“And you’re just going to let the wheat stand there?”
“If we hire the reapers, who will pay for their coffins and candles?”
“In one more day, it will be too late for the wheat. Wine, visitors, talk, more wine.” She turned calmly, went out the door, across the yard into the field.
“Come back!” he shouted.
An hour later she returned, gave him a long steady look, and said, “Tomorrow we harvest.”
“But if we harvest—”
“People will not believe the bomb was ever there, yes? Well, I stomped every inch of that field and I still live. We harvest. Tomorrow.”
The father did not sleep well that night. Several times he awoke to scowl at his sleeping wife. He scowled into the next room at sleeping Tony. “That boy knows something,” he muttered. “Dancing up and down. Fool!”
In bed he lay listening to the rich wheat blowing and the stars turning in the sky. What a life he’d had. If he ran to the village shouting, “My wife just had a daughter!” someone would say, “So? My wife has delivered a son.”
If he arrived panting to announce, “My wife has birthed a son,” someone would snort: “Hell, Roberto’s wife just had two sons!”
If he said, “My wife is sick,” someone would counter, “My wife is dead!” Nothing balanced. His wheat never had the decency to rot or his barn to collapse, while all around neighbors’ silos burned and grandfathers were ruined by lightning.
Thus were his friends lavishly provided conversations for a lifetime with much left over. He couldn’t very well say, could he, “Remember the summer my barn didn’t burn?” No!
Nor were his crops huge enough to be the objects of jealousy. They were casual, on the norm. “Neither bigger nor smaller than anyone else’s. What kind of crop is that?”
But now, here he was, very happy indeed, and tomorrow another day which could be as pleasant as wine and conversation or as full of doom as the gleam of a scythe or the color of his wife’s stare.
Well, well, we shall see, he thought, and shut the trap on his thoughts and snuffed out the small candle in his head.
At six o’clock in the morning, the explosion came.
His wife sat up and said, “It wasn’t very loud.”
“It almost destroyed the house!” he cried.
Smoke rose in the sky. Other men were running from great distances as he leaped out his door.
“It was here!”
“No, over there!”
“No, that way!”
They ran into and around and across the wheat.
“It’s outside the fence,” called Peter.
“No, idiot, inside, inside.”
The children hurried up in their nightgowns.
“There,” said Tony, pointing beyond the fence, “like Peter said!”
Fifty yards beyond and outside the wheat field, down by a little stream, stood a fresh, smoking crater.
Father stared bleakly for a long time.
“It’s not very big,” Tony observed.
“It’s big,” said Father.
“It’s no bigger than my head,” said Tony.
The neighbors ran up, shouting. Father stood with staring eyes which saw nothing. “It was bigger than a stove,” he said to himself. “Anyway,” he added, “this bomb was certainly not my bomb at all.”
“What?!” everyone cried.
“No,” said the father seriously. “My bomb landed in my field. Like a locomotive from the sky. You could see the flames, the iron wheels, the steaming whistle, and almost, the engineer waving, that’s how big it was.”
“But, but, that would make two shells!”
“One, two, dammit!” said Father. “They both landed at once! But mine was a monster. Not like that midget there. Besides, it’s outside my property.”
“Just fifty feet,” said Tony.
“A million miles!”
“But it’s not logical both fell at once. No other bombs have come within miles in all our lives.”
“Nevertheless, the enemy is still hidden in my field of beautiful wheat.”
“Papa,” whispered Tony, pointing.
Everyone turned.
And there, walking quietly through the field of golden wheat, a gleaming scythe cradled in her arms, nodding to all the neighbors, was Mother. She stopped before her husband and very slowly, quietly, handed him the scythe.
Many years later, when he was drinking wine at the village inn, the father would hold up his glass and, after many sighs and exhalations, glance at some stranger from the corner of his eyes and at last speak. “Have you ever heard of the great bomb that fell in my wheat field and still lies ticking there today?”
A grievous sigh. “See these gray hairs? They come from living cheek by jowl with the fiend, the devil grinning under my crops all these terrible years.
See how drawn and lined is my face from never knowing when, plowing or asleep, I’ll be blown to oblivion.”
“Well,” all the strangers would say, “why don’t you just pack up and move?”
“Do I look like a coward?” the father would cry. “No, dear God, we’ll stay on, plowing, sowing, reaping, living on borrowed time.
And one morning you will see my name listed as a casualty of the war long finished, but which threatens and darkens my precious wheat. Yes, thanks, I will have a bit more of that wine …”
And with the burning of many calendars, and the children grown and gone, the father still could not tolerate Tony of the delicate face and the tiny white hands.
Many times in the following years, Tony would write from London or Paris or Budapest, his face smiling his Madonna smile out of the delicate penmanship.
Always, at the very end of his note, his parting salutation was one gentle word: “Boom.”
The end
