A Doctor’s Chosen Field
“I don’t know what it is. Even a barn like this that’s never had a cow in it, my mind somehow tells the olfactory that I smell dung.”
I met him all of twenty minutes ago and already I could tell he was a master at the power of suggestion. When he’d pulled the barn door aside and we’d entered, I was hit with this wall of close air, that broad block of space that should be no differently breathable, but had somehow presented with most of the oxygen and moisture baked out of it. The interior didn’t ring true to any particular aroma, but as soon as he said ‘dung,’ I could swear I smelled it.
His mental device was impressive, given that I was only half listening. I’d thought rich guys were into collecting classic cars or devoting entire rooms to Portuguese frescoes painted in melts of gold bullion with brushes made from the virgin hairs of war orphans. Not this guy. It was throwing me. We hadn’t walked past a pool, a fountain, not one topiary of a stallion rearing up or a ballerina carved in the leafy likeness of his first lay. Apparently, this guy just liked to spend his dough on property, and plenty of it.
“750 acres. I mean, that’s what you’re thinking, right? You want to ask how far back my property goes, contiguously. I can show you the deed. A lot of people don’t believe it. Ten wide and seventy-five deep, clear back to the border. From the house it just looks like it goes on forever.”
Realistically, I’d moved on from that question to the next vagary, the fact that we’d skipped his part of our introduction.
“So, do you prefer I call you Mr. Thabaddon like on the mailbox, or is that just a made-up name to keep solicitors away from the white pages?”
“It’s Dr., actually, Dr. Nicholas Thabaddon, a pleasure. But feel free to call me as the neighborhood children do. They call me Tabby. I didn’t like it at first. Made me sound like a housecat. They used to shout it when they’d TP my front gate at Halloween and before long that’s how I started introducing myself when I’d spot them at the grocer or offer them a hard candy after peeling them from under a crashed bicycle, wheelies versus oak trees. I guess it grew on me. Anyway, I’ve been called worse.”
“Sorry, Doctor. Dr. Tabby. Sounds weird to me. So, um, that’s like a medical doctor title in your case?”
“No, no, certainly not. Don’t get me started on those folks, out there extending lifespans and cheating nature with organ transplants and transfusions and such. I mean, I get it. They’re personal heroes of the people, and all. But, you know, sometimes a person doesn’t want to spend life’s winter gumming fatback sandwiches and unable to scratch that itch between their toes without breaking a hip. The dictionary’s going to tell you otherwise, but I guess a younger me saw a relationship between the Hippocratic Oath and more than a few hypocrisies.”
I’d never thought of it like that. I’d gotten an extra fifteen years with my Mom when they put in her pacemaker, but she did spend the final five of those freezing cold and unable to stomach anything more flavorful than plain, dry Cheerios. Her miracle of science and medicine suddenly seemed like my own ego and not much else.
“Fair enough. So, what do you do, Doctor?”
“Let’s just say for the sake of laying this to rest that I earned a decent doctorate back when such things meant something. I’ve an esteemed degree my field, well, we’ve just met. I’ve a doctorate in some very bad things.”
I became intrigued. Cryptic responses always turned me into a Hardy boy. The doctor’s house was sizable. His front gate at the mouth of the long, winding driveway was adorned with wrought iron dragons and a likeness that he’d let on was Hephaestus, hammer in hand, a dead giveaway as to his income even if I didn’t know who Hephaestus was. Everyone knew this man was the rich guy who lived on the hill. But here, out on the estate, there was nothing flashy, nothing that advertised sciatica from sitting on too fat a wallet. No remnants of a party gone berserk were spread around an opulent firepit, embedded in a hot tub, lashed to a turntable that swung you through life-sized dioramas of ancient Greek battles or famous sex scenes the way they should have happened on the silver screen. It was just plain wheat waving in the breeze as far as the eye could see, interspersed every so often with the presence of a plump, knotty tree or the crease where one hill met another. Even the barn looked out of place. Now, not only was he holding his wealth close to his chest, but his career too? I thought maybe he was a doctor of criminology, one of these guys in charge of figuring out how a murderer thinks. He was older. Could he have been a part of Oppenheimer’s crew? Was it elicit statecraft, ’Nam kind of stuff? Tabby was one man, one mystery, and in my opinion, the unlikeliest guy to have just saved my life. Matters had me trying not to speak in riddles.
