He smiled only twice in the past twelve years without shots of whisky raising the edges of his lips upward. Once was when his son was born back in Mid-September 1993. Days after the birth of his son, his wife had passed away from pneumonia, a death that Jim never forgave his son, Cole Caden Fuller for. Jim Fuller became a farmer in 1996. His knowledge of agriculture came from a few high school classes and living on a farm his entire life. He discontinued the lease with a local farmer in 1996 and put all his savings into this self-sought catharsis. He liked to think he raised his son like the crops, this being poetry as he used to be an obituary writer for the local paper until the task of writing his wife’s seemed too difficult for his pining pen. He compared Cole’s upbringing to the welfare of the boy’s whole and not his individual needs much like he did for the crops. Cole was a cornfield in mid July; tall, proud, full of potential but like every field it had to be cut down from time to time. He never told anyone about his metaphor, he just pondered its complexities the hours he spent farming the land. And on the month of Cole’s twelfth birthday something happened which usually only occurred one or two nights out of the week. He opened a bottle the first day of September and never put it down. The crop went uncut, though everyday Jim would claim he would cut it down. Every night Jim took his remorse out on Cole, leaving a new bruise somewhere different on his body.

           In late September his palms, sweaty with his CLAAS 580+ Combine keys and the sun melting them to skin, shook as though the engine were on. With heaves dried around the grey and black wisps of hair that went unshaved around his opened mouth, you would have thought he was dead until his eyelids pushed open against the grain of the wood floor under his bed. Today he remained asleep until long after the sun was high above him.

            
            “Cole!” he said as he rubbed the back of his neck.

            
            “Where you at Cole?”

           Waiting for an answer he picked up a yellow-stained t-shirt next to him and put it on with the same hole-torn denim jeans he had worn for five consecutive days. He usually woke with the sun, but this entire month he woke much later in the afternoon and spent the nights either drinking alone or at the local bar called “Barnwashed Bills.” He stepped in the kitchen to find Cole at the other end sitting behind a table half hidden by a wall. Cole was looking down at the checkered linoleum like he was playing chess and forgetting he had just yelled for him, Jim angrily asked,

           “Why, ain’t you at school son?”

           “We don’t have classes Saturday.”

           “Oh? You don’t think I didn’t know that, I was just kiddin’ with you.”

           He fell over the sink between Cole and the screen door, his stomach propelling movement to his mouth as though his soul was going to be expelled. His son began to laugh which drown out the sound of water drips from the faucet. He glanced over. His son was not looking at him or the floor but at something behind the wall.

            
            “Who you talkin’ to over there?”

            
            “Abersee, she’s makin’ me laugh”

            
            “You two go ‘long over to her house and play, I gotta start pickin this field today, or I’m never gonna get it done.”

            
            “Alright, Jim”

           He caught the flail of her white dress and gold locks from the corner of his eye as the screen door slammed back and back again on the recoil. He was still bent over the sink and instead of reaching for water he grabbed the bottle of bourbon. With the keys and bottle in hand he headed towards the barn housing antique farm equipment, his CLAAS 580+ Combine, and a lone white horse they called “Majesty.” He remembered what a friend had told him between the gravel slipping underneath his feet and the high pitch cries of a rusted green weathervane pointing east to south in the gentle breeze.

           “Get you guys an animal, and you guys will be closer, I swear.”

           “You think so… I always did want a horse.”

           “Me and family got a Collie, and I’ve never heard my youngest talk so much.”

           He pulled the twenty foot high doors of the barn open sending little light into the darkened space riddled with the sun’s radiance running rampant through small cracks between the boards and knots in the wood. His son took a disinterest in what he called “Mange” as well as farming which caused Jim to clench his teeth at the emaciating horse whose ribs poked through like the two by fours holding up the shale roof of the barn. The mammoth shadow in the back caused his head to turn. He looked up at the symbol of everything he envisioned he had accomplished in the past twelve years, the CLAAS 580+. He remembered when he had bought the harvester, traveling from John Laudell’s house at twenty miles an hour down the highway grinning the entire way, looking back every minute to see the miles of cars trapped behind him. This had been the second time he managed to not feign a smile but really encompass the elated movements of his mouth.

