This New & Poisonous Air

NO HORSE WOULD APPROACH the McCormick threshing machine once its steam engine had clattered to life and shot an antique column of coal smoke into the pale autumn sky. Bill had to put the skittish animals in the stable and pull the grain wagon into place himself, hoisting one shoulder against the leather harness and dragging the wagon to a spot beneath the thresher’s tin arm. His new wife, Minarette, looking dollish in her city clothes, watched him work from behind the rippled glass of the farmhouse window, sipping coffee from a Chinese cup. The McCormick shook the ground as its flywheel quickened, and Bill fed sheaves of newly harvested wheat into the mouth, listening as the internal rakes and shakers cut grain heads from straw and then banged the seed from the chaff. When a river of golden wheat had begun to spill from the arm into the wagon, he mounted the engine that was attached to the thresher by train tongue and canvas belt and climbed through heavy smoke to reach the platform where the throttle provided some control over the leviathan.

Bill hurried the work, more concerned with the road than the harvest and keeping an eye on the strip of dirt that led to town, hoping to glimpse a rising trail of wagon dust. He anticipated a visitor, his boyhood friend Calvin Hascomb, come to say goodbye before heading off to divinity school in Toledo, but it was already late in the afternoon—the light had gone golden—and Bill was no longer sure that Cal would come. In that event, he told himself he would continue to work the thresher—this day and then the next, until harvest was done. Then he would help his father ready the farm for winter. This had been their pattern since he was ten years old. But when he pictured Cal departing without paying final respects, the sun beating down on his icy blond hair and clear eyes fixed on an invisible point in the horizon, Bill found he could barely lift another sheaf.

The McCormick bucked hard against its rotating belt, and Bill adjusted the throttle, reducing the flow of steam enough to temper the drive wheel. He wanted to kick the thing for requiring such attention. The newer, more urbane thresher, made by the J. I. Case Company, had broken down days ago, and Bill’s father had cursed its modernity in Old World Dutch as he stalked off to the barn to pull the tarp off the old McCormick. Bill stood by the horse trough with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his trousers, one boot heel digging nervously at the dirt, and watched as the McCormick emerged from the dark hold of the barn, wagon wheels slowed by mud, spokes strung with woolly cobwebs. “That’ll probably reap one of us before harvest is through,” Bill called to his father. The old man ignored the comment, clenching his jaw and pushing the machine further into the light.

The thresher was the size of a grand piano turned on its side and painted crimson red, and over its hundred-odd years of service, it had developed a frightful personality and a talent for toying with any steam engine that powered it. The McCormick could grip the canvas rotating belt hard at times, causing the engine’s flywheel to stick and squeal, building up an excess of high-pressured steam, then just as suddenly, it would release the belt so the engine would nearly burst. In this way, it had taken four of Bill’s uncle’s fingers during the harvest of 1902 when it had overheated the iron cylinder and finally blown the boiler, sending jets of hot steam and shrapnel in every direction and melting the very flesh of Uncle Dean’s hand into something that looked like an overgrown cherry pit.

The incident occurred only three years after the flood had driven the Von Stolt family up from Illinois to the dryer plains of Ohio, during which time, Bill had witnessed all manner of calamity from floating houses to starving herds and had come to believe that traveling between the States of the Union involved passage through levels of watery Purgatory. It was also on that cross-country trip that he found a crate of books, miraculously dry and balanced on a steep rock—these were French novels translated into English, and even before he could read, they became his most important possession, talismans rescued from the rushing waters. Perhaps it was because those books came from the end of the world, he thought, that they eventually provided him with a temporary exit.

He sounded out words from the flood books for Uncle Dean as the poor man convalesced in the upstairs bedroom, left arm no longer ending in a cherry pit, but a wad of cotton gauze that sprouted blood roses on the hour like an ornate German clock. When Dean got frustrated with the boy’s stops and starts, he would grab the book from Bill and read aloud. “Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814.” Dean grimaced at this sentence, barely awake. “You see there, boy,” he said. “There isn’t anything worth reading in these. Just a bunch of details about rich people who don’t even live in America.”

His wounds went septic after a week, and he ended up throwing himself down the steep farmhouse stairs and dragging his body into the snow, which he attested felt like a bed in Heaven’s finest mansion. Dean went mad from the poison in his blood, and Bill suspected that his father, in his secret heart, had appreciated the service the McCormick provided. The machine left him, after all, with half a brother but in full control of the family farm.

