"They came to get him one morning..."
The stinging crescendo of the locusts rises above the crackling grass, dry heaving from high noon summer sun, insufferable humidity keeping fauna and flora together for another day.
He gets up out of the chair, turns off the failing television set and heads back out to the field, having had his 45 minute lunch break on the farm, rolling west of Chesapeake, with the trails of tears long dried up in the drought of the century. He thinks about his mother, from the Mattaponi, and how she would look at him, knowing their time together was short. He knew that look now. It was in the eyes of Ruth, the only woman he thought he could ever love.
The summers were always sweet, or so he was lead to believe. He began thinking this way when he was 9, the setting of this novel was there, but then he was advised otherwise. He started watching documentaries on fumigation and American trained anti-narcotic units. Fumigation is an unreliable form of control.
She sits on the faded velvet cushion, an antique mirror her window to the world they forgot to abide, and now here she sits, the only one who knows how to get back to that place, if only anyone would ask her.
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