The Field

[Preface: this is what happens when I take road trips to Iowa and listen to Mason Jennings' new album. Enter, the most high-school thing I've written since, well high school. But hey, it beats studying!]

Sometimes late at night, I go to the field. Is that were you are? Are you a shooting star?

The dead yellow winter grass crunched under Jack Mason’s size-12 Red Wing boots and a light dusting of snow collected in the furrows of his snug green wool Filson cap and into the breast pockets of his tattered flannel work jacket. Mid-November always had this macabre pull on Mason, as if the winds that whipped up and screamed down the valley each night were a signal for this annual journey. When he was younger, he wondered if this pull would ever subside. Now an old man, he knew it never would.

That morning, he woke with the sunrise, groped for his slippers in the near-dark, set the shotgun on its hook, and shuffled the twenty-odd paces to the kitchen, which had fallen into a widower’s disarray. He knew where things should be, where she preferred them, but no longer had the luxury of hearing the loving sigh whenever he seemed of the mind to misplace a utensil. Still, he played his part, “I know, I know, honey, the strainer goes on this hook,” – but now, his only answer was the hum of the refrigerator.

After his breakfast of coffee (stale, from last week’s pot) and biscuits (stale, from Mrs. Macomber, who brought Mason leftovers after church functions almost weekly), Mason dressed warmly and stepped onto the porch. Outside smelled faintly of wood smoke and decaying leaves, a comforting, empty cliché.

Darling, can you hear me?

The land had been in Mason’s family for generations. Over 200 acres of dark, rich-tilled Iowa soil passed quietly from father to son as the former’s life flickered after 70 years of good, honest living. A childhood of wandering the fields and tinkering with electronics was upended for Jack when Abigail thrust herself into his life junior year of high school. The girl had large, soft brown eyes and thick auburn hair that transfixed Jack for a better part of a year until she finally turned on her heels to confront the shy boy as he walked home from school in what he thought was a respectful distance behind her. He had no chance after that.

The two married right after high school and moved from Audobon to Des Moines. Jack worked in a high-end stereo shop and Abby wrote historical fiction about the growing up on the Great Plains in the 1800’s. Their life in Des Moines was Spartan, but full. The couple moved back to Audobon some years later to tend to the land that was his birthright. Neither minded the move after a decade of city-life. Abby still wrote winsome fiction and Jack took on odd jobs around town when he wasn’t farming. The two would often relax on a hill with a stand of trees on top, overlooking their land. Their special spot.

Age had been good to both of them. His eyes were kind and his face fashionably weather-beaten with crows’ feet darting from his eyes. She had grown into her delicate features and was no longer fragile. Her gaze was always in some writer’s far-off place, but it focused when she looked at him. At night, he would sit at his workbench, silently, while adding the final touches to repairs of a tube amplifier. A warm, mechanical thwap thwap sounded as he switched controls on the pre-amp to just the right setting. A gentle hum followed by the soft glow of the tubes as they warmed always made Jack smile. He would swivel his chair to face the line of vinyl records, each beckoning with a story, and make his selection for a “test-run” of the rehabilitated amplifier. One day it would be Theloneous Monk. On another, it was Muddy Waters. A throaty thump buzzed the speakers as the needle hit the record, followed by static, followed by dead silence, followed by the exhilarating crash of drums. Playing records was a sacred ritual, rivaled only by Abby’s gentle padding down the old wooden steps at bedtime each night.

Occasionally, Mason would make visit to clients of the electronics shop in Des Moines who had especially difficult projects that required his expertise. While he loved the work, he dreaded the time away from Abby. He left one Thursday morning before dawn for the two hour trek to Des Moines. His wife was still asleep. As he started up the truck in the predawn light, he thought he saw headlights flicker down on the county road a quarter mile from the house. But when he got to the road, it was empty. Interstate 80 was shrouded in a chilly fog. Strange for June, he thought.


Tell me where’s your heart, now that it’s stopped beating?

The sky had clouded up and the snow began to fall and each step Jack took ripped him back to the afternoon he came home from the city so many years before. He wanted to arrive home in time to watch the sunset with his wife on their special hill. It was a Friday tradition. A crowd had gathered at the house when Jack pulled in. The road dust had clouded and now drifted towards the truck as Jack stepped out, but the gatherers’ eyes were averted for another reason, a reason which Jack immediately knew. The sheriff stepped up, with his severe hat folded under the crook of his arm, the other hand reaching around Jack’s shoulder, and said, “I’m sorry.”

Four men had to restrain Jack when they told him that they found her on the hill, their hill. He punched one of the men, Jim O’Donnelly (the younger O’Donnelly brother), in the face. The men, most of them shockingly pale through sunburndt country skin and in tears, then let Jack walk up to his wife. In summer, the little stand of trees surrounded an area about 15 feet across, where Jack would spread out a blanket for his wife to sit and they would watch sunsets or have a late breakfast on Sundays after church. The grass surrounding the hill had been matted down and as he reached the top, he could see her body. Even years later, as Jack pulled his woolen hat tighter around his ears, he still saw that broken thing on that hill. It was one thing about her he wished he could forget.

Her eyes had been ripped out and were dangling from their cups, as if some recoil mechanism failed. Her soft, tan cheeks were cut open to the ear and many of her pretty teeth were knocked in, forming a horrific smile. Her legs, broken, were left dusty and bloody in an unnatural position and her dress had been pushed up. The medical examiner had a difficult time distinguishing the animal marks from the human. She was ripped apart. Remembering this twenty-five years later in November, Jack vomited his breakfast onto the dead, matted grass.

No suspect was ever found. Only rambling, incoherent letters left at in their bedroom gave testament to her ordeal. Ms. Mason was tortured from Thursday morning to Friday, when she was dragged up the hill and left for dead. She held on, said the medical examiner, for hours longer than anyone had the right to. Theories were established by the townsfolk. A drifter, many said. A small minority blamed immigrant field hands. Fewer still, an old Indian ghost. The whole town was paralyzed with fear. Jack seethed with rage, which eventually consumed him. His rage was stoked as letters from the same incoherent mind found their way to his mailbox every few months. The killer was still out there, still taunting Mason. For the first few years after, Jack would carry a pistol with him around the house, sure the killer would return. But one never appeared. Eventually too, the deranged letters became more sporadic, albeit more removed from reality. Jack was resigned to the fact that his wife’s killer would never see an earthly justice.

The trees in November offered no shade, and leaves littered the ground in the place where they found her. He bent down, a more difficult task now, to clear the dead leaves away from a small patch of ground where she rested. As he stood up, a figure strode up the hill, with the sun, peeking through a patch in the sky, to his back. Jack couldn’t make out the face for the sun shone too bright, but he knew who it was. All of a sudden, quick movement, a flash and a brilliant white light, heat, then nothing. As Jack receded, his vision clouding and his breath frothy red, he heard laughter, at first demonic, instant, but fading into the laughter he hadn’t heard in years. The November sky had turned gray as the snowflakes melted into the steaming red pool.