THORNHOPE, INDIANA
He still had dreams about it sometimes. A grain silo glinting with sun. Irregular outbursts from an idling motor. Steel walls that rang with strikes from the shovel, every word his brother barked inside. He hated that about dreams, the details that lingered when he was awake, sat inside him all day as though he’d been filled with rocks.
“Leave the goddamn motor on,” Richard yelled.
Last load of the day and their father had been transporting grain to the Thornhope elevator when the silo funnel jammed. Carl deliberated from the grass, considered the ladder where the auger met the silo mouth, the fingers that gripped from inside the hatch as Richard stabbed away into a sea of kernels. Then the funnel resumed with roaring relief and the hand disappeared, the arrhythmic rustle of rushing corn brought to an abrupt halt as something punched the silo floor. What followed was a prolonged vision of life reckoning with itself, glimpses from the vantage point of some parallel impossible future coming to pass. Carl running to the control panel at the utility barn to disengage the motor. Carl climbing the ladder and peering into the mouth, encountering vacant dunes. The square of light that shone into the hatch, a sifting of kernel sand as he entered the broiling box on his knees and began the impossible task of digging through it all. The grain that just shifted back. He remembered finding Richard’s fingers after several minutes. He remembered squeezing the hand and his brother squeezing back, remembered screaming for help, remembered sinking too, thinking for several moments he’d drown in it. He remembered pulling at the arm until he was sure he’d separated it from the shoulder, unable to retrieve the body against the weight of the grain. He remembered wild pulses of color in the yard, various sirens and the bursts of men tumbling up the ladder and the screams of a saw against silo walls. He remembered that after several minutes the hand grew cold, and then he lost it altogether.
He remembered squeezing the hand and his brother squeezing back, remembered screaming for help.
was still dark when Carl walked the lot. He woke early because he couldn’t sleep and hated the quiet, but outside the quiet was different from the quiet in his room. A pale light shivered out across the fields and the air was thick, smelled of freshly turned soil and barn manure, as it had every summer morning. He passed t he concrete cap where the silo had been, remembered reading somewhere about a tribe in the Amazon that made soup from their relatives’ ashes. He didn’t think he could ever get used to something like that and wondered what someone from that part of the world would think about
