I. "A Sense of Insufferable Gloom"

Part Seven

The bitter sleet had turned to snow by the time they reached the edge of the farm. Several inches were already blanketing the ground with more continuing to fall. It crunched with the frozen grasses under their feet. The dense flakes fell with hardly any noise, only the occasional whisper of a shivering breeze brushing the wet powder against their clothes, their faces, and the sulking blades of grass persisted in the air around them.

Wyatt’s eyes strained in the predawn darkness. It should have been getting thinner, the blackness of the night retreating from the oncoming violet and pink of dawn’s first hours. Instead, it seemed as dark and infinite under the heavy, gray clouds hanging low in the winter sky as it would be at midnight. “Are you sure you want to do this,” he asked softly to the girl he didn’t know walking ahead of him. “We could go somewhere else.”

“No,” she said without looking over her shoulder. Her dry eyes burned as the occasional snowflake would drift between her matted eyelashes. They had been in such a rush to leave the house in town. She didn’t get to straighten up, to look more presentable. What did it matter, really? Her family was dead and she was mourning. She was allowed to look a little horrid. She certainly felt like it.

“I want to be here,” she said. “I need to stand amongst the ruins for a little while.” She stopped near a snow-covered tractor and glanced over her shoulder at Wyatt. “Are you afraid your partner is following us?”

Wyatt shook his head, stopping beside her. “No. He’s probably watching the house, trying to spy what we’re doing there.” Wyatt had told Eleanor, the cashier, and her boyfriend, Jonah, to create an atmosphere of intimate debauchery. Gordon Parks apparently had a dirty mind. Wyatt was willing to humor the younger fool at the fool’s expense.

“Are my friends going to be okay?”

“Yes. He won’t do anything to them. He’s only doing his job.”

The girl looked at Wyatt. “Oh? What is that?”

Wyatt held her gaze. Snow descended swiftly to the ground between them. “To spy on me.” Wyatt turned his head, his tired eyes peering past the abandoned tractor to the distant outcropping of buildings. They seemed farther away in the frozen dark. A subtle orange glow persisted where the charred remains of the barn lay crumbled upon the earth.

Wyatt waited for her to ask another question, to enquire why he would need looking after. She said nothing else. Either she didn’t care or assumed the very fact Wyatt was with her now was enough evidence to warrant his being spied on. “We better keep going,” Wyatt finally said.

She nodded her head and walked around the sleeping, snowy tractor. She continued to lead the rest of the way to the place she had once, even so recently, called home. At two hundred yards from the house, she stopped again. Wyatt stepped beside her once more. They were still in the empty field, the livestock absent from sight or smell. A thin, loose cord of barbed wire bowed between two rotted, wooden posts a few feet apart from one another. A thin layer of snow traced the length of the rusty, steel string. Wyatt was going to put his hands on it. He kept them in his coat pockets instead.

“This is close enough,” she said softly, taking hold of the fence with a delicate motion.

For a long time neither spoke. Wyatt let his gaze shift back and forth from the ruins of the girl’s home, to the falling snow collecting on their coats, their hands, and down their bodies. But, he also found himself watching her, trying to figure out who she was-who her family was. What did they mean to anyone but each other? Why are we really here, he asked himself.

“Why are you here, Agent Douglass?”

Wyatt blinked. Her question caught him off guard and he wondered whether he had voiced his thought out loud. He took a small and quiet breath. “I want to know what happened here yesterday morning. I want to know why six people are dead because of an obscure environmental infraction.”

“I wonder if six people are dead because of that,” she said into the pale darkness. Her voice was flat and raw. “I wonder if six people died because someone decided to stand up for themselves.”

Wyatt blinked again, startled when she turned to look at him sharply. There was blame in her eyes and as she spoke, Wyatt found himself willing to accept it on behalf of the heavy hand he knew he was a face for. “Because,” she said, “someone...my father and my family together...said no. Not here. Not us. Not anymore.”

Wyatt waited until she turned her head before he allowed himself to look away from her. “Tell me what happened here,” he said.

“Don’t you have reports? Didn’t your people already give you that information?”

“They gave me a perspective...one side of a story I can’t help but believe I haven’t come to fully comprehend.” Wyatt lifted his eyes from the snow obscuring her shoes to find her watching him. “I want to know. I need to know.”

