HSA-17: Harvest

Author's Note: As my stories go, this one is 90% story and 10% sex. It's relatively long, so if you're here for straight up naughty stuff, you may find it lacking.

***

In the fall of 1953, the Human Sexual Anomaly division had been officially in operation for six months. No longer did the interviews take place in a dank harbor warehouse or a grimy roadside bar, but in a clean interrogation room two stories below an average office building. A lamp hung over the wooden table causing a gleaming reflection in the new varnish. On one side sat Harry Dean. He would last three more years before meeting an ill fate. He was a squat man with a serious, gaunt face. He wore a thin, tailored, black suit with a white shirt and a narrow tie. His hat and overcoat hung on a hook near the door, still damp from the rain. Arrayed before him on the table were black and white photos, several manila file folders, and a clean white notepad, made specially by the division for this purpose. At the end of his interview for the job, the division told Harry he would encounter things that made him questions his sanity, his morals, and his god. He did not believe it until he learned about the Harvest of Ulster Rock.

Across the table sat another man. Never trust a frayed rope, Harry's father told him as a boy. Ben Holcomb looked like a frayed rope. For the past two years, Ben lived in the care of his blind aunt in Knoxville. How he made it to Knoxville after Ulster Rock remained a mystery of relatively little importance, but Harry intended to suss it out along with the rest of the tale. At twenty-two, Ben looked handsome despite his fraying. The shock of white hair running down the center of his head, hedged on either side by waxy black curls, warned of something uneven inside the young man. Thin, but wiry, made of the thread-thin steel from which country boys seemed to be spun. Periodically, spasms seized his muscles causing his arms and neck to go rigid. He winced at the slightest knock or thump. Harry knew shell shock well enough to recognize it before him. He hates seeing the signs in a man who had been free from the horrors of war. "This boy would trade places with any of them," Harry thought, "maybe even the dead. Maybe only them."

"Let me see your hands, son," Harry asked in the stern tone that he once addressed troops.

Ben did not turn his head, but tentatively offered his bare palms to the man across the table. Harry frowned, and his lips curled. Across the palms and up the wrist to the elbow were three branching patterns which Harry recognized. During the war, a corporal walked out to the latrine during a storm, carrying his rifle. Lightning did what the Germans couldn't and struck the boy dead. Harry helped carry the body back. A medic looked the boy over before sending him on to the white trucks. The same pattern on Ben hands and wrists had been on the back of that soldier. Lichtenberg pattern, the medic called it. Burst all the blood vessels down a line in the shoulder and back. Not what killed him though, the medic had said. The kid's heart stopped, and that killed most everyone. The pattern on the dead boy's back had started to turn black when Harry saw it, like still blood, but the ones on Ben's hands remained bright red, as if the blood vessels broke anew every few minutes. And perhaps, Harry thought, the fingertips are why.

On each hand, on each finger and thumb down to the first knuckle, a thick, tarry substance coated Ben Holcomb's fingers. It writhed like pitch on the boil. Harry nodded, and Ben pulled his hands back. Harry picked up his pencil and made several notes, most centered on the fact that despite looking like pitch, the substance has not worn off on any object or so much as changed position on the skin. Satisfied with that for the moment, he looked up at Ben with the best smile he could muster. "We'll begin now, if that's all right?"

Ben went to a spot in his mind that has been dark and closed off for two years. He saw it as a door once sealed with great difficulty — a red door, covered in pitch stains and nail scratches. Nothing scared Ben more than opening it, but he knew he couldn't keep it closed forever. Because what happened to him could happen again. Men in suits, men like Harry, found him and offered help. They showed him things other men would never believe, some horrible and some beautiful and all treacherous. He sat up straight in his chair, folding the scarred and tarred hands in his lap. He still felt the wriggle and burn of the sticky substance. In his mind or his heart or his soul, wherever one keeps the darkest of secrets, he reached for the handle of the door and found it turned easily.

"It was October 14th, 1951. I just turned twenty, and I took a job in Ulster Rock. They were bringing in the harvest and needed extra labor. Extra men, you see, for the harvest."

Harry nodded, and his hand went to work at the notepad.

