Marvel

A troubled farming family living in 1940s Colorado falls victim to a gruesome, if altogether too common, accident. But they will soon learn that this is only the beginning of their changing fortune.

***Content warning: This episode deals with themes of physical and emotional abuse, ableism, and contains gore and body horror. Listener discretion is advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

It is often said that we do not appreciate what we have until it is gone. Less frequently is it acknowledged that, even when what we lose is by some miracle returned to us, we will so reliably again take it for granted.

Such ingratitude can carry unforeseen and unforeseeable cost, especially on these wide and merciless Plains – America’s darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Fourteen: Marvel.

(Sounds of chickens clucking, rooster crowing)

NARRATOR

Michael Coope Junior – who goes exclusively by Junior, relinquishing the first name to his father – pulls the ten-year-old Farmall tractor off to the side of the field, kills the engine, and wipes sweat from his brow. Though the morning was cool, the sunlight falls more intensely now as noon waxes, and Junior regrets the jacket he donned when he first left the house.

Looking at the ploughed field behind him, he grimaces at the scant progress of the morning. Before even getting into the field, several of the discs on the plough had shown a little too much play and he’d had to tighten them. Then the tractor refused to start without a great deal of coaxing. By the end of it all, he had gotten into the south field a good hour and a half later than planned.

And his father will have noticed—might even now be concocting a suitable reprimand.

The thought makes his mouth feel even more parched than the hot sunlight and the blowing dust from the turned earth behind him. He reaches for the jug of water under his seat and takes a long pull. Glancing at the sun, he calculates that the hour is somewhere firmly between noon and one, the time of day when normally both he and his father would return to the house for a meal, and a brief nap during the sunniest portion of the day, returning to the fields in a couple hours to work until sunset. But with the wasted time in the morning, he decides to forego the midday break, satisfying himself with a few munches of bread and cheese he'd wrapped that morning in a handkerchief for a snack, and washing it down with another generous draught from the jug. He waits a few more minutes to let the engine cool a trifle, then extracts the hand crank from its nook on the running board, turns on the ignition, and throws the throttle halfway up. Moving around to the front of the tractor, he inserts the hand crank and carefully places his fingers, remembering two years ago when the engine had kicked back and the crank had broken his thumb. His father, on seeing the injury, had only wrenched the thumb back more or less into place, and, ignoring Junior’s cry of pain, had said that it might provide a valuable lesson, and then told him to get back to work and to do it right this time.

Junior looks up toward the house, can make out the indistinct shape of his father moving up the steps and into the house. But just before the doorway, the distant figure turns and gazes in his direction for a long moment.

Junior cranks the engine mindfully, and it roars into renewed life. When he looks up again, his father is gone, and the pale house that has been his only home seems to him like an impassive, staring face, the windows dark and dead and utterly unfamiliar with warmth.

[Short pause]

Glancing over his shoulder at the tilled earth behind him, Junior feels a wave of weariness washing over him – not only at the paucity of progress he has made, but at the thought of all the spring and summer work yet to come. His father often calls him lazy, and at times Junior believes there must indeed be some defect of character in him, some hateful inner weakness. But at other times, he is sure that he is simply destined for something other than the thankless, endless drudgery of farmwork.

His mind falls back into a familiar fantasy: he is marching in a sharp green uniform, then he is firing his rifle among the ruined cities of France, or into the jungles of the occupied Pacific islands. He imagines being the hero to capture Hitler, to present Hirohito’s sword to President Roosevelt. And he imagines being a man his father might respect, admire… even fear.

But the familiar doubt creeps in that the war will end before he comes of age, or even close enough to bluff his way through enlistment, that he will lose his chance to become the man he dreams of being and will never be anything more than the disappointing son of a bitter and unsmiling farmer.

[Short pause]

As the afternoon wears on, Junior begins to feel the absence of his lunch, the folly of working when the sun is at its zenith. He feels faint, like he is about to fall asleep, and both his head and his stomach ache hollowly. Even his vision seems fuzzy, uncertain.

He forces his wandering mind to focus once more, and notes that he is coming to the dip in the field. His father has talked for years about smoothing it out, making the field easier and less hazardous to work in the tractor, but still the hollow remains. Junior makes a mental note that he will drive over the most severe pitch of the slope on his next pass and continues on.

Black flecks dance across his vision, and he reaches down for the water jug, feeling again like he is about to fade out.

That is when he feels the tractor lurch underneath him, and the realization flashes across his brain that he miscalculated. The earth that was at his side rushes up to meet him, and the whirring, roaring, groaning machinery casts a deep shadow over him as he opens his mouth to scream.

