Extraction

A short story written from a prompt as part of the "Same Walk, Different Shoes" community writing project.

“Same Walk, Different Shoes” is a Substack community writing project that Ben Wakeman organized as a practical exercise in empathy. The premise is simple. A group of writers anonymously contribute a personal story of an experience that changed their life. Each participating writer is randomly assigned one of these story prompts to turn into a short story. The story you are about to read is one from this collection. You can find all the stories from the participating writers at Catch & Release. Enjoy the walk with us.

My right hand swipes rhythmically across my eyes like a windshield wiper as I head east on I-80. Tears are coming fast enough that I should probably pull over, but I can’t stop driving — if I am not moving away from everything right now, I might not make it. There is corn as far as I can see, endless miles of it, and my beat-up car flies past it all, making a blurred green wall of the center-pivot crop circles I see in my dreams. When people hear “Nebraska,” they think “flat” and “cornfields,” like the ones I’m putting in my rearview mirror. But these fields are supposed to be grasslands — used to be grasslands. It wasn’t just bad luck that brought on the Dust Bowl in the 30s. It was drought, and the relentless replacement of natural grasses with row crops, and government policies that sent people with no business farming west to fulfill a manifest destiny. Eventually, after everything went to hell, after people learned the hard way that rain doesn’t follow the plow, things got better. Irrigation innovations brought renewed harvests, along with industrial livestock and meat processing operations. People could make a living again, feed their families. And hundreds of animals could be crammed together inside a single acre, where it used to take well over one hundred acres to support a single steer. I loved this place once. The sweltering summer heat of the plains, the biblical storms, the deadly winters. The first memory I have is being bundled against the cold, stuffed into a snowsuit, that crunch of snow the cleanest thing I’d ever heard before — or since. The snow is the only thing I will miss.

My father and I fought often, over how to run the business, how to care for the land, how much more debt we could take on after so many seasons of bills paid with insurance payouts. After spending what should have been my college years working by his side, I had given up on the farm that was all I’d ever known. I wanted out, had told him so. I was taking a few classes at Mid-Plains Community College and planned to move to Omaha by the end of the year, a spring semester scholarship transfer to Nebraska University. I’d already begun distancing, stepping back from the day-to-day operations, telling myself it was to ease him into my being gone. Truth was, I just didn’t want to do it anymore.

I’d flush with shame whenever I saw him come in sweating from the field, or frowning over a pile of bills in the kitchen at night. I kept an eye on market prices because I didn’t know how not to pay attention. But I loved the extra time to myself — loved sleeping in till the sun came up, looking for part-time jobs in Omaha, picking out classes from the course catalog. A campus map was tacked on the wall by my desk, and I was looking for an apartment to rent within walking distance. I figured I was a little too old to live in a dorm. Each time I looked at a rental listing, I had to search for the closest bar, coffee shop, and grocery store, imagining myself as a regular at those places. I started spending most of the day out of the house, to plan my future free from the heaviness of the farm, and to keep my father from seeing how happy I was to be leaving it.   

I don’t know whether I realized it then — I will ask myself this question many times in the years to come — but he had given up on himself. He had no hope that things would get better. In his cavernous despair, he saw a useful logic in what he decided to do. A way to take his slow and certain ruin and turn it into something that would feed and shelter the rest of us. My mother blames me for what happened, and for a long time, I will blame myself. But how could I have known what was coming?

That morning I’d spent a couple hours at the library and was headed to Jerry’s Diner when I realized I’d left my wallet at home. I smelled it before I saw it. The corn was high enough that I didn’t see smoke until I turned in our driveway, and then it was everywhere, sooty and billowing. My tires spun a gravel wake as I sped toward the house. Bounding up the front steps, I threw open the door and screamed, “Daddy! Daddy, you in there?” but the fire was raging, the force and heat of it knocked me off the porch. I ran back to the car for my phone and dialed 911. I gave our address to the dispatch operator and said “okay” when she told me to stay put, running around the back as I spoke, looking for the cat, looking for the source of the flames, looking for something to save.

“Mr. Bell — Lance — you still with me? Do you know whether anyone is in the house?”

I didn’t, and that not knowing propelled me in frantic, aimless bursts around the yard. Mama was visiting her sister in the hospital, had said she planned to head straight from there to her afternoon shift at the Hampton Inn. It was almost 11:30 on a Tuesday morning, so Kate was at the high school. Daddy could be here, he could be in town, he could have run out for gas, there was just no way to know. The heat was oppressive. Rivulets of sweat soaked my shirt, mixed with the drifting ash and ran into my eyes. I could hear my teeth chattering as I answered the operator’s questions. 

“Anything nearby that the fire might spread to? Dry brush, other structures?”

A short, strangled sound that might have been a laugh burst out of me. “Ma’am. This is central Nebraska. It’s all tinder.”

“Okay. Sit tight, honey. They’re on their way.”

A few miles east of Nebraska City, I get onto 29 South and there is a section where I don’t know if I’m in Nebraska, Missouri, or Iowa. From there, I follow the Missouri River loosely, and catch it again in St. Louis where it hits the Mississippi. Then I leave rivers behind until I cross the Ohio two hours outside of Nashville. I had this friend in high school, Linda, who would talk about Nashville so much we all got sick of hearing about it. “Hey, Nashville,” we’d say as she walked toward a group of us. She wanted to be a singer-songwriter, like Lucinda Williams or Mary Chapin Carpenter. Last I heard she had married a guy in the Air Force and had a couple kids. I wonder if she still makes up songs and sings them. It seems “potential” is nothing more than the dregs of a dream that stick in your throat as you drain your cup.

