Candy
I found out how to make earthquakes. They were ready, I thought.
I put the last jar in place and could feel the talking together of glass and steel. Dad and Harley lifted the box onto a small trailer that we hooked up to the little pick up. The air shifted with it as the pickup pulled out into the yard.
“Okay, honey, where we need to go with this?” Daddy said.
“Let’s cross the creek with it! Out there, since you cut the alfalfa the field will work perfect. I just need it to be touching the ground.”
“Touching the ground?” He looked at me sideways, then to the gravel at his feet. Mom walked across the gravel drive and leaned against the tailgate of the pick up,
looking at the box. She was wearing a blue and white checker pattern dress, an apron tied around her waist.
“Yeah. Touching the ground. Can’t really explain to you why. I just know it.” “All right. Harley, you can drive, Candy, you and I can ride in the back so your mom can ride in the cab. That fine with you, Vivian?”
“I’d like to ride with Candy Girl in the back. I don’t have to have the cab.” She ran a hand through her red hair and I noticed streaks of grey I hadn’t seen before. Her eyes were worried, but I couldn’t contain myself, the way kids notice things but go
forward, only to think on and regret somehow later, the kind of things that eat on you in a way you can’t quite put a finger on.
“Yes! Ride in back with me, Mommy!” We climbed into the back and Dad got in the passenger seat. Harley started the truck and took it down the road across the creek. Two large trout swam away in the pool as the truck’s wave swept over them, their dark shapes flowing upstream into the shadows of cattails. A cloudless sky, the truck bumping softly across the field, Harley taking it slow so not to crack any of the jars. Even if he didn’t understand or like what I was up to, he did all he could to respect what I cared about, to respect the things he was losing touch with. For him it must have been like a funeral.
Harley looked back at me in the rear view mirror, and for a moment I saw that sameness resurface and he stopped the truck, right in its intended place, without my telling him to stop. We all got out and leaned the trailer back to let the back edge of the box rest on the ground and let it down slowly as Harley pulled the trailer away. The box shone in the sun and I placed my hands in its center, the hum growing upward through my arms and out the soles of my feet.
“Harley,” I said, but he’d already headed the truck toward the edge of the field, like I was thinking.
Lightning in the jars pulsed as a heartbeat through me and then back into the ground. The box sunk into the earth and the ground started to shake, then my vision went white and I felt the inner heat of the sun throb within me and when I came back everyone was laying on the ground unconscious, their breath slow and steady, a slumber of peace,
the box only pulsing, the ground falling back to an active kind of stillness, a low whir of charged readiness. The lights on the truck were glowing and fading with the pulse, growing and fading in brightness as the box came back to a steady-state.∗
∗
Figure 8: Nikola Tesla and the Earthquake Machine
Appocrypha
Unofficial/Documentation Dubious: surface of use of resonance to destabalize earth’s crust use of operatic performance shake to objects until dimantled.
A glass shatters by the vocal chords of a soprano [destruction by nodules] {throat cancer} (dreams from disney films or old movies from cable TV at my
grandmother’s, could have been TNT network, daydream image bleed together, and it could have been a tenor) grandmother has lost her memory, personality remains intact, though, fearful.
The ground moves and
Electrical storms sent through the earth (human influence on tectonics) [hands shake when muscles are taken to edge, love interferes with landscape, fragmentation and reconstruction]
Unofficial tales of Nikola Tesla speak of an earthquake machine he took about. A box that would cause the earth to move. Some say he used it to project electricity through the earth itself.
Chapter 12:
Hank
The truck bumps along through the night and Hank finds the small spur that leads up to the stone circles. His grandfather, Henry the First, had found it years back, when he’d been riding close to the spur road gathering the cows and calves one fall. There was almost nothing to indicate what it was, but grandpa Henry had a feeling about it,
something about it seemed like he needed to respect the spot, and said one day he wanted it to be his final resting place. Henry Jr. had wanted the same.
Hank hits a rock and his dad slides across the bed. He shines his flashlight back and the old man is still wrapped up safe and sound. He hits the gas and the right front tire goes into a deep rut. The motor stalls out and comes to a stop. He takes a sip of beer and starts the truck again, but the wheels spin free in the mud and fail to catch.
“Fuck it,” he says, and gets out. “It’s taken damn long enough to get out, I may as well pack the old fart. He ain’t that big.”
Chapter 13:
Harley
I’d got up early to change the pipe on the upper pasture when I saw dust on the road, coming down toward our place from the county road that came up the valley from the highway. Dust rose faintly in the dawn light, and at the head of the cloud a speck of black that got bigger, but stayed black as it grew. The dust settled in behind and three black cars in a row appeared from the cloud and came around the bend a mile off. They stopped at the front of the house, at the door we didn’t ever use, the front one, so I knew it wasn’t anyone who’d know us. Anyone else used the back. I was muttering
Coleridge’s “The Nightingale,” because Mr. Daggett was having me memorize it as part of my final project that was due at the end of the week. “A melancholy Bird? O idle thought! In nature there is nothing melancholy.” I’d been working on it in chunks. Sometimes two lines sometimes three, and paced it to my step as I lay the pipe. I was matching my record times and beating them in the mornings, but when I’d change pipe after school I found myself slowing, feeling the work more, feeling it deeper, and finding new discoveries within it. I laid in the last length of pipe and turned the sump back on. The water pressure sang against the metal and the sprinklers started up, then the pressure went out and I knew it, a blow out. I ran back and turned the pump off, and watched the fountain of water at the corner pipe go back down. I had an extra joint in the little pickup I’d drove up to the field, and I grabbed it just in case it was only a joint and not the pipe split open. Down below at the house, the three cars were barely visible below the elm trees.
I got to the where the water was still flooding out, cutting through the turf and creating a mud hole, and saw how I had lucked out. It was just the joint that had blown, and it all went back into place as it should, and when I turned the pump back on I could hear the pipe singing again with the pressure. When I made it back to the house, the cars were gone. A faint hint of dust was still in the air, and my dad was working on one of the tractors in the shop. I asked him if he could give me a ride up to the bus in a minute and went to the house to change into dry clothes. Mom had made corn bread and I had a piece with some milk. I muttered lines of Coleridge between bites.
“Poems?” Mom said. I hadn’t heard her behind me where I stood at the counter. “Yeah. How’d you know?”
“I had a teacher have me memorize things when I was about your age. I kept some of them up in here with me.” She pointed to her head and smiled. “I can still recite a little Shakespeare.”
“That’s great, mom. We read Hamlet.” “You like it?”
“Yeah. I did.”
“I always did, dark though.”
I nodded. All that darkness made sense to me. I gave mom a hug and ran in to where Candy was in her room and tossed a rolled up sock at her and ran back out the front door. Dad had the pickup started and I hopped in. Candy got in, papers pouring out
of her book bag, and crawled across me for the middle seat. Her dress was starting to smell. About half way down the road I asked Dad what the cars had been there for.
“Nothing. Nothing really,” he said. “Who were they?”
He kept driving and looked at me from the side and down at Candy. She was twisting and untwisting a piece of foil. “Daddy doesn’t want to talk about it,” she said.