THE DUNPHYS’ VISITORS
By Michael Hart
Ben Dunphy paused from packing his bags as a vision of his older brother forced its way back into his mind. The same ruined image reminded him each spring of what the Visitors were capable of. The consequences of crossing them had kept him marching in endless circles through the same cage his entire life. But this season, with his wife and daughter gone and his son approaching the age when you no longer automatically accept your father’s words and actions as the infallible doctrine of God, the stakes had changed. Following the path of cooperation with the Visitors, as generations of Dunphys had done before, had lost its simple, logical security.
The Visitors didn’t come every year, perhaps only one out of every four or five, and always on the first day of autumn. But every year their crop had to be planted in case they did come. The Dustfly, a barren, stubborn and otherwise abandoned field, had been chosen long ago as the site to do the Visitors’ bidding. The Dunphy farm had always been productive, some might even say lucrative, with the fields adjacent to the Dustfly sprouting healthy crops every season, seemingly to spite the ugly blotch of dirt. An unfortunate aspect of the Dustfly was its visibility from the highway. Passersby could view it during the weeks leading up to harvest, like a bulging wart on an otherwise pleasant looking face.
Inheriting the farm meant inheriting the neighborly stares and jeers. Ask around town, and they’ll tell you how every planting season a massive tarp covering who-knows-what blankets that untenable field of theirs. Ben heard all the jokes and rumors, especially in his school days; Looks like the Dunphys are planting their magic crop again; The Dunphys are harvesting drugs; That’s where they bury dead hitch-hikers; They’re growing food for the Devil. Who would plant something every year only to deny it sun and rain? Many of them asked, but none of them knew.
The pain of knowing that Benny Jr. endured the same humiliation had been tempting him in the months leading up to planting season to make a change, to put it all on the line that year. The most recent silent treatment from his wife lasted especially long when they had to pick Benny Jr. up from school with a bloody nose for defending his “crazy old man.” The strains were coming from every direction. Their daughter, who knew even less about the Visitors and far too much about hushed giggles in hallways and cafeterias, agreed to join her without even asking where they would live. The secret had to stay between the men of the family, according to the old rules, because the women would not understand or accept the magnitude of its responsibility. Dunphy women always leave, Ben. The girls moved south, telling him if he ever decided to give up his family tradition, he and Benny Jr. could join them.
Ben watched the ancient oak trees that surrounded his fields sway in the wind just enough to notice. Old and protective, perhaps they had pre-dated the coming of the Visitors and perhaps they were strong enough to outlast them, but he wasn’t. The farm belonged to him now, along with its secret he had sworn to keep. But still he prepared to abandon his name, leave the farm to the oaks, and go to his girls. He resumed loading up his belongings, but couldn’t completely shake off the weight of servitude.
In the first years of their marriage, Josephine, or “Joey” as Ben had called her since they were youngsters hiding in cornfields together, tried to get him to stop like he had always promised. “You can’t change a man, especially a Dunphy,” her mother had warned, but Joey heard Ben’s resolve. “We can create our own life, even here,” he said with his hands rounding past her hips and pressing her to his chest. “All I need is the right girl to pull me above all this.” And pull she did, but, “A man has to do what he knows when there are mouths to feed,” he would say. And how can a farmer afford to turn down such a fertile inheritance? It crushed her to watch him slowly succumb to the inevitable. “My Dad still needs my help,” he’d say, each word emphasized in turn. She pleaded with him to at least explain what he was putting in the ground. She discovered the repulsive gray sludge, the seed. It was well hidden, but not enough to fool a wife who is losing her man. She knew he snuck out each spring, eventually by himself when his father passed on, to plant it in the dark. It felt like cooled oatmeal in her trembling hands, and its gasoline odor snaked its way to the back of her throat. “Whatever it is, we can beat it together,” she said, refusing to drop her desperate stare until it was acknowledged. But whenever she probed into that barricaded story within him, he again thought back to the twisting and pain that befell his brother Ross and couldn’t allow a shred of that darkness to taint her. “You’re driving a wedge into this family,” she snapped one summer. In recent years she stopped inquiring.
Ben pulled back the tarp off the Dustfly each full moon night of the summer and the family’s embarrassment was displayed at its worst, like contorted holiday decorations that could not be taken down. On the hottest nights the gasoline fumes crept into the house and became tension incarnate. Benny Jr. stood firmly alongside his hero, but the women refused to make eye contact after he excused himself from the table to head over to the Dustfly. As the summer progressed, the fruit of his labor would begin to spike its way up, raising the tarp knee-high off the ground in small clusters like a miniature city of tents. Ben would stand watch until dawn to make sure no curious locals damaged his precious crop. He tried to sleep during the days, if he was able to get enough of his “normal” farm work done. And when harvest time came all he could do was hope it would be an off year. He hoped for an endless string of off years, in fact. Scattering the unneeded crops in the woods allowed him to feel like a normal farmer and a normal father, for awhile.