“Well, I’ve got a B.F.A, myself. Metalwork. I know I drive the tow truck and all but that wasn’t originally the plan. Hard to feed your family when your greatest claim to fame is a half-assed cobalt and steel commission called ’Olallieberry Flame” sitting outside of a Tower Records in Nashville.
“Metalwork, indeed. Then you, my good friend, will have mustered at least some ancillary appreciation for my antique treasures.”
It was quite the introduction for whatever had been hidden behind the overly clean paddock door. The outside of the barn was a plain and faded wood brown, nearly gray, splits and grooves carved deeply into every plank. It was clear that decades of angry sun had had its way, beating endlessly down on the structure to the point where the wooden boards just preferred to gash into rifts and crannies rather than to keep warping in on themselves.
Inside, the paddock doors were bright red, adorned with purposely protruding slats, white exes in squares over each half door, up and down. I couldn’t decide if they’d remained virtually untouched or if they’d all just gotten a fresh coat of paint. They were pristine and that was unbarnlike in my estimation. The good doctor opened the lower half first, adding to the strangeness. I thought I heard windchimes. Then the top half swung to the left, mine and his, and he stepped broadly aside for his reveal.
“Ta-dah.”
He actually said ‘ta-dah.’ Well, he suggested it, and I’d heard it, but did he say it? Strangenesses were now brimming. What I’d otherwise heard were not chimes, not even really sprung from winds. From the ceiling of the paddock dangled dozens upon dozens of pre-industrial farm implements, some simple like hoes and pitchforks, others that had me stretching for a word, a scythe, a hand sickle, steel pruning shears, variously shaped blades and sharp edges capping a multitude of poles and hafts. The vibration of the doors, maybe even just the vibration of our presence, was enough to disturb the lot, swaying them gently on the hooks that bore them, causing each to glance off another and suggest a whispered score in sharps and flats.
There was an almost gloating expression on the doctor’s face. Clearly, I was meant to be impressed. I already had a problem, though. I did not want to be discourteous, but his supposed antiques, at least the metal portions of them, looked absolutely fresh out of machining titanium for aerospace, brand spanking new. They were more than brand new, glinting, shining in those bright whites and blues that only show up in moonlight on water or on displays of ceremonial armor in castles. Whatever space age grindstone he had pressed these pieces against, whatever charlatan had convinced him that a true patina or maybe even a little bit of rust was a bad thing, he’d scraped away any value they could have had. It was like looking at over-polished silver. Apart from a groundbreaking for a new Arthur Treacher’s location, who in their right mind needed a plain, old spade gleaming like a pearl in a Hawaiian sunset? I measured my words.
“Oh, you’re a collector, then. Well, I suppose I’ve seen stranger assortments in the rear windows of just about every other roadside Chevelle. Are these, like, of a personal value to you?”
”Oh, I assure you, good sir, these are more than mere forgotten contrivances in an old man’s shed. Every handheld device in this prickly little hanging garden carries with it a depth of meaning and sagacious inclination the likes of which most folks will never know. Sorry, I guess those are the ten-dollar words of an aficionado. I haven’t shown these to anyone in quite some time. It’s an exciting day. Still, in truth, you could navigate five hundred lifetimes and never come across any of their like.”
I was pretty sure I had seen at least two of them at Woolworths last week.
“Is that so, doctor? Okay. Maybe I spoke too soon. Congratulations on your heirlooms. I didn’t immediately take them for rare. I suppose that old tiller is actually kind of interesting. Can you imagine what it must have been like, working with these sorts of things day in and out? Is that one a machete? I’ve never actually seen one of those.”
The doctor rubbed a finger over the unsharpened backside of the specimen closest to him.
