Dynamite
from House of Fields
For a long time it lives in the granary and we don't know about
it. Or rather, we know about the heavy box with peeling paper
wrap, red lettering and the skull and crossbones on the outside,
but we don’t know what it holds. We stare at the box when
we play in the wheat bins, but we have been warned never to touch
it in such serious tones that even Tom and Rick, “the boys,”
are not tempted. Still, it is alive with our looking, our thorny
interest.
Over breakfast one morning, my father says he must blow it up.
“Blow what up?” Tom is hopping from one foot to the
other and his elbows stick out like something flapping. Rick is
quiet like he is, watching from his chair. The little girls, Marijo
and Patty, are still asleep.
My mother has put her cup down with a sharp click.
“To get rid of it.”
Tom asks, “Can we do like they do in the movies? Can we
blow up the chicken coop?”
My father sighs. He is looking at my mother. “I’ve
been reading. The stuff is old. Unstable. It could be dangerous.”
“Unstable?” she asks.
“Nitroglycerin in that form is supposed to be turned every
month. I didn’t know that. I’ve never done it.”
His uncertainty hovers crow-like over the table.
“You’re saying it could go off at any time?”
“Not if we get rid of it.”
“It’s been in the granary since you cleared the pasture.”
My mother lifts her cup, blows on her coffee, silently counts
the years.
“You blew up something?” Tom, putting it together,
is frantic that he might have missed something. He is kneeling
on his chair, his hands on top of his head.
“We blew some ditches. Didn’t use it all.” My
father stares at his eggs.
“How many are left?” My mother’s voice is too
light. The number will make the threat into something she can
measure.
“Half a box,” he says. She waits. He rubs his hand
on the back of his head and does not look at her. “Fifty
or so.”
She gasps.
I don’t know how many fifty is but the sound of her breath
tells me it is a lot. And then there are these new words: explode,
unstable. Night or glisten. They sound like what they must
mean. Something unexpected.
When it becomes clear that nothing will be blown up except the
dynamite itself,Tom and Rick settle for following my father, trailing
at his pockets and underfoot until my father’s patience
is worn. My mother has tried every argument and has made every
suggestion for other ways to rid ourselves of it, but my father
says no one else can do it, and it must be done. When the time
comes, my father tells us all of us to stay at the house. My brothers
are appalled that they cannot be with him. They wiggle like puppies
but our mother forbids them from taking one step off the
back porch. From the porch, we can see across the barnyards to
the granary and the fields beyond. Here, we are protected.
We
watch this unfolding like a story.
He lifts and places a long piece of wood over the steps to the
granary to make a ramp. He pushes the big wooden slider door to
the side and climbs into the building. My mother, watching, puts
a hand over her mouth. When it takes a long time for him to come
out, she looks away, stares down at some dog shit piled along
the edge of the yard.
My mother doesn’t look away from anything.
When he comes back into the light, he is carrying the box with
the red letters in front of him, a little away from his body.
He walks differently than I have ever seen him walk, like cold
syrup from a spilled bottle. He walks away from the buildings,
away from the barns, workshop, the chicken coop. Stopping now
and then to hold very still, he climbs the east hill. He places
his feet so carefully I think they are like the cars in a choo-choo
train, one after another, alike and evenly spaced as days until
he disappears like something sinking on the other side of the
hill. My mother makes a rough cluck in her throat. Without her
anchor of steadiness, a gnawing of worry grows in us. Unable to
sit still on the steps for more than a few second, we wiggle in
and out of the shadows on the porch, first at the railings, then
the gray clapboarding, then swinging on the post and peeling its
shards of old paint until she speaks sharply to stop it.
We shift our gaze from her face to the hill and back to her face.
After a while something in it loosens, a shoelace coming free
of its knot. My father appears, rising like a dark ghost over
the hill’s crest, his body silhouetted against the sky.
But now he walks in a natural pace down the hill and turns toward
the house. My mother breathes.
“Did it go off?” Tom looks as though he is about to
wail. Rick is biting his lower lip.
“Not yet.” My mother whispers.
My father does not speak with us. His face is still thinking,
focused on what he must do. He comes to the house swiftly, walking
with quick, hard steps. He bangs down the rickety steps to the
basement, rummages. When he climbs up the rough steps, he is carrying
his rifle and a small box of shells.
My mother looks at him.
“It’s the only way I can think of.” He says
to her and leaves again, the rifle in the crook of his elbow.
“Yer gonna shoot it?" Tom asks, delight pouring from
every cell. Rick smiles.