Bill, nearly nineteen and more savvy at farming than Dean had ever been, tried to reason with his father, saying they could repair the Case threshing machine, but the old man merely scowled over the tops of his wire-rim spectacles—blue eyes like the centers of twin gas flames. He slid one hand along the McCormick’s belt, jockeying the flywheel, and said that when he was a boy they’d pounded wheat on a threshing floor using oxen. Compared to that, any machine, even a dangerous one, was a convenience. “By the time we fix that Case, the wheat will have rotted in its sheaves,” he said. “The McCormick hurt Dean. That’s the truth. But Dean wasn’t watchful. My brother would have let water burn in a pot.”

So the red McCormick was put into active service once again, positioned in the barnyard far enough from the chicken coop and the apple orchard where the sheep grazed to avoid frightening the animals. Bill’s wife said it looked like a true instrument of terror—some medieval attempt at representing the ineffable for the purpose of a Passion play. Bill considered this observation as he worked the throttle on the engine’s high platform. If God was anything like the McCormick—strung together by bailing wire and tenpenny nails—they were all in quite a corner.

His mother and father had gone to town, leaving Minarette and him to play farmer and his wife—parts that made them both uneasy. A hill of grain rose slowly in the wagon while a pile of chaff took shape in the grass, casting a low hump of shadow to one side. Bill was covered in coal soot from the steam engine’s chimney pipe, and from time to time, he turned to Minarette and grinned, assuming he looked like some variety of sulfurous demon risen from the depths of Hell and knowing how she’d pretend to hate such waggishness. His teasing and her chilly responses were one of their mutually agreed-upon contrivances. They practiced their relationship even when there was no audience to watch. In reality, Bill felt heart-heavy and longed to see the black church buggy float into view, Cal in the buck seat guiding the horses with effortless twitches of his wrist. The two men would register each other in the way they used to as boys, as if some mark had been made on an invisible scoring card.

Upon catching first glimpse of Calvin Hascomb in the evening light of the county fair, Bill had felt that he was looking into some poor mirror at an image of himself, faded to such an extent that it lacked all color and weight, and perhaps because of these defects, was able to enchant. Cal had blond-white hair and pale lips. His eyes were blue in the same impossible sense that water appears blue until cupped in the hand. They were both thirteen, and Cal’s family had come from Missouri after a flood similar to the one that had driven Bill’s people up from Illinois. The two of them took to each other and played games of chance all evening, pitching baseballs at bowling pins and cheering each other’s laughable skills. Bill finally won a tiger with shoe-polish stripes and eyes of melancholy green and gave it to Cal who carried it proudly the rest of the night.

When Bill described these scenes to Minarette, she warned him that she thought he’d been deceived. “The apprentice preacher has allowed religion to bend him in ways that no man should be bent,” she said. “You don’t see it, Bill, because you’ve know him too long. But from what you’ve described in your stories, I can tell you though that Calvin Hascomb, the boy, and Calvin Hascomb, the man, are two distinct substances.”

She herself hailed from Chicago, and though she’d brought only a small dowry, she’d managed to drag all her expensive taste and eloquence out of the city—high-collared dresses, cloisonné broaches, and a comportment most farm girls would never dream of adopting. She seemed a piece of urbanity, transported, and her body too looked like it was derived from the delicate architecture and light that Bill had seen in postcards. To some degree, he’d married her out of spite for the fact that as soon as he’d turned eighteen, his parents had been on him, pushing him to find a girl. Not the right girl, but any girl as long as she knew how to work a farm. They’d nearly thrown him on poor Clara Hutchinson one Sunday at church, even though she’d had a cough since infancy and a cloudy eye. Settling down was important, his father told him. It would get him right in the Lord’s eyes, and, on a more practical level, would provide progeny. “Without blood,” his mother said, “a farm withers. Family is the life of a place like this.” So when he caught sight of Minarette Anderson at a barn dance, Bill saw his chance. She’d arrived that week from Chicago to visit her cousin, piquing the interest of everyone in town, and he liked the way she glared disdainfully at the farm boys in their haphazardly polished boots and checkered shirts. Bill was brave enough to ask her to dance, and after that, he hadn’t let go for the rest of the night. She smelled not of lemon verbena as the other girls, but of French perfume which mixed with the smell of her vitriol and excited him. He recognized her as something new—a sophisticate that his parents would fear. Surprisingly, she’d warmed to him as well, clasping her hands behind his neck and moving to the sound of the slow German fiddle. She whispered, “I do hate all of this, Bill—these fools playing at culture.”

