By Richard Wirick
If you wish to supplant someone, to substitute yourself for them, could wishes be little waves, partial causes, small curling waters like the ones Roger fished in through the rivers flowing north to Erie, the inland sea that could create or be created from anything—glaciers, ice-swales, beginnings and endings of ages before men walked these grassy places, the flattened green.
What was the difference between the great and final cause and its tributaries? Roger wondered this in the months before what happened to Hazen, the one who had risen in old man Jay’s eyes as the splendid issue, who had shed his clumsiness and was now the planner, the craftsman, the farm’s bright star in the shadowed, cropless valley pushing up against Ohio.
He thought of how much he hated his brother’s name, his loose white shirt that bobbed now on the tractor seat, working the gears that clanged like an anchor chain, a compass needle finding the family’s new direction—north or true north it mattered not, pulling all of them now up through the weirs and harrows.
Hazen the rising one, Roger one to be risen above. No two could be equal in bringing up things of the earth, turning great beasts into fountains of meat and milk and the leather that wallets were made of.
Hazen looked back at him and smiled. Roger did not smile back. Each of them saw the farm as their legacy, their destiny. Roger was prudent, some would say conservative. Hazen was all progress, taking on risk as a sort of necessary breath. The wobble and blur of their debates took over dinners, holiday suppers.
Hazen passed the bowl of peas under his mother’s nose before she had even finished grace. Matie grabbed the bowl and placed it over in front of Roger.
“What’s the bank want for the loan? The milking machines?”
Hazen didn’t seem up for talking.
“I’ll ask again tomorrow. Our broker is good people.”
“Ballpark?” Roger asked, dishing himself a pile of green he’d turn into a pyramid when he was little.
“Hundred thousand on the land. Straight collateral.”
Roger was going to fake one of his chocking sounds. But he wanted to give Jay and Matie a break.
The father said nothing. The old man could hardly hear.
***
The following day was blueprint day, what they called Fridays now. Their cousin Liza was an accountant. She kept the books. Roger thought she was partial to Hazen, but then at times thought he was imagining it all. When she leaned now to put the sand-filled weights on the prints he looked down the front of her blouse. She looked back sharply at him once. But today she was in a hurry, all business, all taps and totals on her pocket calculator. Her aloofness around him was puzzling, because he was also a man for figures, rows and columns of them stuck crookedly into machines and then spitting up out of them like new clean snow. He tried to figure her snobbery out, for years, for endless ways of thought. But she pushed him away, turned up her nose at Roger’s wife Vanessa, kept them out of the charmed circle she and Hazen would guard like sentinels.
Liza spread the blueprints, smoothed them with her whitened nails which seemed as white as the lines that floated up from the unrolled sheets. Roger loved the blueprints that pictured plankings and peaks for unbuilt barns, for switches and panels and hoses that ended in glass udder tubes, where before there had been hands, squeezing and pulling for a hundred years.
He didn’t expect them to take his advice, take what he’d say into the whole of the magical process. He just wanted to be listened to. To be considered. Attention must be paid, like the playwright said.
He leaned forward as Hazen’s hand traced the lines out of the consoles and across the floors. It was a mighty architecture. Few people of their ilk had entered the world of milking machines. The hands on the udders, the stools would be things for a reliquary. When he saw the calloused fists of their own hired men now he saw the bones beneath the skin, the sticklike squeaking of human hinges.
He gazed across the blue-white grid. It was the future. It was a picture of the future.
Liza spent a lot of time on a set of tall books, back against the office wall which only she seemed to have the key to. Hazen was hypnotized by the blueprints, and when Roger moved forward to watch Hazen looking at them, Liza interposed herself between them, twirling the ring of keys smartly around her index finger.
“Vanessa, how is she?”
“O, good,” said Roger. “Thank you for asking.”
Liza seemed to like Vanessa more than Roger, and Roger sometimes thought of this as progress, and other times a kind of double insult.
“What’s back there?” Roger asked, nodding to the desk where the books were.
