To Weigh a Ghost

by

Kirk Vanderbeek

THE BOY HAD GOTTEN UP to look out the window five times in as many minutes when his father told him to sit still, he was making him nervous. So the boy, all knees and elbows and anxious energy, sat on his hands in a worn recliner and tried to think patient thoughts while he rocked himself back and forth, back and forth.

Later, when his mother stood up at the kitchen table, smoothed out her house dress and said, “Looks like they’re here,” the boy jumped up and let the chair hit the wall behind him with the kind of thump that would have inspired a stern lecture from his father just six months ago. Instead, his father sighed and said, “Alright, let’s greet ‘em proper,” as he eased open the bent screen door and hitched his way onto the whitewashed porch, the door held open behind him with the four-and-a-half dry, cracked and crooked fingers of his right hand. The boy and his mother stepped through the offered opening. The screen door squeaked shut behind them.

Framed before the bright porch lights and their orbits of desperate, deluded bugs, the boy and his mother and his father formed a shadow of the perfect family. All three raised their hands in a collective wave to welcome a silver SUV making its lumbering way down their long, uneven driveway.

The boy blinked as the driver of the car flashed the brights on and off – on and off – and a pit opened up in his stomach. It closed as quickly as it came, but for that second, he dreaded the next few days. The car came to a stop and four of its five passengers emptied out and raised their arms in waves that evolved into joint-popping stretches.

“Let’s help with the luggage, boy,” his father said.

The boy felt and fought a sudden impulse to hide behind his mother’s skirts. That was baby stuff. So he let the fabric of his mother’s paisley-patterned dress slip through his fingers and watched his shadow shrink as he followed his father down the porch steps.

“Look how big this guy’s gotten! Get on over here, Connor.”

The boy, Connor, stepped into a hug, his cheek warm against the air-conditioned cold of his uncle’s shirt.

“You’re growing like a weed, buddy. Something in the milk out here, huh? Hey, Bill, good to see you.”

Connor’s body shook as his father and uncle shook hands, his body jostled by the force of their greeting.

“Alright now, bud, don’t get too attached,” his uncle said.

Connor felt his neck turn hot, prickling with embarrassment as he let go of the hug he’d held for too long.

“Good to see you,” he said, his eyes on the dusty driveway.

He looked up to see his mother sharing a hug with her sister, Connor’s aunt, on the other side of the expensive foreign car. Their smiles were tired, drained, but their eyes flickered with light. With love. Connor imagined walking over and timing his hug to coincide with theirs, warm in the familial fantasy of both of them turning every ounce of their radiant attention onto him at once. He felt a nudge at his shoulder.

“Sup, Connor.”

Danny, the middle child of Connor’s three cousins, smiled at Connor with the confidence instilled in him by the twenty-three more months of life he’d experienced, a head start on the knowledge of all things worldly to which Connor could never catch up.

“Hey, Danny. Your voice sounds different.”

“Yeah.”

Agate came around the car with a pillow clutched to her chest. Three years older than Connor, Agate was fifteen now and as foreign as an alien species, drenched in teenage femininity.

“Hey, Con. How are ya, bud?” She pulled him to her side in a convivial half-hug.

“Hi, Agate.” Connor searched for something more to say. Worried that he’d embarrass himself with the wrong slang – kid slang, country slang – he stayed quiet and inhaled the scent of fabric softener and sleep-sweat in the cotton of her pillowcase. Lesson learned, he prompted the hug’s conclusion, staving off potential embarrassment.

“Where’s Miles?” Connor asked.

Danny gestured into the car where a boy approximately Connor’s age was slumped, asleep in the centre seat, his mouth wide open, his breath a series of asthmatic wheezes.

“God, it’s so quiet here,” Agate said. She scanned the horizon.

In the country-darkness of night, her gaze revealed the flat horizon of farmland, its uniformity disturbed only by the single-story farmhouse, the familiar, childlike contours of a barn, and, just beyond it, the silhouette of a ghostly grey monolith jutting up against the star-splashed sky. A grain bin.

IN THE LIVING ROOM, Connor’s father asked, “Who’d like a cold one? Popped a few in the fridge to celebrate y’alls visit.”