“It’s a panga, actually, but that’s exactly my point. Without an interested party asking after these matters, the distinctions of them, one and all, could be lost to history or even to myth.”
I’d never heard of a panga, and I’d seen just about every episode of that Mutual of Omaha show. Those guys went all over the world. He must have been making it up. I tried to change the subject.
“Alright, doctor. Panga got me. I’m sorry. I’m out of my depth here. I want to show some greater appreciation, but I’m really just curious about why you’re showing your treasures to me. Why now exactly? Aren’t we supposed to be settling up?”
“Oh, well, of course, this is part of our last week’s deal, you and I. You don’t just get to see them, you’re going to get the chance to use them.”
What was mostly a casual conversation batted suddenly at the nerves in my temple. I hadn’t thought about last week for going on a half hour now, pretty much the length of this conversation. Eliminating it from my mind somehow let my lungs fill normally. Now I was back at his doorbell again, like a short while ago, my stomach eating itself, shoulders up around my ears.
Last week, dispatch sent me out to collect this old F600 workhorse from the 60s. Said someone had dumped the beast mid-U-turn near the entrance to the dam and I was the only wrecker rated for five tons this side of Dyersburg. That’s barely within specs, but I was game. I get there and it’s the 700 series, grain truck body with a modified rear axle and half-filled with barley. So I put on my 9th-grade arithmetic cap and I started thumbing through the greasy manuals that had been sitting in my glove box practically since I’d gotten my license. Before long I’m dropping mud flaps on the curb to lose weight and I’m breaking in on the CB chatter looking for the driver and otherwise begging dispatch to dump the grain. Traffic was backed up clear around the bend and I was getting back noes on all counts. So, I made like Mr. Wizard, using the grade to my advantage and tow-chaining the base of my boom to my chassis to ease some of the stress on its bolts. I took it easy in low gear and I hauled the monster out.
Fifteen minutes later I came to be on that downhill out front, windows open, the incomparable Styx rockin’ the 8-track. Taking it slowly, I was, maybe, a few seconds shy of the rich guy’s gate and the hairpin switchback it decorated. Couldn’t see it yet. There are no sidewalks on the hill, no hiking trails that I know about. But, there was a guy out there, standing alongside what I thought was the worst place you could stand on a road like this. Summer had been braising the rest of us like briskets, but he was settled in that spot, wearing a long black trench coat like it was nothing. I adjusted the wheel, a tweaked little cinch that breezed me past the guy, just close enough for him to say aloud, like he was in the cab next to me, “Cut it.” I heard him.
Here’s the thing. If he’d said something like, “Stop,” like a normal person, I probably would have ignored him, thinking that he was blaming me for his own clueless ass being so close to the road. If he was like anyone else and had yelled, “Slow down,” or “Look out,” or even “My baby,” I likely would have slammed on the brakes, fishtailed and jackknifed the whole unbalanced haul, probably winding up either in an early grave or on death row, oddly similar results. But this guy calmly said “Cut it,” like I’d heard a million times learning to back up with a Buick LeSabre strapped to my rear. “Cut it,” like it was my Dad come back from the afterlife still angry about the driving lesson when I’d pitched the heft of his Plymouth Fury straight through our neighbor’s chicken coop. It was a phrase that immediately keyed me in to cut the wheel, operate on instinct, no thought, and one that, around the blind turn a split-second later, pushed me to narrowly miss the young girl in the plaid skirt who was spinning bubbles from a plastic wand, smack dab in the middle of the street. I saw the wind from my fender arch her backwards into the gravity at her heels and pull her straight down with a scream and a thump. Then I crashed into the rich guy’s gate.
I woke up to an underweight paramedic tending to the extra head that had grown on my head and a blurred vision of that man in the street whom I now know to be this rich doctor, Tabby Thabaddon. He was giving a statement to an officer, one that looked young from a distance. The gate was destroyed. Stone pillars were toppled. Its iron designs were completely mangled, some of them crimped into a Jugendstil grimace up under my wrecker, much of the rest exploded forward so that the once expensive curves of it now looked like wool in a cheap sack. Barley was everywhere, including my mouth. The Ford was upside down, disconnected. I supposed the young girl had been collected by her parents. She was nowhere in sight.
