Dead Man's Song

against the small of her back, hidden by a red-checked thermal jacket. She was walking the fields with Diego, a short, barrel-chested East Texan who had worked for her father for almost twenty years, doing spot tests of the soil pH. It was still a clean 6.54, far above the range of any of the surrounding farms, whereas most of the other farms had shown pH drops well below 5.0 and even lower. Val’s soil remained solidly in the 6.0 to 7.0 range, even in the places where all that separated her fields from her neighbors was a wood-railed fence. Her closest neighbor, Charlie Kendall, had shown her the analysis of his samples and the levels of soil phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium, sulfur, magnesium, and calcium had all dropped, even when a sample was taken five inches from a healthy sample taken along Val’s property line. “I don’t get it,” Val said. “It doesn’t make any kind of sense. It’s too weird to be an accident of nature, and if there is something in our soil that’s making a difference, then it has to be something that was deliberately put here.”

“Like reverse ecoterrorism,” Diego said, trying for a joke.

“If it was something different in our soil it would show,” she said, shaking her head in frustration, “but it doesn’t.”

“Nope,” Diego agreed. After twenty years he still had that East Texas drawl. “I was talking to Spence the other day,” he said, referring to Todd Spencer, his counterpart on the Kendall farm, “and he was saying that there was not one single stalk that didn’t show signs of root worm. Not one. They’re going to have to burn the whole crop, and this is weird because as you know they’re growing that Mon 863, that insect-resistant corn from Canada. Shouldn’t be even a small percentage of root worm over there.”

“And we have no traces at all of them.” Val shivered in the freshening breeze. “That’s really weird, Dee.”

“No joke,” Diego agreed. There was a rustle behind them and they turned to see the stalks snapping back over the passage of something that moved quickly through the rows. “Deer,” he said, shrugging it away. He went back to collecting soil samples, but Val continued to stare at the spot where they’d heard the rustle, frowning. Then she took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and let it out through he nose as if to cleanse herself of her jumpiness. Her cell phone rang, startling her.

“Hey, baby,” Crow said and the day seemed to brighten for her.

“Hey yourself. I was going to call you soon. I need an insanity break.”

“You mean a sanity—”

“You heard me.”

“Nice to be appreciated for one’s talents. Anyway, honey-chile, I just called to check in. Mike and I finished his first lesson in Kickass 101.”

“How’d he do?”

“Metza-metz. Started off by fighting me tooth and nail about even discussing it, let alone giving it a try, but he came around. Kid is seriously spooked, though. Vic Wingate has really done a number on him.”

“Uh-oh, I’m hearing that Captain Avenger tone in your voice,” she warned.

“Me? I wouldn’t lay a finger on him,” Crow said, then in a stage whisper added, “the slimy shit-eating bastard.”

“Tch-tch,” Val said, but in her heart she agreed with Crow. “Well, maybe one of these days karma will drop a transmission on him at the shop.”

“From your lips to Kali’s ears. On the upside, we did have a good session after he got into gear. Kid has some good reflexes. Really good, actually.”

“Honey…do you think you can teach him enough to do any good?”

Crow made a noncommittal noise. “Time will tell,” he said, and then changed tack. “So, how are you doing?”

“Okay, I guess. I’m out in the fields with Dee. Taking samples and such.” She sighed. “And this afternoon I’ll be setting up for the funeral tomorrow. God, this is so weird. I’m doing ordinary farm stuff one minute and the next I’m planning how to memorialize my dad.”

“I’m meeting that reporter out there at four. You want me to be there earlier?”

“No. I’ve got Diego and the guys.” She told him about the plans, finding a strange sort of calm in the mundane details.

“Well, if you need me there today, sweetie, I’m there. You sound pretty wired.”

“Thanks, but it’s just that I…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

“I understand, baby. Your dad’s spirit is all over that—”

“No,” she interrupted. “Not daddy…I keep seeing him everywhere.”

“Oh,” he said after a moment.

“No matter what I’m doing I always get the feeling he’s right there, watching me from around a corner or peeking through the blinds, or following me through the corn. I can’t seem to shake it. I mean…just now there was a deer walking through the corn and my first thought was him.”

“Val…this is all still pretty raw. It’s just been a week, it’s going to take some time.”

She made an ambiguous noise. Crow said, sounding startled, “Heck with the store. Let me tidy up a few things around here and then I’ll be over. Want me to pick up some Chinese?”

“That sounds good.”

“See you soon, my love.”

“Crow…?”

“Yeah, baby.”

“I really do love you with all my heart.”

“Me too, Val. See you soon.”

She punched the OFF button and snugged the phone back down into her jeans, waved good-bye to Diego, and strolled back toward the house. As if in reflection of her mood, the sky was a weary gray with a sadness of clouds drooping low over the distant trees and a sigh of a cold breeze. A few birds flew overhead but they were hungry and lonely birds, flying fast to find other places where warmth and hope still prospered. Far above the clouds an invisible plane flew from some distant somewhere to another place, whisking by over the grayness of Pine Deep, the intermittent drone of its engine sounding like the moan of some sleeping person dreaming of pain.

As she walked, she came to the spot where her father had died and stopped. There was no sign of it now except for tattered streamers of yellow police tape tied to the fence posts. She climbed onto the fence and sat there in the cold, her short hair snapping in the wind, her dark eyes filling with tears, her mouth tight with cold anger, trying to grasp the impossibility of it all. Her father had died there. Right there, on that tiny stretch of earth that looked no different than any other soil anywhere in the world, and yet it was there, right there, that he had bled to death alone in the rainy darkness on that terrible night last week. The thought that his blood was still trapped within the soil made her feel at once totally repulsed and yet at the same time oddly comforted. It was a stupid thought, she told herself, but somehow she felt as though it meant that something of her father’s spirit remained here, too, as if some trick of geomancy had allowed him to linger. With a certainty as if of ancient ritual Val knew that day after day, probably for the rest of her life, she would come out here and feel for her father’s spirit in the air and in the soil. The thought that such a spirit, such a person who had been filled with so much vitality, so much love and gentle strength could simply end was just too horrible, and it made her feel terribly mortal. If Henry Guthrie could be snuffed out with no more than the flex of a finger on a trigger, then her own life, Crow’s life, and the life of their baby were all equally transient.

She thought also of another Guthrie who had died there, just a few feet from where Daddy had been killed. Young Roger Guthrie, on leave from the Air Force, Val’s handsome cousin who looked more like Henry than Mark did. Rog had been home just a week, but had picked a bad time for it. That was the year of the Black Harvest, three decades ago. A lot of folks had died that year, some from diseases born of the blight—but Rog had not caught any disease. He had been one of the victims of the Pine Deep Reaper. Right here, right at this spot. This place was awash in Guthrie blood, and the thought of it fueled Val’s rage.

Val wiped her eyes, feeling the wind back and freshen. There was a hint of moisture in the air, and the tang of ozone; it smelled like snow but was too early in the year for that. A storm smell, she judged. Another storm. God. The last storm had come on like this, growing in the afternoon, building all through the evening and then exploding in the deep of night with a force that had shattered her life. If there could be a worse storm—or a storm whose power could do more damage—than the one that had blown Karl Ruger into Pine Deep, Val hoped that she would never live to see it. The very thought of it made her stomach take a sickening