Digging Holes for Seeds

Anderson. Jon Anderson. The man had worked on our families’ farm for nearly four years, before I learned his last name. It wasn’t surprising. Truth be told, I didn’t spend nearly as much time in the fields as I maybe should have, but in my defense it had only been a year since I returned from University of Austin. Apparently he’d been here for three years before that, as well; though I hadn’t seen him the few times I’d returned home during my degree.

You might still think–a year, though? A full year? Yeah, but you have to understand the way that farms work. People have different jobs, and I didn’t really work on the farm anyways. Most of the time, we’re separated by kilometers of distance. The only time we really ran into one another was in the barn, every once and a while, or when he tramped slowly back through the field at the end of the day–about once every two weeks–and we bumped into one another while I was studying on the porch and he was climbing into his beat-up, sky-blue GMC. It was old-style, and rattled when he turned the key in the ignition.

It suited him. Jon was about twenty years older than me. It was a guess. He could have been a rough-looking early forties, or an average-looking fifty year old. I imagine he’d probably have been good looking, once. His jaw looked like a block of hewn wood; the same squareness as the rest of his stern-looking features. At some point, the square of his nose had been broken; perhaps many times, and healed badly along the bridge. About half-way up, I could see the lightning-shaped line of scar tissue, a paler while against his sun-darkened skin. His arms and shoulders both looked powerful, their shiny roundness matching that of his clean-shaven head. A bit of blonde stubble poked up over his cheeks and chin, like wheat-shoots peaking their winter-sheared heads out of the dirt for the first time in a season. I’d always thought he wore the same sleeveless black shirt, until I realized that one of them had a hole in the back left, just above his hip. By that, I judged that he had seven of the same style folded in his drawers at home. Seven of the same khaki pants. Seven of the same pairs of white socks. Seven pairs of underwear.

It wasn’t that Jon was unfriendly. In our limited interactions, I’d never heard him raise his voice to anybody–even when something, as they often did on a farm, went disastrously wrong. In fact, I had rarely heard him communicate in much past the way of a grunt. I could tell that the new-hires, who appeared at the beginning of every season, exhausted him. Life itself seemed to both exhaust and annoy him, in equal measure; a fact that he hid well, but not well enough. He didn’t have tattoos, but I thought he should. They would suit him. Not well-done ones, but the traditional style done with a single needle; jailhouse ink. He looked like he belonged on a chain-gang, but I don’t think he’d ever been to prison. Some small part of me, the part that I can’t explain, hoped that wasn’t true; found some small excitement in the idea of a man so completely unrestrainable, somehow captured.

Sometimes, I wondered where he lived. Probably a one-bedroom apartment in Elgin, the closest town. I couldn’t picture it, though; Jon belonged in a field. Either surrounded by wooden fences or stone walls and barbed wire. It also hurt, to think about him in a small apartment–like thinking about a bear in a zoo cage. He was that kind of creature. Large and quite. He needed space to roam through.

I thought about all of these things, as I set the rope around my hands. Had Jon and I ever shared a proper conversation, beyond the exchanging of polite nods? I don’t think we had. It’s why he was perfect; it’s why this was going to work. I could hear him, in the room adjacent to the long one that I was in. He was like clockwork. Four o’clock, he came in from the fields. Four-fifteen, he went into the barn, checked over the machinery and organized the things that others left out of place. Four-thirty, he organized the smaller back room; categorized the seeds, got things in place for tomorrow, left a list of orders on my parent’s pushed-back wooden desk, and gathered his things. Four-forty, he walked through the barn, down the dusty path back toward the house, and climbed into his rattling truck. Every–single–day. It’s how I knew there were exactly two minutes before he opened the wooden door from the side-room and emerged into the proper space of the barn.

In front of me, a bag of fertilizer–one of the fifty-pound ones, in crinkly blue and white plastic–stood on top of a small wooden stool. A rope had been wrapped around the center of it, running a loose line up to the support-beams overhead, looping over one, and falling down. Down to where the three loops of rope wound around both of my wrists. I knew I’d judged the distance correctly, because even with my hands held in front of my chest, I could feel a bit of tension in the rope.

My nakedness felt strange here. My clothes were a neatly-folded pile on top of the tractors front motor, just behind me. The only light in the barn came through the open front door–not the panel ones, for removing machinery, but the one that people came through from the fields. The light of early evening flooded through it; making the long space a bit dim, but easily enough light to see by. Dust motes floated on the still air. The only sound was that of my breathing, and Jon moving equipment in the other room. Cardboard boxes, judging by the sound. Probably the order of aphid-repellent that had been delivered earlier that morning, which would need to be sprayed over the plants tomorrow.