“A load of crap,” Liza answered. “More manure than you’d see in the grazing vale.” She smiled, then all three of them grinned. The blueprints always did this, reduced them to their common purpose. It was like a fire which they gathered around, a substitute hearth. Liza rolled them up and Hazen had sets of rubber bands for each end.
“Stay for supper?” Roger asked her.
“A pleasure, a pure pleasure. Always is.”
***
The hired men, now three of them, ate at the table with the family. Matie had only one requirement. The men had to wear shirts. Shirts with collars that hadn’t been worn outside. Domer had a brother, Wade, and Wade’s son Earl, with a bodybuilder’s biceps, was indispensable for the haying and binding. “Big guns on him” Jay said once. Matie winced at the comparison. She had been raised Quaker. Guns were the Other, made for things all humanity should be moving away from. Hazen reminded her that the farm had been given to her own father by the new Union his soldiery had preserved.
Dishes were passed around with a nimble elegance that covered the black energy flowing between the brothers. Hazen watched Vanessa dab her mouth with a Kleenex. The hired men ate like savages, men who hadn’t seen a plate of food for weeks.
Roger saw Hazen looking at Vanessa, as he often did. Hazen had never married. “Too much treasure out there to dig,” he’d say. “Too much in the trees to shake loose. A wife and kids would ruin all adventures.”
Roger knew Hazen admired his wife’s great beauty, the fierceness of her poise, the body of a sylph that would never leave her.
Roger squinted at his brother’s gaze, and Hazen looked up at their father. Jay of the last century, of the sleeve holders and suspenders. The old man took extra shots of the port whose quality he derided, calling it the brandy of the damned.
The women did the dishes and gossiped. The men sat in recliners and talked about football, Civil War battles. Jay nodded off while Roger fidgeted, seeing Hazen go into the kitchen, feigning conversation while he surveyed what was Roger’s better self, his only prize.
Roger said he was going outside to check the well pumps. In the workroom he went to the back where Liza had put the long ledger books and pulled them out. One had clean balance sheets with no markings. The other said, at the top, ‘Not For Auditors.” It had larger amounts all bracketed with penciled numbers and column titles. Roger had always wanted in on the firm’s finances, wishing the accounts to be farm documents and transparent with their profit accrual corpuses. But Liza was the designated steward. The right book’s extra funds had gone somewhere, but Roger, and he knew his parents, had no idea where. When he was closing the cover, a staple cut his thumb. He wiped away the blood drops and then spit on his handkerchief and watered it clear in little circles.
The day it happened was a bright, cold day. Shadows of clouds blew over the sheep sorrel, whirling above it like a twisting cape. The pasture grass shimmered; the trees shone emerald over the fences where the grasses ended.
Hazen was on the John Deere, Wade riding on the metal running board. They were heading to the churning shed to fix a leak. One of the mistakes they made was putting the tools in their belts—there was plenty of room in the toolbox behind the seat. There was a giant pond of mud in a dip in the grass path. Hazen drove forward into it, guessing it was a foot high max. He entered fast, hoping to splash through. But the tractor immediately started to sink. The mud went up to the top of the tractor’s wheels. Wade’s jumper went black up to his knees, and he held fast to the tractor’s engine block and started to laugh at first.
The tractor sank quickly, very quickly. Roger watched—Jay had told him about these sinkholes, coming after heavy rains. He ran to the close-in garage and grabbed a pole, ten or twelve feet long, with a wishbone prong stretching out from a yellow trunk that had been painted, sanded by one of the hands who was good with finish work.
By the time Roger got down to the sinkhole’s rim, the tractor was plunging at an unreal speed, like grass fires he’d seen spreading in the straw. He couldn’t see Wade at all and figured he had jumped free somehow. The mud was up under Hazen’s arms.
When the redness of panic had drained from his face, his skin whitened with a more sharpened, practical fear. He looked back and forward in quick snaps, conveying a gratitude that his brother was doing all he could. He leaned right and pointed at the bubbles of Wade’s air under the surface.
