Dead Man's Song
Newton shrugged. Even after eight years in Black Marsh, what he knew about cattle farming would barely fill the back of an index card. Other than the fact that they were big, smelly, and went “Moo!” he didn’t know from cattle beyond medium rare at Outback Steakhouse. “Private sales?”
Crow shook his head and continued, “Griswold ran his farm more or less by himself. Sometimes he’d turn a couple of acres over to crops like pumpkins and corn and gourds, and then he’d hire day labor, always hiring drifters as his day labor. Not regular migrant workers, mind you, but hoboes, bums, guys like that. Never any local people.”
“So what? Cheap labor is cheap labor, and, who knows, maybe he felt sorry for them.”
Val said dryly, “I don’t think that was it.”
“No,” Crow agreed, “I think he just liked the fact that these were people no one would ever care about.”
“How do you mean?”
“If they went missing, I mean. No one would ever know if they went missing—no one would care.”
Newton laughed. “What are you saying? That he was doing…what? Feeding them to his cows?”
“I think he was killing them, is what I’m saying.”
“Killing them?” That knocked the smile from Newton’s face.
“It lays out like this. For four years Griswold ran his farm with the drifters acting as day labor, and no one ever noticed a damn thing. Then the fifth year was the Golden Harvest.”
“What’s that?”
“Local farmer’s legend,” Val said. “The Golden Harvest was the year we had the best crop that was ever reaped in these parts. Who knows why, but the crops went absolutely wild. Understand—when you plant, the birds get about half the seed and of the rest only a fraction actually produces a harvestable crop. That’s why farmers sow so many seeds, far in excess of expectations, so that the resulting crop will be enough. Well, that year it seemed like every seed that was sown took root and bore fruit.”
Crow nodded. “And what a crop! Jesus God! Ears of corn so big that they actually made it into textbooks as agricultural oddities. Tomatoes bigger than softballs and sweet as sugar, and apples that would make any teacher cry. Newt, this was like farmer’s heaven.”
“What does it have to do with Griswold?”
“Don’t rush me, son,” Crow said with a crooked grin. “It actually has more to do with the drifters than with Griswold per se. The crop yield was so big that farmers just couldn’t keep up, so they had to fish around for extra hands. A lot of them took on busloads of migrants from the ghettos in Philly and Trenton, and some of the others snagged up anybody who had two hands and needed a buck. A few farmers took on the drifters who usually worked for Griswold. As it chanced, that was one of the years that Griswold was not growing crops in his fields, he was just raising cattle.”
“The cattle he never sold,” said Newton.
Crow nodded. “The cattle he never sold, right. Henry Guthrie took on four or five of the drifters who had done field work before for Griswold and who were scouting around town for some shifts. Oren Morse was one of them. Now Morse—the Bone Man, as I prefer to call him—was a genuine cultural dropout. Young black guy, about twenty-five or-six. A blues-playing ex-hippie who quoted Santayana and Charles Bukowski and John Lennon. My brother Billy and I thought he was coolest thing going. We used to work side by side with him. We had lunch with him, listened to his stories about being on the dharma road like Kerouac. Even at eight I knew he was a good guy. Maybe not a pillar of any community, but he was a decent person—just a dropout from a world that he wasn’t suited for. He’d dodged the draft in 1969 and then just kept on running. This was long before the amnesty thing. He wasn’t running ’cause he was scared but because he actually thought the peace movement meant something and he didn’t want anyone to put a gun in his hand. Does that sound like a killer to you? Anyway, all through that season, through the Golden Harvest, we worked and talked and we learned a lot about dreaming and thinking from him. We all wanted to be just like him, to be that free. Then the year of the Golden Harvest came to an end and the year that followed changed everything.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Well, I suppose when you get a year like the Golden Harvest you can become soft really quickly. Everyone came out on top that year, from the farmers to the merchants to the everyday folk; that year was incredible. We all made money, we all had more than enough to eat, and I guess in some ways we all got complacent. Then the following year we had a different kind of harvest.”
“Nothing like the Golden Harvest?” asked Newton.
Crow snorted. “No sir. What came that next year was a Black Harvest.”
“A…Black Harvest? That sounds ominous. What was it?”