           He opened the combine door and pulled himself onto the hundreds of cracks unearthing the leather seat. He sat there lost in the levers searching for the ignition he had started a hundred times where he came across a picture of his wife wedged in the lower right dashboard, illuminated by a beam of light. His fingertips pressed on the photograph, caressing the cheek until meeting the golden locks of hair until they slid off falling upon a ring, lightly dusted in dirt. He picked up the ring holding it to his eyes in the creviced sunlight; he whispered the inscription and slid it on to his finger. With his palms sweaty and keys in the ignition he turned the engine on. Dust clouded from the metal exterior, and his head tilted back while whiskey writhed down his esophagus.

           Sunlight quickly created walls through the wood board siding from the immense amount of exhaust and dust in the air. With the shift of a lever, the machine crawled forward to begin to shave the earth of the stalks sowing the land. The light diminished from inside the barn as he closed the doors and looked out over the gold corn fields that slumped late in the September month. He knew the horse would suffocate immediately from the amount of carbon monoxide in the barn but ventured on.

           He never forgot September 18th, the date his wife died; he never remembered the specific date of his son’s birthday years ago. His son’s twelfth birthday passed and with that, more empty bottles of whiskey which had started to accumulate in their bathtub.

           “Your mother loved that bathtub; she loved you”

           “Are we gonna put flowers out at her grave this year, Pa?”

           He buried her behind the barn and spent a few days of the week staring at the epitaph on the stone. The lines of a poem for her threnody etched into the stone read:

“One’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one.

Millie Smith Fuller

1973-1993”

           “I’ll pick her some lilac she used to put all over the house; you don’t need to worry about it, Ok?”

           “I wrote her somethin’ can I set it out there?”

           “I’ll set it out there, let me see.” Jim grabbed the letter and began to read,

           “Dear Mom, I only saw you for a little while, but I feel like you’re here.”

           Cole’s cheeks had not grown red in anger or embarrassment as his father prated the letter in complete mockery; Cole had simply got up and walked away from his father. Jim thought about these dysfunctional conversations while juggernauting down the dirt road toward the end of the field as gold leaves and a dust trail followed. He wished he could hide his reproach for his son’s curiosity of his mother. The truth that he held him responsible was evident to both, even at Cole’s young age. His father from time to time would bring up things like this about his mother only to scorn Cole’s curiosity. Acclimated to this sort of abuse Cole would shift the attack by changing the subject, his father by drinking more. The cicadas that swept from the corn field reminded Jim of the night before.

           “Cole, I shoulda’ named you Corn or Maize… Corn Shine Fuller, you ache me drink ‘way my sworros.”

           “You are a drunk idiot.”

           “Those bugs rewn’d my crop, din’t dey son.”

           “Won’t know till you pick it.”

           “Those bugs are like you, they rewn’d my crop you rewn’d my,”

           “Go to Hell old man!”

           “Well son, I got youa’ burtday presint boy you ain’t soon gonna forget.” Jim tried to beat Cole, his belt wrapped between both hands longed for Cole’s skin in between the leather snaps. 

           “Tomorruh I’m gonna pick that crop and put you up fa ‘doption, you ain’t no son of mine!” Jim yelled, in a last effort to punish Cole.

           Jim with keys in hand had stood in front of his bed laughing at the stalks of corn waving at him in the pallor of the moonlight, followed by his crash against the cold wood floor knocking him out.

           Abersee and Cole sat under the only tree lying between the two corn fields late in the afternoon of the day that Jim had decided to actually start picking. Cole had grown found of disobeying his father, and there he sat with Abersee as the sun began to set.