The grown-ups migrated to the kitchen and Connor felt the sudden burden of being host. He watched his cousins, out of place in his house. Miles plopped down on the couch and stared off into space, still half-asleep. Danny dug through a suitcase in search of something. Agate looked up from the glowing screen of her phone to ask, “What’s your Wi-Fi password?”

“We don’t have one.”

“Really? Oh yeah, I guess you don’t have, like, neighbours.” She scrolled some more, her eyes wincing in the blue light. “So, wait, what’s the name of it?”

“We don’t have a Wi-Fi.”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

Danny found what he’d been looking for and plugged a metallic tube into an unused outlet.

“What’s that?” Connor asked.

“3D pen. I’ll show you how it works once it’s charged up. It’s pretty awesome.”

“It stinks,” said Agate. “Smells like burning tires.”

“Not anymore. I use a different kind of filament now. It’s made with corn, so when I’m, like, doodling something it just smells like popcorn. I wouldn’t recommend tasting it though.”

After the Coors cans were emptied and tossed into the garbage, Connor’s aunt woke Miles up so that Agate could spread her sleeping bag out on the couch and Connor could show the boys to his room, where Danny and Miles would share the empty bed opposite his.

Connor listened, in the dark, to the comforting sounds of others in the room with him. The rustle of sheets as bodies sought more comfortable positions. The occasional rattle of a snore. The intimate mumble of words recited in a dream.

THE NEXT MORNING, Connor woke to an empty room. He wandered down the hallway and found Danny on his belly on the living room floor beside Agate, stretched out on the couch, her head and bare shoulders emerging from the chrysalis of her sleeping bag – phone in her hand, headphones in her ears.

“Hey, Con,” Agate said.

“Morning. Where’s Miles?”

“He’s still sleeping with mom and dad,” Danny said. “He went into their room in the middle of the night. Bad dream. Dude, you were having crazy dreams last night, too. Talking and kind of, I don’t know, like whimpering.”

“Leave him alone,” Agate said.

“What? I’m just saying. Connor, check this out.”

With small, precise gestures that smelled faintly of burning plastic and popcorn, Danny was bringing something to life out of thin air. Each stroke of his 3D pen added another line, another layer, to the orange, six-inch tall structure rising up from the notebook in front of him.

“What are you making?”

“I’m just kind of freestyling right now.”

With tight circular spirals of his wrist he added a cone to the creation, orange goop oozing out of the pen and turning instantly solid.

“Is that cheese?”

Danny laughed and shook his head. “No, it’s filament. But it does kind of look like that crappy can cheese.” He sat up and appraised his creation. “Cool.”

“It’s finished?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

For a moment, Danny looked with pride at what he’d made. A haphazard, upright assemblage of shapes. Modern art in miniature. Then his face drained of interest and he dropped the pen. “Do you still have that old Xbox we gave you?”

Connor nodded. “I had to trade most of the games you all gave me, though. They were pretty violent.”

“Which ones did you keep?”

“Just the farming one.”

Danny smiled. “You live on a farm, and the only video game you have is a crappy farming simulator?”

“Yeah. It’s not that realistic, but it is fun. I get to play it on weekends if I have free time, after chores are done.”

Danny laughed in such a way that Connor knew he’d either said something funny or something worthy of pity. Heat crawled across the back of his neck. He turned to find that Agate had somehow gotten dressed beneath the cover of her sleeping bag, right there on the couch while the boys had been in the same room. Heat crawled across his throat.

Miles walked into the room with a big grin on his face.

“Dad just farted so loud in his sleep it woke mom up.”

THE DAY WAS ALREADY HOT. Steam rose in waves from the hulking grain bin. A cloud of dust followed the four kids as they kicked their way along the gravel path to the barn. Grasshoppers sparkled in the morning sunlight, skipping from plant to plant in the cornfields that stretched out to either side.

“This is a good setup for a game of paintball,” Danny said. “You ever play that?”

“Yeah. Definitely,” Connor said with a glance to the ground.

“Kinda hurts, huh?”

“A little bit, I guess. Or, no. Not really.”

“You got any Nerf guns?”

Connor shook his head.

