Silas chewed on a reed and kicked at the tilled soil beneath his feet. It hadn’t rained in weeks. Clouds hung low overhead, deep grey and menacing, but no matter how humid it got, how much the rich scent of precipitation filled the air, they wouldn’t relinquish a drop.
Henry spat on the dusty ground and adjusted his hat. He leaned against a rusted tractor a few yards behind his son, the machine weighed down with heavy burlap bags, the season’s third attempt at seeding the field.
Gradually rolling hills stretched before them, and continued beyond the horizon, each piece of farmland as barren as the neighboring plot. Henry smacked his lips.
“She’s got fuel my boy. Filled ‘er up myself.”
A surprise to a childless family, Silas had just turned twenty three on an uncelebrated Tuesday, any acquaintances miles away, parentage distracted by poverty. By his tenth birthday, his father was an old man and Mom was long gone.
Flecks of blue paint chipped from the tractor as Henry stood, exposing the wasting remains of metal beneath.
Most days, they barely spoke, the words between them growing further and fewer as years went by. In the cold months, weeks would pass, neither uttering more than a grunt over a scrappy shared meal, a wordless command to add more wood to the fire.
Silas pushed a wisp of blonde hair behind his ear.
“I ain’t talkin’ about the gas. It’s all of it, Pa. This place is a wasteland.”
To Henry, it was a barrage, an onslaught of insult so dense, so laden with unfettered resentment that it caught the breath in his throat. For decades, he’d scarcely left the stretch of land he was born upon, where his grandfather had laid claim and paid for in blood.
In an instant, his son became a mutineer.
He stormed off toward the house in the distance, favoring his left hip in a crooked stride that reminded Silas of his father’s age, the increasing weakness he’d never admit. With the knife kept fastidiously at his hip, Silas carved a gash in one of the seed sacks and got back to work.
Henry eased himself down onto the hand-hewn stairs and rested his back against the clapboard. He watched the obscured sphere of the sun traverse behind the clouds, and as it wandered near the horizon, escaping light painting the edge of the sky in deep orange and red, he heard the tractor rumble to a stop. Silas emerged as a phantom, the dust behind him saturated by the sunset, the hint of his shadow dancing across the crabgrass. Henry stood with a creak in his knees.
“So. You quit?”
In a wordless response, Silas slid past his father and into the house. His belongings were few, his sentiments meager.
Shuffling things into a leather satchel, he pushed two books, a whetsone, and three tins of sardines among his scraps of clothing, and after a moment of hesitation, left the the dingy tintype of his parents behind.
Outside, Henry cried.
He didn’t have the language to name his anger, only the tears cascading from his face and the pounding in his withered chest. As Henry hunched and sat back down, the droplets fell around the stairs, disappearing all but instantly into the thirsty ground below. When Silas emerged, he could only seethe at the boy with a weeping rage he could barely understand.
“Maybe I’ll come back some day.”
The old man was silent as his son slung the bag on his shoulder, quickstepped down the stairs, and walked toward the growing dusk. He began to mutter as he climbed up to the small platform of a porch and lit a dustcaked lantern hanging near the door.
“Ought not. Only find a corpse.”
As Henry closed the door behind him, the soft glow of the lantern filling the single room of the house, a gentle sprinkle of rain tapped against the windows.