Harvest

In October of 1989, a well-to-do farmer, ruled by his voracious appetites, reaps the ultimate fruit of his labors.

***Content warning: This episode touches upon themes of familial loss, racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and psychological abuse. Listener discretion advised.***

Transcript

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

Traditionally, American culture has prized wealth above all else. Prosperity Gospel, free-market libertarianism, neo-liberalism: these are the American golden calf. Every other measure of well-being, every ideal, lives and futures are sacrificed to feed it. The gilded lie that anyone can achieve prosperity if they only bleed enough is bought and sold, over and over again.

When such seeds are widely sown and nourished with every form of morbidity, it is hardly any wonder that they bring might forth the most appalling fruit.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Nineteen: Harvest.

(Sounds of red-winged blackbird singing)

NARRATOR

Luther coughs into his cheap red and white paisley handkerchief, spits a wad of chew into the dust ill-temperedly. His hired man, Cesar, isn’t tilling close enough to the road. He has told Cesar so many times to edge out into the ditch, county right-of-way and public safety be damned.

After all, he is fond of saying, it’s farmers like him that have made this county, and not the other way around.

Climbing back into his shiny new blue-and-white ’89 Dodge Ram, Luther is turning the ignition when he chances to look at the field on the other side of the road, and he pauses. It isn’t his, but he has often coveted it, with its better drainage and darker, richer soil, enriched long ago by a small river that has long since dried up.

And Luther thinks that such good ground is wasted on that damned fool Rex Herzog. Rex keeps neatly to his boundaries, even leaves a portion of the field untouched every year. The tiny cemetery there is ancient, the prairie township of Mycenae which it once served long ago disappeared. No one comes to visit it anymore, none of the family names still legible upon the weed-choked, neglected headstones are even represented in the county anymore.

A goddamned waste, Luther thinks, shaking his head and spitting again.

When he returns to the house, Ida has set a supper of ham and beans and fresh-baked bread upon the table. Silently, they sit and eat, until Luther observes coarsely that the ham is dry and the beans are too mushy.

Ida says nothing, but he can see the slight shift in her shoulders and spine, the schooled calm on her face – it is like she is collapsing inward on herself, like the breath in her lungs has contracted into a vacuum pressure.

When he walks out to check on the pigs and chickens after dinner, Luther whistles cheerily to himself.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

A week later, when he reads the obituary of Rex Herzog in the local paper, Luther can hardly get to the phone fast enough. Like Luther’s two boys, Rex’s children have all moved away, showing no inclination to follow in their father’s footsteps.

Rex’s widow, Ethel, is slow to answer, and when she does, Luther smiles at how frail her voice sounds.

He keeps the call short, only offering brief condolences and planting the first seeds of his aspiration. Being a farmer, he knows patience, knows that some things take both time and consistent effort. And so he makes a mental note to call again, perhaps tomorrow or the day after, and then again and again until the moment of ripening comes.

And it will come, he is sure, if only he does his work well.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It doesn’t take Luther as long he expects, though, to wear Ethel down. Perhaps his years with Ida have honed his instincts and his skills, or perhaps he has simply timed it perfectly and struck with the iron was perfectly hot – or while her bereaved and lonely heart was particularly soft.

With only a bit of hardline haggling, he even manages to get her to agree to a much lower price than the land should really bring. If Ida’s children have had any input, he reasons, they must either not have learned anything about their father’s livelihood, or they are only interested in a quick windfall.

When he drives over to the Herzog place to write out the check, Ethel looks far smaller and older than the last time he saw her, her eyes hollow and haunted, her face slack and dull. Luther has to consciously suppress the habitual tuneless whistling that comes whenever he is feeling pleased.

At the last moment, Ethel seems to become a little more alert, showing a moment of hesitation when she looks over the sum he has written out. He reminds her firmly that it is what they agreed to over the phone, and she looks up at him, a hint of anger flashing around her eyes. But then the slackness returns, and she nods and takes the check, says she will have her lawyer draw up a deed within the week.