(Doomful music)

[Short pause]

His mother, Ruth, is the first to see him.

How long Junior has aimlessly wandered the yard, they do not know. The sun is westering, washing the gentle hills and rolling fields in pastel hues of pink and orange, turning the blue shadows long.

The boy turns blindly and stumbles toward the house, and Ruth screams from the kitchen window, drops the plates she was carrying. The broken crockery shrills and skitters upon the wooden floor as the farmwife sways faintly upon her stout, work-thickened legs.

She breathes her son’s name, and stares at what remains of him.

Where the beautiful face once was, the face she had watched change gradually from that of newborn babe into that of a youth on the cusp of true manhood, is gone. There is only a severed, crushed mass of the lower jaw, and red ruin.

And yet, somehow, Junior approaches the front porch.

Michael Senior comes out of the bathroom where he was washing his oil and dirt-stained hands to investigate the noise, but goes rigid when he traces his wife’s gaze outside. He says nothing, makes no utterance, but only stands there beside Ruth and, like her, stares at the thing that is and is not their son.

Finally, drawing a deep breath, he moves toward the door and opens it. He speaks to the almost-headless figure, and it makes no movement or reply. Dimly and distantly, Michael Senior thinks that he was stupid to expect anything else, that the boy’s ears are gone.

He reaches out and lays a hand upon the shoulder. Still no response, but the flesh is warm to the touch. The father guides his son into the house, and the body walks without resistance, but also without real volition – moving by mere instinctual impulse.

A strange sound emanates from Ruth’s throat, somewhere between scream and laugh. She falls to her knees in the kitchen, then to all fours, the sound swelling and ripping out of her. Her hands are cut upon the many scattered shards of ceramic and smear red across the polished wood, but she appears heedless of the injury.

Michael guides the boy to an armchair and firmly urges him down into it. Junior complies, and then sits perfectly still. The father goes to the smooth black rotary phone, a recent addition to the household, and dials for an ambulance from town.

Ruth sobs and bleeds upon the floor. The coagulated gore upon what remains of Junior’s head moves only with the slight shifting of breath through the roofless throat.

[Short pause]

A medical marvel, the town doctor calls it, seeming more excited by the novelty than sympathetic. He explains that not only should the initial decapitation – or partial decapitation – have killed Junior outright, but that the ensuing blood loss should also have proven unsurvivable.  The doctor’s only explanation is that something – an otherwise potentially fatal blood clot, the pressure of the crushing machinery, or some other mysterious mechanism – staunched the flow and saved the boy, if not most of his destroyed brain. The brainstem, though, seems to be intact, and there are likely remnants of the cerebellum as well. With clinical detachment, the doctor theorizes that this is enough to keep the heart and lungs working and perhaps even allow for rudimentary reflexes, though how Junior can balance without the inner ear or without eyes, he cannot explain. He insists on keeping the boy in the hospital for observation, and at first, the parents bow to the doctor’s knowledge. 

Michael Senior reflects that this is the first time a doctor has seen his boy since the day of his birth.

But when it becomes clear that there is nothing more that medical knowledge can do, no chance of undoing what has been done, and that the doctor is only interested in studying Junior, they take him home and care for him as best they can.

Mostly, it is Ruth that feeds him, spooning thin white porridge carefully into his ruin of a mouth. The older Michael now has to shoulder all of the farmwork himself, and spends no time indoors except for rushed meals and meager sleep.

Ruth seems, most days, almost content with her new lot, which is not after all so new. It is as if her child has been returned to her from the slow encroachment of adulthood, recalled to the absolute dependency of infancy. And Ruth had so adored her boy as a babe, had loved to care for him.

But sometimes at night, Michael hears her sobbing mutedly beside him, muffling her sorrow in the pillow. He pretends not to notice, to be asleep. He pretends because there is a deeply buried part of himself, one which he will never acknowledge, that knows all of this is his fault. He pushed the boy too hard, was the same kind of cruel his own father had been despite swearing he would never become like that man.

He saw the boy reading the papers, listening to the radio in the evenings after supper, saw the way Junior’s eyes lit up whenever there was mention of the war, of the tribulations and heroics of the soldiers abroad. Michael knew that, as soon as he was able, Junior meant to leave the farm and enlist, knew that he would lose his only son and heir, that all his life’s labors and aspirations would be reduced to meaningless toil with that loss.

It had terrified him, and he had become harsher toward Junior, overworked him and belittled him and beaten him, instilled in him a gnawing dread of fatherly wrath. And though Michael can never say exactly how the accident came about, he feels a creeping certainty that it was somehow precipitated by all of this.

