Now they were far down this road; night was only a few hours away, and Bone was terribly hungry. Bone felt the Calling in him, a deep persistent summoning; but he had discovered that he could ignore it for a time. All these commonplace physical demands— hunger and pain and the Calling—could be suppressed. For a time.
Deacon pointed out the grain elevator on the horizon. “Town ahead. Maybe there we get something to eat.”
“Huh,” Archie said despondently.
Deacon shook his head. “Doubt,” he said. “Doubt and negativism.”
“What do you think,” Archie said, “they’re gonna throw food at us? Multiply it, maybe:—like the loaves and fishes?”
“You’re not so fucking smart,” Deacon said. “Just shut up and follow me.”
The command was too imperious to disobey. Archie followed Deacon, and Bone followed them both.
It was a meager town. There was a crossroads, a feed wholesaler, a post office next to a coalyard, two side streets of clapboard houses and a scabrous grain elevator silent in the cascading sunlight. The main street was virtually empty. Bone was thankful for that: he disliked drawing attention to himself (the consequences were so often dire) and he had learned to avoid places like this. Had learned to avoid, too, places like the one Deacon seemed to be leading them to, which was the sheriff’s office—the jail.
Archie hung back. “I’m hungry,” he said, “but I don’t know if I’m that hungry.”
“You can’t tell,” Deacon said. “Some places like this they run you out of town. Some places put you up a night. Maybe even feed you. I’ve been fed in jails as often as I’ve been beat in ’em. Quiet town like this not likely to want us on a vag charge… not if we promise to move out in the morning.”
Bone only shrugged. It made him nervous when Deacon and Archie argued; the conflicts were difficult to grasp and the anger hung in the still air like a poison. Bone had been beaten in jails, too; jails frightened him. But, like Archie, he acquiesced; when Deacon set his mind to a thing he was as implacable as a force of nature.
Inside the wooden building Deacon spoke to the cop in charge, a small man in a sad brown uniform. “We only want to spend the night,” Deacon said. He said it twice, his voice strangely obsequious and cringing. The small man considered them for a time and then nodded wearily and took them to a cell. The cell was tiny, empty, two stacked beds and a wooden bench. A postage-stamp window looked out on the darkening sky. Bone stepped inside reluctantly, fearing the confinement. This was worse than a boxcar, Bone thought; this was like riding the empty ice compartment on a refrigerator car, sleeping on the wire-mesh bottom and praying the hatch-cover wouldn’t fall shut. The cop closed the cell door and turned to go. Bone’s head swam with claustrophobic fear. Deacon inquired in his cringing voice about food, but the cop only looked at him, shrugged, turned away.
“Well,” Deacon said, “it’s at least a place to sleep.”
Bone spent the night on the floor, shivering. The deep waters of sleep eluded him. He floundered for what seemed an endless time in the shallows, drawn back to awareness by his hunger or by the less specific imperatives of the Calling. He dozed until the rattle of the cell door brought him fully awake. He opened his eyes then, twisting his head out of a pillar of morning sunlight.
The cop stood there and a tall tanned man beside him. The cop was frowning and impatient as Deacon and Archie stirred on their mattresses. The other man betrayed no emotion. Bone sat with his eyes lidded, wary, waiting for Deacon to say something, but it was the cop who spoke first.
“This is Paul Darcy,” the cop said. “Owns a farm near here. You want to work for him, you get meals and a place to sleep. If not, you can clear out now.”
Deacon blinked down from the top bunk. “Well, that sounds fine.” He showed his yellowed teeth. “Doesn’t it, Archie? Bone?”
Archie said he guessed so. Bone nodded fractionally.
Paul Darcy nodded in return but did not smile.
Darcy drove them in his rattling pickup truck to the farm, a house and barn and silo, a garden and a collection of outbuildings besieged by wheatfields. They climbed down, and Darcy led them to a long, low structure of two-by-fours and barnboards with bunks and mattresses enough for ten men.
“This’ll be where you stay,” the farmer said (and his voice, Bone thought, was dry, like an amplification of the rustling of the wheat), “as long as it suits you. We can’t pay you but we can feed you.”
“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.