Luther doesn’t bother to hide his merry whistle as he walks out the front door and gets back into his Ram. The urge to celebrate with a whiskey and a good steak dinner takes him, and for a moment he considers sharing the little celebration with Ida, but then he considers how much gas the added miles would burn and decides it’s really only for him, anyway. He turns the engine over and drives toward town.

When he comes home to Ida sitting over Luther’s favorite meal – a table loaded with mashed potatoes and fried chicken, green beans garnished with bacon and browned onions, and a rich chocolate cherry cake for dessert – he says that she shouldn’t have bothered, that he’s already eaten.

Her only response is to say that the food has gone cold.

Luther shrugs, takes the latest copy of the local newspaper, and goes out onto the porch to chew and read. Ida sets her elbows on the table, buries her face in her hands.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Ethel proves as good as her word, and Luther has the new deed filed within the week. And he already has Cesar out in the field, planting corn on the Herzog tract.

So he is quite pleased when he drives out to check on his hired man’s progress on the new acquisition, piping an atonal melody. But when he sees Cesar’s progress, the whistle dies on his lips, and he feels an ache in his chest and temples at a sudden burst of outrage.

Throwing his truck into park in the middle of the field road, he climbs out and waves Cesar down. When Cesar stops and leans out of the cab, Luther wrathfully asks him what the hell he’s doing, why he has left the fallow part untouched.

In his soft, only slightly accented English, Cesar explains that he can hardly farm over the graves – even disregarding the fact that the headstones would chew up the machinery, it would be completely disrespectful, barbaric, even.

Disrespectful, Luther echoes, incredulous, and then asks what Cesar would call refusing to do the job he’s been paid to do – even after all Luther has done for him, given him.

Cesar looks down at him, seeming like he can’t decide whether this is a joke he should be laughing at, or something else, something he can neither define nor comprehend.

Voice grating, Luther tells him to pull the stones off the field and farm the ground – that, or to find another job, if anyone will have him.

Cesar’s apparent indecision evaporates, and he kills the tractor engine where it sits, climbs down out of the cab, and stares levelly at his erstwhile employer. Slowly and coolly, he says that if Luther wants to commit a crime against the living, the dead, and God, then Luther can do it himself.

Then Cesar walks out of the field toward his rusted-out, hail-beaten, eleven-year-old Pinto, and drives away for the last time, leaving Luther to watch him go in fuming disbelief.

Far too late for Cesar to hear, Luther screams that he is an ungrateful little shit, that he owes him, that he wouldn’t even have a place here if it weren’t for Luther’s generosity. Only the wind and the settling dust from the dirt road offer any reply.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

George and Miguel prove just as unwilling to farm the overgrown Mycenae Cemetery, and within a few days, Luther finds himself without any farmhands. So he does it himself, though it takes him a little longer than it should, being older and heavier and having gotten unused to the kind of labor he’s left to his hired men for the better part of a decade.

He puts out a call for replacements, but he has finished planting the last of his fields and has worked through much of the growing season without response. It is only by happy accident that he learns about the Webber boy, one evening that Ida is feeling talkative and shares the local gossip that Luther usually pays only half a mind to. The Webbers have lived a few miles down the road for thirty years now, and Ida tells him that their eighteen-year-old boy Saul has started a family – likely by accident, since he still has a year left before he finishes high school. Luther observes shrewdly that the boy must be in dire need of work, and Ida agrees heartily before she goes quiet, understanding his thought.

After dinner, Luther places a call to the Webbers, talks to the young father-to-be, and is pleased to hear that the boy is eager for work, and none too choosy about the terms so long as it provides steady pay.

Over the kitchen sink and elbow-deep in suds and dirty dishes, Ida winces slightly when she hears Luther hang up the phone and begin to whistle.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The summer passes in a blur, with all of the work to be done, split between to men now instead of four and one of them still young and inexperienced. Keeping the circle pivots running properly, staying abreast of the never-ending cycle of farm equipment maintenance, repair, and replacement, keeping the year’s crop healthy and unblemished – with all of the land Luther has acquired over the years, it is almost too much for them, and the added stress of training the somewhat slow Saul grates on Luther’s nerve. Still, Luther congratulates himself on the prudence of his new hire – unhoned as he is, Saul is a hard and compliant worker, putting in sixteen hours or more a day without complaint. Sure, there seems to be a strain creeping in around the boy’s eyes, making him look like he’s aged years in a few months, and he begins to lose weight that his spare frame can’t really afford; but such is the lot of the young and the poor, Luther knows.