***

Ben arrived on a Greyhound line thirty miles south of Ulster Rock. At the depot, he met up with his new foreman, a dusty old man called Willard. Six other young men got off at the same stop. They'd been riding together for miles and none of them knew they were headed to the exact same place. An eighth man came a different route, bringing an old beat up Ford on its last leg. The young man behind it looked two sizes too small for the rig, and Ben half expected to see him sitting on a pile of books with cinder blocks taped to his feet to reach the pedals. Willard gathered the lot of them on the rear side of the bus depot.

"Glad to see you all made it. We've got a good drive left ahead of us, but figure we should shake things out here. Ulster Rock is out in the fuckin nowhere. Don't get no passers through, and no man with a truck is heading out of town till after harvest. So if you get fuckin sick of me, you got a long walk before finding any way back to your momma's leakin tit." He spat to emphasize his point. Willard wore muddy and tattered overalls covering a shirt that might have once been white. His face and arms were sun worn leather. Wisps of white hair jutted out from beneath a denim cabbie hat. His left eye had turned to milk, but the right still sparkled a lively green. He spoke with his arms wrapped around his chest, showing pocked skin and knotted knuckles. "Two weeks of hard work. Pays twice, once at the end of the first week. Again at the end of the second. One hundred dollars a week with a fifty dollar bonus if'n you don't cut up none. I don't begrudge a man his drink, but can't have you whooping around town and causing trouble. That settled?"

The troop of young men nodded. For a brief moment, Ben wondered how and why each of them had come to be standing in front of Willard's one good eye. Ben guessed by the look of the lot that they all couldn't be more than a few years apart. It was the first time Ben felt his hair stand on end, an instinct his daddy had taught him to always heed. He believed if any danger was to come out of the group, he suspected it to be the fellow standing in the middle. Nathan Puckett, a bull of a man with cold, heavy lidded eyes and a nasty scar running down the left side of his face, nodded along with Willard's instructions like a greedy hog watching his keeper bleed out in the pen. Slow and cold, he'd eat the world so long as it laid still in front of him. Ben's active imagination had no trouble spinning a tale of the butcher Nathan Puckett, who took farm jobs with other men, working side by side with them until the pay was doled out in full. Then with that dumb smile on his wet lips, he would follow each of them down an alley and introduce a knife to their guts for the money in their pockets.

"Chuck here has volunteered to drive up behind me. I'll take half of you in the truck. The one who stinks the least can ride in the cab with me. The other half pile in with Chuck. If'n you got to piss, do it now. I ain't intending on stopping on the way back. Gotta get ya settled."

Fifteen minutes later, they had loaded their meager belongings in the car or truck and divided themselves up. To Ben's relief, Nathan went off to the truck with Willard. "Like goes with like," Chuck offered as a greeting as they situated themselves for the drive. Ben introduced himself in return by asking what Chuck had meant. "That dullard. The big one. I can see him gettin on fine with old Willard. Willard and the Dullard, a fine pair to make us break our backs haulin corn or just apt to split an axe in your back from the look of them."

"Yeah, sure," agreed one of the two in the rear seats. "Norman Black, pleased to meet you fellas."

"Gregory Anders, people who bother to call me, call me Anders," said the fourth.

"Charles Thornton is my full name," Chuck continued after Ben gave his name. "Been called Chuck since as long as I remember, though. Like a woodchuck my ol' ma would say. Small, but industrious." He flashed them a grin and cranked the car. It rattled. Ben immediately thought they'd be left behind, but the engine rolled over and Chuck's feet went to work on the clutch. "Hi-ho silver!" The engine roared defiantly, and a swirl of dust rose up behind them as they followed Willard's truck out onto the road. From the bed, leaning back against the cab, Nathan alternated between glaring at them menacingly or looking dumbly at nothing at all. At first, Ben found it unnerving, but as the corn fields started to roll by and the conversation started up in the car, he forgot the eerie feeling he'd had. "I come from Kansas, myself," Chuck prattled on, bouncing in his seat along the rough road. "Pa went off in the war when I was still in shorts. Left him over in North Africa, we think. Thought. Ma moved on last year. Kicked around the old place for a while till my brother came back for it. He ran me off, telling me to go find my own. Gimme the car though, so he ain't all that bad. What about you fellas?"

