William Krueger: Mercy Falls

A solitary two-lane highway splits the marsh. To the right and left, brittle reeds disappear into a dingy, low-hanging mist. A fragile light falls over the scene, the day almost breaking. The marsh is silent. The birds have fled south or been killed by the virus, or perhaps it’s something about the place itself that inhibits their song, for there is the feel of abandonment here, of death, like an old battlefield or a cemetery.

Far to the west rises the dark square of a barn wall and the slope of a roof. It seems like an ark floating on a dun-colored sea. East there is nothing but the empty slate sky and the reluctant dawn.

He walks in his windbreaker with his shoulders hunched, each breath of cold air a reminder that autumn is making its last stand. He knows what will follow is a killing season.

He hears the rattle long before the mist around him begins to glow from the headlights, and then the truck passes, an old pickup, the bed fitted with rickety slat-board sides. Thirty yards beyond him the brake lights flash. The truck slows, stops. As he approaches, he sees that the bed is filled with feed sacks stacked half a dozen high in neat rows, and a contraption of wood and metal with gears and a long handle whose purpose is unknown to him. He opens the door. The smell of manure greets him.

“Hop in.” The man at the wheel beckons. He’s in overalls and his boots are caked. “Where you going?”

“North,” he says as he climbs in and slams the door.

“Whereabouts?”

“Just north.”

“Big place, that.” The man grins in a friendly way and gears into the mist.

In a moment, the truck is lost, heading north, which is indeed a big place, but not big enough.