Then Ida begins in the first of the tomatoes from her garden, looking plump and bright and sweet, but when they take the first bites, something seems off in the flavor. None of the three of them, sitting around the table over their lunch, can seem to articulate precisely what the subtly distasteful intrusion calls to mind, but Ida and Luther are not able to stomach more than a few bites. Saul finishes the meal as mechanically as he does all of them now, and leaves without a word to return to work before Luther has even finished complaining about the spoiled fruit.

Mood soured, Luther carries the remaining tomatoes out to the pigs. The eternally ravenous creatures display no similar qualms about the taste, but as he watches the fat, squealing things gobbling them so noisily, he is struck by an uncharacteristically whimsical flight of fancy. The crimson juices oozing from the jaws of the swine, and spattered upon their pallid flesh and sparse pale bristles, seems altogether too thick, too opaque.

Luther pushes away the obvious association that drifts into his mind, and walks away from the pen, toward his truck.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

It takes Luther a while to notice the new change in Saul – it is not the sort of thing that Luther is inclined to notice, since it hardly affects him. But by the time the young man has ceased entirely to speak, Luther cannot help but take note.

When he brings it up idly over dinner one evening, Ida claims to have mentioned it weeks ago. Luther frowns and says he doesn’t remember it, to which his wife doesn’t even bother to reply.

But even after noticing it, the farmer takes little interest. In fact, he thinks it might be an improvement – sometimes the inane friendly chatter of the younger man had irritated him, in the first few weeks of the boy’s employment, and he had never wanted to learn so much about the boy’s bride-to-be or the names they were picking out for the coming child as he learned in the first day with Saul.

It is only when the farmhand comes to the house one day over the lunch hour, pale and shaking, that Luther asks Saul tactlessly what the hell’s wrong with him.

Saul hesitates an instant, gathering and measuring the words which he seems so loath to part with of late. Falteringly, he finally says that there’s something wrong with the crop on the Herzog land.

Of course, Luther cannot leave that vague statement unelucidated. The prospect of losing that much harvest would be a dire prospect for any farmer – but to Luther it is utterly unthinkable, and he asks what Saul has done, if he’s been neglecting his work.

Sick, is the only word Saul offers by way of explanation.

Ignoring Luther’s attempts to extract more information, Saul turns and walks out of the house, gets into his secondhand Chevy Silverado, and departs.

He does not return the next day, and does not answer or return Luther’s calls. And when Luther loses all patience and drives over to the little trailer on the Webber’s field corner where Saul and his young fiancée have made their humble home, Saul speaks only a few moments at the door to make it abundantly clear that he will not be coming back – even after the threat of having the last week’s pay withheld.

Luther drives home, red-facing and raging behind the wheel. People just don’t want to work anymore, he growls. When he sees a swift fox dart across the road, he swerves out of his way to try and hit it, and roars wordlessly when he sees it disappear unharmed into the weeds of the ditch.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The following day, after a hearty breakfast and a pot of coffee, Luther drives out to his newly acquired land to inspect the fields, still muttering to himself about that damned fool Webber boy.

Reaching it, he parks the pickup along the roadside and walks out among the tall, ripening cornstalks. They look healthy as he inspects them: no signs of excessive insect damage or fungal infection, the ears well-developed, no overgrowth of weeds or volunteer seed.

Luther snorts in derision at Saul’s bizarre behavior and senseless words, wonders if maybe he’s lucked out by losing the boy after all.

But as he stands there, Luther becomes aware by degrees of a faint sound, pervasive and sustained but on the very edge of hearing, that seems to emanate from all around him. At first, he only takes it for the usual sounds of a midday cornfield, an accumulation of pivots running and plants shifting, unseen animals moving and insects chirring, even the burble of water soaking into the soil. 