But he says nothing of this to the wife with whom he has shared so little tenderness, who long ago stopped even dutifully accepting his occasional lustful overtures during the night.

Anger blossoms in him for a moment, and he thinks that it is really Ruth’s fault. She should have given him more children, more sons, more heirs and helpers.

But they had tried so long before Junior came, and he had always thought that the boy did not look much like him and a little too much like his closest neighbor, Gerald. And that stirs the older doubts about his virility, his manhood, which he cannot quite manage to push out of his mind.

Michael does not weep, but he sleeps as poorly as his wife.

And as for the damaged son next door… who could say? Only the rhythm of his rattling breathing distinguishes waking hours from sleep.

[Short pause]

When Gerald and wife first come around, it is with an offering of beef casserole and a cake, both costly delicacies with the wartime rationing. They come with murmurings of sympathy for the family tragedy, and despite the old suspicion that still dogs Michael, he expresses the appropriate gratitude, and even graciously accepts Gerald’s offer to help with the farmwork. He can hardly refuse – the workload is too much for him alone, and Gerald has fathered three healthy sons and two daughters. The offer is the neighborly thing to do, and Michael knows that turning it down would not only be rude, but outright foolish.

Then come other visitors from farther away: Loren and Juanita Williams, Keith and Carol McCormack, Geoff and Miriam Eichenbaum. And with them come more gifts, more offers of help. Michael accepts them all, each time feeling his pride shudder a little more.

And behind the polite sympathy, he begins to notice what really brought their guests – morbid curiosity. They are too proper, too reserved in that friendly flatlander way of the prairie sodbusters, to express it openly, but it stands ever more naked to him in their eyes, their voices.

And so, at last, he asks if they want to visit Junior in his room, explaining that they had to lock him away therein because sometimes, for no guessable reason, he will rise and wander blindly about the house, risking further self-injury. And while they primly demur, none of them fail to accept invitation in the end – out of compassionate charity, of course.

When they see him, they are mostly able to maintain their composure in the face of the gruesome spectacle. Only Carol is unable to contain a gasp at the remaining lower jaw, the unsightly ruin behind it. But even she recovers quickly and almost convincingly pretends there was never any such outburst to begin with.

Their eyes linger though, greedily, upon the wreckage of Junior’s head, upon the spaces where the inner workings are laid bare, drinking deeply of the novel horror of it all and rapt with darkest ecstasy.

When they are shown out, Michael cannot help but notice how slowly they move, obviously loth to depart.

And with all of these little moments and the insights they bring, a shadowy seed is planted in his ripe mind, flowering and fruiting in the night of his thought.

(Creepy music)

[Long pause]

The two travelers hesitate at the entrance of the faded, dusty little red-and-white striped pavilion. They seem to be a couple and appear quite young. The older man standing before the entrance keeps eyeing the young man, no doubt wondering why he isn’t off storming beaches and bunkers with the other males of his generation.

But when the couple make up their mind and step forward, the older man accepts their money as readily as anyone else’s, and ushers them through with a few poorly delivered theatrical lines.

They remain inside for a long, long time. This is not unusual for the Headless Boy’s visitors, and the man at the entrance makes no move to extract them, only waits patiently for the next customers and their admittance fee of fifty cents per viewer.

While he waits, Michael Senior rolls a cigarette and lights it, savoring the rich first puffs. He looks across the field, which he has rented out to Gerald. He claimed it was because he could not bear to work the site of his son’s tragic accident, but in truth it was only a sound business decision for a sonless –or at least, nearly sonless – aging man.

He looks across the leased field toward the white little farmhouse with its windows like dark eyes. Ruth, he is sure, will be sitting beside the window, mirroring his gaze and looking out at the tent he bartered off a man at the county fair. She hates the tent, hates all that it represents, hates him for raising it so near the hillock that stole Junior’s voice and mind. This does not particularly bother Michael – there was never any love between them, and she will not actively oppose him in word or deed.

Just like a woman, he thinks bitterly. Always whining, but too weak to act.

 The young couple emerges, and the fluttering tent flap behind them allows Michael to see his broken boy for the briefest of instants, lit by the wan glow of the hanging kerosene lantern within. He tries to look at Junior as little as possible, not sharing the customer’s ghoulish fascination, only needing their money.

More use this way than when he was whole, Michael thinks as the image disappears behind peppermint stripes, and feels a twinge of guilt for the sentiment which he quickly tamps down.

What else, he reasons, is a man in his position supposed to do?

