Her feet wouldn’t move any closer. Ruth had to shake off the wariness that had taken hold, but somehow she could only watch Bill, not wanting to be any nearer. Only when Benjy beckoned her, urging her on with the bobbing of his head, did she succeed. Benjy stood on one side of the fissure and Bill on the other, and Ruth spotted the thing that had drawn their attention before she’d even reached them. It gleamed in the dark, blue and white like marble or maybe mother-of-pearl. Beads of rain landed and then slid across its surface.
“What the hell is that?” she whispered, surprised to find her voice making words.
Near the base of the oak where the ground had heaved and split, something had emerged, pushing up from below like the largest poison mushroom in the world. What she could see jutted up from the hump in the field by about six inches, but in the furrow down in the dirt, it appeared at least three feet long. Part of the thing appeared to be thick roots from the oak that merged with it. Again she thought of a mushroom.
Bill reached down to touch it.
“Don’t,” Ruth said.
He flinched at the urgency in her voice and glanced up, his fingers less than a foot from the surface of the thing. “Some kinda root or fungus, I guess.”
“Don’t touch it. Leave it till morning and we’ll get Russ Bornstein out here.” Bornstein was another farmer, but he’d studied botany.
Benjy walked over to the ruined tree and put one hand on the bark, leaning over to look down at the thing. “You think it’s poisonous?”
“Get back from there,” Bill told him. “Your momma’s right. We’ll have another look in the morning, and after this storm passes.”
One of the things about being an only child, cherished by his parents, was that Benjy had intuited early just how far he could step over the line, when he could pretend not to hear them, and what his punishment would be. In that moment, he knew disobedience would earn no punishment at all, just a wag of his father’s finger. Ruth knew this about her son, but he’d always been such a sweet boy that she saw no harm in letting him strain at the yoke a little. He’d need to make his own way in the world someday, and testing boundaries was natural.
Benjy stepped closer. His left foot rested only inches from the hole in the ground. Whatever had erupted from the field would be beneath him now, that mushroom flesh right under the spot where he stood.
“Careful, kiddo,” Bill said. “The ground could be unstable. Don’t want you falling in.”
Benjy should have made a face. He’d always been overly dramatic, even as a toddler. Normally, he’d have pretended to tumble backward, throwing his arms wide, making light of everything. Or he’d have gone rigid in mock fear and tiptoed away like he was Lou Costello eluding Frankenstein’s monster.
“Benjy?” Ruth said, voice cracking.
All the excitement had drained out of her boy. His arms hung limp at his sides, his smile erased. His eyes were dull and faded, the flat buttons of an antique doll.
“Bill, what’s wrong with him?”
Ruth approached carefully. In the back of her mind were echoes of old wisdoms, like the one about not waking a sleepwalker. But Benjy wasn’t sleepwalking. He had been wide awake, almost bouncing with fascination just a moment ago.
The damage to the field and the oak tree had been forgotten. Even the split in the ground and the enormous mushroom seemed peripheral. She watched as Bill took Benjy by the wrist and, with a tug, got him moving away from the edge of that furrow. The rain fell a little faster, a bit harder. The pale, oil-sheened thing in the ground jerked, shaking dirt loose around the edges.
“Jesus Christ!” Ruth shouted, backing away. “Did you—”
“What?” Bill stared at her, then at the furrow.
“It moved. That thing is alive!”
“What do you mean, it moved?”
Ruth shot him a hard look. “It moved, Bill. I think it’s a giant snake or something!”
Benjy stood by his father, gaze focused on nothing, as if he’d gone entirely blank. Bill stared at the thing down in the furrow, and Ruth mentally urged it to move again, if only to prove she hadn’t been seeing things. A thick root had broken when the thing shifted, leaving a gouge where the root had been attached to its flesh, and small bits of bark attached. Bill had to see that—no denying it.
He stepped closer to the furrow, and suddenly, it didn’t matter to her if her husband believed her. Ruth didn’t want him to go any nearer.
“Bill, wait,” she said.
As she spoke, Benjy lunged at his father. Ruth cried out as he grabbed Bill, twisted, and hurled him to the ground. Bill let out a pained cry and a stream of profanity as he tried to push their son away, but Benjy held him down. Impossibly, their boy had the strength to keep him there. The illogic of it froze Ruth for a few seconds, but then she strode toward them. She leaped over thefurrow in the ground, avoiding the low-hanging branches of the leaning half of the oak tree.
She grabbed Benjy by the shoulders. “That’s enough!”
He struck her with the back of his hand, the blow so hard it sent her reeling. Wilted cornstalks caught at her heels, and she fell backward into the whipping, scraping, postharvest tangle. Her pulse drummed at her temples and hammered her chest as she scrambled to her knees in the rain. Something snagged and tore the hem of her dress.
Bill roared at their son to release him. Ruth staggered to her feet, legs scratched and bloody. A wind kicked up, gusting around her, whipping the rain at her eyes. What she saw when she wiped them confounded her—Benjy, a third his father’s weight, holding him down. Bill grabbed him with both hands, tried to hurl him away, but Benjy knocked his father’s hands away and then struck him in the head, hard enough to turn Bill momentarily senseless.