Yet the longer he listens, the more it sounds like the faint susurrus of many breathy voices.

Only the wind, he tells himself. And when he leaves the field to walk back to his pickup, he tries very hard not to notice how unusually still the air is.

(Sounds of many faint whispers)

[Long pause]

NARRATOR

Unable to find a new hired man – or at least, one willing to work for as little as he is willing to pay – Luther is forced o take up all of the farmwork himself.

So when he comes home in the evenings, after very long days, his tongue and eye are even sharper than usual, and Ida, always delicate of disposition, seems to grow smaller by the day, and spends more and more time out of his sight.

When she brings in the potatoes from her garden, and screams aloud while peeling one over the sink, Luther is much less than sympathetic. Shouting from his recliner in the living room, he tells her to cut that damn screaming out. She offers absolutely no response, and at last, huffing with impatience, he rises and comes out into the kitchen. Ida stands staring down into the sink as though transfixed. He asks, only a little more gently, what’s gotten into her.

Still, she doesn’t answer, seems not to even hear him. He walks to her side and peers down over her shoulder.

At first, all he sees is a small, dirty potato, but then his gaze catches the shiny, greyish blue orb nestled within it, looking for all the world like a milky eye.

Ida trembles, and murmurs that it looked at her. Her voice is so soft that Luther realizes she might have said it before, might have repeated it several times without him hearing.

Nonsense, Luther says, insists that it’s probably just a growth, a tumor or a fungus or something.

When Ida doesn’t reply, he tells her to just throw it out and get on with making dinner, that he’s hungry.

She finally complies, still seeming unsettled and reluctant. A couple minutes later, she screams again, and drops something back into the sink with a hollow, metallic thunk. Before Luther can react, she is fleeing from the kitchen and up the stairs, a gibbering sob escaping her throat.

As Luther again peers down into the sink, the wrinkled skin of this second, larger potato parts, and the palled orb beneath rolls until a dark bluish spot is directed up at him.

Luther calls out to his wife that’s just mold breaking through the skin, or a burrowing beetle larva emerging. His wife neither answers nor returns, and he chokes down a rising nausea as he picks up the potatoes and throws them outside for the chickens to eat.

He tells himself that it’s fine, that his appetite is spoiled now anyway – and then he definitely has none at all for infested potatoes. It must be mold, he keeps thinking, or maybe bugs. He keeps turning this thought over throughout the night, as though doing so will erase the fact that he has never seen any pest like this before – or that he too had the unmistakable feeling of being watched when he gazed down into the sink.

(Threatening music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

Ida is gone when Luther returns to the house the next evening, along with a large old suitcase, many of her clothes, and several mementos of her mother’s from around the house.

She hasn’t even left a note, and even after an hour of placing phone calls, Luther still is unsure who picked her up from the farmstead, or where she has gone.

At last, tired and uncertain, he sits at the table, as though still expecting her to appear and make his dinner. As night falls fully dark outside, he finally gets up to pour himself a bowl of cold cereal and milk. Over his joyless meal, he says aloud to himself that she’ll be back, that she has nothing without him.

And yet, she does not return the next day, or the day after that, or at all the following week.

Luther puts off checking the Herzog field as long as he can. As much as he denies it inwardly, that patch of land has become connected in his mind with the experience with the malformed potatoes, even though the latter were grown in his wife’s garden.

But then he remembers that, years ago, just a few years after they had moved into this house, she had hired someone to bring richer soil up to the place, to spread upon her new garden. And the more he tries to remember the details about this, decades past and hardly of interest to him even then, the more he thinks that person might have been Rex Herzog, who had always been on friendly terms with Ida’s folks.

Eventually, though, he has no choice but to go back to his new property. The days are beginning to turn cold with dark autumnal promise, and the weather authorities predict an early and bitter winter.

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

The morning he drives the combine harvester over to the Herzog land, he feels silly for his procrastination. It is a bright blue autumn day, the sky perfectly clear and the sunlight pleasantly driving away the lingering chill of night. The wind carries the sweet smell of dry fields settling gradually into their annual slumber.

