“That’s fine,” Deacon said.
“I’ll bring something out, then.”
Bone sensed that the Darcy man was taciturn but not actively hostile; pleased, if anything, that they had come. Deacon and Archie tested the mattresses and said they preferred them to the jail cell. This was a fine place, Deacon said, “a damn fine place.”
Darcy and his wife brought the food: steaming bowls of beef stew, warm bread to sop up the gravy. Bone ate hastily from his lap, watching Mrs. Darcy. She was of a piece with her husband, silently benevolent, her body not large but hardened by work. She gazed at the three men thoughtfully.
The food was good and even Bone’s hunger was satisfied for a time. Mrs. Darcy took the bowls and promised them “a decent breakfast in the morning— before work.” Bone basked in the glow of his satiation. Deacon and Archie were right, of course; this was a good place. Nevertheless he thought: I cannot stay here.
Here I am. Find me.
Bone raised the objection that night, their first night on the Darcy farm. Deacon and Archie were playing cards by the light of an oil lamp. The two men sat on hay bales with a wooden crate between them; Bone lay on a cot with his knees against his chest. “I can’t stay here,” he said finally, the words hoarse and awkward in his mouth.
Deacon played out his hand and lost, cursing. Then he turned to Bone.
“What’s this shit?”
“Deacon, I can’t. It comes back. The sickness.” “What sickness?”
Bone shrugged unhappily.
“Sick in the head,” Deacon told him. “Sick if you leave this place. This is the best berth we’ve had.” He was silent a moment. Bugs dived about the lamp. “Comfortable,” he said. “It has possibilities.”
Archie shuffled the cards, shuffled them again.
“Just forget about leaving here,” Deacon said. “We don’t leave for a while yet.”
Bone retreated into the bunk. He was not sure how long he could stay here. A little longer, maybe. If Deacon wanted it. He closed his eyes against the glare of the lamp and listened to the moth-flutter of the playing cards. Inside him, the voice was more intense.
It was July, and the wheat needed taking in.
Bone had never been so close to wheat. It was a new thing to him, strange in its immensity. One day in that long fatiguing first week Paul Darcy stood with him gazing at the wheat that filled the horizon: wheat, he said, was like a child, nine months of cultivation and this terrible laboring at the birth. “It wears you out,” Darcy said.
The wheat was as high as Bone’s waist. The stalks of it stood up strangely, the scaled wheat-heads dangling at the top like insect husks. The wheat was a golden color, as if it had absorbed some quality of the sunlight, and it spoke to itself in hushed whispers. Bone, like Deacon and Archie, had fallen quickly into the routine of the harvest. They were up before dawn to eat, Mrs. Darcy serving up huge meals of griddle cakes and eggs. Then the work began in earnest. The Darcy farm had been, in past years, prosperous, and Darcy owned two gasoline-powered binders, spidery machines striped blue and ivory beneath their skin of oil and dust. The binders cut the harvest wheat at the ground and compressed the stalks into sheaves, the sheaves were carried up a ramp to a canvas cradle and bound there into bundles. On dry days both machines worked flawlessly, but when the fields were wet, the damp straw eeled into the gears until the gasoline engines screamed in protest. Several of Darcy’s neighbors had joined in the harvest and Bone, pausing among these other men, liked to watch the binders dance their slow, gracile dance between the barn and the fallow ground.
The finished bundles were stacked as high as the barn roof next to the thresher, which Darcy called the “groundhog”: a long and hideously noisy machine much less pleasant than the binders. The purpose of the thresher was to separate the wheat from the straw, and somewhere in its grinding mechanism of belts and pulleys this task was accomplished: Bone did not know how. The thing was, the groundhog had to be fed; the straw bales needed to be pitched into the thresher. This was a gargantuan task and could not be postponed, and this year there were not the usual hired men because the Darcys could not afford them. Bone and Deacon and Archie and the occasional neighbor did the pitching, feeding the maw of the thresher each day as it roared and coughed out blue clouds of noxious smoke.
Bone worked from breakfast until dusk, pausing only for a huge noon meal of fried chicken Mrs. Darcy would bring out wearily, as depleted from her labors as the men from theirs, and spread on a long pineboard trestle. Deacon and Archie did their share; but Bone, working at his own pace, levering the big pitchfork silently until his hands were raw and his outsized wrists were trembling with exhaustion, did what Paul Darcy said was the work of two men—if not more. Darcy was so grateful that he took Bone and Archie and Deacon into the farmhouse kitchen one evening and fed them at the family table; there was chocolate cake that night to follow the fried chicken.
Over coffee, Darcy asked each of them how they had come to be wandering the countryside.
Deacon spoke of the work he had done in the Chicago Stockyards, how he had been married once and had a child—“but that broke up even before the Crash”—and how riding the boxcars was not a new thing for him. He had hopped his first freight when he’d come back from the war, he said, and had ridden them periodically since. “Now, of course, everybody’s doing it.” He spoke cheerfully and at length, but Bone saw the way his eyes wandered about the Darcys’ farmstead kitchen, lingering thoughtfully on the wooden shelves, the black belly of the coal stove, the rifle suspended on ornate J-hooks against one wall.
Then it was Archie’s turn. Archie spoke haltingly of a childhood in Louisiana and his family’s unsuccessful migration to New York. Before the hard times he had worked as a delivery driver, cabbie, salesman, “anything that, you know, brings in a little money. Never been married or any of that. Only myself to look out for”
Then Darcy turned to Bone. Sweating under the concerted gaze of the farmer and his wife, Bone said haltingly that he kept to himself, had pretty much always kept to himself, had been riding the trains as long as he could remember. …
“But surely,” Mrs. Darcy said, “There was something before that? I mean, nobody’s born a tramp—are they?”
Paul Darcy quickly hushed his wife. “Meg, it’s none of our business. Bone helped save the harvest. That’s what matters.”
“But I was,” Bone protested. “I was born that way. I was.”
He thought about it that night, sleepless in the bunk bed that was too short to contain his outstretched legs and too narrow to support him unless he lay on his side. Where had he come from? Everything had an origin. He had learned that. Birds from eggs, leaves from trees, wheat from wheat, spiraling back to an unimaginable infinity. The only exception to this universal law, apparently, was Bone himself. Birds from eggs, he thought, leaves from trees, Bone from—what?
Drifting out of consciousness he dreamed of a place that was not like any place he had ever seen, bright colors and shapes that made only dreamsense, creatures of unbearable wholeness and purity adrift in a jeweled landscape. No such place existed, of course, but the dream of it made him inexplicably sad,- he wanted to weep, although he could not.
When he woke he felt soiled, ugly, inadequate. He thought, I am less than half of what I should be—and felt the Calling, that sweet high voice inside him, as achingly compulsive as the night cry of a train whistle, more insistent now but quieter, too, now easily buried beneath the quotidian sounds of the machinery, the farm animals, the hot far-traveling wind.