He lay in bed late, just listening to the silence in the house that wasn’t anything like death silence, but a silence of things living well and happily.
He got up, dressed, and ate his breakfast slowly. He wasn’t going to work. He went out to milk the cows, stood on the porch smoking a cigarette, walked about the back-yard a little and then came back in and asked Molly what he had gone out to do.
“Milk the cows,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” he said, and went out again. He found the cows waiting and full, and milked them and put the milk cans in the springhouse, hut thought of other things. The wheat. The scythe.
All through the morning he sat on the hack porch rolling cigarettes. He made a toy boat for little Drew and one for Susie, and then he churned some of the milk into butter and drew off the buttermilk, hut the sun was in his head, aching. It burned there. He wasn’t hungry for lunch. He kept looking at the wheat and the wind bending and tipping and ruffling it.
His arms flexed, his fingers, resting on his knee as he sat again on the porch, made a kind of grip in the empty air, itching. The pads of his palms itched and burned. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants and sat down and tried to roll another cigarette and got mad at the mixings and threw it all away with a muttering. He had a feeling as if a third arm had been cut off of him, or he had lost something of himself. It had to do with his hands and his arms.
He heard the wind whisper in the field.
By one o’clock he was going in and out of the house, getting underfoot, thinking about digging an irrigation ditch, but all the time really thinking about the wheat and how ripe and beautiful it was, aching to be cut.
“Damn it to hell!”
He strode into the bedroom, took the scythe down off its wallpegs. He stood holding it. He felt cool. His hands stopped itching. His head didn’t ache. The third arm was returned to him. He was intact again.
It was instinct. Illogical as lightning striking and not hurting. Each day the grain must be cut. It had to be cut. Why? Well, it just did, that was all. He laughed at the scythe in his big hands. Then, whistling, he took it out to the ripe and waiting field and did the work. He thought himself a little mad. Hell, it was an ordinary-enough wheat field, really, wasn’t it? Almost.
The days loped away like gentle horses.
Drew Erickson began to understand his work as a sort of dry ache and hunger and need. Things built in his head.
One noon, Susie and little Drew giggled and played with the scythe while their father lunched in the kitchen. He heard them. He came out and took it away from them. He didn’t yell at them. He just looked very concerned and locked the scythe up after that, when it wasn’t being used.
He never missed a day, scything.
Up. Down. Up, down, and across. Back and up and down and across. Cutting. Up. Down.
Up.
Think about the old man and the wheat in his hands when he died.
Down.
Think about this dead land, with wheat living on it.
Up.
Think about the crazy patterns of ripe and green wheat, the way it grows!
Down.
Think about . . .
The wheat whirled in a full yellow tide at his ankles. The sky blackened. Drew Erickson dropped the scythe and bent over to hold his stomach, his eyes running blindly. The world reeled.
“I’ve killed somebody!” he gasped, choking, holding to his chest, falling to his knees beside the blade. “I’ve killed a lot–“
The sky revolved like a blue merry-go-round at the county fair in Kansas. But no music. Only a ringing in his ears.
Molly was sitting at the blue kitchen table peeling potatoes when he blundered into the kitchen, dragging the scythe behind him.
“Molly!”
She swam around in the wet of his eyes.
She sat there, her hands fallen open, waiting for him to finally get it out.
“Get the things packed!” he said, looking at the floor.
“Why?”
“We’re leaving,” he said, dully.
“We’re leaving?” she said.
“That old man. You know what he did here? It’s the wheat, Molly, and this scythe. Every time you use the scythe on the wheat a thousand people die. You cut across them and–“
Molly got up and put the knife down and the potatoes to one side and said, understandingly, “We traveled a lot and haven’t eaten good until the last month here, and you been workin’ every day and you’re tired–“
“I hear voices, sad voices, out there. In the wheat,” he said. “Tellin’ me to stop. Tellin’ me not to kill them!”
“Drew!”
He didn’t hear her. “The field grows crooked, wild, like a crazy thing. I didn’t tell you. But it’s wrong.”