I can feel a couple of small rocks, scattered in the hard-packed dirt below my feet. About the size of my pinky nail. Not sharp enough to be uncomfortable, but just a strange enough sensation against my skin to remind me of my feets bareness. A gentle breeze came in, through the open door. I felt my nipples stiffen slightly, as it passed over me and deeper into the barn, cooling as it left the sunlight behind. My hair was a knotted blonde braid, hanging to just below the nape of my neck. A few loose hairs had escaped it, floating around my cheeks and the top curve of my forehead. In my chest, my heart hammered; part nerves, part excitement. Mostly nerves.

You might be tempted to ask, why am I here? Why am I doing this? The truth is–I don’t have an answer for you. It’s not a thing that people are supposed to do. It’s not right; not a right thing to want, not a right thing to need, not a right thing to lay in bed thinking about, turning over, planning for weeks. Pretty girls aren’t supposed to get themselves off, one hand between their legs and the other over their mouth, thinking about this kind of thing. Dimly-lit rooms. Stern-faced strangers. Or, nearly strangers. When our parents leave town, we’re supposed to throw parties; not think about whatever this was, not do whatever this was. We’re not supposed to be turned-on, sketching out rope measurements and weight-necessities while sitting on the porch, watching a man climb into his beat-up GMC the same way he did every single day.

We’re supposed to be pretty. Think pretty. Act pretty. Fuck pretty. But you know what? Fuck that. So you want to know why I’m here–in a dusty barn, butt-ass naked, feeling the slight tension of a cattle-lead rope around my wrists? Because it’s not pretty. Because the thought of it makes my heart hammer, in a way that the polite, good-looking boys who ended up in my University dorm room simply… didn’t.

I glanced at the ropes around my wrists one last time. I’d tested it, of course–not here, but in my room. Very carefully. It had taken hours of research, and weeks of practice. The initial restraint was actually a relatively simple one; a double-column tie, looping around both wrists and crossing at the center. It was the adjustment that had been difficult, making the center loops slip sideways as it was pulled tight, catching on smaller knots near my arm; tightening enough that my hands couldn’t slip free, but not enough that it cut off circulation to my hands. Easy enough to do on somebody else, but doing it on yourself was a different matter. By feel alone, I knew I’d gotten it nearly perfect. My eyes turned to the clock, hung by nail on one of the support beams near the door.

4:39.

Deep breath. Raising one leg, I set my toes against the edge of the wooden stool. Exhale. Straightening my leg, I felt the weight of the fertilizer bag shift; I kicked, hard. The stool fell. The bag of fertilizer made a soft thump as it fell, half-catching on the bottom leg of the stool, bending up in the center while the two sides made small puffs of dust fly away over the ground of the barn. Even knowing what was going to happen, the suddenness of it made my exhale go sharp. The rope tightened. My arms pulled upward, wrists crossing above my head–I’d done the measurements two-dozen times, but I still felt almost weak with relief when it worked. Long enough that I wasn’t suspended, my feet on the ground, my heels able to touch it if I pushed them down intentionally, but arched at the instep while they were raised. Tight enough that my hands and arms were straightened overhead. There was a bit of give in the rope, as I pulled on it; not in the weight on the other end, but in the rope itself. Just enough to let me bend my elbows slightly, if I pulled all of my weight against it.

Even if my fingers could have reached the knots, which they couldn’t, I knew I’d never have been able to undo them. I was here, until somebody found me.

My eyes watched the second hand on the clock. My heartbeat wasn’t just pounding; it was the steady drum of a horses hooves on dry dirt. My stomach was tight, but whether it was because the skin was pulled taut by the position, or whether it was the knot of nerves buried there, I didn’t know. I could feel a slight stretch in my breasts and shoulders and the ribs below them. It wasn’t difficult to breathe, but each time I did I became aware of the sensation of breathing in a way that I hadn’t previously. Thirty seconds. I could feel it, between my legs–I was wet. Not just the tingle of arousal, but fully wet; so much so that I was almost surprised to not feel a drop of moisture running down one of my thighs. Twenty seconds. I could feel a small tremble behind each breath. Inside of me, excitement coursed through my blood, beginning to outpace my nervousness. Ten seconds. I watched the second hand on the clock tick down, like a metronome; each movement counting off three of my heartbeats.