Gold
A man finds a treasure...but how much is it really worth?
GOLD
By Ruth Sullins
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Each day the empty bag felt a little harder to carry, but today it was a different sort of burden—not that the treasure added much weight at all. No, it was what might happen if they found out about it that made every step an effort, made the bag pull down on his mind like it pulled on his shoulder.
The ash had fallen again that morning. The road was a dusty ribbon, boiling in the sun. The ash was still fluttering down like butterflies, gray and soft, mixing with the brown dust of the road when his shoes scuffed the ground. He stumbled suddenly, and feel to his knees, the road scorching through his tattered clothes so that he struggled violently to his feet again. He felt that the bag was secure again. The last of the white, withered cornfields had faded behind him, and there were only the gray ones—the ones that fields that had been so long untended they were blanketed in gray ash. The town was just ahead of him.
What if they found out what was in the bag?
My, he was thirsty. He felt his tongue, swollen, sticking to his mouth like a dry cloth. His throat burned with pain, but he was used to it now and it didn’t anger him like before. He hated the thirst, because it made him slow, and the slower he moved the less chance there was that he would find anything to eat.
He was done looking, today, though. He would sit on the porch like the others and rest. He couldn’t go inside, of course; the disease was there. That’s how it is, he thought, as he entered the town. Disease on the inside, ash in the streets, ash and death and the dried bushes that piled against the houses.
The first porches were empty; the doors boarded up, the ash piled on the steps.
The house next had been yellow once; now, it was dirty white. The porch was empty—almost empty; there was only Old Tom in his chair, and Tom had been dead for weeks. He wouldn’t care what Jackson had in his bag.
“Find anything, Jackson?” Wilson crowed at him, his voice dry as the cracked skin of his face. Jackson tried to think up something—anything—to say, to keep the man’s attention away from the bag, from the gold inside.
“No,” he said, and kept walking. That was it, steady, don’t hurry or they’d know. He felt their eyes, the gazes of the men on the porches, on the steps, the men burning in the sun, searching for the scraps of shade against the sides of their houses, against the white bleached colors, cringing away from the stripes of sub-light cast by the missing pieces of roof.
His bag swung with its weight and he pressed it hastily to his side. It was hot today. He felt heavy, so heavy, like every step would drag him down to the road where he wold lay and burn. Why was it so hard to walk? He felt the faintness coming on, like it did every day, only it was early today. Why did the world seem to move slow—so slow, the watching faces leer and swim before his eyes?
He stopped abruptly, wondering which house was his. They suddenly looked alike, alike in a way he had not noticed before—faded and splintering and beaten, like the men on the porches—and then he remembered. His was the one with the brown-eyed susans on each side of the concrete steps. Lily had planted the seed there; it was native seed, she said, and it wouldn’t need any water at all.
But even they were dead, now, dry husks and stems that scraped against the house when the hot wind blew.
He climbed up the first step, and then the second, landing harder than he meant to as he sat down. He looked at the burning street. He looked at the men, sitting on their porches beyond locked, boarded doors, watching him or each other, or the ash or the road or the purple cloud of smoke in the distant sky. They were all watching. How could he keep his treasure a secret?
There was a noise in an alley, farther up the road, and he saw a dog emerge beside the house. She was brown fur on bones, sniffing the ground and the empty garbage cans whose contents had long been devoured. Searching, as he had been, for a scrap or morsel of food.
The heat pounded in his head, in his body, and he felt his mind reel, threaten to lift from his body, to escape the pain and the heat and the weakness of hunger. He shouldn’t have gone to the fields that morning; what good was a useless treasure?
He couldn’t shake away the faintness, and he knew, suddenly, that he was going to die. Fear drove through his body like a spike and he lurched awake.
He realized it was now. If he didn’t do anything, he would never get up again.
He looked at the men. He waited until they turned away, looking at their hands or the road or the bone-faces of their neighbors.
He slipped his hand into the bag, closed it. No, they could not see, if he sheltered the treasure…
He took a nibble, a tiny nibble.
Pure, golden sweetness flooded his dry tongue. The corn was water, the corn was food, heaven in his mouth. With one bite the world was suddenly sharper, his mind could move—
The dead plants rustled, shifted against each other.
In that moment, he knew all was lost. He shoved the corn away, but the beggar had seen. The man wiped a filthy hand over an ash-covered, sunburnt face, dragging away the stupor of sleep. The word from his mouth was hoarse, demented. “Corn!”
The word rang over the street like a specter’s bell. The men on the porches turned, their wasted faces shrewd, their eyes hunting, locking on the bag in feral realization.
They stirred themselves from their chairs, from the porches, from the concrete steps and the scraps of shade. They moved, shuffling, onto the street, their shriveled faces never straying from him. They came like carrion birds, skin clinging to bones, leather-tanned, wasted, starving.
Wilson stopped at the stairs, looked at him.
“What’s in the bag?” he croaked.
Jackson considered the words, let them weigh on him like the heat. In the bag was food, he thought, in the bag was wonder and light and song, was wisdom and life.
And there was nothing in the bag. A second, a breath, that was all; and a breath was nothing. One cob of corn would never be enough to keep even himself alive.
