[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro]

NARRATOR

In many cultures, greed and gluttony are considered the worst of human iniquities. To do harm to one’s neighbors merely to feed a bloated appetite, to take more than one needs no matter whom it may harm, is the ultimate sin, an expression of pure callous selfishness. Such taboos can be seen in the well-known legends of the wendigo among the Algonquian-speaking peoples. It is reflected in the Lakota term for white men, wašíču, which is sometimes said to be derived from a phrase meaning to take the fat, an expression of total self-centeredness and a microcosm of all that’s wrong with Western society.

American culture has often taken pride in its individualism and its industry. These two values drive it to achievement, but also to reckless consumption and destruction. Endless appetite irrevocable shapes and changes the land and the people.

What else might it bring into the world, birthed in these darker pastures?

[Darker Pastures Theme - Intro - Continues]

NARRATOR

Episode Three: Homestead.

(Sounds of Canada geese flying overhead)

NARRATOR

Autumn is a brief thing on the high plains, coming suddenly one day in September or October and giving way just as quickly to winter. Sometimes the first snow falls before Halloween, and the frost sinks its claws in deep. Other times, the summer heat will linger through October.

It will be the former kind of autumn this year, Carl thinks, as he stands shivering in the morning air. The slight northwesterly wind gnaws subtly at his flesh, pleasant at first but gradually chilling him through to his bones. It is barely past Labor Day, but the wind carries that unmistakably autumnal scent of the sandsage prairie, dried grass settling into slumbrous dormancy for the year, the drying evergreen leaves of the silver sagebrush spicing the air with a pleasant, vaguely medicinal odor.

His father calls to him from a perch over the weathered timber chute to push the calves through, clambering down to unbar the gate at the far end and then moving to the back of the pickup to refill his vaccinating syringes. Carl gently pushes at the calves at the back, shouting a meaningless herding call, until the brockle-faced red in the front finds the opening and the calves flow out like an undammed river.

Carl looks down at a feeling of warmth to find one of the calves has shit all down his right leg, saturating the fabric of his worn blue jeans. Even the calf shit smells of the sweet grass. It is a common, even an inevitable, experience when working calves, but nonetheless Carl’s lip twists with faint distaste. He looks at the sorting pen behind him and calculates gladly that they are almost done, less than two full runs of calves remaining.

He removes the broken fencepost he uses as a backstop in the chute and walks down the lane to gather the penultimate cluster of calves. Trying to focus on his work, his thoughts keep drifting to the life he left behind in Kansas City: to the little apartment which had been his only home other than the house he’d grown up in, to the passionate but stormy relationship with Deandra, to the devastating end of that trouble-riddled love. The slightly dull but comfortable job he had settled into and then lost when the small company was sold to a nationwide conglomerate. The spiral of deep depression that had swallowed him, his savings, his independence, that brought him back to the county and the house of his childhood to which he never intended to return, and which reminds him in every breath that he is a failure.

Walking through the yellowing and trampled bluestem, grama, and reedgrass, he pushes these dark thoughts away, instead reflects on how at peace he feels up here in the rolling hills, far from any house or cultivated land. And he reflects on how it contrasts with the unease that steals back through him when they leave the pastures, rolling through the irrigated farmland and past the little town with its towering white grain elevators.

Carl realizes that, no matter where he goes, he has always felt out of place, isolated, and that being around people has always made that feeling worse rather than alleviating it. The old suspicion that there is something thoroughly and irremediably wrong with him inks through the underside of his mind, and the blue September skies somehow seem less bright, less clean.

The two men finish vaccinating the calves, then turn them loose into the southern pasture. There will be more to do later: weaning, rounding calves up for sale, moving the cows from the summer pastures to winter cornstalks, but for today, the work is finished. His father talks amiably as they load up, as they roll over the sandy trail roads. Carl listens, as he always has, liking the sound of his father’s voice even when his mind wanders. Though they are very different, they are both thoughtful men, given to reading and reflection, and the bond between them is deep. Carl often feels guilty for having left, for not being the son that he thinks, deep down, his father wanted: an heir, someone as devoted to tending and building the herd as he has been for the past half a century.

But Carl can never be that person, though he sometimes dreams of it. There are two yawning maws in his mind, one that spits forth bright and beautiful dreams of someday being a filmmaker, and another, darker one that swallows every thought, feeling, and hope.