The out-of-state Ford Model 40 rumbles down the road, and Michael turns his eyes anticipatorily in the opposite direction, hoping another automobile materializes soon out of the summer dust and heat, guided perhaps from the distant highway by the hand-painted sides he has diligently raised.

[Short pause]

Michael reads the last issue of the local paper over his morning coffee and eggs, and smiles to himself. Not for the first time, he begins to read aloud the article about the growing attraction of the Headless Boy, about the rumors of the gubernatorial hopeful, Paul Scharbock, making a detour in his campaign trail for a surreptitious visit.

Scharbock, it is said, is a great lover of all things occult, grotesque, and macabre. And on top of that, he is known to be quite wealthy, having shrewdly invested in mining and construction interests prior to the war, and who owns several for-profit prisons both in and out of state.

As Michael reads, his smile widens. Across the table, not touching her own breakfast, Ruth watches him and tries to recall if she has ever seen him smile before. Michael lovingly mouths the last line of the article: it may prove a most providential day for Mr. and Mrs. Coope, and of course their unfortunate son, should the rumors prove true and Lieutenant Governor Vivian’s sole worthy rival pay them a visit.

There is a clattering and then a heavy thud from the locked room upstairs, and Ruth stands to check on Junior. But Michael, folding the paper suddenly, rises and tells her to sit, says that he has everything under control.

As she hears his heavy tread recede up the stairs, Ruth decides that he has never smiled in her presence. She reaches for the newspaper, wads it up, and throws it into the wood-burning stove.

[Short pause]

Paul Scharbock arrives late in the evening, just past sunset. Michael is getting ready to pack it in for the day, and begins to tell his visitor to come back tomorrow, until he sees the shining cream Chrysler Imperial, so out of place amidst the windblown dust of the plains.

Then, donning his best smile, Michael welcomes Paul and his much younger wife, perhaps a shade too fawningly. The young woman barely looks at him, her eyes lidded and somnolent. She walks silently beside her bald and grey-goateed husband, whose demeanor is wholly different, sharp and raptorial.

How much, he asks brusquely, and Michael blinks. When the question is impatiently repeated, Michael swallows and stammers out his answer: a hundred dollars per viewer.

For a moment, silence reigns. Michael thinks for an instant that a cold wind has risen at his back, but it is only his own nervous sweat prickling along his spine. He curses himself for a fool for making such an outrageous demand, waits for the esteemed visitors to laugh and turn away.

Instead, Scharbock nods once, extracts his wallet from his coat pocket, and carefully counts out the banknotes.

As Michael stares in disbelief at the small fortune in his hands, the two dignitaries pass him and enter the tent. Gathering himself, he awkwardly stuffs the bills into his pocket, then looks around to make sure no one has observed the exchange, not wanting anyone to know his good luck lest they be tempted to partake in it. The only other soul in sight is Scharbock’s driver, who sits rigidly behind the wheel, eyes obscured by dark Ray-Ban aviators.

That is when he hears the horrified gasp from the tent behind.

What is this?

Frowning, Michael peeks in through the tent flaps.

Rather than sitting on the floor or stumbling around in his crude chicken wire ring as he usually does, Junior has opened the gate in an unprecedented display of intellect and coordination and is blindly groping his way toward the would-be gubernatorial couple.

Michael says feebly that everything is alright, that Junior will do no harm.

Then Junior’s fingers close around Scharbock’s throat, and the old man’s face turns purple around his sharply groomed little beard.

Swearing at the headless boy, Michael leaps forward and tries to wrest his grip from around the campaigner’s throat, but the boy seems stronger now than he ever was whole. Bloody spittle froths at Scharbock’s mouth, there is an awful crunching sound, and then the old man falls limply to the earthen floor.

His young wife backs away, an aborted shriek burbling in her throat. Ignoring Michael’s incoherent plea, she turns and flees outside into the falling night, knocking aside the hanging kerosene lantern in her flight.

Michael spares but a moment to eye the lantern’s ominous swaying before Junior turns his incredible strength upon his father.

No, Michael’s command comes out as a whimper. You know me, I’m your daddy.

Junior can speak no reply. His tightening fingers do not relent.

The lantern uncouples from its hook upon the chain, shatters, throws sputtering flame upon the parched fabric of the tent. Michael feels the blood vessels in his eyes bursting, sees dark stars exploding in his vision as the headless boy tightens, tightens, tightens his grip.

As acrid black smoke rolls over them, as the burning tent collapses around them, Junior leans with all of his ruined being into the only embrace he and his father have ever shared.

(Bleak music)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and music by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please help spread the word about the show by rating, reviewing, and sharing. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]