“Any real guns?”

“Holy shit,” Agate said as she hopped up into the seat of the biggest tractor. “This thing is huge. Let’s take it out. Do you know how to drive it?”

“Yuh. Ain’t supposed to take it out on my own, though. Not without father.”

“How would he know?”

“Well he’d hear it, for one. It’s noisy as anything. Anyhow, it serves a real specific purpose, and it ain’t much of a ride just for the heck of it.”

“You and your dad do everything here?” Danny asked.

“Are these crickets or grasshoppers?” Miles asked, stepping a few feet into the cornfield.

“Hoppers. There’s other men work here during the week,” Connor said. “I help out with things before and after school, and on the weekends.”

“It’s crazy that you work with your dad so much. I don’t even know what my dad does,” Agate said.

“Business, right?” Connor said.

“Well, yeah, but what does that mean?”

Miles stepped back out of the cornfield, waving bugs out of his face with exaggerated flaps of his arms. “We should play zombie tag.”

“Really? Tag?” Danny asked in a tone that echoed Connor’s own thoughts: That’s baby stuff.

“Not tag. Zombie tag,” Miles clarified.

“What’s the difference?”

“One of us is It, and the other three are a team. If you get tagged you turn into a zombie and you can only, like, stumble around and moan and groan until someone on your team who isn’t a zombie can get to you and give you the serum, then you’re back to life or whatever.”

“What’s the serum?” Danny asked.

“You just tag ‘em and say, ‘Here’s the serum.’ And the game’s over when whoever’s It has turned everybody into zombies.”

Agate jumped down from the tractor with a crunch of gravel. “Alright, let’s do it. Not It!”

“Not It!” Miles and Connor yelled at the same time.

“You guys better start running,” Danny said.

Connor’s heart rate spiked with excitement as he ran towards the scale house that sat next to the driveway. Roughly the size of a large shed, the scale house sheltered an old, manual beam connected to an exterior scale that Connor’s father used to weigh incoming and outgoing trucks. The heaviest hopper bottom Connor had ever gotten to weigh on his own had been just under 88,000 pounds, all loaded up with grain – his grin growing steadily as he’d slid the weight farther and farther to the right with shaking fingers.

Connor ducked into the shade of the scale house and slid to a stop against the wall. He waved away a small flurry of angry, displaced flies and turned to see Danny chasing Agate inside the distant barn, their bodies weaving looping patterns between lawn mowers and tractor tires. Miles ran through the cornfield, his erratic path marked by a chaotic rustling and bending of plants.

Squatting beneath the time-warped window of the scale house, Connor tried to catch his breath. It’d been a while since he’d played a game like this at home, and most of his friends at school had chosen this as the year to ditch formal games at recess for milling around and trying to look important, or gathering at one of the covered picnic tables to play a trading card game Connor’s own parents had declared “a waste of money.”

Connor heard a distant voice calling out “Grains!” in a ghostly, guttural tone. “Graaaaiiiins.” Connor poked his head up to see Agate, hamming it up as a zombie, staggering out of the barn with her arms stretched out stiffly in front of her, calling out what Connor now realized was the word “brains.”

“Braaaaaaiiins!”

Danny chased Miles out of the cornfield and around the circular exterior of the grain bin. Zombie-Agate stumbled aimlessly along the path, grasshoppers spiraling away from her dragging feet – tongue hung from the side of her mouth, eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Connor’s stomach turned and bile rose in his throat. He swallowed it down, grimacing as he ducked beneath the window and listened to the distant game unfold, his eyes unfocused on the wall that hid his cousins from his view.

“Oh, and zombies can eat whoever’s It if they sneak up on him,” Miles announced breathlessly.

“Since when?” Danny asked.

“Since always, I just forgot to say it before.”

Zombie-Agate stumbled after Danny.

“Braains!”

Connor felt something sharp digging into his knee. He reached down and pinched a small, broken piece of metal between his fingers. He looked at it in the dusty light and recognized it as the old toggle switch to his grandad’s ancient moisture tester. It had snapped off more than two weeks ago, and the impatient search for it had ended the same day.