His father falls silent, and then, as he sometimes does when there is no pressing task at hand, pulls off of the trail road and carefully drives up to the crest of a high hill, parks the pickup and kills the engine. The two of them, in almost a ritual manner, exit the cab, drop the tailgate, and clear a space to sit and look at this wilder country. If he closes his eyelids just enough to blur his vision, Carl can almost blot out the lines of barbed wire fence, turn the distant cattle herd into roaming buffalo, and imagine that these hills were never touched by the white man, or the rapacious appetites which he calls by the name of progress.

Then his gaze drifts toward the west, toward a dark stand of trees and the ruins of an old house and a windmill pump. It is on the other side of a fence, just beyond the border of the pastures that have been in his father’s family for three generations.

Moved by idle curiosity, he asks his father who lived there. The older man turns and follows his son’s gaze, and a strange expression passes over his face, like he is trying to recall something just at the edge of memory’s reach.

At last, he says he’s not sure, but that, if he remembers right, they were pretty well off. He says that it was before his time.

This answer shocks Carl slightly. In the sparsely populated countryside, family names have a way of sticking in the communal memory, and his father is something of a local historian. And for such a gap to exist in his knowledge of a place so close to the center of his livelihood seems almost inexplicable.

Their talk drifts to other things, and after a while the chill has gotten to both of them, and they get back into the truck and make the twelve-mile drive home. All the while, the image of that dark house, sheltered by struggling trees, keeps returning to Carl’s mind.

[Brief pause]

NARRATOR

It is the middle of the week before Carl returns to the pasture, this time alone. His father is laid up at home, after stumbling in the dark while they did the Monday evening chores and badly hurting his knee. The old guilt that his father still takes on so much of the work, even with Carl home, rises and poisons his mood until it matches the heavy grey clouds tinged with an ominous blue that carpet the sky.

The task before him is not too great a burden: he has only to check that the windmills are still pumping water properly, replace the mineral and salt blocks that supplement the cattle’s diet, and make sure that the corral in the middle pasture is in good condition for the fall weaning. Even so, Carl feels strange, shouldering these responsibilities alone.

The half dozen twelve-foot metal corral panels in the bed of the truck rattle raucously as he leaves the county-maintained roads for the pasture-ward twin-rut trails. He looks out over the grass, grazed down almost to scrub, and feels nervous apprehension settling in his brain like windblown sediment. They cannot wait too long to wean the calves, with so little forage left, and he isn’t sure whether his father will be healed in time. The thought of rounding up and sorting the dams from their offspring by himself fills him with a vague dread.

A slight drizzle speckles his windshield sporadically, and he grumbles at the inauspicious weather even as he is thankful for the desperately needed precipitation over the thirsty grassland.

Soon he finds that his misgivings were empty: he encounters no trouble with the water or mineral supply, is able to shore up a few weak spots in the aging timber corral with the handful of panels he’s brought. With a feeling of relief, he begins the drive home, but when he reaches the place where they paused the weekend before, he comes to a slow stop and sits, staring at the place that has kept creeping into his thoughts ever since.

An internal debate bounces in his skull, but at last he decides that he has a little extra time, enough to indulge a whim. He pulls off the trail road and drives carefully across the range toward the fence. When he reaches it, he parks the pickup, then seized by a sudden thought, takes the Rayovac lantern flashlight from its place behind the seat. Leaving the pickup, he parts the upper two strands of barbed wire, ducking through with an unpleasant feeling of trespass. Still, curiosity proves the stronger drive, and he closes the remaining distance by foot, shrugging into his padded plaid jacket against the cool damp.

Drawing near to the old house, he stands in the overgrown yard a long moment. There is no sign that there ever was in fact any lawn, any yard fence, or even any driveway. His eyes pass over the trees and the dilapidated windmill, but keep being drawn back inexorably toward the house. There is some gravity there, something that feels altogether too much like a sardonic invitation.

The house has no door, no glass or framing partitions in the windows. The roof looks on the verge of total collapse, only a few of the drily rotting wooden shingles remaining and fewer still intact. The darkness within seems absolute.

A clutching sensation settles around his throat, like the grasp of invisible talons, subtle but merciless. The impulse to turn and leave, to return to the pickup and to his waiting work, seizes him powerfully, but still that curiosity that feels less and less voluntary on Carl’s part pulls him onward. He takes slow, uncertain steps toward the house, and passes through the yawning aperture where it seems no door has hung for years, maybe decades.

