Read Online The Fall of Alice K. by Jim Heynen - Free Book Online Page B

years—the ash, the box elder, the cottonwoods, the willows, the mulberry, the apple trees, all hanging on like faithful mourners at a wake, until the big Caterpillars shoved and tore and leveled and dug, a brutal preparation for mass burial. Then only the erasure mark where the farm had been, and finally only the long unbroken rows of beans and corn with their indifferent suggestion that nothing had changed, that things had always been this way and were meant to be this way. Rolling endless fields of beans and corn without the jarring images of barns and sack swings and houses and other nuisance reminders of human habitation. Land that imitated what the settlers saw in the endless ocean of prairie grass, waves of it extending toward the horizons. Miles and miles of uniformity. Fields of corn in full uniform, at attention, tasseling bayonets pointing up. All of the undone farms, like the Den Moolens’, making what travelers looking at the Iowa landscape called boring boring boring.
    â€œDear God,” she finally prayed, “send a miracle.”
    Instead of a miracle, more images swept through her mind: fields of sameness, corn of uniform height and color, bean fields of narrow uniform rows, corrugated metal cattle sheds, the uniform silver ridges,
the big round bales stacked in perfect rows, the feeder cattle like huge Walmart sales baskets filled with identical cattle figures with glassy plastic eyes, and milk cows all uniformly sized with uniform bland and white spots and with perfectly sized udders and teats, as if shaped for convenience for the cup size of the milking machine, and their uniform cow eyes, all blue-black, shining, perfectly round, rolling across the level screen of her mind. She counted the eyeball marbles as they rolled past, counted and counted until she fell asleep.
    When the electricity came back on at 2:00 a.m., it took only the sudden hum of the electric clock to startle her awake. The lights in the cattle and hoglots were back on too—big fluorescent banners that made the whole world outside look as if it should be awake—or at least be on guard. Everything was silver and luminous and resembled neither winter nor summer. She walked around the upstairs and looked out the windows in all directions. The ground had a sandpapery texture, with earth showing through the glowing ice pebbles. The dark lawn was decorated with a million dull lights. Some hailstones had formed elongated mounds along the buildings in the shape of windrows and had the color of the corrugated metal storage bins.
    She put her face to the screen in her bedroom window. The air was cool and quiet. She stared at the icy pebbles for a long time. The sight was storybook beautiful: fairy dust, fairy godmother sparkles. Wisps of steam rose up—like afterthoughts, or a ghostly ascension. Like the cloud that hung over the Israelites to guide them as they made their way to the Promised Land. She was with Noah on the ark, and the dove had returned with a leaf in its beak, promising a new beginning. She thought of her mother’s fear of the millennium and wondered if this might be a foretaste of what it would mean for the millennium to come and go: destruction followed by the promise of a new world.

9
    If Alice thought for a moment that the misty cloud had been a message from heaven that a new and better day was dawning, that hope was erased by the revealing light of the next morning. Hail insurance adjusters in four-by-fours and minivans cruised the sticky gravel roads before seven, stopping every quarter mile to measure the damage.
    No insurance adjuster stopped by the Krayenbraak farm.
    â€œDad? Why aren’t they stopping here? Our corn looks worse than anybody’s.”
    He shook his head.
    â€œ What?”
    â€œNo crop insurance this year. Couldn’t afford it.”
    She stood next to her father and pulled on her boots in unison with him. They walked out into the muddy fields together, shoulder