Norman answered first. He seemed glad of the conversation after the long drive to the bus stop. "Up from Atlanta. My, uh, parents are still living. Worked for my dad's company these past four years, carpentry. Lots of building going on back home. Thought I'd be fine there for a while, anyway. Then all these fellas start coming back from the army or from college, looking for work. My dad says they'd earned a spot that I hadn't and that it would do me good to head out for a while. Earn my legs, apprentice around the world a little. I rightly agreed with him. And so here I am. Might not be much building, but seems like honest work."

Ben wondered. "How'd you hear about this spot, anyway?"

"Heard about it from an old codger at the hardware store back home. Said he used to come west every year for picking season. Gave me a number to call and so I did. Got Willard on the other end of the line, he asked a few questions, and here I am." Norman shrugged. What did he know about how work was found? It was no different than an apple falling from a tree in his experience. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn't.

"Same with me," Anders chimed in morosely.

Chuck looked back in the rear view mirror to put a face to the voice once more. "What'chu mean same with you?" Anders and Norman were both handsome young men, the kind that Chuck had long ago learned to either respect or hate based on their personalities, but in either case envy as well. Norman's face looked a little more brutish, with his brow and eyes protruding forward over his jaw. Anders, on the other hand, had a well balanced face with a strong jaw that might one day be suited more to Hollywood than field work. Each had a swoop of brown hair above their eyes, still boyish and soon to be bordering on foppish, unlike Ben who had a crew cut that any old, blind barber would give or Chuck himself who kept his dark hair matted down with grease.

Anders looked up grey eyes, "I mean the same. Old fella, out of towner, dropped in the soda parlor where I was hired on to sweep up. Started talking about hundred dollars for a week of work. That'd take three months back home."

"Where's home?" Ben asked, softly. What he lacked in judgment of appearance, he mostly made up for in judge of disposition. Of the eight who had come to the bus stop, a hot wire of desperation or determination ran through seven of them, but not Anders. Those grey eyes held a mission of solemn and grim importance.

"Auburn, Alabama." Anders turned his attention back to the window and made no further explanations.

"Sounds like the old bastard made good time then," Chuck said. "Saw him myself. Gave me the number to call and everything. Long distance too. Thought I was going in on a scam, but here I am. Lucky, too. This pay'll set me up pretty good for a while I think. Course I heard about people doing farm work through the seasons before. Kind of died down during the war, at least so far as I saw. Easier pay, and sometimes safer, to go fight Nazzis."

Ben couldn't help but smirk at the Midwesterner's pronunciation of Nazi rhyming with snazzy. "I met him too. Didn't have to go out of my way though. He came by the house looking for me. Said he'd heard about me in town and told me about work up north. Talked it over with my folks, and they said it might be worth it. Guess it makes sense."

"Sure it does," Chuck agreed. "That'd have to be ol' Willard's pappy, you see. Willard's probably eighty so Pappy would be in his early one-teens. Since Willy can't be bothered to find fresh blood, Pappy is sent out to round up some new roosters to do all the work now that he'd gotten to old to shuck his own corn, if you catch my meaning. Time for some fresh cocks to waggle around the hen yard, you might say." Norman roared a guffawing laugh, and Ben chuckled while shaking his head. Anders remained silent, though the edge of his mouth twinged up slightly as though it might remember how to laugh properly if Chuck went on with his obscenities enough.

The conversation turned to things that young men talk about, pushed forward by Chuck's waggling tongue and encouraged by Nelson's swelling urge to tell his whole life story. Ben said little, Anders said less, and as the sun lulled behind the cornstalks they all found themselves travel weary. Until Ulster Rock came into sight. Though Ben didn't know it, they all felt the same pricking of their skin as they crossed an invisible threshold on the edge of town. It passed in an instant, but left a lingering unease in their guts that would not pass until driven out of them by hard labor.