My first flash of relief came from the stickman poking at my lump with a long, gooey Q-Tip. He said I was lucky to be the only one who’d gotten hurt. He claimed I’d be home in time to watch Soap. I could breathe again. The girl was unhurt. The man, the same. Even I was going to live to see summer reruns.
Second relief came from cop two, an older badge with a porn star mustache. He’d strolled over as if giving me a gift when he mentioned that he was foregoing the field sobriety test, pursuant to my injury, but also because the owner of the destroyed property was willing to not press charges, not even involve insurance. All he sought was recompense. I figured the gate for some $100,000 deal. My kneejerk was an immediate snap to attention from the waist up, but the paramedic settled me back into my sore slouch as the cop held up a reassuring hand indicating he’d not yet finished. He told me the man only needed some odd jobs done around his house and that if I was willing to let bygones, I should come ring his bell when I felt better. He handed me back my license. I didn’t know he’d taken it. His summation added that if I ever wanted to make kids piss their pants again, I should stick to high school bullies and budding Tarheels fans, making sure to literally steer clear of adorable little eight-year-olds like Grace. I nodded. Pretty name. Matters could have been so much worse. The sweat equity he’d suggested seemed more and more reasonable to me as the week had gone on, perhaps only because the authorities had taken down both our addresses, passively holding me to it.
The doctor’s impetus in showing me his prized and seductively glistening tool set turned consequently to be about the chores that I had been warned were coming. It was to be yard work, a lot of yardwork. I got it.
“I’d been meaning to ask you about that, actually, last week’s deal and all. I’m not backing out or anything, but at risk of tipping a bad hand here, Doc’, you kind of had me dead-to-rights. I was trying my best to be careful, but overloaded on the downhill, music blaring, carefree elbow out the window, near fatal misses. That had to look really bad. With respect, don’t folks like yourself usually Huey in a bunch of lawyers and begin suing people from the closest phone booth to the mess? Why the trade?”
The doctor curled the lower half of his face into a simper.
“That’s right. There was music, wasn’t there? Oh, well, you know what they say, my friend. Rock-n-roll is the work of the devil. Maybe next time you put on a little Earl Scruggs bluegrass and just go with it. Or not. What do I know.”
We both laughed at the rock joke. My laughter ended before his.
“Sooo?”
“So. Well. Okay. I guess I’ll let you in on a few secrets. The landowner back that way…”
“Your distant neighbor, you mean? The guy at the county line on the other side of your back border?”
“That’s him, yes. Well, he and I don’t much get along. Bad blood, you could say. I used to work for him back in the day. But since we acquired adjoining fields, everything’s gotten a little competitive. Now, a lot of my assets aren’t what one might call, liquid. They’re tied up in all kinds of emerging commodities and offshore interests. And you’ll forgive an old academic for not wanting to run to Manufacturers Hanover in town every other day and deal with their born-cranky bank tellers. It got to the point that I could borrow against future financial yields in checks large enough to bring on teams with an army of tractors and a commercial grade thresher, but I didn’t have enough change in my pocket to grab a dog at the ballpark. Imagine, a well-to-do guy like me hounding Little League fans for a spare quarter. And then, of course, there’s my desire for a little quiet. Have you ever been to a playground full of kids on a Saturday? You can call it youthful joy or whatever you like, but with due respect to the innocents, it’s just a day of non-stop, endless screaming. A fellow can scarcely hear himself think. A lot of my other properties face spots like that, screams and wails and yowls. This place is my solace. I wasn’t too keen on bringing aboard uproarious tank engines to constantly vibrate the earth beneath my feet, thundering away over the hill. I don’t even have a gas lawnmower. Let’s just say that when the opportunity arose for my neighbor and I to share a common employee, bad blood or not, I jumped. I would let him lay out for the daily wage, upfront, and when enough debt had accumulated to match one of my more standard transactions, the check would be in the mail. I could do one guy. One guy is quiet. One guy is manageable. In fact we had Morty working here for what seems like ages.”