We move as one body to the porch rail to track his movements.
Again, he crosses the barnyards, leaves the circle of buildings,
climbs to the crest, and at the very top of the hill but still
in full view, he kneels, loads the gun slowly, then lowers himself
to his belly. He is so low in the grasses that the rifle, extended
before him as he aims, looks like the stinger of a mosquito. Then
he shimmies back, down from the highest point. Watching how he
is using the hill to protect himself, my hands turn cold. I look
at my mother. Again, she is looking down, her mouth calm, as though
there was something of great interest growing between the boards
in the porch.
At the first sound, everyone looks at each other. But it is merely
a gun shot, a sound that, because we live among hunters and hunting
from the time we can crawl, we know. Despite its power, it is
familiar. It does not frighten us.
“He missed.” My brother says, a little disgusted.
Rick shakes his head, scuffs the dirt below the lowest step.
“It’s hard at that angle,” my mother tells him.
But when he misses a second time, she makes a tisking sound, as
though someone annoyed her that she would like to scold. Her mouth
knots up again, her expression turns tight and too quiet. My hands
ache. I pull the hem of my tee shirt and stick my thumb into my
mouth. She is one to speak her mind, she is one to say when something
is not right. And if she is not doing that now, what is wrong?
Fifty sticks of dynamite.
The explosion, when it comes, makes the sharp pop of the rifle
seem like a toy sound. This sound is lightning and thunder at
exactly the same moment, a small and ugly sun, hard and fast,
scarring the mind. It is bigger than any other sound in our small
lives. It rolls down the hillsides, bangs against the barns and
sheds, bounces off everything, leaving it raw as skin scraped
clean, then shoves itself deep into the crevasses of dreams. It
is night collapsed onto itself, stars blinking on and off at once.
I hear it, we all hear it, and there is nothing that can take
it back.
Dust and smoke flies up and out like gray fireworks, then drops
into a slow cloud down the hill.
My father lays in the grass for so long that my mother makes a
motion like an animal tied to something it cannot get away from.
Her body jerks toward him, then back, holding itself in some cage.
At last, he pushes himself up on all fours, rises to his knees,
lifts the rifle, stands, dusts off his arms, scuffs in the dirt,
unloads the gun and disappears over the crest. For the first time
since the task began, we are still. A stream of dark smoke rises
and rises. Finally, for the second time, he appears above the
crest. He gestures that it is okay for us to come. My brothers
leap like peas from rubber slingshots.
I turn to see my mother, her face white, looking up at the kitchen
window. A single crack spread all the way across the clear glass,
dividing it like a cut from a knife. It breaks the reflection
of the fields in two. I look away. Then I am running too, with
wild curiosity, to see this thing that was big enough to change
the world.
I want to tell my father that it was a good story.
When my mother and I reach the hilltop and look down the slope,
my brothers are running around the hole. They have already been
stopped from climbing into it because, my father says, “Hot
as hell.”
“As hell,” Tom says, his voice big.
I look down into a gray hole that smells like metal that’s
too hot. The grass all around is singed black for several feet.
Here and there tiny flames pop up out of nowhere. My father walks
around and around, stepping on burnt grass, twisting his boot
hard onto these places. He asks my mother to bring the water bucket.
He tells us to look, then move away until it all cools down. I
step close, sniffing the bitterness that stings and hold my breath
as I realize how big the hole is. The hole could fit my mother
and me, my father and Tom and Rick. It could fit Marijo and Patty—though
she is too small to walk, maybe even my bigger cousins, Eddy Jo
and Harry, Mike and Teddy and Kathy. I stand with my body open,
thinking how many of my family could climb into it and not ever
fill it. But what makes me feel sick—even as I am trying
to figure out how many people could fit—is how empty it
is. Something that was our own dirt, solid, steady as a field
is now like a hot gray bowl. The hole is empty, a mouth that needs
to be filled and can never be filled. Like it ate itself. There
was earth and now there is not. It scares me more than the cracked
window.
When I look at my father, I see that he is too quiet. I think
about the sound, how it came to us bigger than anything real,
how it made emptiness, not the good kind where you can sit in
it and listen to the outside world, but a new kind, the kind that
would hurt you if you stayed inside it too long. You would never
be able to hear anything in a hole like that. You would never
fill it with anything, people or words, because it is the kind
of empty that could, yes I know this now, it could kill you. I
look hard at my father’s face which is deep red like he
has been in the sun too long. I realize he has no eyebrows.
more
samples
