Pale Harvest. Braden Hepner

       This star of heaven which descended like a meteor from the sky; which you tried to lift, but found too heavy, when you tried to move it it would not budge, and so you brought it to my feet; I made it for you, a goad and spur, and you were drawn as though to a woman.

      — THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, translated by N.K. Sandars

      Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Chapter 14

       Chapter 15

       Chapter 16

       Chapter 17

       Chapter 18

       Chapter 19

       Chapter 20

       Epilogue

       Braden Hepner

       Torrey House Press

1

      IN THE EXODUS WEST SOME CAME IN BORROWED WAGONS and some pulled handcarts. Abandoned by their government, exiled and driven by their countrymen, these pilgrims trod a harried trail across the Midwest, seeking asylum and isolation enough to build the kingdom of God. A people proud without reason, tormented by God, and self-chosen. In winter, mothers lay infants without names in the frozen soil along the way and these graves were not marked but for piles of stones placed on the mounds to deter carrion feeders. They crossed a wild land in search of one wilder, carrying their peculiar ways, strange doctrines, their faith, sorrow, and hope. They crossed the mountains and arrived gaunt and clothed in rags like a sect of vagrant scarecrows wandered from the fields of the civilized world and come to behold a land of desert grass and salt, their new promised land. They carried what civilization they knew, and the land, unclaimed by methods of the world they’d fled from, was deeded according to infant law, and they tilled the earth and planted seed and claimed it for their own. They dug ditches and channeled water that flowed from snowbound peaks. Their prophet foretold glory as Bridger did doom. They multiplied, and the children of the first generation expanded their holdings. They moved about between the mountains, uprooting sage and planting grain, replacing desert grass with crop. They raised industry. They enlarged their borders until all land was accounted for in records they had fashioned. They built kingdom and commerce. They increased faith and wealth. Later generations lost the land, it was deeded again, lost again, most not a hundred years from the time the progenitors broke the first furrow, and it was a portion of this land that John Blair Selvedge worked now, twenty years old, without parents, unknowingly come back to the land of his forbears in the sixth generation, a diesel tractor and a shaftdriven implement with which to work, not an owner of the land, but a daily toiler of it.

      The summer solstice had passed and these bright days led him toward the darkness of December. He rarely failed to notice the solstices. When he came into his adolescence and first felt the foreboding the summer solstice brought on, the subtle realization that although the days were as bright and long as they had ever been they would now begin to grow shorter and the dark would come earlier and stay longer, he did not want to go into the darkness alone without the warmth of another beside him, someone with whom to spend the crepuscule of the long evenings and the dark cold nights that would follow. This feeling of apprehension and loneliness recurred each year but had lessened as he fell farther into his solitude and his drawn out days on the farm.

      On a summer night when the temperature dropped and the last light drained from the sky, this tractor work was therapeutic, meditative. The field he cut lay between the railroad tracks and the road. He was alone with the beat and hum of the swather and with the dog that followed behind, gulping down freshly killed gophers and mice spewed through the back of the machine until she puked. The machine sang a song that evoked his deeper thoughts and the vibrations beneath him shook some themes loose from others, settling them among their kind. A freight train appeared in the distance, its headlight like a slow comet. It shook by with no whistle, for there were no crossings near, and from his seat he watched the cars glide through the darkness and disappear. In the open field he felt a pull. His lights caught the reflections of feral eyes, carnal creatures slinking under the blanket of night to appease basic appetites. Were it not for the low thrum of the swather he might have held a hand out flat and watched it shake at what chaos could roil inside him, a young man, tried and found wanting, alone in this field under the black sky.

      When he had done enough he left the tractor and drove the mile into town. He drove past the small park, through the town square, over the railroad tracks and to the co-op, where he took a Pepsi from the machine. From the town square a man could walk in any direction and be in the open in minutes, the open that surrounded the town and pressed it together into a bleak huddle, that reached in like tongues to the center. There was the concentration of houses on a few fragmented grids set up around the square, but the puny town proper had never warded off the tremendous open, never established itself with any conviction on the landscape, and the open threatened now to overturn what had been done, to restore what had been altered. The town had begun its demise as soon as it was called a town, and sat in its demise now, no running businesses, no fresh paint. No upkeep but the old brick church. Beyond this, fields stretched into the black open of night.

      Within sight stood the house he had grown up in before his parents were killed coming back from a temple service in Willow Valley, before his move to his grandparents’. His father was thirty-eight, his mother thirty-seven, and they had left this world together. A run of premature death narrowed his father’s