Dr. Tabby had an odd body language. I remember my grandfather, when he’d blather on about cheese in The Great Depression or God-forbid dove into other salient recollections of warm sweaters, his eyes would scan away to the wall or the ceiling, as if searching for the details that would hook me in and ask him to tell me more. The same could be said for a number of the elderly customers who stunk up my side-seat with Ben-Gay while I towed their Bonnevilles and their Studebakers. Advice offered to you was done with dead-on eye contact. Stories about themselves meandered seemingly without a point, always grabbing their chins and their foreheads as if physically extracting the memories with a pinch or a pull, a stroke of the beard or a paw at the back of a neck that ached just thinking about the past. And while they’d tend to the individual muscles in their faces; always, always, always they’d peer around in every which direction as if they were beset by hungry ghosts kept at bay solely with a lurid stare.
The doctor was just the opposite. His eyes hadn’t left mine for his whole story. While I suppose that might not have bothered me otherwise, his eye-contact contained this morose quirk. He glowered at me even when he moved, even when he tilted his head to this side or that. Picture a wolf locked on to his next meal, head down, gauging the distance, but slowly moving sideways around some obstacle in his path. I can’t say I liked it. I wondered if the doctor had missed a dose of his own medication.
“Don’t tell me this Morty guy worked your fields until retirement age.”
“Oh, no, no. He’s moved on, dealing blackjack tables in Vegas, I heard. I can’t say for sure though because, in truth, that weaselly Mickey Mouse on my back forty altered the deal without consulting me. ‘Our’ employee. What a joke! Morty hadn’t come by in a dog’s age and I can only suppose he got suckered into my rival’s malarky about harvesting techniques that don’t stress the stalks, something about it yielding a better crop next time around. Seriously?! What kind of bull must he have been slinging for a full-grown adult to buy into that happy Earth Day stuff?! I’m sorry. Where are my manners? In any case, I didn’t have to worry terribly long. Morty may not have shown on my doorstep in years, but eventually he hops a red-eye in Laconia and not a day later, kismet. There’s a job opening! Just one. I’d like to fill the position before you-know-who finds somebody, maybe hire someone who’s strapped to my side of the fence for a change. Let his fields go fallow a while. Didn’t think my checkbook issues were going to quite facilitate that. Still, it’s kind of hard to ignore a sign from above staring you right in the face, though, eh friend? In my case it was barley grain raining down all over my driveway. Barley…wheat; tomato, tomato.”
He pronounced “tomato” the same way both times, the rich guy way. Finally, his stare broke for another venue. It loosened me up enough to rejoin the conversation.
“That explains why it looks so wild, overgrown. I can’t even see where your rows used to be. You plant all this yourself?”
“Heaven forbid. This was all kind of here already.”
“Really? Okay, I can free-up weekends for a while. I figure I should start slashing it clear so you can sow new. How many acres do you expect would pay for your gate, Doctor?”
I reached for the scythe, mainly because it was the biggest implement that I thought I could swing on my own without pulling something important. Tabby swatted my hand away, like an electric shock had bolted through his system.
“I’m sorry. Truly sorry. It’s just that, from a trim-the-verge perspective, that one’s more like an epidemic or a holocaust. I’ll implore you to start with something smaller, more careful a pluck. Besides, that one kind of belongs to Morty. I should retire it like a jersey. Let me help you make a choice that will see some of my experiments through to fruition.”
“Experiments?”
“Yes. Here, come. Let me show you.”
