The boy in the field. Is he tow-headed? Carrot-topped? Freckled? Olive-skinned? Cow-eyed? Wall-eyed? One-eyed? Is the boy white? A possibility: the boy lies on his back in a fallow field beyond the edge of town. Perhaps he chews kernels of raw wheat into prairie gum. Scudding clouds hypothesize representational shapes. On a distant ridge, a question-mark of smoke smudges the sky with the lingering threat of a grass fire. The sun may burn, yellow-eyed, edging towards one horizon or another. Imagine the boy’s pockets full of potash.
A hired man takes a break from the toil of twisting an auger to dig a hole for a gate post. He pulls his hat from his head, wipes his brow with a forearm. He walks and fetches the canteen full of water, covered in wet burlap and hung on the outside rearview mirror of his truck. After drinking three long draughts, he soaks his hat. He settles the canteen into the crook of his neck, and rests his cheek against it.
At night, under the patchwork frenzy quilted by grandmother’s arthritic fingers, the boy curls around a pillow. Transistor radio held tight to his ear, he listens to hillbilly music from a station in North Carolina. In an abandoned farmhouse in the fallow field, hundreds, thousands of bluebottle flies lie dead on the floor. He catches a garter snake, keeps it in a mason jar covered with a burlap remnant until it escapes. At the shore of the lake—more slough than lake—every flat rock is potentially an arrowhead. The boy turns each one in his hands, then skips it across the water. What does potash look like?
The hired man takes a cigarette from a tin box he keeps in his pocket. He dangles it from the corner of his mouth, where a cigarette always dangles, so that his left eye has a permanent squint from closing against the smoke. He cups his hand around the Zippo and flicks the flint wheel. Squatting in the scant shade of the truck, he takes deep inhalations of tobacco smoke. He thinks about his children: “Just stepping out for a deck of smokes.” How old would the boy be now?
Rodeo bulls bursting through the gate, smashing fences, stampeding the crowd. The boy buys Coca-Cola in a six-ounce bottle. He tucks the green glass into the crook between cheek and shoulder, the way his dad used to do with stubby brown bottles of Bohemian Maid.
The hired man hauls himself to his feet and plucks the cigarette from his mouth. He flicks it aside and the wind carries the glowing butt into the tall grass. He grips the handles of the auger and bends his back to the dig.
Father has gone to Saskatoon to work in the potash mine. Standing between rows of ripening corn, the boy stares down between his feet into the dark earth, a mile down through topsoil, the clay mantle, granite bedrock, through underground rivers teeming with blind pale fish, through layers of rock flowing in the push of earth lifting the fossilized dinosaurs in their tide, he stares down into the earth, searching, searching, searching for potash.