Bill did not know Salomé but thought Minarette looked like an oil painting fit for a museum in the farmhouse window, a tableau vivant with one white hand against the curtain and a beam of sunlight hooked across her powdered face. He turned from the thresher to wave again, but she did not raise her hand in response. She only stared at the strangeness of his work and sipped his mother’s coffee, which she complained was as weak as tea. There was a look of perturbation on her face, and she, too, from time to time, glanced toward the road.

Minarette was no real worry to Bill. He continued to enjoy her presence and had even begun to think of her as something of a compatriot—another piece that did not fit. On top of that, she was able to occupy his parents in ways that he hadn’t imagined possible; it seemed that they’d taken on their daughter-in-law as a new project, determined to translate this gadabout into a rustic girl of the farm. His mother tried to teach her how to churn butter and collect eggs from the chickens, but inevitably Minarette could not get the cream to set and broke foul smelling yolks across her stylish dresses. She would cry and sometimes even throw herself down in the tall grass of the yard. Bill’s mother and father would lean over her, cooing kindnesses, worried that they’d damaged something dear. Bill wondered sometimes if she had not come to the farm for him but for his parents, born from their wish for a daughter. During their drawn-out scenes of instruction, he crossed his arms and rested against the porch post, smiling at his wife’s ability to control their small universe. Once Minarette had even convinced his mother into having her face painted “city style,” and the poor woman had gone around for a whole day with rouge on her doughy Dutch cheeks until she couldn’t take it anymore and scrubbed herself with lye. Minarette had also used a length of ribbon to tie bells around the necks of all the sheep in the orchard—a contribution to what she called the farm’s “pastoral scene.” When the herd moved together, they were a choir.

Though these antics provided small pleasures, Bill felt a weight in his chest, as if an all-consuming pile of chaff, spilled from the mouths of a hundred identical McCormick threshing machines, was building. Distractions sometimes diminished that pile, but he found lately that he had to pull himself through daily work, taking no real joy in dances or fairs. Like his wife, he too was living a life he hadn’t expected, but his blood was stamped all over the land, pounded into the fields, and where blood was concerned, there was little chance of escape—unless through acts of the imagination. And that variety of escape was sadly temporary.

The crate of French books he’d found during the flood were all written by a man called Jules Verne, and Bill had taken greatest enjoyment in the author’s more isolating adventures like The Steam House and From Earth to the Moon. As a boy, he’d imagined himself traveling in that steam powered mansion that was moved by a mechanical elephant across foreign deserts. A desert, after all, was the opposite of a farm, dead and dry where the other was lush. He loved the idea of being carried away from everything he knew: the daily chores, the parents, and the church folk. And from those deserts of Araby, he’d traveled to the gardens of the moon in a metal oil barrel that looked enough like a rocket to take him there. The lunar gardens provided not food but strange flowers with billowing petals, stirred by a solar wind and lit with gentle phosphorescence as all things were on the moon. Bill had luxuriated in those gardens, dragging his fingers through luminous pools, climbing the stalks of roses that towered toward the stars. And until Cal had come into his life, transported by the flood waters, he’d done all of his traveling alone.

Though Cal was Bill’s physical opposite, wan and white where Bill was thick and dark, he was his metaphysical compatriot, a perfect partner for playing Jules Verne. And when they’d reached the moon or their mechanical elephant had grown tired and they were stranded in the sugar-colored oceans of the desert, that is when they found themselves the happiest. Sometimes they played at being men in search of an exotic wife. Other times they were just Cal and Bill, top-notch adventurers. Bill would touch Cal’s white hair, saying that if they ran out of money, they could sell such a pelt for a good price. Cal would laugh and stroke Bill’s own hair in return, saying it was like crude oil, and if their rocket ship ran low, they could shave it off and pour it into the engine.

At the age of sixteen, without good warning, Cal began his studies to become a minister, working privately at the church with Revered Fellhorne, a red-faced prophet of damnation, and to Bill’s dismay, the ministry seemed to cool his friend, moving Cal toward some absolute zero in which no motion or life was possible. Cal stopped working at his family farm and then stopped coming to Bill’s for games. His skin took on a glassy sheen, as if transmogrified, becoming a delicate ornament that an old woman might be proud to sit on her shelf. He no longer drank root beer nor went swimming at Brook’s Pond. His white-blond hair turned into a field of icy thistles, and even his liquid eyes went hard.