For a while, he stands just within the entrance, unwilling to replicate his father’s blind fall. Then he remembers the flashlight he has carried ever since he left the pickup, and, feeling a little stupid, he clicks it into life. The broad, powerful beam illuminates the interior walls, and the feeling of choking apprehension grows stronger. Whereas from without the individual planks, splintering and grey, had been clearly defined, from within the walls appear to be one unbroken, uniform surface. As he looks more closely, Carl has the deeply unsettling sense that they appear organic, grown rather than constructed.

He shakes his head at the absurdity of the thought, and casts the beam more broadly around the house interior. There appear to be no partitions, with the entire house just one large room and a single ground floor. Carl frowns, knowing that he saw at least one upper-floor window, and not believing that a house of that size would be kept as a single room. There is some detritus upon the floor, but not nearly enough to account for a missing story or for fallen walls, and as he kicks at the thin accumulation of dead plant material, dust, and splinters, he gets the same impression from the floor that he first got from the walls: that they were never assembled, but formed through some impossible natural process.

There is something else about the floor, though, and it takes him a moment to articulate it in his thoughts. The texture is wrong, slightly yielding and almost spongy, but with a hardness underneath that. A notion flashes through his mind that it feels like a very thick layer of felt laid over stone.

And it is then that the smell comes, unexpected and unsettling despite, or even because of, its wholesomeness: the smell of something cooking. It is faint, but unmistakable, and it calls to his might the smell of frying beef and onions, of baking bread.

He swears at himself in the gloom, wondering if his senses are failing him, if something in his brain has come untethered. He looks around the house for anything else that might provide explanation, and finds a single roundish opening near the center of the floor. It appears to be the entrance to an ancient cellar. Somehow, the flashlight beam seems to penetrate the lower darkness less readily, and Carl hesitates at the mouth of the passageway, imagining rotten stairs and a precipitous fall through the dark. The hole is oddly formed, with a curving slope at the edges. As he stands hesitating above it, the smell grows a little stronger.

He takes one cautious step downward, putting as little weight on that foot as possible, and finds a surprisingly firm surface below his foot. It makes no sound as he puts more weight on it, seeming more like soft but solid earth than old wood. Another careful tread, and then another, and Carl begins to descend with something more like confidence. The slope is a little steeper than he’d like, but not dangerously so. The scent of cooking is becoming noticeably stronger as he descends. The flashlight beam illuminates only vaguely the space before and below him, enough to show him that the passage continues without widening, narrowing, or changing pitch. Carl considers, with a little alarm, that the flashlight battery might be running low. The walls around him are dark and featureless, seeming burrowed out of the earth, and the floor is the same, not a stairway but a tunnel.

Carl wonders at this. Given the size of the house, and his father’s vague comment about the relative wealth of the long-gone occupants, it seems incredibly odd that they would have dug such a crude lower level, especially in such sandy soil. It seems amazing to him that the whole passage has not collapsed below the stabilizing influence of the grass roots.

After descending what feels to him like twenty feet with no change, much too far for a small cellar, he reaches out and touches the wall. It is warm and damp, almost slimy, beneath his fingertips, and he pulls away in surprised revulsion. There should not be so much moisture in the soil, unless he has reached the water table, but in that case, the passage should be partially flooded.

(Unsettling music)

NARRATOR

Claustrophobia rises like fog in his chest, and Carl imagines becoming trapped down here, tries to calculate how long it would take for anyone to find him, or even come looking. Unconsciously reaching once more for the wall, he feels once more that unpleasantly moist surface, but now perceives something more: the sensation of movement, a slight vibration. He is on the verge of turning and retracing his steps, but some tugging inner voice urges him onward, just a few more steps, and he gives in to it.

And suddenly, the passage levels out and widens into a single large, globular chamber. He walks into the center, and shines the flashlight all across the chamber. There is nothing at all to give any sense that it was built or used by anyone, ever: no shelves or furniture, not even that subtle but distinct orderliness that bespeaks human design. There are many small openings, more branching pathways that lead in all directions from this expansion. His foot disturbs something that clatters dully, and he looks down to find that many bones lie scattered across the floor. Most are clearly animal, prairie dogs and badgers and smaller rodents, and even one skull that he is sure belonged to a raccoon, but a few are too large for his liking. The realization of aberration has become too certain for him to deny it any longer, and Carl casts the beam around again with hands that feel distinctly unsteady.