True, the cold strain in Ben’s household offered little sanctuary from the whispers and pranks of the community. True, Ben fought through the insect-humming heat to keep his heavy head above his defeated frame as he stood guard of his crop each summer. But it was the things that no one else knew of that he would certainly be damned for dragging Benny Jr. into. The biggest reason Ben wanted to keep the tradition away from his son, to let the job end with him, was that he didn’t want Benny Jr. to actually have to deal with the Visitors. He didn’t want him to know that these kinds of things existed. He didn’t want him to have to see one. The night Ben himself first encountered them, the night he and his brother Ross were indoctrinated as Dunphy Men, was the first night of the rest of his life. His senses had been burned by the oversized, wretched beasts, and his world moved underwater for years afterward. He tried to sit through one more church service after the incident, but he did not believe God would allow such things to walk the earth and found his faith to be hypocritical. It was months before harvest time when they were both given the talk, as the older and wiser Ross no longer believed that the ritual was done to help the other crops grow, or that it was all for good luck. He had come home from school with a few fat lips and bloody knuckles himself and his violence demanded a fair explanation. During their long walks to the bus stop Ben would talk of getting away, perhaps going off to college some day. “Whatever it is,” Ross replied bitterly, “Dad thinks he has to do it. Well maybe there’s another way. Eventually you and I are gonna’ have to face up to it. I ain’t gonna’ run off to some school and hide.” He grabbed Ben’s elbow. “Dad warned me about what happened to the people that tried to take the easy way out.”
His father had done his best to prepare the boys for their first crop delivery to the Visitors, telling them that with any luck it would be an off year. “Life can shove your face in the mud and keep you there,” he said. “You just gotta’ learn how to make mud soup.” He sat on the edge of the bed they shared and placed his hands on their feet, both as a sign of compassion and a way to brace them for the harsh facts. He revealed the ancient family history, so much of it lost or misunderstood, without a hint of pride. “What we grow in the Dustfly. . . it has to stay completely dry,” he said as carefully as the hardened man could. “And it’ll only grow when the moon’s at its peak.” Being curious boys, they had of course snuck a glance at the finished product before, even knowing the pain their father could inflict with a belt. They had whispered and they had tip-toed, and stuck their heads under the blue tarp to see the arm-sized gray spikes protruding from the ground, neither of them yet associating the crops with the misery and fear they deserved.
That season, twenty-some years ago, was the first time they had helped their father with his duty. The three of them loaded as much of the crop as they could carry into burlap bags and lugged them deep into the woods. Their father led them down an increasingly overgrown trail. “Don’t worry boys. They can’t hurt us because they need us,” he said without pausing or turning. As the spikes poked at his back with each step Ben had a new appreciation for the man, who had made the trip by himself so many times. Exhaustion had been diluting his fear until they reached the clearing. Despite the burning in his rubbery limbs, Ben hoped they would still have farther to go, if only to delay the inevitable meeting. But it was not to be.
The clearing was an oasis in a desert of trees and had no natural reason to be there. Discarded and decomposing crops from previous off-years lined the perimeter, browning the grass and slowly broadening the clearing. The air was completely still for the impending violation, and even the stoic oaks seemed to turn their backs on the three. His father took them by their hands on either side of him as a faint light appeared through the trees. “Close ‘em tight boys!” his father shouted. The light rapidly grew in intensity, and despite his turned head Ben felt like he was watching static on a TV screen within his eyelids. With extraordinary ferocity it rushed them like a band of locomotives converging on the clearing. Every sense told him to turn and run, except for the touch of his father’s hand. Ben felt no embarrassment as he shrieked and whimpered in front of his big brother for the first time in years. The deafening rush came to a halt, and the frenzy of brightness relaxed as it seemed to be satisfied with its place in the clearing. Ben felt a series of jolts in the ground, accompanied by the clang of heavy metal and heavy footsteps.
“It’s okay boys. Remember what I said, they’re just passing through. They won’t hurt us if we keep doin’ it right.” His father’s voice was a shield from the grunting banter of the Visitors as they inspected their surroundings and their crops. “Open your eyes, Ben. You’ll be alright.”