Risking a quick peek out the window, Connor walked to the table that held the broken moisture tester. It was from a time almost too prehistoric for Connor to imagine – the sixties – but his father still preferred this manual old monster to the digital ones all the other farms in the area used. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” his father always said.

Only now it was broke. And no one had fixed it.

Connor ran a finger along the rusted metal of the machine that looked to him like something a crackpot inventor had cobbled together in his basement. Some otherworldly device designed for a purpose far more interesting than determining the moisture levels of inserted grain samples.

He put his fist into the plastic measuring cup that dangled from a sensitive scale arm, ran the knuckles of his other hand over the dials and knobs that had been rendered useless by the loss of the toggle switch now hidden in his fist.

A year ago, Connor’s older brother had dared him to take a piss into this same plastic cup that now held his fist. For some reason, Connor had done it. He’d stood right up on the table, taken his willy out and peed into the sample cup until the scale arm had popped up and leveled off, grinning as his brother laughed his dang head off on the floor of the shed, actually rolling side to side and stamping his feet on the floor. Man, but he’d been laughing.

Before Connor had a chance to pour his sample into the machine for a moisture reading, their father had stepped into the scale house. He’d picked Connor’s older brother off the floor by the front of his shirt and smacked him once, loud, on the side of his head, then shoved him against the wall, finger pressed against his chest. “Enough,” he’d said. It was the only time his father had ever raised a hand against either of them. To this day, Connor couldn’t understand why he hadn’t been hit, why his brother had been the sole recipient of their father’s violence. It was Connor’s pee all over the machine.

“Connor! Where you at?”

Outside, Agate and Miles both stumbled around groaning for brains. Danny cupped his hands around his mouth and called out again, “Connor! We playing zombie tag or hide and seek?”

Connor dropped the broken toggle switch and watched it roll into a groove on the tabletop. He stepped out of the scale house and squinted in the sunlight. Agate and Miles dragged their legs through dust. Tongues lolled out of their mouths. Fingers clutched at nothing.

“Braaaaiiins.”

Connor stood frozen in place, watching his cousins amble away from the hulking grain bin.

“Braaaains!”

The living dead, reaching out to him in desperation.

“Connor, what the hell?” Agate said, breaking character. “Do something.”

Connor inhaled and ran. Straight for Danny.

Bouncing on the balls of his feet, ready to zig left or zag right, Danny watched, confused, as Connor quickly closed the gap between them.

Connor blinked, his eyes diluting drops of stinging sweat with his natural tears. With less than ten feet left between himself and Danny, Connor pivoted right, towards Miles, then suddenly juked left, aiming for Agate. Danny slid in the dust as he tried and failed to adjust to the sudden shift in direction.

Connor pumped his arms and legs with animal abandon, momentum forcing his body into an awkward, out-of-control stoop.

“Here’s the serum!” he shouted as he reached for Agate.

He lost his fight with gravity and lurched forward, an erratic tangle of limbs. Agate tried to move out of his way but she wasn’t quick enough, and Connor’s nose crunched against her knee with a sound like an aluminum can crushed beneath a boot. Agate cried out, hands in front of her mouth to stifle the sound.

Danny slid to a stop, hunched over Connor. Miles ran up, laughing. His rippling giggles dried up at the sight of blood. Lots of it. Sliding from both of Connor’s nostrils and pooling into a congealing puddle of dirt and gravel on the driveway.

“Holy shit, Con, are you OK?” Agate asked with an edge of panic.

“Here, dude.”

Danny took off his T-shirt. Connor grabbed it without looking and held it to his face. He shifted his weight onto his butt, his elbows on his knees – his wet, rattling breaths shaking the confidence of his cousins.

“You need to pinch it and tip your head back,” Miles offered.

“He knows that. Everyone knows that,” Danny said. “Give him a second.”

Silent tears slipped down Connor’s cheeks as Danny’s white shirt darkened with his blood.

“Does it hurt bad?” Miles asked.

Connor shook his head and stared straight up into the sky.

“Then why are you crying so much?”

“Ain’t crying, it’s just from bangin’ my dang nose against Agate’s knee. You never hit your nose before?”

“Not like that.” Miles looked at the bottom of his shoe. “Ah crap, I stepped in crap.”

