The Ones Who Run

by M. C. BENNER DIXON

From the distance of generations, the memory of famine flooded his body. The fear he felt walking down the rows of yellowing, curling leaves seeped out from the snarls of his DNA, quickening his breath. It was his great-grandmother’s fear, her fingers touching the black spots that spread across still-green fruit. She had wrapped it in her gut, then, and passed it on. Before her, some other predecessor had written a line of it crouched on his haunches in a field that smoked with dust and bore nothing.

And now. His shame curled itself into the shape of the diseased leaves in the field, his failure. He stretched the wire fence to unlatch it and turned his body through the opening. He did not hook the bent wire back to itself but kept walking, away from the field, from the house. His body knew what to do. He was the descendant of the ones who ran, who scented death and fled. The ones who had survived.

He always remembered the place as it was when he left it. He did not, through the distended blur of his regret, imagine the effects of his absence. The fields and house shifted under the weight of time. The blighted leaves rotted, loosening their hold on the stems and falling, but he was gone and did not see it happen. The churning seasons absorbed the rusty wire fence and the black remains of the crops. In bouts of humidity, the ceiling paint caught the disease of the fields; it curled wildly and dropped to the table and into the cast iron sink. If he had known of it, it would have broken his heart. The back door arched out of its frame. Raccoons entered and left, bore a litter of kits, fought, and died in the house. His clothes remained folded in dark drawers. A fern rooted on his mattress and spread its green fronds in the afternoon light. Rain dripped through the roof to soak its roots.

His niece, Dee, came only after all of this had already occurred. She was surprised to find the place in ruins. He had spoken of the old farm so much, naming every corner of it, reconstructing it for her; perhaps his constant remembering had drained the walls and fields of their vitality.

“He left everything,” Dee said to her daughter, Michelle. “Look.” There were plates on the counter, like he was going to do the dishes when he got back. They explored the dark cave of the house, tiptoeing around the dead raccoon, admiring the fern growing on the sunken bed.

Outside, wading through arching foxtail seed heads and dense stands of half-wilted horseweed, Dee’s foot caught in the remnants of the fence. Its far end had grown right into a cedar. She called her daughter to see it. There were other cedars clustered inside the fence. To their inexpert eyes, the trees looked mature—a stately grove. Though if this had been the field, they must have grown here only after he had left. They were younger than they looked, then—upstart invaders who had claimed the abandoned soil for their own.

Except for their swatting at bugs and the sky-scraping engine of a 737 crossing to Chicago, all was still. In the heat of the afternoon the fallow earth exhaled, its breath heavy with the scent of pollen and rot.

The fields and the house seemed to reach towards them then, and for a moment the women turned, responsive to the beckoning land. He had willed the farm to them, so they could try again and not fail. They watched figments of themselves living here, carrying water and wiping the hot day from their eyes. They considered evenings on the porch and the cost of a new roof. The property hid its treacheries under soughing cedar branches while they dreamed. But behind the glass eyes of the house, a cruel hunger stirred, and the rafters trickled the fine grit of years down onto the sagging floor.

Caught by the impulse to tend the land that now was hers, Michelle bent down and pulled at a clump of foxtail grass. She strained at it and broke into a fine sweat with the exertion, her upper lip prickling. The grass seemed to give a little, encouraging her. But suddenly the twisted stalks broke off with a jerk, the grass’s rough edges leaving her hands red and sore. She tossed the blades away and massaged her fingers. Something in her bones groaned a warning. Her many great-grandmothers’ many escapes whispered something to her. She looked around at the ground, the grass, the cedars, the leaning fence post with clearer eyes, then. A cloud’s shadow passed over the ground, and she saw her own erect silhouette dissipate into the earth.

“We should sell it,” Michelle said to her mother. “There’s nothing here.”

“No,” Dee answered, roused from her own imaginings, thinking how much Michelle’s voice sounded like her own mother’s these days. “Not anymore.”

They turned away, then, back to the car. It was, though they did not know it, the same route he had taken when he fled. And then they, too, fled, scraping the dirt from their shoes as they stepped into the car.