Lance wiped his brow with the back of the rough rawhide glove he wore and looked up at the sun. It beat down onto the open field like a golden hammer on an anvil and soaked the light T-shirt that Lance wore with sweat. His hands were already cramping inside the gloves, which wasn’t a good sign at this point since they had only scooped up and baled a third of the windrows that lay on the already greening field. His back hurt from dragging and trying to stack the heavy bales on the wagon’s surface behind him. He could only make the rows three high; his strength had failed him when he tried to make a fourth, and his father had cursed loud enough to be heard over the chugging of the Case tractor that he rode ahead of the baler.
Lance cautiously looked up at his father. Anthony’s shirt also stuck to his skin, the interlaced lines of scars standing out against the wet fabric on his back, and Lance watched him, transfixed by the sight. His mind went back to the afternoon he had seen the ropy healings up close and he shivered in the heat of the late July sun. Anthony turned in the steel seat of the tractor and glared at Lance. The white line of scar that ran down his bottom lip shone in the light, but his eyes were two dead spots in his face.
“Grab that fucking bale, you dumbshit!” Anthony barked from his roost.
Lance lunged forward and barely caught the compressed alfalfa before it tipped and fell beneath the rolling trailer. He grasped the two lines of yellow twine and half drug, half carried the bale to the closest row and shoved it tight among its companions. Lance twisted back just in time to see his father spin around in the tractor’s seat and navigate the next turn. There was a brief break in the windrows and the bales halted to a stuttering stop in the chute. Lance let himself relax and drift as he balanced on the turning trailer. His mind slipped into a blank state and his eyes ceased to see the landscape around him. The last seven months had passed by him in much the same way.
After the night his stories had burned in the garbage barrel behind their house, a large part of him had given up. The amount of work he had lost crippled his ten-year-old mind. If his very creations could be taken away, what else could? His mother hadn’t come back either, not that he had expected her to. For a while the infantile hope that she would be there when he returned from school one afternoon remained, but soon that too disappeared, the last utterances of childhood finally tearing away and leaving behind the husk that he was becoming.
He hated the sheriff for some time after that day. He hated him just a shade less than his father, mostly when he lay awake at night and stared at the darkness of his ceiling. Times when he would have normally wrote something in his notebook. He had even seen Sheriff Dodd once since then. He was exiting the bus one morning in May and looked out across the fog-filled school parking lot. The sheriff was standing near his car, looking back at him through a haze of spring mist. Lance felt the urge to run to him then, to wrap his arms—his hands—around his waist—around his throat—and squeeze. Instead he turned his head back toward the school’s doors, as though he had seen something obscene.
His father’s satisfaction at seeing how disturbed Lance had become lasted over a month. The older man would sit across from him over the dinner Lance had made and just grin. The smile said anything and everything that his fists sometimes couldn’t. He had put a hot poker inside of Lance, directly where he’d been aiming, and it pleased him to no end.
“Goddammit!”
The yell brought Lance’s wandering mind back to the shimmying trailer strewn with the droppings of hay and the heat that pressed down on his shoulders like hot bricks.