Miles dragged the soles of his shoes through the dust and grass, sliding backwards to scrape it all free. Connor decided to try out one of his family’s favourite jokes.

“It wasn’t Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk. Was the farmer.”

Everybody laughed and Connor flushed with pride. It felt good to be the cause of intentional laughter.

Miles bumped against the base of the grain bin. He balanced on one leg to check the bottom of his shoe, hand placed on corrugated steel to steady himself. His palm came to rest at the pointed base of two bumpy lines of fused metal, stretching up to form a three-foot-tall V. Miles rubbed his fingers over the shining scar. He looked up, registered the shape and yanked his hand back.

“Is that – ?” Miles looked at Connor with wide eyes.

Connor nodded and tipped his head back, eyes pointed at the sun. He sneezed. A spray of blood and spit hung in the sunlight before hitting the dirt. He touched his fingers to his nose, wincing with pain. “I think it’s done bleeding. Boy, that sure was dumb, huh.”

“Will you tell us about what happened?” Danny asked.

Connor closed his eyes. He watched floaters flit across the warm-orange glow of his eyelids and sighed.

“You know what happened. Right?”

“We don’t know all that much about it, really,” Danny said. “Everyone skips over . . . big parts of it. Which I get, you know, I’m just curious. We all are.”

“You don’t have to,” Agate said softly.

Connor checked his nose for blood. Still dry.

“Thing is, I don’t much like talkin’ about it. They made me talk about it a lot after it happened. With a couple different doctors. Didn’t help none. Matter of fact, mother and father decided I should stop seeing them. That maybe I’d be better off if I didn’t talk about it altogether. If none of us did.”

“Yeah, but we’re not doctors, we’re family. It’s different,” Danny said.

Insects buzzed. A few birds sang. A distant train whistled. Connor sighed and put his elbows on his upraised knees. He looked up at his sun-soaked cousins.

“If I talk about it, it stays with me. For a long time. It’s like once I let it in, it doesn’t wanna leave again. And then I’m stuck with it.”

“You really don’t have to, Con,” Agate said, her face a mixture of pity and interest.

Miles sat down in the driveway across from Connor and said nothing. Danny dropped his eyes from Connor’s and sent a rock skipping away with a kick of his foot.

“Alright.”

“Yeah?”

“Yuh.”

Danny sat down. Agate did too, completing the circle of cousins. Gathered around an invisible campfire. Waiting for a ghost story.

Connor gave them his.

“Sawyer wanted to throw these guys down from the top of the grain bin. These little parachute army guys he got at a birthday party. So we went up there first thing in the morning, and we threw down the three or four that he had. We were both kind of disappointed, I don’t know why. They just sort of floated down. I don’t know what we expected ‘em to do. Then, uhh, then Sawyer dared me to jump into the bin. Wasn’t much of a dare, we’d done it a hundred times before, but there’d been an accident earlier in the year across town, a bad one. So father’d gotten a lot more strict about it. More rules. Walkies. Hung a lifeline inside. There’s even a bucket with the bottom cut out tied to the top of the ladder in there.”

As he spoke, Connor dug his heels into the dirt, scuffing his foot forward and backward over and over, carving twin tracks into the driveway.

“I said no, I didn’t wanna jump in. Sawyer said if I wasn’t gonna do it he would. Long as I promised to come in after him. I don’t know why I didn’t want to. The unloading system wasn’t running. All the openings were closed. Grain can’t even move when it’s all sealed up like that. But I just . . . had a bad feeling about it.”

Connor’s shoes stopped digging grooves in the drive. He looked up at the rusting grain bin, a blank expression on his bloodied face. Then he looked at his cousins. Their eager expressions. Their quiet anticipation.

His heels started up again, back and forth across the driveway.

“But see, I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t know if I really had a bad feeling or if I’m just . . . Like with the aeration fan. I can remember noticing it was busted that morning, or at least not running, before we climbed up there . . . but I’m not sure that’s true. How can I know if it’s true or not?”

Connor looked into Danny’s eyes as though expecting an answer.

Danny looked away and Connor turned his eyes back to the bin.