“Figure it out,” Crow said. “We went from one extreme to the other. Where the year before every damn seed was taking root and producing stalks and vines heavy with succulent fruit, the year of the Black Harvest was a year of blight and sickness. It started at the end of June, which is when the first wave of crops are generally harvested, and the crops that grew were thin and sparse, or swollen with disease. You’d break open a big juicy watermelon and the meat inside would be spoiled and black and crawling with maggots. The corn was so harsh and foul that even pigs wouldn’t eat it. Any person dumb enough or unlucky enough to eat the vegetables and fruits harvested that year fell sick, and soon we found that the diseases and decaying vegetation had bred some kind of virus or bacteria, or something like that—I don’t know the biology of it, all I know is that a lot of people died that year. Highest mortality rate in the history of Pine Deep, highest per capita in the state for any one town, at least in this century. It was like a plague, and it swept right through the town, from mid-July until the middle of September, and it chopped down old folks and kids, and left a lot of the adults weak and broken. Forget the farm animals—those that didn’t just drop dead in their tracks had to be slaughtered to try and keep the infection from spreading to Crestville and Black Marsh.”
Newton held up his palm. “Wait a minute…you’re describing what’s happening this year.”
Crow nodded, eyebrows arched significantly. “You should get out and meet the people, Newton. Everyone over thirty-five is talking about this being another Black Harvest year.”
“It can’t be that bad. There hasn’t been a significant increase in deaths.”
“No, not like before, and that’s a plus,” Val said. “Maybe it’s because we have a hospital here now, or maybe the antibiotics and drugs are better now. Who knows? Some older folks and some kids have gotten sick, but we haven’t had a real killer plague this year, thank God.” Crow reached out and gave her thigh a small squeeze.
Newton said, “Did the blight spread to other towns?”
Crow shook his head. “No, and that’s pretty weird, don’t you think? Some folks said that it was because Pine Deep is surrounded by water on all sides, it’s kind of like a little island. They said that the water boundary stopped whatever infection was in the actual soil. Of course that wouldn’t stop an airborne virus, nor would it stop much of anything else with all the traffic that goes back and forth between Pine Deep, Crestville, and Black Marsh, but none of the surrounding towns experienced any increase in sickness or mortality and none of the crops of the other towns was in any way affected.”
“Jeez, that is weird.”
“On the other hand,” Val said, “it’s different from the current blight. This time there are cases of crop disease as far away as Lambertville, Stockton, and Frenchtown in New Jersey, and all through this part of Bucks County. New Hope, Upper Black Eddy, Doylestown, New Britain. Understand, it’s not as bad anywhere else as it is here in Pine Deep…but it’s spreading this time. No doubt about it.”
Newton looked at her, then at Crow. “I have to say, folks, that this is making me feel a little sick myself.”
“Buckle up, Newt, ’cause it gets worse,” Crow said drily. “Folks who got sick back then, but who went to hospitals outside of town, or who went to stay with relatives in other towns, got better quickly and never had any lingering symptoms. Not one sick person who left town to recuperate died as a result of the disease.”
“Oh, come on—”
“It’s a matter of public record,” Val said quietly. “Look it up.”
“Yeah,” Crow agreed. “That was a terrible year. I got sick, too, but not bad. My brother Billy never got sick, so he was okay. A couple of my friends from school died, though.”
Val said, “Eventually the blight and the epidemic ended. Slowly, but it ground to a halt. There were fewer new cases of the sickness, and fewer deaths as the weeks passed and it got closer to October. Of course by then most of the crops had been chopped down and burned, so perhaps that halted the spread of the infection.”
“I know you’re going to think that this is romantic or morbid or something,” Crow said, “but it was as if the souls of the people of Pine Deep were being harvested that year, instead of the crops.” The reporter said nothing to that, nor did Val add anything to it. After a moment, Crow said, “Okay, so that sounded stupid.”
“‘Sounded’?” Val said with a wicked little smile pulling at one corner of her mouth.
Crow motored on. “Obviously I didn’t work at the farm that year, but the bunch of us hung out there all the time. Morse was there sometimes, too, but not to work. My brother Billy said that Morse was working out at Griswold’s farm that season.”
“Griswold’s farm wasn’t hit?”
“Oh, his farm was all but smashed flat. Nearly all of his cattle died in the first few weeks, and the meat must have been spoiled because Morse worked his ass off hauling off dead cattle and trying to keep alive all the new ones Griswold would import, but they all died, too. It must have been some nasty, disgusting work—but it was work. Drifters can’t be all that picky, you know. So the weeks passed and Morse kept at it, and at the same time the town kept going to shit. Finally, by the middle of September the plague and the blight were over, probably because every harvestable crop was already dead. The crop that year was a complete and total loss. Just a year after the Golden Harvest, that year turned out to be a financial disaster. Whole families went down the drain, people lost their homes, their farms, and, as you can imagine when things go really bad really fast, there was a lot of anger and frustration. Even some violence. Fights broke out, people started getting hurt.” He paused and looked up at the ceiling. “My dad was one of the ones who took his frustrations out with his fists.” That statement hung there, and Newton was sharp enough to read into it what was meant.