On the day Cal announced his intention to follow the ministerial path, they were sitting on a bale of straw near the lowing cows, and Bill was kicking his boot against Cal’s, trying to knock the other boy’s foot into the air. Both had grown accustomed to these sorts of physical intrusions and though they usually ended in wrestling, neither seemed to mind. Cal was carrying the family Bible, a worn object with a soft hide cover, embossed with a faded Methodist cross. Already, he had begun to wear white clothes that matched his fine skin—a living snowstorm of shirt, suspenders and trousers, even going as far as buttoning a starched collar at his neck. “Bill, have you considered why the Bible has only two testaments?” Cal asked, hefting the book. “There’s the Old and the New—the book of the Father and book of the Son. But there are three members to the Trinity, isn’t that right?”

Bill shrugged, not accustomed to his friend playing at rhetoric. He wanted to rest his forehead against Cal’s neck which was still plain and strong because he’d only recently given up farm work, though this was an act he’d never dare attempt. “Well, I’ve been thinking about it,” Cal continued. “It’s the sort of question Reverend Fellhorne doesn’t much appreciate. He says that Abraham didn’t question God nor did Moses. But I think it’s important to work things out before you go preaching to other people, don’t you?” Cal let the Bible fall open between them. “How many pages do you see here?”

“That’s how many I used to see too,” Cal said. “Only recently, while listening to a sermon from the reverend about the Holy Ghost did I begin to perceive the third page.” Cal touched the air between the two open Bible pages, pinching his fingers together as if holding something thin and vertical. “You have to learn to read the Testament of the Ghost,” he went on. “It’s not immediately visible, but once you gain the ability, you realize it’s the most important part of the book.”

TWO YEARS MORE AND BILL HAD MARRIED Minarette Anderson who attested to not believing in any sort of god, a refreshing notion in farm country where everyone seemed to wear a wooden cross. It was generally agreed that Minarette’s atheism was part and parcel of her city ways and therefore mysteriously accepted by most. Minarette confided to Bill that Calvin Hascomb’s additions to Reverend Fellhorne’s sermons gave her a bad case of the chills. “He looks like a crazy person in all those white clothes,” she said one day when she and Bill were at a church picnic, watching Cal from some distance. “And when he talks about the Holy Ghost, I can’t help but picture some loosejawed ghoul hovering behind him, waiting to do his bidding. Who’s ever heard of an invisible testament that sings? He’d be laughed off the pulpit in Chicago.”

Most of the time, Bill was fine with his wife’s temperature. In bed, she folded her hands over her stomach and lay staring up at the ceiling like a woman in a casket. Once he’d had gotten up the courage in the dark of their bedroom to ask why she’d married him—she so clearly did not think of him as a wife thought of a husband. Minarette took her time in answering this question. In a measured voice, she said, “I married you for the same reason you married me. Because I understand that much of life is theater.”

He shifted his weight in the bed, unsure of her meaning, then thinking about how the cook at Gardener’s Kitchen served Minarette a special plate, extra nice with all the trimmings, to make her feel at home. They held bolts of fabric for her at the general store, believing it was of a quality she might have encountered in the city. Mrs. Emmet at the post walked into the street to meet them and personally deliver Minarette’s exotic mail. He’d never considered that Chicago might not be the place they’d all imagined.

When he fell asleep that night, Bill found himself wandering through a city that leaked pistons and gears from its shadows. He called the names of everyone he knew until his throat went dry and his voice would no longer make a sound. Finally he leaned against a wall, exhausted and hardly believing that after all those years of yearning to leave the farm, he’d come to understand that there was nowhere else to go.

THE WAGON WAS HALF FULL of wheat and a great hill of chaff had accumulated behind the McCormick. Bill adjusted the throttle, listening closely to the engine for distress. He watched the road, hopeful still for Cal’s wagon. He’d sent a letter into town with another farmer days ago and wrote only that he wanted to talk before Cal’s leaving. He hadn’t seen his friend for months except at church where the barely recognizable figure in white sat at the right hand of Reverend Fellhorne, sometimes standing to preach near the end of the service, but then disappearing behind a polished oak door before Bill could detain him. Cal no longer seemed to walk on the ground as other people did but rather floated through an invisible ether, perhaps supported by the hand of the Holy Ghost itself. Bill worried that Cal might come permanently unteathered from this town and this cluster of insignificant farms. He’d slip off into the stratosphere, as Minarette must have done when she left Chicago. But he would not let Cal go off to Toledo like that. He would have his say.