           “Jim says that one is not half of two, but two are halves of one”

           “Your daddy is a drunk idiot says my momma. Yer daddy gave you those bruises didn’t he Cole?”

            
            “Ummm… Want me to show you how two make one?”

           He remembered when he asked his father this question. Jim didn’t answer him; instead he had thrown his chair behind him and grabbed Cole by his shoulders. The dead stare between Cole and Jim Fuller had caused a night of winter in August. Jim’s black irises jetted into the green of Cole’s eyes and from then, their relationship was never the same. In the complete unnerving silence Jim’s mouth had parted separating every single syllable he could stress.

           “Between you and me Cole, you and me, there are two. Two of us, fuck maybe between you and me there are a thousand, maybe there is a dead man and a dead boy, but you listen, you, you and your mother were never two halves of one, never one and you never repeat what’s on her grave again, if I hear you ever, ever repeat those words I will slit your fuckin’ throat. You understand?”

           The boy had stood there, maybe a man, the green in his eyes a shade darker, his skin tone a shade paler. He had stood there intoxicated merely in the fumes from his father’s breath and a grasp that contused around the edges of his shoulders. The man in front of him was no longer human as tears teemed endlessly in his eyes and refrained him from blinking, blood spilled from his nose. Cole had stood there unshaken, emotionless, more dead than his father but without demons scratching at the mirrors behind his eyes.

           “How does two make one, Cole? That sounds like the stupidest thing I ever heard.” Abersee said through Cole’s long pause.

            
            “Jim says he’d kill me if I ever repeated what was on my mother’s grave, but I figured out the meaning.”

            
            “What’s it mean Cole?”

            
            Cole took Abersee’s palm and placed a pocket knife in it.

            
            “Why do you have this Cole?”

            
            “I took it outta Jim’s back pocket while he was sleepin’ this mornin’.”

            
            “I know but why did you take it?”

            
            “To make two into one.”

            
            “Why do you keep sayin’ that nonsense?”

            
            “Ok, look at the tree, see those initials in it:J.F. +  M.S.with the heart around it?”

            
            “Yeah.”

            
            “I think it means two people make one heart.”

            
            “You want to put our initials on the tree Cole? Well… I want you to stop bein’ a chicken and be my first kiss”

            
            “How ‘bout a race to the otherside of the cornfield and back, and the winner gets to pick?”

            
            “Looks like a beautiful sunset to share our first kiss, Cole Caden Fuller.”

            
            “Abersee if I kiss you, you’ll never be able to leave me, guess I’m not gonna let you win on purpose this time.”

            
            “Hey Cole, I bet I know something you don’t know the meaning of.”

            
            “Oh yeah?”

            
            “What’s my name mean smart guy?”

            
            “Umm a sea of burs, bears that can see? I dunno. What?”

            
            “It means snowless, never being cold in winter. My momma tells me your daddy up with it.”

            
            “Why did Jim think up yer name?”

            
            “Probably cuz’ my daddy’s never around Cole.”

           Jim poured of sweat in the eighty five degree heat of late September. One endless day he had an idea to write down his thoughts but figured out he forgot most of them soon after he was done working. This day, the first day Jim had started picking the six hundred acres of corn, he thought about… not being hung over. He combed the land like a poet penning the pages of a notebook. His son was almost a man he thought and for the outcome he blamed like a year's bad crop. He sat ten feet high reaping the land, correlating things like this for hours on end. A wooden pipe Jim’s father had given him rested unlit between his teeth clamoring on the ivory end. He dropped a still lit match while inhaling the incandescent shreds of tobacco curling further into the pipe’s opening. The match danced back and fourth before it rested in the spilt pool of whiskey amassed on the Combine floor.