Tabby led me off, downfield quite a way. We ended up in a shadier spot beneath a hackberry tree, set in a crescent-shaped stand of scragglier boughs he called aralia spinosa. The cooler splash of shadow beneath the leaves had formed open ground from which we could observe the wheat from the edge of its growth. The whole walk he’d gone on about his neighbor and Morty’s absence and the growing seasons in this part of the world getting longer. Once, he interrupted himself as if it was imperative to point out this crooked old log on the ground, whipping out a phrase in a foreign language he pronounced something like etz hadaath. You didn’t get a lot of that in my part of Tennessee. It reminded me again that he was a doctor of something, but it wasn’t clear to me if I was supposed to be looking at the log, the concave depression around it, or one of the multitudes of oversized insects that were boring into it. Nonetheless, his oration took a quick and evident turn when we’d reached our destination. The doctor was getting down to business.
“So, here you can see some of my experiments. When Morty left me without my daily bushels, I used those years to try out a few techniques of my own. It’s kind of scientific, actually. See, over there, that I didn’t touch yet. Kind of a control group. Amber waves, yes? Then, that patch to the left that is kind of all dilapidated, that’s where I mixed into the soil some torn papers and custom inks, old contracts and scratchpads and such that I didn’t need anymore. This near mess I mixed with pineapple bark and a bottle of hemolymph from imperial moths. Sounds exotic, but they’re local. Tricky to come by that much though. I jokingly call it imp blood. I mean, anyone can fertilize with droppings, compost, eggshells. What have I got to lose going a little awry? This broken patch just here, that’s been covered on and off with a bearskin. Don’t ask how I came by that. But this selection to the side, this one lonely varietal, bloated at the center, tanned over the whole of it. Nothing matches it. It is singular, unique. You can see a tiny bit of blight forming at the tip of the kernels. Notice on the beard, those little hairs around the spikes, they’re supposed to be sort of blonde, but these are reading jet black. There, look, see those sort of jailhouse stripes on the main stem when the sunlight refracts over a cloud’s edge.? You can’t explain that genetically, congenitally even, anymore than the tiny crystallizations forming on the leaves. When the light hits them just right, they glimmer like rhinestones.”
The doctor was in his element. There was no arguing about that. I knew he was going to tell me anyway, but I asked just to show that I was listening.
“And what went in the soil here?”
“This one was a true concoction. I churned into the dirt under this baby a full jar of Skippy and a slew of Chiquita bananas. There are a couple sticks of butter under there and some toast points I fried up myself in bacon grease. It may not sound like much. I’m not splitting the atom again. But look at it. It’s only a single blade of wheat, but so, so special.”
I saw another weekend disappearing in the length of our back-and-forth. I thought well to turn the topic back to what I owed the man.
“In all seriousness, doctor, I’ve never worked a farm before. But blight is what you don’t want. You should have me hacking down most of it, and fast, so that it doesn’t spread.”
“And make waste of my discoveries? I don’t think you understand Mr. Metalwork. I want the blight to spread. I want more of it. I want to understand it, cultivate it. This isn’t just any blight. This needs to be carefully identified, studied, plucked delicately from whence it came to preserve the full force of its nature before being transferred and proliferated and perfected. I don’t need the money. I’m not taking grain to market. I intend to bask in the limelight of innovation, to pierce the medicinal interlude that is the host and the parasite, grafted together, each looking to prevail. I want to bottle their fight, capture the essence of how they are drawn together. It’s not too subtle a statement to claim that this could be my gift to the world. Left to your previous devices, you would have come in with the handheld equivalent a stump grinder to mulch it all away in bulk. That can’t happen.”
It didn’t make sense, but I supposed penicillin hadn’t either. A week ago I almost ran over a kid with a tow truck. Yet it was today that I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. I think the lump on my head was making a comeback.
“Doctor, how do you know it’s this blight that’s your golden ticket? How do you know that’s the one? That could be the bug that wipes out your whole place, hell, the town’s entire crop.”
“No, no. Again, this is special in ways that defy description. Look closer. Look very closely with the kind of eyes that have forgotten you might have anyplace else to be later. Think as if the mouse might never run down the clock. See what previously could not be fathomed.”