***

Ulster Rock was a small and pleasant town of short brick buildings comprising a main street with a few houses around the edge. The healthy contingent of the population lived out on the farms. It had built up as a "T" with the north highway ending in front of the town hall square. Leading up to it on either side were several storefronts. Ben noted them on the way, a general store, a pharmacy, the post office, a pair of farming supply stores, a small bookshop that might have been a library on some days, a diner, and a few more darker buildings that Ben guessed to be professional services. The two car caravan turned right at the end of the road and headed east. The boys in the car got a good look at the somewhat more stately house that acted as city hall, jail, and any other municipal function that might be required. In front of it was a large lawn, a peculiarity in such a small town where every inch of land was gobbled up by corn. On it was a half built platform that resembled gallows. The unsettled feeling in their guts kept that guess from their lips, but it passed like a shadow over each of their minds.

They carried on until most of the town was behind them. The last building, or the first if you happened to be headed the other direction, was the boarding house. It was a brightly lit, two story building with a wide porch on the first and second floor. The windows spilled orange light out into the dirt lot where Willard finally came to a stop. The men piled out of the vehicles, glad to be rid of travel for the moment. The four from Chuck's car joined the others as Willard left them standing outside the wood plank porch. From the looks of them, the other four had not enjoyed the ride nearly as much as Chuck, and they glowered at him when he chirped a question about Willard's whereabouts. Nathan, whether through his latent malice or simple traveler's discomfort, looked ready to correct Chuck's cheerfulness with his fist. Ben got the distinct impression that the three men with him would oblige, as though they had been infected by Nathan's peculiar aura. In turn, Ben and his cohort felt ready to defend their blabbermouth driver. All unspoken and displayed through a quick set of glances back and forth, a web of tension ready to break into a scuffle. Willard stomped out of the door just in time.

During the drive, the old man added a chaw of tobacco to his earthy mystique. He spat, the black mucus dribbling from his lower lip and turning the dirt into mud at his feet. "Alright now, your rooms are set. Two to each, but you have your own cots all the same. I've slept it off here plenty of times, and you won't find no better lodgin within sixty miles any direction. I'll let Mira settle that up with you in a minute. My business is your work. Tomorrow morning, five sharp, I want you on your feet and standing right'chere with fuckin bells on. You can wake up on the ride out to the fields. I recommend hard coffee and no cream. Cream just lulls you back to sleep. Butter if you like, but mind it you don't take a shit where we ain't picked yet. It's rough for the first two days if'n you ain't used to it. After that, you won't be able to sleep past the first sunbeam, I wager. We'll split off into two teams. Reckon how your rode up here is good enough dividing for it. The four that come with me, I'll be shuttling you out to Wilson Hambridge's. You other half will go out to Tucker Morrow's. Can't miss the places as they're across the road from one another. That'll do for now. I'd tell ya to go straight to bed, but I doubt you'd listen. Five in the morning, on the dot. You boys ought to be used to this work, but I won't tolerate layabouts."

Willard said nothing else. He nodded to them and headed off to his truck. From there, he would drive another twenty minutes to the shed he kept at the edge of town. He would suck down two cups of whiskey cut with water, eat a half molded bit of bread with butter and some cooked corn, and then fall soundly asleep with a shotgun across his lap.

With the old man gone, the boys took better grips on their meager belongings and headed into the parlor of the boarding house. Ben saw that the first half of the bottom floor was taken up by a common room. It looked plain, but practical. Two long benches ran down the center on either side of a table. Along the walls and in the corners were rustic chairs and some smaller card tables. At a few, some grim looking men sat throwing cards into a pile between them, but the majority of the room was empty. On the opposite side stood a high desk behind which sat the first in a long line of women who would immediately replace one another on Ben's list of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen.

Mira Thorne strode out from behind the desk. She wore a prim and old fashioned style of dress that cut much closer to her body than any of the boys would have suspected. Her gold-spun hair wound back into a tight bun held in place by unseen pins. Her face was smooth curves that matched the rest of her from head to toe. Chuck's mouth hung open at the sight of her backside as it came into view, not knowing until that moment that all he'd ever truly wanted in life was to bury his face in the various crevices of a woman slightly prettier than him. The reactions of the others, including Ben, were not much different. The sole exception was Anders who lacked the astonishment that such a beautiful creature could exist, but instead saw her as an affront to a deeply held belief.