But Roger wasn’t doing all he could. His grip was only halfway up the wishbone struts. He could have given its reach another ten or twelve inches by grabbing the last segments of the prongs. But he didn’t. Someone watching from above or at a distance would be as fooled as Hazen. But someone by the pool would be able to see the abbreviation of Roger’s efforts. The calculated gesture. The holding back.
What lay above the line was Hazen’s blood and gulps of oxygen. What lay below were generations of ambitious dairymen who had moved too fast. They were the drowned and the saved of the afterlife, traversing halls whose ceiling was this black muck where the sun flung spangles, brightening, wavering coins.
Roger heard the sirens of the fire trucks, and when the long one backed down into the swale, a yellow ladder swung out and Hazen, his shoulders covered, reached up and grabbed it.
“Harness, harness,” a fireman yelled, and Hazen threw the canvas vest around himself, wiping his hands on the tightening burlap. But the ladder twisted him, snapped him around in one direction, then jerked him in the other. The coat of mud slipped off him and with each ladder jerk what was left went off in blackened spray.
That is when everyone heard it, the snap of his vertebrae. He had gotten what, in the old days before the electric chair in Harrisburg, was called the perfect hangman’s fracture. His useless limbs would stay that way.
They fished Wade’s body out with an angling gaffer. The firemen put Hazen on a stretcher under a mound of blankets and jackets. Liza wasn’t there to run to him. Vanessa was, and she gave Roger a menacing look, motioning him over with an irritated sweep of her hand.
When they stood in the hospital room in Pittsburgh, somebody said that Liza was on her way. Roger watched the doctor’s hands rove over the X-ray mounted and lit from behind. He pointed out the broken trail of the spine, the free-floating triangles of bone. The x-rays had an azure cast, and the doctor’s hands, feminine and small, reminded him of Liza tracing the white lines along the blueprints.
When Hazen was out of anesthesia he looked up at Roger, standing beside his bed, and thanked him: thank you, boss, thank you brother. I never should have gone through that patch.
Roger patted Hazen’s sheets, looked at his watch, and went into the bathroom and vomited.
It was a slow, sometimes violent job of erasing the events from his memory. There were splinters of guilt he pulled loose from the doors behind doors that led to the horror of it, the doors smoothed flat by the wood plane of forgetting. It was like whitewash on the sides of a new spring barn. But inside of him each room of thought was lightless, and when he left its darkness and opened another door, it got darker.
Roger had to carry on, but the work of erasure was exhausting and nauseating. He was the man of the place, and the endless ways of thought had to give way to new tasks and efficiencies, small lamps flickering in emptiness.
***
Wade’s funeral was four days later. His immense wife suspended from her wide black dress a gaggle of stunned children.
The widow was seated in a sort of apex the misarrangement of the chairs had made. The minister was dreadful, and Wade had been in Vietnam and the head of the burial detail brought the triangled flag to her, kneeling on an aging knee and saluting.
But just after this, under the fiddles and Irish drum of a Bluegrass hymn, his friends had written decades before, Liza sat by Hazen’s wheelchair, a kind of almost-widow, and looked over at Vanessa and Roger. Under her unbuttoned coat, hidden from the gun-hating Matie, she bunched her fist into a makeshift pistol stock. She raised its invisible barrel toward Roger and Vanessa, and when Liza saw that he saw her, her eyes narrowed, and a barely detectable grin grew on her face so that the edges of her mouth twisted like a crooked pin.
Then she raised her thin pink index finger and pulled the trigger, faster and then even faster, two shots for Roger and two shots for V.
Richard Wirick is the author of two fiction collections Kicking In (2010) and Fables of Rescue (2023), as well as a memoir, ‘One Hundred Siberian Postcards, a novel, The Devil’s Water (2011), and a book of essays, ‘Hat Of Candles.’ He is a practicing attorney and lives in Los Angeles with his family.