I didn’t know what I was supposed to be looking at, what I was supposed to see. I’m thirty-three and standing in a field with a stranger, my ridiculous gaze focused on a blade of grass. It was growing where nothing else was near it. I thought that was weird. There were no spotty patches of wheat around it, all poisoned with this guy’s pantry leftovers and his super icks. They probably all died off. I could see the tan of it, the black hairs, like he said. This one was freer in its surroundings. All the others nearby would sway uniformly in the breeze, the drafts between trees, but this one seemed to twirl oddly at its center, abruptly jutting in offbeat directions in the middle without the top or bottom bending with it, sometimes even moving their opposite. To whatever degree a plant can, off in this raw dirt by itself, it did look tender, lonesome, heartbroken. There were these tiny beetles sneaking up behind it. It grew close to this practically ancient root that had also breeched the ground and, given its proximity to a blade of wheat without contemporaries, had likewise been exposed to the elements year-round. That was all I was getting from this exercise. None of it seemed enough to warrant anything particularly unusual about a sight we’d just walked a quarter mile to see.
I looked to the doctor. I turned back to the wheat. That I did twice, searching more for words to lash from my tongue than the doctor’s repeated explanations. It wasn’t helping. As one does, I craned an eyeball up toward my brow, part sarcastic expression, partly as if interrogating the sky for answers. That’s when it happened. It was in my periphery. It was blurred, but I saw it.
A few color variations and blemishes weren’t what the doctor was talking about. I inhaled sharply and threw my gawk back down to the ground. It was the rest of the wheat. All the wheat he hadn’t touched, his control group patch, the verge we’d traipsed through, all the natural wheat covering the hill clear back to his house…no matter where the wheat was, it was all bending over, slightly, in a way that pointed them straight at this one freak stem. It was like they were bowing or beckoning, wheat that should have been upright and coaxed only into subtle waves as air currents traveled overland, they were lurching at it; slanting, tipping, leaning, doing whatever they could do to be closer to this one enigma in the sunlight. The roll of the hillside, a stationary beast by all rights, seemed to wag and to rock all the wheat in pulses on a million unforgiving trajectories toward the anomaly. I began to shake, bodily, with some harsh realizations.
“You see it now, don’t you? Yes. You can’t unsee it. Don’t try. You can’t untoll that bell. A minute ago you’d have come back here with a wrecking ball. Now you understand the precision required, the singularity of it, of what you are about to do. An employee doesn’t just brazenly start with the biggest tool in the shop. They have to know. They have to connect to what precisely it is that they are accomplishing and what it means thereafter. Walk over to it. Listen to the rhythm that takes you there. Prepare yourself. Envision it.”
I approached the plant. Doctor Thabaddon drew a shiny utensil from the breast pocket of his shirt. He gestured slowly, but with insurmountable purpose. It was a pair of nail scissors, like from a travel kit, polished to absolute perfection as would be the sword of a king, its fine metal edge folded a hundred times over in a great forge. They were tiny. I could barely fit my finger and thumb into the loops. Oh, but they were sharp. I tested them with a trivial touch to my opposite index and watched blood pool in the swirls of my prints and drip down into the waiting soil. There was a sudden redness to the sky and stinging tears evacuating ducts in the pinches of my eyes.
I gestured to return the device, but the doctor struck no posture to indicate reclaiming it. With one hand he reached into my own breast pocket and pulled from it the seed head from another wheat plant. I had no idea how it got there or how he knew it was present to be drawn. He held it flatly on his palm and spoke to it.
“Come, Grace, it’s time we found a place for you while the nice man starts paying back his debt.”
With his other hand, scissors still stuck at my knuckles, he guided my own toward the specter of this lone blade of tanned wheat. I heard a heart throbbing. I spotted more blight. I smelled dung. I didn’t want to do it. Blue Suede Shoeswas my Mom’s favorite song. The doctor brought his nose mere inches from mine, sniffed disgustedly, and caught my gaze, forcefully prying at me with only his deepened, malevolent squint. But a moment before the last girder in me would have summoned spine enough to resist, he smirked and spoke in a whisper.
“Cut it.”
Two years later, a recently collected Duke was still in my pocket when disco charted its best week on record. Two thousand years later, I still hadn’t graduated from my clippers.