Soil Read Online Free Page A

tempo of society and not nature, that had prevented him from seeing it before. And as he felt the white numbing warmth of the sun on him and enjoyed a new cleansing breath of pure air, he believed that he could still win his wife and son back, that he could still coax his fields to fertility, and that his setbacks, the ruination of his farm and the disintegration of his family, would one day be charted as necessary bumps in the road over which all great achievement must pass.
    Out of this reverie Jay heard an idling engine and then saw it there on the road behind him, a pickup truck with camouflage detailing pulled over to the shoulder. The passenger window was down and the driver leaned out the window, braying, “Hey, buddy. Anythang bitin?”
    Jay stared back, trying to recognize this person. He thought it might be an old friend having a laugh, but after a moment he realized it was only an interloper making small talk. Who wanted simply to know how things were biting? The guy was probably angling for money or permission to fish, some preface to a scam.
    â€œThis is private land!” Jay shouted back.
    He snatched his racket and gave the boat a bitter shove away from the road, back toward the house.
    Privacy, he believed, was the fastest vanishing civility among men. He’d already posted a No Trespassing sign by the road, a futile gesture to defend his field from the carloads of illiterate country tramps who showed up with their poles and tackle, fishing the ditches, sometimes casting right from the front seats of their old beat-down cars. Who but a common thief would just walk up and take food from a man’s crop? He’d recently caught a pair of shirtless teenagers whipping around his field in their daddy’s high-powered Bass Tracker like a couple of Panamanian drug smugglers—as if the spilled river had negated all property division!
    Just then a vile stench rambled down his throat and turned his stomach. Something dead, too potent to be beached fish or rotting timber. This was something sweet and worse.
    Up ahead some fifty yards, a turkey buzzard balanced itself with awkward wings, betraying the carcass in a clutch of tall mud-tangled grass. Was it truly something or just a wet, gnarled log poking out of the murk? He rowed closer, burying his nose in his shirt. It was hideous, all contorted and half-submerged, reared back and eaten with lesions. He thought it could be a deer or a heifer.
    The bird’s head bobbed and wrenched, tearing off wet mouthfuls. It stopped midchew to give Jay a daring glance. It made no distinction about its prey. Dead is dead. Something in the bird’s savage possession told what it had and the lengths to which it might go to keep it. He turned back toward the road and squinted to see if the camouflage truck was still there, but the road was empty.
    He looked again at the buzzard, slurping and gagging, its neck contorting as it choked down scraps of brown meat. Jay took a swing at the bird with the racket. It hissed at him and then rose aloft with much clumsy effort, making a few passes overhead before lighting on a tree branch some twenty yards away.
    â€œHoly God,” said Jay, studying the remains. He leaned over the bow of the boat and looked into the face of it, into scraps of flesh that once gave expression. There were horrible festering holes from which eyes had been plucked and the hollow nasal cavity where a detached bulb of cartilage flapped. Receding lips exposed its teeth so that it looked like a whinnying horse. Some green congealment had bubbled up from a jagged divot in the skull. The face reminded him of the alleged alien autopsy photos from the UFO crash at Roswell, all bloated and fabricated. Against all doubt, he noticed clearly a hand, just under the water’s surface, in a rigid palsied gesture. Five fingers grasping for some last mercy.
    A car sped past on the road. Jay righted himself and whipped around, his eyes darting nervously