He got into bed and pulled the other half of the blanket over himself, snuggling close to the potato. The pulsations of the object mirrored the beating of his own heart.
He put his arms around the potato. "I love you," he said.
He hugged the potato tighter, crawling on top of it, and as his arms and legs sank into the soft slimy flesh, he realized that the potato was not cold at all.
The Murmurous Haunt of Flies
I'm not a poetry fan. Never have been, never will be. But while suffering through a graduate class on the Romantic poets, the phrase "the murmurous haunt of flies" leaped out at me while we were reading John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." I thought it was a great line and wrote it down.
Some time later, I found myself thinking of my great-grandmother's chicken ranch in the small farming community of Ramona, California. She'd died years before, and I hadn't been there in a long time, but I remembered a little adobe banya or bathhouse on the property that used to scare me (this bathhouse pops up again in my novel The Town). I remembered as well that there had always been flies everywhere— because of the chickens—and I recalled seeing flypaper and No-Pest Strips that were black with bug bodies. The Keats phrase returned to me, a light went on, and I wrote this story.
***
"Stay away," my grandpa told me. "It is a haunted place, strange with secrets."
He had lived on the farm all his life, was born on the farm and would die on the farm. He knew what he was talking about. And as we sat in the old kitchen, chairs pushed up against the now-unused icebox, we grew afraid. I suddenly felt a wave of cold pass through me, though the temperature in the farmhouse was well over ninety degrees, and I saw multiple ripples of gooseflesh cascade down Jan's bare arms. Neither of us exactly believed the tale, but we were ur-banites, out of our element, and we respected the knowledge and opinions of the locals. We knew enough to know we knew nothing.
He struggled out of his chair and, one hand on his gimp leg, hobbled over to the screen door. The fine mesh of the screen was ripped in several places, from human accidents and feline determination, and a small covey of flies was traveling back and forth, in and out of the house. He stood there for a minute, not speaking, then beckoned us over. "Come here. I want to show it to you."
Jan and I put the front legs of our chairs back down on the wooden floor and moved over to the screen. I could smell my grandpa's medication as I stood next to him—a sickeningly acrid odor of Vicks, vitamin Bl, and rubbing alcohol. He looked suddenly small, shrunken somehow, as though he had withered over the years, and I could see his scalp through the wispy strands of hair he combed back over his head. He was going to die, I suddenly realized. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for all time.
I was going to miss him.
He touched my shoulder lightly with his right hand while his left pointed across the meadow. "It's over there," he said. "You see the barn?"
I followed his finger. A large, square, dilapidated structure of rotting, unpainted boards arose from the tall grasses beyond the chicken coops. I remembered playing there as a kid, when it was all new and freshly painted; playing hide-and-go-seek with my brother and my cousins, hiding in the secret loft behind the hay-baler, endless summer afternoons of sweaty searching. This was not the barn I once knew. I nodded, smiling, though I didn't feel happy.
His finger moved across the horizon, passing from the barn to a small cluster of shacks on the hillside to the west. "See those buildings there to the right of the barn?" Again I nodded. "On the hill?" I continued nodding. "That's it."
Jan was squinting against the afternoon sun, her hand perched above her eyes like a makeshift visor. "Which one is it? I see a couple buildings there."
My grandpa was already starting back across the floor. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Just stay away from the whole area." He sat down once again in his chair at the foot of the kitchen table. A sharp flash of pain registered on his face as he bent his gimp leg to sit down.
We, too, returned to our chairs. And we talked away the rest of the afternoon
.
Jan awoke screaming. She sat bolt upright in bed, the acne cream on her face and her sleep-spiked hair giving her the appearance of a shrieking harpy. I hugged her close, pulling her to my chest and murmuring reassurances. "It's okay," I said softly, stroking her hair. "It's all right."
She stopped crying after a few minutes and sat up, facing me. She tried to smile. "That was some nightmare."
I smiled back. "So I gathered. Tell me about it."
"It was about the bathhouse," she said, pulling the covers up around her chin and snuggling closer. "And I don't want you to take this wrong, but your grandfather was in it." Her eyes looked out the bedroom window as she spoke, and she gazed into the darkness toward the group of buildings on the hillside. "I was just sleeping here, in this bed, with you, when I woke up. I heard some kind of noise, and I looked on the floor, and there was your grandfather. He was crawling along the ground, looking up at me and smiling." She shivered. "I tried to wake you up, but you were dead asleep. I kept shaking you and yelling, but you wouldn't budge. Then your grandfather grabbed me by the arm and pulled me down on the floor with him. I was screaming and kicking and fighting, but he had a hold on me, and he started pulling me out of the room. 'We're going to the bathhouse,' he told me. 'We're going to take a bath.'
"Then I woke up."
"That's horrible," I said.
"I know." She laid her head against my chest, running her fingers through my curly chest hair.
We fell asleep in that position.
The day dawned early, just as I'd known it would. Sunlight was streaming through the window with full force by six o'clock. Sunrise always seemed to come earlier on the farm than in the city for some reason. That was one thing I remembered from my childhood.
Jan was still asleep when I awoke, and I crept out of bed softly so as not to disturb her.
My grandpa was already up, planted in his chair at the foot of the table, drinking a tin cup of black coffee. He looked up and smiled as I walked into the kitchen. "Day's half over, city slicker. What took you so long?" His smile widened, the new ultrawhite dentures looking oddly out of place in his otherwise old face. "Where's your wife? Still asleep?"
I nodded. "I'm letting her sleep in. She had a pretty bad nightmare last night."
"Yeah, your grandma used to have nightmares, too. Bad ones. Some nights, she'd even be afraid to go to sleep, and I'd have to stay up with her." He shook his head, staring into his coffee cup. "There were some pretty bad times there."
I poured myself a cup of coffee from the old metal pot on the stove and sat down next to him. "You ever have nightmares?"
"Me? I'm too boring to have nightmares." He laughed. "Hell, I don't think I even dream."
We sat in silence after that, listening to the many morning sounds of the farm. From far off, I heard the crowing of a rooster, endlessly repeating his obnoxious cry. Closer in, cowbells were ringing dully as four bovine animals moved slowly across the meadow to the watering pond. And of course, under it all, the ever-present hum of the flies.
"It's going to be a hot one today," my grandpa said after a while. "It feels humid already."
"Yeah," I agreed.
He added a dash of cream to his coffee, stirring it with the butt end of a fork. "What are your plans for today?"
I shrugged. "We don't have any, really. I thought maybe we'd go into town, look around a bit, then maybe go for a hike."
"Not there?" He glanced up sharply.