Without looking behind him, Anthony whipped the hand holding Lance’s notebook in a short arc, and let go. The pages flapped once and the cover opened a bit as if to wave goodbye, and then it dropped out of sight into the flames licking hungrily out of the barrel.
“NO!” The word came again unannounced from Lance’s lips, and he felt the ground tilt. The flames in the barrel shot up higher for an instant like a cannibal raising its head from a feast. Lance realized his hand was reaching out toward the barrel, past his father, as though he might will the notebook out of the fire, whole and untouched. He let his arm fall to his side and felt tears begin to squeeze onto the ledges of his eyes. All his words were gone. All his stories were burning. His poems. His thoughts. The feelings that wanted to spew out of him night and day, transcribed there on the pages, were blackening and curling. They would soon be light enough to float on the heat. They would alight out of the inferno and glide away on the night setting in and he would never see them again.
Lance blinked until the tears flooded from his eyes and he was once again able to see clearly. His father still stood near the barrel. The shadows were deep on his battered face and the bruises and cuts now looked like inky pools on Anthony’s light skin. A new feeling began to churn within Lance, and boiled over into a flooding warmth in his chest. It was like a pilot light of blue flame had been lit there, perhaps waiting for the right fuel source to ignite something so deep within him. At that moment Lance knew he could kill his father if given the chance. If a gun had appeared within his hand, he would have pulled the trigger without thinking. A knife, and he would have gladly run it through his heart.
Instead of any retribution, Lance turned away from the sneering figure before him and waded through the snow to the house. He shut the door behind him and took off his outside clothes, putting each item away carefully. He walked down the hall to his room, where he again put another barrier behind him. Without undressing further, he lay down on his bed and began to weep openly. The tears he cried were again for his mother and his excuse for an existence up to this point. But they were also for the creation he had lost, the words gone forever. He knew that he could never recreate everything the notebook had held, not exactly. Nor could he recall everything he had written, no matter how hard he racked his brain to retrieve the titles and first lines.
The room grew darker and shadows wound around him as he lay on his bed hoping that someday this all would be a memory and not a reality he would be forced to wake up to. His tears began to run dry, and before the last shudder of despair shook his body, he had fallen asleep.
Chapter 3
“I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.”
—William Ernest Henley
The hay wagon shifted under Lance’s feet and forced him to stagger across the uneven planks that made up its decking. He caught his balance and walked back to his position directly behind the baler’s steel chute. The International Harvester’s red body wore scars and scrapes from the previous summer’s battles of baling their fifty acres, but the dents and dings did nothing to slow the workhorse down. The square bales kept inching their way out of the machine, pushed by the inevitable force of the unyielding packing ram.