She stared at him for another long moment, then turned her head once more to watch the dying embers of the crumbled barn being slowly smothered by the wintery powder enveloping the charred remains. She realized, then, she was trembling. Small bits of snow slipped free from the barbed wire under her quivering grip. She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly in an attempt to steady herself before she began to speak.

The daughter of the farmer named Parrish told of the first time she had seen the men from the government at their home. It was a year before and a late afternoon in the spring time. Her older brother had picked her up from school. She had been helping out with one of the clubs. Her mother and father were standing firmly but politely in the way of a man who seemed eager to learn all about their land and the methods of her father.

“He never asked about us,” she said. “It’s like we were just flies on a plate to him. We existed as something not needing to be considered.”

She told Wyatt of the fliers and notices that began to cover the breakfast table. She described the strangers that walked up their driveway claiming to be our neighbors. She pointed toward the tractor behind them. Six months before that freezing early morning it now stood quietly in, its engine was gutted and some of its parts stolen. She managed a smirk, though there was no joy or illusion of happiness on her face. “Is it ironic that the tractor actually belonged to our neighbors?”

Wyatt listened as she explained the fines that began to get levied against them. Her father saw their taxes rise unexpectedly and in stark contrast to the others who lived around them. But that was when her family really took notice of the number of farmers that had given up, their land surrendered to the government. “New people showed up. On the Montright farm...some people who had never even seen a combine or a harvester before.”

Crops didn’t grow. The fields were cleared of the stain of Man and his efforts, “the acres preserved” the main phrase spoken with a smile by men and women with faces like snakes. She told him of the announcement that new solar farms and wind farms were going to be built-the orchards and pastures of a new and greener century. Wyatt nodded his head as he listened. He knew those projects had yet to be completed or even begun.

“They wanted our farm. They wanted our livelihood,” she said. “‘It was our turn to let someone else have theirs’ they told us. Apparently, my father was too successful in his career.”

The girl took another breath. “My father was not afraid. Not for himself, anyway. He would not budge but he knew they weren’t going to stop. He had watched the way the country went. It was like standing in the way of a train that doesn’t know where it’s going but too many others are afraid to stop. That’s what he said, anyway.”

She paused for a long moment. The soft breeze had picked up into a steady wind. It howled through the snow banks of the open field. “And sure enough,” she said at length, “...they came.”

Wyatt stood beside her, his back against the wind. He felt the sting of it, of the snow that bit at the exposed skin of his neck. He ignored it as best he could, sheltering her from the passing gust. “What really happened yesterday morning?”

She told of the final warning they had received days before. Then, their water was cut off. Then, because they still would not comply, the power was shut down. Still, the family stayed. In a way, the description of her father the girl provided matched the profile documented by Wyatt’s peers, but only to a point. While he did seem stubborn, he also seemed noble. He wasn’t just trying to protect his home. He was trying to stand and defend against the blatant attack on his family, on his children. Their future was being robbed from them by the nullification of their present.

She didn’t watch all of the events. She saw the cars coming up the driveway. She was told she could not stay. With unstoppable tears her parents hugged and kissed her. They told her to run and not look back. She had to live. She had to survive to tell the world what happened to their family. As the cars came to rest a short distance in front of the house, her brother was dragging her into the barn. “He hugged me tighter than I’ve ever been hugged,” she said into the snow and wind. Her eyes were locked onto the blackened remnants of the fallen structure. “He kissed me on the forehead and told me he loved me...that he believed in me.”

At the back of the barn, she pointed out, was a small cellar accessible by a heavy, wooden hatch. In the cellar was a wall that could be pushed aside, revealing a third rate tunnel that led all the way to the highway. It was meant to be used to install a new type of irrigation system her father had been developing. If it worked, it would have actually saved water.

“My brother smiled at me before he closed and locked that hatch,” she said distantly. “It was the last time I saw him. It was the last time I knew he was alive.”

She didn’t say anything else, not for a long time. Minutes felt like hours in the howling wind that kicked the wet snow across the frozen plains. Wyatt stood as silent as she was. He didn’t urge her to say anything or do anything. He felt no need, that is, until something in the distance caught his attention. He stared past the bared-wire fence to the darkened farm house, watching the slowly fading shadows. It was movement, a guard on patrol steady and oblivious.

