A Beautiful Field

All the moving shapes of the past fade into one stale mist. There stands a shadow in the mist, it is cold. Time is unmeasured. There exists only a changing space of numberless absences, of empty beds. There are a great many of those. Time is long.

…

In those sealike mists stray thoughts group and scatter and group and float on. One needs a strong net in that vast sea. Its long fingers probing the dark occasionally picking up some fish, more often junk but most of all nothing. Sleep work eat work eat sleep. There is no name. Nothing to be named. Except a number. And this? A dream. A dream of the past. There is no present, no future. Memories are hermits from the past, decrepit now. The reaction is still felt so extreme. But then it wasn't a rational choice. No choice at all.

…

It is a cool summer morning and a farmer goes to town for a few things. He owns a small tomato farm in the Umbria region, the beating heart of Italia. It is known by the tomatoes’ full sunred flesh. Later they took those in taking him. He no longer exists to claim them. They gave him a spoon, beaten out of tin. 

The farmer lives with his wife. She is plain but he doesn’t mind. He needs someone to manage the home while he works in the fields. She is good at it and he loves her. Though the farm is small it employs two farmhands: A scruffy young man named Emmanuel from one of the nearby villages and a n****r from Tunisia. The farmer does not like him, the n****r. When he looks the farmer in the eye it feels like a challenge or rather the victory of a superior. But he is cheap. Maybe he is grateful for whatever paying work he can get. The wife gets on with him though. They are friends something more than natural, if a n****r can be friends with an Italian.

Today when the farmer is making his way home someone offers him a lift on the back of their cart. He arrives home an hour earlier than expected. The n****r isn’t around nor the wife and Emmanuel is away for the week visiting his ill momma. Instinct leads the way like a dog chasing the stench of fear. The farmer feels in his chest what he’s walked into. His wife is no angel. The blood and the brain don’t often get along and calmness is a luck given talent which the farmer never won. But strong emotions must run their course like a tribute to a violent god of storms with the blood of a bull hoping the tempest passes over indifferent to your existence.

The farmer creeps up the stairs like a cat towards a perched bird. He wants his gun but that is in the bedroom right where he’s heading. His ears are tensed and his whole body is the head of a heavy arrow on its upward flight aching to fall. His blood makes a sail of his skin. He needn’t be quiet, the foul noise coming from the door is indistinguishable from rutting animals. His thoughts are in his arm. He brunts the door and it smacks against the wall. There on his bed lays his wife on her back and entangled inside her legs and arms is the n****r, wet, dark and shiny like a polished boot, kicking. 

No thought no word, he runs towards them and grabs and swings the cheap metal star his mother used to fondle and caves in the back of his wife’s head. Her skull melts at his touch and her brains spill out a wave over the cotton bedding which absorbs like a sponge buckets of the stuff. He kills her first because he loves her. She has to stop. The n****r jumps out of the room rabbitlike after a missed shot. Coward and vermin. The farmer runs to his gun. No second shoots past unsavoured. In go two cartridges and leaning out the window butt to shoulder he sighs one two. A shot rings out and the monkey cracks like a whip and then sags like a loose bag of potatoes. The farmer grabs the star again. It is warm and wet. Their blood and brains shall mingle now in death as their bodies and souls did in life. 

The n****r is found on his side writhing wildly in the dust with white clouding eyes and holding his sputtering stomach. Hoarse sounds and a rumbling in his chest wrench blood and breakfast up through his throat and spatter the dark filth upon the dirt like a sliced balloon loosed of water. A fist sized flesh flower is sprouted on his mud coloured skin. Fatal in time. What is now to be done isn't technically murder, only defilement of the deceased. See the animal’s body, the muscular wreck. See his brown drooping penis. Even flaccid it is much bigger than the farmers’. The farmer’s heart falls into his stomach and boils in the acid. The n****r steadies his shuddering and sees the famer’s seeing. He smiles so wide like he’s splitting at the jaw and he throws his head back in a frightful laughter which stirs the farmer to the quick. The n****r strains to speak. You think. You never. At that he is cut off. The farmer brings the star down hard upon his smile. No word. His laughter returns to silence and his mouth moves not.

The farmer returns to his wife. She is still propped up in bed. Her face is beautiful and vacant like an angel. The wound is near the back of her head like a child’s kiss goodnight from a loving parent and her face remains as it had been in life. It almost seems to forgive. Reigning rage drops from the farmer’s soul like an eagle from a cliff. He sees the world again and what a world he sees. He howls like an animal caught in the jaws of some dark monster and grips his wife’s sodden belly and throws his head down into her barren breasts. His tears flow freely into her blood and his kisses impregnate her wound. He tilts her head from side to side like a child with dead game and looks into those soft eyes for any love and murmurs incoherent mixes of desperate appeals and half-remembered prayers. He kisses her lips and her cheeks and her nose and her eyes all the while crying and begging forgiveness. He has been silly, he says. He has been angry, he pleads. But she has been naughty, so naughty. My God! My wife!

He stays there for many hours. No one comes. Natural enough, he lives too far from town for many to hear and the few that do are used to his small game hunting. Emmanuel’s absence played into the n****r’s plan though not its execution. 

The farmer leaves his wife. And seeing he is now also drenched in blood goes to clean himself and change into a fresh set of clothes. Soap easily cleans blood.

It is early afternoon. This cannot be hidden nor will it be forgotten. Still in a daze he decides to bury his wife, take what he can and leave. The n****r he leaves as he lay. Let the ants have him. He doesn’t look at him again nor those brutish eyes.

It is late afternoon before he is on the move northward. It all won’t be discovered for at least a week when Emmanuel returns but by then the farmer will be far away.

After a few days of rough and cheap living he isn’t very far and finds himself in the unusually busy town of Arezzo. He pawns his watch and buys some cheese, bread and a bottle of cheap wine. 

Near the off centre of town there is a large gathering of men in uniform and men in suits. To see what is happening the farmer sits down on the stone rim of a fountain where mermaids sing from the rock as they drown. It seems the men in uniform are German and the men in suits Jews. These Jews are apparently being taken to work in the north to the other side of the Alps. 

There is something unnerving about the Germans’ efficiency but the farmer needs to go north so he lines up as well. He informs the list ticker that he is a Jew from the South volunteering for work. The list ticker looks up at him with annoyed eyes as if the farmer was a dog that had just pissed in his house. He sighs and motions him to the left to climb into the truck. The farmer obeys.

…

Long ago. The farmer goes back home, after. No one recognises him now. His wife is no longer where he buried her. They moved her to the cemetery out of town for a proper burial. Maybe it is right and it is a beautiful field. The farmer also finds the n****r’s grave in the same place. He smashes it and s***s on it and leaves.