“Nothing,” he said, and the bitter word was clear, stark truth.
The youngest man—closer to a boy, perhaps, but hunger and heat had aged the face a thousand years—cackled out loud. “There’s ‘nothing’ in his teeth!” He lounged at the bag, and for a moment Jackson saw him as a slavering beast—his leering yellow teeth, the lunacy in his eyes, his scrabbling, gaunt fingers. Jackson cried out in sudden terror, recoiling, but there was no need. Another scarecrow, clothes hanging from his arms like the skin from his bones shoved the boy away and snatched at the bag. Finding sudden strength, Jackson struck with his hand, finding the man’s snarling face. He was on his feet, suddenly, and then Wilson lurched forward, and Jackson could not get away in time—
“Stop!” someone said, and the scarecrows fell back, the command in the voice stirring ancient habit in their minds.
The man who’d spoken wasn’t old, but the vestiges of hair around his head and chin were like bleached white cornstalks.
He was a judge, once, in a life that I never lived, Jackson thought. In a life where I threw food away when it was rotten, and when Wilson—he looked at the animal staring at him—was a friend.
“They’re going to kill you for your bag,” the judge rasped. “You don’t pull out what’s in there and let us see it, there ain’t no reason for them not to kill you.”
He put his hand in the bag and slowly pulled out the corn slowly. It gleamed gold and clean in the ash and dust. He heard the gasps of the men. Here it is, he thought. Here is nothing; nothing which you would fight and kill and to have, a few more hours to burn. A sweetness, a ghost of something sweet that he would fight them, kill them for.
The animals were silent, shifting and croaking in the sun. Then he heard the queer rasping laugh of the judge.
“Which of us is worthy?” the judge said. “Who here’s worthy enough to live a few more moments on this earth?”
“Me!” someone shrieked, his voice rolling gravel on a hot road. “I is a preacher!” He held up a book in his hand. Jackson looked at it. The cover had been torn away long ago, devoured by its owner. The first page was stained in dark red splotches.
“I’m an orphan,” the young man hissed, the dry rattle of corn’s bones against your legs when you walk through the fields of death.
“We’re all orphans,” someone hissed back. “Where’s my pa and ma, I ask ye? Where’s there’s? We got as much a right to the corn as you!” He looked at the gold in Jackson’s hand, a wild light in his eyes.
“As much a right,” someone creaked, dry stems blowing on the road. “As much a right,” they whispered, a dead snake’s rattle shook by the wind.
Jackson heard their voices dimly, and the road and their faces were spots of dark color in his eyes. Another voice came into his head, telling him that if they did not kill him, it did not matter—he would die here and now either way. They stood; he could not. His hand shook, up and down, up and down, holding the corn; and the world was only heat. Heat, and pain, and hunger that had long faded to frailty.
“I’m a doctor!” someone crowed.
“Save us, then, heal us,” someone mocked, and Jackson knew dimly that it was Wilson’s voice.
He wanted to live, to breathe, wanted to see the creek and the green trees return, wanted to bury his wife and child in the locked house behind him—wanted to see cars, hear rivers, wanted to talk, wanted to laugh. A few hours! They were nothing, nothing, but he would be alive, living…
He lurched forward, saw to his surprise that the gold was there, in his hand, bent, sank his teeth into the corn—and there it was, the sweetness, the water, on his tongue, in his mouth—
Someone shrieked at him, screamed, and then another, and there was a hand on his throat, nails and cracked skin striking his face. He feel from the steps, landed in something dry and painful—the wildflowers by his porch. He crawled away from them, feet striking him, the hoarse cries of the fight above him ringing in his ears.
Then there was blistering heat underneath his hands, the dust of the road. His limbs would not move, would not listen, and he feel, his face lying in the ash. It was pain against his cheek, fire on his face, but the pain did not cut into his brain and he felt it as a curiosity.
The savage, croaking cries above faded into silence, and there was a thud as someone feel into the road nearby, and another behind him.
There were no footsteps, no breath, no croak or shuffle in the street. All was silence.
Then, in the far part of his brain that still felt the pain, that still cringed at the sun beating upon him, there was a gentle sound, a rolling whisper, the vibration of something bumping down the concrete steps nearby.
Golden, blemished, dirtied by ash, the corn rolled softly into the street in front of him. Beyond it Wilson’s porch, the paint peeling from his wooden lattice.
A cob of corn lay in the sun. The men lay there, all of them, beside the flowers, on the porch, in the street, not stirring, not moving.
Jackson heard a sound, the soft padding of the dog’s feet. Her bony frame appeared—he saw every rib in the body, the gaunt hide of its face as it bent and picked up the corn.
She will eat it now, he thought, taste the sweetness, feel the honey in her mouth.
The dog turned, moved slowly, dying, turned toward Wilson’s porch.
Something stirred behind the lattice. Three brown heads popped up, shiny and eager and new. The dog dropped the corn and the pups fell upon it, tearing the kernels from the cob with eager energy.
Jackson lay still in the heat and the silence.
By and by, he closed his eyes.
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The End
Thanks for reading, as always.
- Ruth