A whippoorwill had begun to call and with his ear to the ground this way he began to hear the train too. A star arced long and dying down the sky. He raised his head and looked toward the house. Nothing moved. The train had come on and her harpiethroated highball wailed down the lonely summer night. He could hear the wheels shucking along the rails and he could feel the ground shudder and he could hear the tone of the trucks shift at the crossing and the huffing breath of the boiler and the rattle and clank and wheelclick and couplingclacking and then the last long shunting on the downgrade drawing on toward the distance and the low moan bawling across the sleeping land and fading and the caboose clicking away to final silence. He rose and adjusted his clothes and went back along the rows of corn to the woods and to the road and set himself toward home again.
Brogans stood in the tracks he left. Walking up, back, turning. Toeing the bunged melons lying in the sun. A slow spout of black ants pluming forth. A yellowjacket.
He came again that night. In a persimmon tree at the edge of the field a mockingbird whistled him back but he would not hear. Down past the corn he came and into the dark of the melonpatch with stark wooden lubricity, looking once toward the lightless house and then going to his knees in the rich and wineslaked loam.
When the light of the sealedbeam cut over the field he was lying prone upon a watermelon with his overalls about his knees. The beam swept past, stopped, returned to fix upon his alabaster nates looming moonlike out of the dark. He rose vertically, pale, weightless, like some grim tellurian wraith, up over the violated fruit with arms horrible and off across the fields hauling wildly at the folds of old rank denim that hobbled him.
Hold it, a voice called.
He had no ear for such news. The dry bracken that rimmed the field crashed about him. He crossed the stand of cane in a series of diminishing reports and went over the top of the honeysuckle in graceful levitation and lit in the road in the lights of a car rounding the curve. The car braked and slewed in the gravel. A crazed figure dressing on the run blown out of the dark wall of summer green and into the road. In the distance the train called for the crossing.
Two pairs of brogans went along the rows.
You aint goin to believe this.
Knowin you for a born liar I most probably wont.
Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.
What?
I said somebody has been …
No. No. Hell no. Damn you if you aint got a warped mind.
I’m tellin you …
I dont want to hear it.
Looky here.
And here.
They went along the outer row of the melonpatch. He stopped to nudge a melon with his toe. Yellowjackets snarled in the seepage. Some were ruined a good time past and lay soft with rot, wrinkled with imminent collapse.
It does look like it, dont it?
I’m tellin ye I seen him. I didnt know what the hell was goin on when he dropped his drawers. Then when I seen what he was up to I still didnt believe it. But yonder they lay.
What do you aim to do?
Hell, I dont know. It’s about too late to do anything. He’s damn near screwed the whole patch. I dont see why he couldnt of stuck to just one. Or a few.
Well, I guess he takes himself for a lover. Sort of like a sailor in a whorehouse.
I reckon what it was he didnt take to the idea of gettin bit on the head of his pecker by one of them waspers. I suppose he showed good judgment there.
What was he, just a young feller?
I dont know about how young he was but he was as active a feller as I’ve seen in a good while.
Well. I dont reckon he’ll be back.
I dont know. A man fast as he is ought not to be qualmy about goin anywheres he took a notion. To steal or whatever.
What if he does come back?
I’ll catch him if he does.
And then what?
Well. I dont know. Be kindly embarrassin now I think about it.
I’d get some work out of him is what I’d do.
Ought to, I reckon. I dont know.
You reckon to call the sheriff?
And tell him what?
They were walking slowly along the rows.
It’s just the damndest thing I ever heard of. Aint it you? What are you grinnin at? It aint funny. A thing like that. To me it aint.
Once she had moved beyond the shadow of the smokehouse he could not see her anymore. He could hear the dull chop of the hoe among the withered yardflowers as she progressed with bland patience along the little garden she had planted there, her and the hoe in shadow oblique and thin. And the chop and clink of the shadow blade in the stony ground. Or she came up from the springhouse lugging a shrunken bucket that sprayed thin fans of water from between the slats and left a damp and trampled swath out to the flowerbeds and back. He sat on the porch with his feet crossed and fashioned knots in weedstems.
Finally it rained. It rained all one afternoon and at dusk the burnt grass stood in water and it rained on into the night. By the time he left the house it had quit and the sky was clearing but he would not turn back.
He waited and waited at the field’s edge watching the house and listening. From the dark of the corn they saw him pass, lean and angular, a slavering nightshade among the moonsprung vines, over the shadowed blue and furrowed summer land. They gripped each other’s arm.
It’s him.
I hope it is. I’d hate to think of there bein two of em.
Before them in the field there appeared sudden and apparitional a starkly pale set of legs galvanized out of the night like a pair of white flannel drawers.
Thow the light to him.
He aint mounted.
Thow it to him.
He was standing in the middle of the patch facing them, blinking, his overalls about his ankles.
Hold it right there, old buddy. Dont move.
But he did. He caught up the bib of his overalls in both hands and turned to run. The voice called out again. He had the straps clenched in his fist, making for the field’s edge. The train bawled twice out there in the darkness. Now beg God’s mercy, lecher. Unnatural. Finger coiled, blind sight, a shadow. Smooth choked oiled pipe pointing judgment and guilt. Done in a burst of flame. Could I call back that skeltering lead.
He was lying on the ground with his legs trapped in his overalls and he was screaming Oh God, Oh God. The man still holding the smoking gun stood about him like a harried bird. The blood oozing from that tender puckered skin in the gray moonlight undid him. Shit, he said. Aw shit. He knelt, flinging the gun away from him. The other man picked it up and stood by. Hush now, he said. Goddamn. Hush.
Lights from the house limn them and their sorry tableau. The boy is rolling in the rich damp earth screaming and the man keeps saying for him to hush, kneeling there, not touching him.
3
The deputy held the car door and he climbed out and they entered a building of solid concrete. The first deputy handed Harrogate’s papers to a man at a small window. The man looked through the papers and signed them. Harrogate stood in the hall.