In short, it is the sort of beautiful day that makes all fear and worry seem trivial.

The hired semi-trailers arrive right on schedule, ready to haul his harvest into storage, and by lunchtime he has worked his way through almost a quarter of the field. The yield is heavy, but his pleasure at this is soured by reflecting upon the cost of the hired trucks. If only there were decent help to be had, he might have used the grain cart and saved a little money.

But they all screw him, he thinks. His hired men, his wife, his sons—they all abandoned him, betrayed his generosity.

When the combine is full, he stops and waits, knowing that the truckers will also be breaking for the midday meal. The day has become warm, warmer than it’s been for over a week, and he pops open the cab door to let the breeze roll in. He looks out over the field as he munches from a jar of pickled pigs’ feet.

No one gets the best of Luther Forst, he says aloud to himself, around a mouthful of pork.

  A moment of silence hangs, and then underneath the soughing of the cornstalks in the October wind, he catches another sound. At first, he thinks it is the same many-voiced whispering he heard once before in this field, which would be easier to explain away. But this is a shriller sound, like thousands of thousands of miniscule screams.

Luther shuts the cab door and packs away his meager lunch, not full but no longer able to eat. And he starts to turn the engine over, but the trucks have not yet returned, and the combine is full.

There is nothing for him to do but sit and wait, alone in this field. He realizes that, through overexposure and constant habitation, he has forgotten how big a quarter section of land truly is. Sure, in a vehicle it can be quickly traversed, and it looks small enough from the high cab of a tractor or a combine, but when a man sits in the middle of it motionless, or tries to cross it on foot, he is dwarfed by the wide space, even swallowed entirely by the rows of swaying, whispering cornstalks.

The faint shrieking sound is penetrating his cab now, seems to be coming from all around him. Luther thinks he can even feel it reverberating through the metal of combine harvester’s body.

Then he thinks of the filled grain tank, and begins to tremble slightly with an awful, impossible thought.

For a full five minutes he sits there, trying desperately to master his wildly racing mind. He prays that one of the trucks will appear on the road, so that he can get back to work and shrug this off, focusing on the harvest and drowning out what he is hearing under the rumble of the engine. But that prayer goes unfulfilled, and finally he growls an obscenity and climbs down out of the combine, walks over toward the unpicked portion of the field where the golden cornstalks yet stand tall and unbroken.

He tries to convince himself that the sound isn’t growing louder, that in a moment he will laugh at himself for a damned fool.

Reaching toward the tallest, healthiest looking stalk before him, he seizes an ear and rips it free. It feels dry and with a slight heft in his hand, just the way it should feel.

But when he peels away the shuck, the ear begins to vibrate in his fingers, emitting that high, thin screech more clearly now. And as he gazes down at the kernels, he feels like he might faint for the first time in his life, for upon each is a small, warped, skeletal face, locked in an endless cry of horror and rage.

(Dark choral music)

[Short pause]

NARRATOR

When they find the field aflame, the hired harvest drivers call it in as quickly as they are able, one of them racing over to the widow Herzog’s to use her phone. The local volunteer firefighters arrive with astonishing speed, and are somehow even able to contain and quell the blaze in the dry autumn field.

At first, it is assumed that the combine was the source of the fire, as overheating machinery is an all-too-common cause of such disasters. But the most experienced of the firefighters soon determine that it couldn’t have been, from the direction of the wind – and from the distance at which they find the charred remains of Luther Forst, and the sooty metal lighter they find in his clenched, blackened fingers.

No one much seems to mourn the old farmer, who had quarreled with so many, and whom so many saw as a miser, a cheat, and an opportunist. More, however, mourn the destruction upon such a good tract of land, especially since the remaining crop will likely be ruined before any questions of ownership or of selling can now be settled.

Too bad, they say, he had such a beautiful harvest. And after that day, none walk upon the field before the snows cover the cornstalks, and silence the subtle scream that lingers in the air around them.

(Sound of wintry wind)

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]