She stared at him. His eyes were blue glass, nothing else.
“You think I’m crazy,” he said, “but wait ’til I tell you. Oh, God, Molly, help me; I just killed my mother!”
“Stop it!” she said firmly.
“I cut down one stalk of wheat and I killed her. I felt her dyin’, that’s how I found out just now–“
“Drew!” Her voice was like a crack across the face, angry and afraid now. “Shut up!”
He mumbled. “Oh–Molly–“
The scythe dropped from his hands, clamored on the floor. She picked it up with a snap of anger and set it in one corner. “Ten years I been with you,” she said. “Sometimes we had nothin’ but dust and prayers in our mouths. Now, all this good luck sudden, and you can’t bear up under it!”
She brought the Bible from the living room.
She rustled its pages over. They sounded like the wheat rustling in a small, slow wind. “You sit down and listen,” she said.
A sound came in from the sunshine. The kids, laughing in the shade of the large live oak beside the house.
She read from the Bible, looking up now and again to see what was happening to Drew’s face.
She read from the Bible each day after that. The following Wednesday, a week later, when Drew walked down to the distant town to see if there was any General Delivery mail, there was a letter.
He came home looking two hundred years old.
He held the letter out to Molly and told her what it said in a cold, uneven voice.
“Mother passed away–one o’clock Tuesday afternoon–her heart–“
All that Drew Erickson had to say was, “Get the kids in the _ car, load it up with food. We’re goin’ on to California.”
“Drew–” said his wife, holding the letter.
“You know yourself,” he said, “this is poor grain land. Yet look how ripe it grows. I ain’t told you all the things. It ripens in patches, a little each day. It ain’t right. And when I cut it, it rots! And next mornin’ it comes up without any help, growin’ again! Last Tuesday, a week ago, when I cut the grain it was like rippin’ my own flesh. I heard somebody scream. It sounded just like–And now, today, this letter.”
She said, “We’re stayin’ here.”
“Molly.”
“We’re stayin’ here, where we’re sure of eatin’ and sleepin’ and livin’ decent and livin’ long. I’m not starvin’ my children down again, ever!”
The sky was blue through the windows. The sun slanted in, touching half of Molly’s calm face, shining one eye bright blue. Four or five water drops hung and fell from the kitchen faucet slowly, shining, before Drew sighed. The sigh was husky and resigned and tired. He nodded, looking away. “All right,” he said. “We’ll stay.”
He picked up the scythe weakly. The words on the metal leaped up with a sharp glitter.
WHO WIELDS ME–WIELDS THE WORLD!
“We’ll stay. . . .”
Next morning he walked to the old man’s grave. There was a single fresh sprout of wheat growing in the center of it. The same sprout, reborn, that the old man had held in his hands weeks before.
He talked to the old man, getting no answers.
“You worked the field all your life because you had to, and one day you came across your own life growin’ there. You knew it was yours. You cut it. And you went home, put on your grave clothes, and your heart gave out and you died. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? And you passed the land on to me, and when I die, I’m supposed to hand it over to someone else.”
Drew’s voice had awe in it. “How long a time has this been goin’ on? With nobody knowin’ about this field and its use except the man with the scythe . . .”
Quite suddenly he felt very old. The valley seemed ancient, mummified, secretive, dried and bent and powerful. When the Indians danced on the prairie it had been here, this field. The same sky, the same wind, the same wheat. And, before the Indians? Some Cro-Magnon, gnarled and shag-haired, wielding a crude wooden scythe, perhaps, prowling down through the living wheat.
Drew returned to work. Up, down. Up, down. Obsessed with the idea of being the wielder of the scythe. He, himself! It burst upon him in a mad, wild surge of strength and horror.
Up! WHO WIELDS ME! Down! WIELDS THE WORLD!
He had to accept the job with some sort of philosophy. It was simply his way of getting food and housing for his family. They deserved eating and living decent, he thought, after all these years.
Up and