“We opened it up, and I know for sure that we were confused why the corn was up so high. We’d just emptied a few thousand bushels out a couple days before, but that thing was pretty well full up. Sawyer jumped on in anyway. Landed fine. It wasn’t much of a jump, full up like that, he more just stepped out into the corn. I was all set to follow him in when he said to hang on. And he, uh, he put his hand up to his forehead and he said, ‘Somethin’ just dripped on me,’ and then uh . . .”

Connor cleared his throat and squeezed his nose. Hard. His eyes watered.

“That’s when the stink of it hit me. Like rotten potatoes in there.”

He blinked a few times, tears flushing down his cheeks, and continued.

“Then it collapsed. The corn.”

“How?” Agate asked.

“How what?”

“I mean, if everything was closed up how could it collapse?”

“It was all mouldy. Mildewed. It’d been loaded up wet, must have been, which ain’t good. And the fan was busted, so it just went to hell in there. That’s why it seemed so full up. See, the top of it’d crusted together. That’s called a grain bridge. Where it’s solid on top, all stuck together, but there’s a gap underneath it. It broke, the bridge did, and Sawyer fell right through into the sort of funnel underneath there, and corn came sliding down and trapped him in before he could even pull his legs up. He weren’t in too deep, just above his knees, but he was stuck fast. It’s like a suction cup, that much grain. You wouldn’t believe it. Like quicksand.”

“Quick-corn,” Danny said.

Agate punched his shoulder.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”

“It’s OK.”

“Then he went under?” Miles asked.

“Nope. He’s just stuck there. Looking up at me, kind of grinning, kind of wincing. So I threw him the lifeline and he caught it, wrapped it around his wrist and pulled tight. I’m yelling out for help and pulling on the rope and Sawyer isn’t going anywhere, he’s just planted there. Then I, uh, noticed him looking around, kind of scanning the walls, so I leaned in and boy it just smelled like hell in there. And I looked around and then I saw all the grain. All up the sides. Grain walls, that’s what we call ’em. More mouldy corn kind of piled up on the edge of all the loose stuff. Piled up high. Real high. It’d stuck fast when the grain bridge fell through, but now it was just waiting to fall. Little chunks of it kept slipping down into the funnel every time Sawyer moved at all. That’s when we both got worried. Sawyer looked up at me and said, ‘Man, this sure was dumb,’ and I told him to just hold on tight and stop your moving around ’cuz I was real anxious about those grain walls.”

“Is corn grain?” Danny asked.

“Danny, Jesus,” Agate said, shaking her head.

“I’m just confused! I thought corn was corn. It’s a grain?”

“Yuh.”

“OK. Sorry.”

They waited for Connor to continue, but he just silently dug his grooves in the driveway. He seemed to be gathering his thoughts. Miles inched out of the way of the dust cloud Connor was kicking up. Danny caught Agate’s eye and shrugged his shoulders.

“How long had he been in there now?” Agate prompted.

“Probably about a minute or two, but it felt like twenty. I’d been calling for help the whole time. Father finally heard me and come running out the house. He’s pulling on a shirt and calling out, ‘What’s all the GD fuss?’ when he sees me up there, hanging out of the grain bin and pulling on that lifeline with everything I got. I tell him Sawyer’s stuck and he takes off running for the car, screaming for me to hold on tight and he’ll be back with help.”

“Wait,” Agate said. “He didn’t help?”

“No, he went to get help. Neighbour down the road a piece is trained for this kinda rescue. It happens more’n you’d think.”

“Huh. I feel like . . . I don’t know, I’m surprised he didn’t come up and help. Maybe send you for the neighbour.”

“Yuh. Yuh, I’ve thought about that. Wondered whether someone stronger than me could’ve maybe pulled him out. I asked father about it, when we were talking with one of the doctors. He didn’t care to talk about that. I figure since I can’t drive the truck, just the tractors, he thought he’d be a good deal faster than me at going to get help. And there’s some truth to that. I suppose.”

Connor cleared his throat.

“This is where it kind of . . .”

“Maybe we should stop,” Agate said. “We know the rest.”

“No we don’t,” Danny insisted.

“I may as well finish now. I’m already in there.”