The lights never let him fully focus, not that he wanted to. The obese silhouettes of the greasy brutes were enough to make him melt into the ground. His father pulled him back up, not allowing him to hide. The Visitors, perhaps three or four in all, waddled and spat their way around the burlap bags, laid in front of them like sacred offerings.
“When will they leave?” Ross asked with a coolness that surprised Ben, and even emboldened him to look back up at one of them. As wide as they were tall, their greedy oversized mouths were full of frothing puss and encompassed most of their bald heads, drawing attention away from their lifeless black eyes. A moment of paralyzing terror struck Ben as one of them set down its burlap sack and seemed to look directly at him. It did not move, but rather inspected him curiously as though he were on display in a store window. When Ben no longer thought he could keep himself within his own skin, the thing made what he guessed was a smirk and resumed its work.
“Yeah pop, when will they leave?” Ben asked in a less steady voice.
“They leave if we’ve brought them enough,” his father forced out, obviously beginning to wear down himself, “Otherwise we’ve gotta’ go back and get more.” The last words emptied out of him like a death sentence.
#
Ben watched his son lay in bed reading, his packed suitcases already stacked neatly in the corner, and wondered what he had done to deserve such a loyal boy. He knew Benny Junior’s eyes would see death some day, maybe even war. But he wished they would never have to see a Visitor. The undermining warning whispered to him, They’ll always find us, Ben. And if they could find that clearing and this farm from wherever they came from, they could find the Dunphy boys again, he thought. One afternoon long after his first encounter, Ben brought his father’s medicine to him in bed. The old man, retired from making the deliveries, clutched a photograph of Ben’s estranged mother in his lap, though his stare was comfortably fixed outside the window at the Dustfly. Ben closed the curtains and gave an acknowledging grin to the photograph. His father merely shook his head. “The only thing you can ever count on coming back is them.” His arthritic finger extended from a once powerful hand and pointed forcefully toward the darkened window. The hand then plopped to his side as if his last drop of energy had just been spent, and he had resigned himself to whatever judgment awaited. “It’s fuel they want, Ben. We’re just a highway stop for ‘em, wherever they’re goin’. . .”
#
Ben, Ross, and their father made the second trip back for more crops that first night. He knew what to expect this time, unfortunately, and seeing those lights waiting for them as they dragged their cargo closer was like walking on nails. Eventually he spotted their brutish silhouettes waddling through their work again, carefully unloading the bags into their charred, tank-like vehicle. “Just drop the bags, and they’ll give us more seeds, and then they’ll be gone. . .”
His father saw the shotgun first. Ross had stashed it in the burlap bag with the extra crops between trips. “Ross, put that on the ground slowly and stand in front of it.” But Ross was deep within a trap of rage and fear, unable to back up or go forward. He had the teary stiff-lipped look of a kid who’s taken beating after beating, but won’t accept the fact that he’s lost the fight. The gun faced downward harmlessly as he dug even deeper for courage. “Son, you put that down this instant!” his father said as intensely as he could without being too loud.
And then they heard it. As one of the Visitors pointed at Ross it let out a fierce roar, a sound that at once terrified and awed the three of them and left no other option than worship and unflinching obedience. The other Visitors fixed their gazes at Ross, all letting out similar warnings like a deep, continuous belch from the bellies of great bears. Ross’s jaw shook and he took a step back, but his hands couldn’t register the command to drop the gun. Their father tried to intervene but he was swatted aside without slowing them a step. They bent and twisted the shotgun into an unnatural shape, and despite his father’s screams they did the same to Ross. Ben had never imagined someone could look like Ross did when they tossed him aside with the empty sacks and departed. His limbs seemed to have two or three extra joints, and his open ribcage exposed an inert heart. Ben slunk down into the arms of his helpless father. They covered the remains with empty sacks quickly, before they could even talk or weep.
#
Benny Jr. looked up from his book to see his father silently admiring him. They’ll always find us, Ben. Sometimes you just gotta’ make due with mud soup.
“What’s wrong, dad? Aren’t we supposed to finish packing?” A gust of late March wind roared through the fields and over the roof, creating a deep moan that commanded those in its path to stay indoors. Through a long, frustrated pause, Ben watched his son’s face progress from confusion to a sort of optimistic acceptance. “Mom’ll come back. They both will,” the boy said. He closed the book and laid it next to him in bed. “I can stop fighting, Dad.”
Ben squeezed his foot tightly. “It’s gonna’ be alright Benny. You’ll make a good farmer, just like your granddad, and his dad too.”