space.

He had fallen through one of the square holes
that Grandpa used to toss hay down to the cattle. The pole was
longer than the haychute and caught on the edges, bending like a
bow but holding Jerp's weight.

He heard Grandpa yelling as if they were
miles apart. He kicked his legs, trying to find purchase in the
empty air. Crumbs of tobacco leaves trickled down the back of his
shirt. His hands, toughened by a season in the fields, held onto
the pole until his body stopped swaying.

"Hold on here, Jerp. You okay, boy?"
Grandpa's voice came from somewhere above.