The Feeding Grounds
Northwest Ohio is ‘where the black swamp used to be.’ The land is so flat you can’t see the stars through light pollution forty minutes away. Leave a kid in a cornfield and they will find their way home. Forget the north star. Head toward the lights of the Whirlpool factory and you’ll hit Route 23 eventually. The corn in the fields isn’t fit for people. It is all to feed the beef the people who live there can’t afford. Rachel’s grandmother once dug a watering hole for the cows behind the junk yard. The cows died off before Rachel was born. All the grandkids swim in it now.
Whenever Rachel thought about death she felt coldness in her belly. Hell, which the signs on the highway promised was real, was cause for concern. That wasn’t her biggest fear though. The thought that would send her scrambling to the toilet every night wasn’t about hell or heaven. They both sounded awful. The threat she could not name had more to do with the idea of a forever spent anywhere. The quickest way to make that cold feeling go away was to make herself throw up. She felt like throwing up now.
“You’re full of shit.” The swearing helped. She had always been more adept at it than her cousins. She was more worldly even being the youngest. That was why she didn’t climb on top of the piles of scrap metal with them. She knew about tetanus shots. Her brother had told her the needle was big and had hurt worse than the nail that went through his boot. Her sister told her lockjaw was real. She could imagine that. She’d been grinding her teeth for years.
“He said he’s the devil,” Leah said without opening her eyes. She had slipped the shoulder straps of her swimsuits down under her arm pits. Rachel couldn’t imagine why her cousin cared about tan lines when Grandma wouldn’t let her wear anything that showed her shoulders anyway. “The devil is real. Everybody knows that.”
Rachel wanted to, but she didn’t dunk her head. Grandma put bottles of Clorox in the water to keep the algae down. It killed the weeds along the edges, but it burned when it went up her nose. “Just because he’s real don’t mean you seen him in the woods,” Rachel said. ‘The woods’ were little more than an overgrown copse behind the junk yard. “You would have told Grandma about it.”
Leah sat up to look at her then, hand over her brow to shield from the glare of the sun off the bits of tin that been pulled off a barn roof and laid out as a makeshift deck. The faint scaring from damage she’d done clawing at her forearm after she’d rolled around in poison oak looked much brighter against the red of her sunburnt skin. “He said he’d kill my mom if I told. So, you can’t tell either,” Leah said. “And I’m not scared. I like him. We kissed.”
Rachel sighed and rolled her eyes to hide her relief. She knew Leah was lying. She was only ten years old. She hadn’t kissed anyone yet, especially not a grown man and probably not the devil. When Rachel headed for the house alone, Leah turned up the radio behind her. She could still hear the music as approached the back of Grandpa’s garbage truck. She held her breath until she moved passed the hot trash stench to the more comforting scent of diesel fuel. On side of the hopper he had written the words JESUS NEVER FAILS in reflective safety tape. Underneath was THE VILLAGE LITTER-GITTER. Rachel didn’t know if it was meant to read as one sentence or two separate lines, but she was certain *gitter* should have two E’s.
Though she was mostly dry by the time she made it to the trailer, her hair was still dripping. She sat down on the porch to listen to the mourning doves coo to each other in their cage. Her mother’s voice was coming through the window. She sounded angry.
Rachel was thinking about what it would feel like to open that cage and hold one of the grey birds. She’d picked up a fallen baby robin once and could still remember how odd it had felt in her hand. She couldn’t explain how she had been able to sense that she could have crushed the tiny, hollow bones inside if she’d only closed her fist. The doves were bigger than the robin had been, but she wondered if they would feel just as fragile. She wondered if she would feel just as powerful.
“I don’t care what the law says,” her grandmother shouted back. She wasn’t shouting in anger though. Her voice just always got that way when she was gearing up to talk about the glory of the lord. It was like she was afraid he couldn’t hear her. “He took Jesus into his heart and was forgiven. Good enough for the lord ought to be good enough for you.”
Rachel had only placed her fingers against the bar of the cage when her mother told her to get in the truck. From the bed, she watched as they drove far enough away that she couldn’t see pass the corn to the watering hole. Then she turned her face toward the cab of the truck. “Mom,” she shouted over the wind. “Leah said she saw the devil.”
Her mother shouted back, “Baby, I told you not to listen to her. That girl lies just like her mom.” Then she seemed to laugh, though Rachel couldn’t hear it. “Anyway, if anyone in this family saw they the devil, they’d probably invite him to stay.”
After/Thought Literary 