Danny, Miles and Agate waited, their eagerness tinged with shame.

“Sawyer was saying something about how his feet were starting to hurt, kind of wiggling his hips around, when the first grain wall collapsed. I pulled on the lifeline hard as I could, watching corn slide down and pile up around him down there in the middle of that funnel. Corn’s up past his waist now. The next grain wall fell right after the first. A cloud of rot and stink puffing up at me and I’m pulling on that rope till my fingers start bleeding, watching the corn pile up to my brother’s chest. He’s still talking to me, so calm somehow. Calmer than me. It was hard to breathe in there, I had to keep leaning out and taking deep breaths of the fresh air outside. Like you were breathing in poison. Hard to even see in there after the grain started collapsing, air was so full up with dust. But Sawyer was still talking to me, saying again and again how dumb this was, and I kept looking over my shoulder, waiting to see my dad’s truck coming back down the road with some help. And Sawyer, he just keeps on talking, talking about how nice it would be if a hopper bottom could just pull right up to the unloading gate and fill on up, the ten-inch auger just emptying that thing out while he held onto the rope and the corn drained out from around him. I remember he sighed and he said, ‘Boy, that’d feel better’n pissin’ in the field after a long ride home from nowhere.’”

“How deep was he?” Danny asked.

“’Bout up to here,” Connor said, tapping his chest. “He’s taking a lot longer ’tween words now. Complaining more about the pressure. ’Bout the air. I’m still watching for father and trying to talk to Sawyer, but then he started coughing, trying to catch his breath, and every time he’d breathe out the corn would press in on him and he couldn’t fill his lungs back up with air. That’s when the, uhh…”

Connor cleared his throat.

“There was one last slide of corn. Big one. Piled up past his shoulders, his neck. I tied the lifeline to the ladder, tight as I could, told Sawyer to hang on to it, hang on to it with all he’s got, and I unclipped that bottomless bucket and I jumped in, nervous as anything. Sliding down the corn, and it’s all gathering around Sawyer’s face, piling up to his chin. I got to him and I slammed that bucket down around his head, hard as I could, I pushed it down and I started digging all the mouldy corn out from around his face. He’s spitting it out of his mouth and gasping and I’m digging it all out of the inside of that bucket and praying more won’t slide down and spill up over the edge, and Sawyer’s eyes’re looking up at me, looking at me like . . . Well, I got the bucket cleared out, his face was out of the corn and he’s just taking these tiny sips of that poison air. Whispering to me that his ribs feel like they’re breaking, his spine feels like it’s breaking, he can’t breathe. And I started crying. A lot. Sawyer, he looks at me and he says, ‘Come on. That’s baby stuff.’

“So I stopped. I stopped crying.

“And he, uh, he tried to say a few more things but he wasn’t making any noise. Just his lips moving. And his eyes staring at me. Then he stopped talking. Then he stopped breathing. And, uh, his eyes kept on staring up at me.”

Connor unwrapped Danny’s shirt from around his hands and draped it over his head. Agate shivered. Danny and Miles turned their attention to the sparkling grasshoppers leaping through the corn.

Connor took a deep breath and finished his story, bloody shirt masking his face.

“So I held onto the lifeline and waited. I went ahead and passed out ‘fore my father made it back with two of the men from the next farm over. You just couldn’t breathe in there. They were pulling me out, making kind of a big fuss over me, and more corn started slipping down with everyone sliding around on it, pulling me out. And it overtook the bucket. Buried my brother. And, uh, they pulled me out, and man, the fresh air in my lungs . . . It was like a drink of well water.

“I don’t remember anything for a while, and then I was on the ground watching all kinds of cars and trucks pulling in, people everywhere, a fire truck. There was an ambulance. The auger was cranking grain out quick as it could, which ain’t all that fast with a ten-incher. And some men were carving those cuts into the bin to speed it up, cutting through that metal and peeling it up like a tab on a can of sardines. Corn’s spilling everywhere. People digging it out of the way. Loading up trucks and driving off. The stink of it all just everywhere. Couple dogs barking like this is the best god-dang game they ever been a part of.