           Cole looked at Abersee; her blonde hairs fell from behind her ear. He watched as she pulled the snagged brown edges of her white dress from the dulled barbs twisted around the rusted fence. He stood up in the knee high meadow surrounding the tree to roll his pants while stretching for his certain victory. His eyes peered into the thousands of solemn stalks swaying in the wind before closing as sun danced on the back of his eyelids. Between the sounds of the wind brushing through the silk of the dried corn and rattling drone of the Combine fading, he turned toward Abersee, finishing “A.H.” in the tree next to his parents’ initials.

           “Cole, I don’t care who wins.”

           “Don’t worry, you know you always win. Go on three Ok.”

           When Cole said “One” Abersee jetted through the stalks leaving behind Cole to see her path quickly disappear. He climbed up the first branch of the sycamore looking over a line of stalks slowly shaking towards the other side of the field. He jumped down and sprinted into the field pushing through corn that seemed to have no end. Soon after, his sprint came to a stop as he was completely surrounded with only the vibrations of the Combine drawing nearer. The snapping sound of fibers began to appear from behind him as the shine of the corn-header prongs swept by where he had stood seconds ago. The smell of mud turned to smoke as a trail of haze poured behind the stalks now leveled to his knees. The engine of the Combine suddenly stopped about twenty feet from where he stood. “Abersee!” he yelled while making his way through smoke and severed stalks.

           The sky disappeared in the smoke enveloping the Combine. Jim’s arms were soaked in blood, trembling as if he were in purgatory begging for mercy in front of a red headed girl in a red dress. Cole in this moment didn’t acknowledge the man before him, rather made his way to Abersee. He took her head in his arms, the last glimmer of life he could see retreating in her eye.

            
            “Cole… Don’t leave me” she whispered.

            
            “I couldn’t ever Abersee.”

           He smiled at her as though it were for the first time, flames fanned from the combine to the dry stalks surrounding them. His hand moved from the nape of her neck to the side of her jaw as his mouth lowered half open to press against her lips. With her last breath drawn, her lips froze parting from his; the last pigments of green melted from his eyes and ran down her cheek. “Snowless…” Cole whispered as his father jumped up into the cockpit of the Combine. Jim reached for his only remaining photo of Millie but managed for the ring on his finger to be seared to flesh through the inferno. Without struggle Cole carried what he knew now was an angel through the peeling white coated fence encasing the field while ashes snowed down.

            The sound of sirens could be heard miles away while the fire spread throughout the entire crop. Cole set Abersee down on the grass under a gable illuminated by spinning red lights and escaped in the shadows of the barn before anyone arrived. He peaked through a knot in the boards to see Jim cuffed against a patrol car. As the night grew, Cole harbored in the barn hiding himself from everyone. He could see the flashlights from inside as they passed board by board while tiles of the shale roof slid to the ground from the firemen blasting the barn with protective foam. He hopped over the stable fence where he would usually take refuge from his father’s fury. Majesty’s motionless shadow rested there sprawled out over the straw floor with the shine of a bridle unclenched in it’s opened mouth. Cole laid there curled up inside the emaciated ribs of the horse. His eyes were wide open, completely black like the horses; skin as pale as it’s white hair. He laid there, his head resting on the outstretched lifeless leg. Thinking about the remnants of a white dress weaving into the brown coverings, unfurling corn cobs, the loaded shotgun waiting in his father’s closet, and Abersee telling him everything was going to be alright, his eyes started to close.

           The sun pierced through the eastern wall of the barn lifting his eyelids. He made his way out and knew the shotgun was not the answer he wanted. His palms pushed against the peeling paint on the fence while his eyes reflected the charred field. He started moving towards the sycamore as the tree line miles back emerged behind the smoking stalks plagued by a fallen machine smoldering in the middle of the field. The sycamore was in front of him; behind him was a trail of footprints embedded in the ash. He pulled the knife from his back pocket and switched it open towards the obsidian bark covering the leafless tree. Embers took flight towards the sky from the carved wood spelling out Abersee’s threnody. Turning his back on the scorched earth that no one would ever reclaim, he knew he would never smile again; he would never love again. He made his way through the ash whispering the words he had etched into the tree.