And as he does so, he realizes that there are bones incorporated throughout the substance of the walls and ceiling, which he had at first taken to be earthen, but which he now realizes have a rougher texture and irregular coloring. It is like they are woven from mismatched fur and hair, feathers, perhaps even leather. And as he looks in stricken disbelief at the whiles, he can now see clearly that they are in fact pulsating rhythmically. They make him think unpleasantly of the interior of a womb… or of a stomach. And with that last association, a feeling of overwhelming panic blossoms and fruits in his stomach, pours venomously through his arteries.

(Doomful music)

NARRATOR

He runs back the way he has come, feeling light-headed and on the verge of vomiting. He expects, every moment, that something will reach out and try to stop him, or that the impossible passages will close, but the place is silent and still as death. He emerges from the hole in the floor, stumbles as he lurches toward the door. Clawing instinctively at the wall to right himself, his fingers rake away a handful of grey keratinous fibers, exposing a portion of what can only be a human ribcage underneath. A faint whimper burbles in his throat, and he staggers out into the overcast day, finds his balance, does not stop running until he reaches the fence. He tears a hole in his jeans crossing the barbed wire, gives himself a long and bleeding scratch across his forearm, but pays no heed to either. Loping toward the pickup, he throws in the large flashlight, which he has never thought to turn off, into the seat and clambers in beside it. Then he turns the keys and drives, too quickly for the uneven terrain, back toward the trail roads.

When he reaches the place where trail turns back into county roadway, he sits and idles. His pulse feels too strong and uneven, his mind is white noise, blank with agitation.

He turns on the radio, listens to the local golden oldies station that he abhors. The normality of the music steadies him somewhat, calms the chaos within. But when he pulls into the driveway and shuts off the engine, the silence brings it all instantly back. He weeps a little, sitting in the pickup cab, and afterward looks into the rearview mirror and tries to wipe away the evidence. Then he gets out and sets to the evening chores.

When he reaches the house, his father asks what took him so long, if he ran into trouble. Carl wants to tell him about the old homestead, what he found in that dead house and underneath it, but he cannot summon the words. It is partly the fear of not being believed, of being thought mentally unwell, but it is also in part fear that his father will someday be seized with a similar curiosity, might someday make the same journey as Carl had, but come to a different end.

So, he makes up a lie about getting the pickup stuck in a sandy blowout, and having to gradually dig and work his way out. He is surprised by how naturally the lie comes out, when he has never been a good liar, and his father accepts the explanation readily, shrugging it off as an unfortunate but not a devastating loss of time.

As he and his parents sit to a supper of spaghetti, green salad, and home-canned green beans from the garden, Carl wonders how long that shadowed house has stood there, waiting with both infinite hunger and infinite patience. He wonders if once, long ago, its face had a different cast, that of an oversized tipi or earthen lodge, or some unlikely but inviting natural shelter; or if it came into being around the time that European settlers arrived, and took the best form to draw the most common prey. He wonders if the trees and the remains of the windmill are really what they seem, or if they are camouflaging outgrowths, and this raises the question of whether there are more of its kind, if they are capable of proliferation. Thinking of the many branching pathways in that globular, cellar-like chamber, he suddenly has a stark mental image of roots and tendrils honeycombing the rolling hills, and he wonders how deep the house’s roots have sunk into the prairie earth, how many perfectly clean bones lie within it, in those dark reaches he dared not, dares never, plumb further.

(Threatening music)

NARRATOR

And still, that house will forever cast its long shadow over the fence and across the range, spilling into his life. Perhaps he could destroy it, but he knows he will never find the courage to approach it again. And maybe someday, he’ll forget, and his own son or daughter will ask him about the ruined homestead, and he will reach in vain through the mists of memory and find only a vague, unsatisfactory answer, that dangles like bait in a cunningly placed trap.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro]

NARRATOR

Story, narration, and arrangement by Lars Mollevand. If you enjoyed today’s story, please rate, review, and share. Thank you for listening. We’ll meet again… in darker pastures.

[Darker Pastures Theme - Outro - Continues]