As for when exactly he’d decided on what to say, he wasn’t sure, but knew it had occurred to him around the same time as Minarette’s speech about life being theater. Bill understood that one way to ensure a man did not continue to devote his life to the ministry was to draw back the curtain and show him that there was, in fact, no such thing as a God. Or even if there was, He was a small and distant body, and there were more fulfilling idols here on Earth. Bill had decided to play out a scene. He wanted to take Cal into the orchard and lift an apple from a branch. He imagined the sheep mingling around them, ringing their bells as Catholic altar boys did when a host was raised. Transubstantiation—Bill had learned the word from Minarette who’d been raised Catholic because her father appreciated the grandeur of High Mass. If bread could become a body, then the apple might become a whole world. He and Cal could play out a final story together—a new creation in which there was no Fall. Instead, they would be enfolded in the garden. They could remain there, isolated. If there was no city that offered true escape, then they would invent a place as they had when they were boys. Bill understood, of course, that they were no longer children and games of the imagination could only go so far, yet he thought such a diversion might be enough to catch Cal’s attention, to remind him what they had once been.

When working out exactly what to say, he’d even gone as far as asking Minarette for help, approaching her while she was busy with one of her cross-stitches which, unlike his mother’s country patterns, revealed the image of some ancient temple covered in statuary. “Min,” he said, dragging the tip of his boot along the seam of the floorboard, “if you were—well—if you were lacking in the adoration that you currently garner, how might you attempt to draw such attention?”

“No need for apologies,” she replied. “We’re beyond that. But asking for affection can be dangerous business. One of my father’s early plays was called All the Birds of Africa. A mess of a drama, though it did have something to say. He didn’t know the first thing about the continent, of course, and made up most of the details, using poorly digested bits of anthropology. But the general plot concerned a group of missionaries making their way down the Congo, attempting conversions at every port. They told everyone they met that God was love and that He wanted nothing more than to receive their love in return. The missionaries traveled in a houseboat painted boldly with crosses, and they sang hymns to the crocodiles. Most of their failures at conversion were caused not by their own actions but by a series of absurd accidents and intrusions. My father contrived these events to make the missionaries look like fools because he enjoyed that sort of embarrassment. These men and women, who’d begun their adventure with pride in their hearts, fell deeper and deeper into the sort of despair and lust that my father often wrote about. In the end, the missionaries agreed to set fire to their boat and surrender themselves to the whims of the Congo, knowing they might die or be swept to a place where no one knew who they were. They decided to unmake themselves because life was not worth as much as they thought. More than that, they were not worth as much.”

THE SUN HAD DIPPED toward the western field, and Bill paused for a moment at his work, allowing the McCormick to tear and cut the wheat already in its gut. He passed one hand across his brow and squinted at the road. Still there was no sign of Cal’s wagon, but the moon had risen, and it seemed for a moment to act as a kind of proxy, glowing and pale like his friend, suspended by some unseen force. He did not realize Minarette had come outside until she was standing directly in front of him, holding a tin cup of water. Bill took it from her and drank, and she spoke to him, but he could barely hear her words over the cacophony—something about dinner—his parents coming home—maybe something about how she was sorry how things had worked out. She touched his arm lightly then turned away before he could question her, ascending the porch steps with the hem of her dress gathered in one hand so it did not drag. When Bill turned back to the thresher, he saw the flywheel was turning more slowly than it should have been and the engine was whining, begging for its steam to be released. In a matter of moments, the boiler began to shake and hiss, and Bill knew he needed to adjust the throttle but found that he could barely move. His legs were heavy, as were his arms. The platform atop the engine seemed miles away.

The clatter and whine of the thresher and its engine were developing a kind of rhythm—a strange music. Bill thought of the invisible Book of the Holy Ghost, the way it sang a song that only Cal could hear, and he wondered if his old friend would be able to hear the thresher singing too. He realized that if he turned toward the road at that moment, he might be able to catch a glimpse of Cal himself standing there, arms crossed and grinning as if he were still a boy. Cal wasn’t coming from town. He’d been standing there all along, watching the work, watching Bill’s definite and continued existence. Cal knew that the right kind of music made the invisible become visible. And now that Bill was finally ready to see—it was too late. The thresher’s song was nearly through.