Wyatt heard the girl beside him shift in the snow. “I’m ready to go now,” she said.

He wasn’t watching her. His eyes stared at the dim beam of a flashlight scanning the snow around the house. “It’s probably the best time, anyway,” Wyatt said, gesturing to the lonely guard with his chin.

“It’s getting brighter here,” she said, taking a step back from the fence. “He might be able to see us.”

Wyatt didn’t move.

“Agent Douglass, please...” Wyatt felt her hand on his arm. He looked at her fingers, then into her eyes. “I need to leave this place now. With or without you.”

Wyatt watched her eyes for a long moment before turning his head to look out toward the farm house. The single guard had stopped to talk to another that had emerged on the stoop of the side door. Neither seemed to be aware of them on the other side of fence. Wyatt nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

The first light of the morning cast the rural Oklahoma countryside in a hazy, gray luminance. The snow had tapered to an occasional, wispy flake by the time they approached the beat-up pickup truck they had borrowed from a neighbor of the cashier, Eleanor. The rusted metal had more dents than paint coating its weathered skin. The windshield was cracked and the one remaining windshield wiper was stuck pointing upward at a sixty degree angle.

The hinges of the driver’s side door wretched as if in pain when Wyatt pulled it open. He wondered if it was just going to come off in his hand. She hadn’t opened the passenger door yet. She hadn’t even walked around to that side of the truck. Wyatt turned around. She was standing near the warped and mangled tail of the pickup. He looked at her, watching her tug on the black, padded straps of the book bag she had been wearing the whole time. Snow fell from the wrinkles and folds it had settled into during their trek back through the white, frozen and deserted fields.

“You aren’t going to get in,” Wyatt asked her. He already knew the answer. He had probably known before they ever arrived.

“I want to thank you,” she said instead of answering his question directly. “...For bringing me out here. I think I needed this more than you said you did.”

“I just wanted to try to understand what happened.”

“I know. And I needed to say goodbye...to mourn.” She forced herself to smile. “Or, at least start mourning. Because, that means I can start moving on, right?”

Wyatt tried to match her smile. He watched the single tear roll swiftly down her cheek. He nodded. “So you’re moving on?”

“Yes,” she said, wiping her face of the tears that were following the first. They were warm on the cold skin of her cheeks and shimmered briefly in the hazy morning light. “Tell my friends I said thank you. They knew I wouldn’t be coming back. I already gave them my goodbyes.”

“Where will you go?”

She chuckled and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not really sure. The Red River is not far that way.” She pointed south to her right.

Wyatt let his eyes peer past her delicate hand to the gray, fog enshrouded horizon beyond. He looked back her and asked, “Will you be able to make it?”

She shrugged her shoulders again. “I don’t know. I know I never will if I stay. There is nothing for me here, not even hope. But out there...maybe I can start over. Maybe I can have the chance to live the life my family gave theirs up for. Whatever the chances or risks or whatever...I have to try.”

Wyatt nodded. “Good luck-” He stopped and smiled suddenly. It was a genuine smile. “I don’t know you’re name.”

Her face brightened in the cold, gray light of the morning. She smiled warmly, as if she were smiling at a joke shared by an old friend or some long lost relative. It was almost like a joke, as she thought about it, albeit a tragic one. She knew in that instant the feeling of trust she had felt upon seeing him for the first time at the bottom of the stairs only hours before was one of the most well-founded intuitions she had ever known. “Madeline,” she replied simply.

Wyatt nodded. “Good luck, Madeline.”

“Thank you, Agent Douglass.”

With that, the girl he now knew as Madeline Parrish turned to face the snow fields leading away to the south. Wyatt watched her intently, studying and storing the sight of the miracle he was witnessing. Wyatt thought of something his grandfather had told him once: that the greatest moments in life always start with a single breath. Madeline took her breath and then her first step into a new life. The old one slowly faded into the snow and haze behind her as she treaded bravely into the cold and snowy wilds. Wyatt watch her until she was out of sight in the field. He let himself smile again, proud of the young stranger he felt so close to. He knew in his gut she would make it. It gave him hope. If she could do it, maybe Wyatt Douglass could find the strength to walk toward his own freedom beyond the wind and snow. He was still smiling as he cranked the chugging engine of the old truck to life. He would follow her tracks one day soon, just not today.