The Collection

He went into the barn to get his tools.

He had finished the box and gate for the potato, putting it in place well before seven o'clock. It was eight o'clock be­fore the first carload of people arrived. He was in the living room, making signs to post on telephone poles around town and on the highway, when a station wagon pulled into the drive. He walked out onto the porch and squinted against the sun.

'This where y'got that monster 'later?' a man called out. Several people laughed.

'This is it,' the farmer said. 'It's a buck a head to see it, though.'

'A buck?' The man got out of the car. He looked vaguely familiar, but the farmer didn't know his name. 'Jim Lowry said it was fifty cents.'

'Nope.' The farmer turned as if to go in the house.

'We'll still see it, though,' the man said. 'We came all this way, we might as well see what it's about.'

The farmer smiled. He came off the porch, took a dollar each from the man, his brother, and three women, and led them out to the field. He should have come up with some kind of pitch, he thought, some sort of story to tell, like they did with that steer at the fair. He didn't want to just take the people's money, let them look at the potato and leave. He didn't want them to feel cheated. But he couldn't think of anything to say.

He opened the top of the box, swinging open the gate, and explained in a stilted, halting manner how he had found the potato. He might as well have saved his breath. None of the customers gave a damn about what he was saying. They didn't even pay any attention to him. They simply stared at the huge potato in awe, struck dumb by this marvel of na­ture. For that's how he referred to it. It was no longer an abomination, it was a marvel. A miracle. And the people treated it as such.

Two more cars pulled up soon after, and the farmer left the first group staring while he collected money from the newcomers.

After that, he stayed in the drive, collecting money as people arrived, pointing them in the right direction and al­lowing them to stay as long as they wanted. Customers came and went with regularity, but the spot next to the box was crowded all day, and by the time he hung a Closed sign on the gate before dark, he had over a hundred dollars in his pocket.

He went out to the field, repositioned the box, closed the gate, and retreated into the house.

It had been a profitable day.

***

Whispers. Low moans. Barely audible sounds of despair so forlorn that they brought upon him a deep dark depres­sion, a loneliness so complete that he wept like a baby in his bed, staining the pillows with his tears.

He stood up after a while and wandered around the house. Every room seemed cheap and shabby, the wasted ef­fort of a wasted life, and he fell into his chair before the TV, filled with utter hopelessness, lacking the energy to do any­thing but stare into the darkness.

In the morning, everything was fine. In the festive, al­most carnival-like atmosphere of his exhibition, he felt reju­venated, almost happy. Farmers who had not been out of their overalls in ten years showed up in their Sunday best, family in tow. Little Jimmy Hardsworth's lemonade stand, set up by the road at the head of the drive, was doing a thriv­ing business, and there were more than a few repeat cus­tomers from the day before.

The strange sounds of the night before, the dark emo­tions, receded into the distance of memory.

He was kept busy all morning, taking money, talking to people with questions. The police came by with a town offi­cial, warning him that if this went on another day he would have to buy a business license, but he let them look at the potato and they were quiet after that. There was a lull around noon, and he left his spot near the head of the driveway and walked across the field to the small crowd gathered around the potato. Many of his crops had been trampled, he noticed. His rows had been flattened by scores of spectator feet. He'd have to take the day off tomorrow and take care of the farm before it went completely to hell.

Take the day off.

It was strange how he'd come to think of the exhibition as his work, of his farm as merely an annoyance he had to contend with. His former devotion to duty was gone, as were his plans for the farm.

He looked down at the potato. It had changed. It was big­ger than it had been before, more misshapen. Had it looked like this the last time he'd seen it? He hadn't noticed. The potato was still pulsing, and its white skin looked shiny and slimy. He remembered the way it had felt when he'd lifted it, and he unconsciously wiped his hands on his jeans.

Why was it that he felt either repulsed or exhilarated when he was around the potato?

'It's sum'in, ain't it?' the man next to him said.

The farmer nodded. 'Yeah, it is.'

He could not sleep that night. He lay in bed, staring up at the cracks in the ceiling, listening to the silence of the farm. It was some time before he noticed that it was not silence he was hearing—there was a strange, high- pitched keening sound riding upon the low breeze which fluttered the cur­tains.

He sat up in bed, back flat against the headboard. It was an unearthly sound, unlike anything he had ever heard, and he listened carefully. The noise rose and fell in even ca­dences, in a rhythm not unlike that of the pulsations of the potato. He turned his head to look out the window. He thought he could see a rounded object in the field, bluish white in the moonlight, and he remembered that he could not see it at all the night before.

It was getting closer.

He shivered, and he closed his eyes against the fear.

But the high-pitched whines were soothing, comforting, and they lulled him gently to sleep.

***

When he awoke, he went outside before showering or eating breakfast, and walked out to the field. Was it closer to the house? He couldn't be sure. But he remembered the keening sounds of the night before, and a field of goose-bumps popped up on his arms. The potato definitely looked more misshapen than it had before, its boundaries more ir­regular. If it was closer, he thought, so was the box he had built around it. Everything had been moved.

But that wasn't possible.

He walked back to the house, ate, showered, dressed, and went to the foot of the drive where he put up a chain be­tween the two flanking trees and hung a sign which read: Closed for the Day.

There were chores to be done, crops to be watered, ani­mals to be fed, work to be completed.

But he did none of these things. He sat alone on a small bucket next to the potato, staring at it, hypnotized by its pul­sations, as the sun rose slowly to its peak, and then dipped into the west.

Murial was lying beside him, not moving, not talking, not even touching him, but he could feel her warm body next to his and it felt right and good. He was happy, and he reached over and laid a hand on her breast. 'Murial,' he said. 'I love you.'

And then he knew it was a dream, even though he was still in it, because he had never said those words to her, not in the entire thirty-three years they had been married. It was not that he had not loved her, it was that he didn't know how to tell her. The dream faded into reality, the room around him growing dark and old, the bed growing large and cold. He was left with only a memory of that momentary happi­ness, a memory which taunted him and tortured him and made the reality of the present seem lonelier and emptier than even he had thought it could seem.

Something had happened to him recently. Depression had graduated to despair, and the tentative peace he had made with his life had all but vanished. The utter hopelessness which had been gradually pressing in on him since Murial's death had enveloped him, and he no longer had the strength to fight it.

His mind sought out the potato, though he lacked even the energy to look out the window to where it lay in the field. He thought of its strangely shifting form, its white slimy skin, its even pulsations, and he realized that just thinking of the object made him feel a little better.

What was it?

That was the question he had been asking himself ever since he'd found the potato. He wasn't stupid. He knew it wasn't a normal tuber. But neither did he believe that it was a monster or a being from outer space or some other such movie nonsense.

He didn't know what it was, but he knew that it had been affecting his life ever since he'd discovered it, and he was almost certain that it had been responsible for the emotional roller coaster he'd been riding the past few days.