Just past Nashville there’s a stretch where the highway climbs up and up like a rollercoaster before the drop. After all the flat I came from, this is almost too much for me to bear. I am gripped by a certainty that I will never reach the top, that it is more likely my battered car will quit on me, and I will roll back down to where I came from. My heart is pulsing in my throat. I drive exactly the speed limit, forcing back the urge to floor it. When the road finally evens out again, something crests inside me and this time, I do pull over. Sitting on the ground at an overlook, my back against the front driver’s side tire, I weep, a keening that is more body than mind. But what else can I do with the memory of the smoke and the heat and the bag zipped up over her face?

She must have been skipping school, snuck home to take a nap during third period — probably math, which she hates. Hated. They found her in her bedroom with the door locked. The fire chief told us forensics indicated that the cause of Kate’s death was smoke inhalation. “Then she didn’t burn,” said our mama, her voice like rocks grinding against each other. “Praise God,” said Aunt Sarah, and Mama slammed the door behind her as she stalked out of the room. 

Someone from the Fire Marshall’s Investigations Division called to ask about my father’s state of mind before “the event.” They said the investigation was just about wrapped up, but they wanted to know if he had seemed depressed, if he was under financial strain, if he had been moody or isolating himself. I did not know how to answer those questions. My father had owned and operated a small farm in North Platte, a farm that had been in his family for over one hundred years. Federal agricultural policy benefitted corporate farmers and consolidated agribusiness, while small family farmers like him were left behind. People who knew nothing about supply management and price floors demanded hormone-free milk and organic produce, without also demanding their government enforce its antitrust laws. Dry seasons kept getting longer and the water levels in the Ogallala Aquifer kept getting lower. I thought about all of this, and I said, “Farming’s not an easy life.” They didn’t call me after that. I guess they got what they needed.

When the letter from the insurance company arrived at the post office, I brought it to my mother. She asked me to read it to her, but I stopped reading out loud after the subject line: “COVERAGE DENIED” in bold print next to the policy number. The rest of the letter is a blur of sentences that I neither processed nor remember, except for one line tucked in the middle of a paragraph: “…investigation concluded that the occurrence was not accidental.”  

Somewhere on I-24, stony waterfalls appear out of nowhere like a dream along the road. Rolling my windows down to smell the air, I feel a wordless understanding from the gentle cascades. I have been thirsty since the fire. I have not been able to rid my chest of smoke. But here, at these waterfalls, the heat I have carried from Nebraska begins to dissipate.

When I get to Atlanta, I check into the cheapest motel I can find and bring everything I own into the room with me, because this doesn’t seem like a safe area to leave my belongings in the car, and because everything I own doesn’t amount to much. The firefighters managed to bring the fire under control with a little of the house still standing —though not before it killed off half the Bell family — and I had salvaged a few things before I left. Some clothes, a pair of boots, Kate’s neon green water bottle she’d left on the table when she got home from school that day. In the dark of the motel room, I think of the last time I saw my mother. Her hollow eyes had been somewhere far from me when she said she did not want to see me again. I told her I loved them too, and she’d turned her face away. As I was leaving, she had hissed after me, “Lance. All you had to do was stay and help him.”

A few months after arriving in Atlanta, I drive out to the East Palisades Trail. Before I came here, I didn’t know Atlanta was called “the city in a forest,” but I can see why. It’s a metropolitan web anchored by old trees: dogwoods, magnolias, river birches, loblolly pines. The Palisades Trail has a small bamboo forest hidden inside it. It is early in the day and quiet, apart from for the raucous joy of the birds. Trees tower above me. In the steeper areas, there are jagged rock walls slick with moss. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so alive. I get lost a few times, but never too far from the path, making use of the slippery steppingstones to cross and re-cross a stream. The buzzing of the cicadas increases with the heat of the day. Stopping to rest, I take off my shoes and plunge my feet into the cool water, and hope there are no snakes nearby. I take stock of my calloused feet. They have the gnarled, work-flattened shape of my father’s. My toes grip the gritty bottom of the stream and then let go, water threading between them.

I wish I could tell him about this place. Maybe if he had known how big the world was, he wouldn’t have felt so trapped in his desolation. But then, he never thought the wide world was meant for him. He was the dusty land of the high plains. He knew the land was sacred and that he was its steward, as had been his father, grandfather, great-grandfather. He did not know how to restore the land or himself. He did not see another way. I allow my mind to wander from the wreckage, and imagine my sister in Atlanta with me. Kate would have loved the buzz and pace of things here, new faces every time she walked down the street. Maybe we would’ve shared an apartment after she graduated. But she will never know this place or any other, and I would never have left Nebraska if not for the fire. The sudden wave of grief rocks me. I close my eyes, concentrate on the sensation of mist on my skin, on the living, breathing forest. I take it all in, take my time, then send it back into the universe. To my father and my sister. To my mother.

I start sending Mama a Christmas card with some money in it every year, care of Aunt Sarah because I no longer know where my mother lives. The message is always brief: “Merry Christmas, Mama. Hope you’re doing alright.” The sun keeps coming up and going down. I have lived in Atlanta for three years when I write my mother to say that I am going to be a father, that I am going to name my daughter for hers. She does not write back. I send her a copy of the sonogram anyway, and after Mary Kate is born, I send photographs. It takes one more letter with baby pictures enclosed before she writes to ask when they can meet. When I pick her up at the bus station, I see that my mother has become an old woman. The first time I put Mary Kate in her arms, Mama can’t stop crying. Until she does. She spends the rest of the trip holding the baby and humming to her. She changes all her diapers and rocks her and takes long walks pushing her in the stroller. We half worry Mama will steal her back to Nebraska when she leaves.