“My mother kept saying over and over, ‘He could have found an air pocket, he could be OK. He could have found an air pocket. He could be OK.’ But I knew he was already gone. I’d watched him go. I couldn’t tell her that, so I just listened to her, saying over and over, ‘He could have found an air pocket. He could be OK. He could…’

“And then they turned the auger off so it wouldn’t pull his body into it, and, uh, his body slipped out of one of those vents there. Lights everywhere just flashing on and off, on and off, and he was…”

Connor trailed off, head hung beneath the bloodied shirt.

“Dead,” Miles said.

The shirt bobbed up and down, a gory Rorschach test.

A bell rang from the farmhouse.

“Man. That’s a really . . . messed up story,” Danny said. “Sorry, man.”

Agate reached out and put her hand on Connor’s shoulder. “You OK?”

A nod. The bell rang again.

“What’s that about?” Danny asked.

“Breakfast.”

Miles’ stomach growled.

“Guess I’m hungry,” he said and grinned sheepishly at his siblings.

Danny stood up, breaking the circle. Miles stood as well, wiping dirt and dust from the seat of his pants.

“You coming in for breakfast?” Agate asked.

The shirt didn’t move.

“You sure you’re OK?”

The shirt didn’t move.

Connor’s feet stayed settled in the deep grooves they’d dug into the drive. Agate stood and followed her brothers towards the house. She stopped and looked back at Connor’s hunched figure in the driveway.

“Thanks for sharing that with us, Con. I’m really sorry.”

After he’d been alone for a few minutes, Connor slipped Danny’s bloodied shirt from his head. He looked up at the bin, shrouded in the shadow of a passing cloud. The sound of liquid hitting the dust between his legs drew his attention.

Red rain.

His nose was bleeding again.

Connor eyed the nearby auger, yet to be installed, that his father had brought home a few weeks back. A thirteen-incher to replace the ten-inch one. Able to move sixty-five more bushels of grain per minute. Too little, Connor thought, too late.

SEATED AT THE TABLE, Connor watched as the members of his family finished up breakfast. His mother and father laughed at some private, adult joke with his aunt and uncle, their eyes shimmering with shared confidence. His cousins fought over the best bits of bacon, Miles making a contest-winning fuss and crunching through the crispiest piece of the bunch.

Connor sat silently – his plate empty, his nose puffed up like a fist, his eyes already turning black – and it was like he wasn’t there.

Like he was still back in the bin, holding onto a lifeline and waiting for someone to pull him away from all the rot and the fear and the death.

His father passed him the plate of biscuits without a glance.

IN THE LIVING ROOM, Connor watched his cousins play with his farm simulation video game. They took turns running tractors through his carefully plowed fields with gleeful carelessness. Recklessness. Childishness. Bringing each other to larger fits of laughter the crazier their antics became.

By the time Miles held the controller and had the onscreen farmer knelt behind a cow, bumping his head into its backside over and over, Agate, Danny and Miles were laughing so hard they couldn’t talk.

Connor walked to the front door. He looked down at Danny’s abstract 3D creation from that morning – its nonsensical architecture of cones and spires, its lingering smell of burnt corn. Danny had been so proud of it, if only for a moment. But it was nothing. It was just some orange goop that had flowed out of a pen. Connor crunched it beneath his foot, the fragile structure cracking and splintering into tiny pieces with the smallest amount of pressure.

OUTSIDE, ALONE, the boy walked through the late morning haze surrounded by the drone of buzzing cicadas.

He stood on the weighbridge outside of the scale house.

He jumped.

As high as he could, again and again, he jumped and brought his feet down on the scale so hard his shins ached and crusted blood flaked off his face. He watched the beam inside for any movement. It didn’t budge.

It was like trying to weigh a ghost.

Inside the scale house, the boy hoisted himself up onto the table with the broken moisture tester. He could see his house through the cloudy window, all full up with family. He turned his head to look at the grain bin as he unzipped his pants and emptied his bladder all over the useless machine. The boy listened to the distant rumble of a train on its way to better places. Urine splashed onto his shoes, the table, the floor.

When he was finished, he zipped his pants back up and shivered in anticipation of the punishment this was sure to earn him. This time there’d be no one else to take the blame.