Well, they didn't notice at first, who would? It was difficult to make out things were any different, those marks, cept when you looked from the very top of the water tank.
It took gramps a while to get up there and longer to believe it, and gran she never had a chance, she was brave to hear out what we said our eyes'd seen.
Thinking now I'd never have called them circles; they were closer to footyshaped or maybe like what a cat's eye looks like, and isn't that the more queer.
The old man yelled at me - he said I mowed it like that - then I said how could that be the case when he'd gone off at me for driving into town to see a picture and staying out til half two. He said that was just the motive. Sure, I took it on the chin. Made his money back, what it were worth.
First I fetched the Reverend Merrick - he was moseying about the Wesley Chapel that day, the same yard where they buried my mother - he had a car paid for by the parish and it took half as long home than it took me to jog there. I held the bottom of the ladder as he climbed up.
He was young, around long enough to be married though, and separated, much more able in getting up there than the old man. He was up there for a minute and then he said, I'm coming down, and I steadied the ladder again, but he didn't come down right away, he just kept looking over the field, holding up his wrist against the sun.
Gramps and the minister spoke for a while; both of them were towelling their foreheads and sighing and kicking up dirt and chaff with their boots and I wasn't allowed near any of the conversation, until they shook hands and the Reverend wandered over.
He looked dazed, like heatstroke or something. I asked him to be straight with me; then I said I swear on God and my mother's grave both I've nothing to do with it and I knew he didn't like my saying that but he entertained me all the same. The minister said to me, well, it was like when they walked around the walls of Jericho and on the seventh day they blew their trumpets and then the walls came down - similar I suppose to when people see the Virgin Mother in the clouds or in the skin of a gum tree, not that we were Catholics, but it was well known the minister used to be - the stigmata of the earth, those are the proper words he used.
After that I was let off and there wasn't an accusation more levelled at me; well at that time I figured the Reverend had had a word with the old man, but I suppose Gramps' attention was turned toward different things all along.
The next morning, or maybe the morning after that, I was running in the wheat. The stalks here were a head taller than mine and every once and a while I stumbled out into a corridor and gasped and almost fell right into the plain air because there were no sheaves to slow my traipsing around the field.
After that I was let off and there wasn't an accusation more levelled at me . . .
You couldn't see round the curve of it, and I knew from how I'd seen it up above I must have been in the pinched end of the eyelid, where the sand gathers in your sleep. The breeze passed through cleanly in this tunnel. It hadn't been trimmed all the way, maybe just to my waist or right below that, but the reeds were all folded toward the sunset, and soon as I noticed this it was pins and needles in the ends of my fingers and it smelt like rain and coal and my lungs were suddenly very heavy and all I could see was a big ticker tape party and in my ears a whirring or whistling, both . . . what woke me up, Gran was singing out. I had one foot in the tall wheat and one foot in the cropped. When I looked toward where I knew the verandah was I saw against the horizon the old man on the top of the water tower, with one or two men stood behind him and another coming up the ladder - they had their hands on their hips, all gazing out over the acreage.
There were visitors every day after that. Well, gran was a good host, but it wasn't as though she had much choice. He charged a pound each person who showed up and a shilling went to the Reverend.
At first Gramps had me helping him at the gate, but the amount of coin coming in convinced the old man I couldn't be trusted. He nailed up the ladder - that I was allowed to help with - and ever since, on a good day, there might be some hundred people who went up there, and some paid again to go up and see a second time.
No one went in the field. No one cared to. You couldn't see the wonder of it if you were in it, could you? The minister had his worries but the money alleviated them. He laboured in the heat, telling the visitors the same story he told me.
I never even so much as stepped in the untouched grain again. I was never questioned - the old man quit farming as long as the guests kept up. Not that they did, either, cause in the last days folks showed up just to see the faint picture on the field as the wheat growed up, and they still arrived in droves.
Then one day he was drunk and mouthed off - he'd given everyone their money back - he said go on, I shouldn't be mad this time, and handed me the scythe.
No, I said, I wouldn't put a foot in there.
***
Dakota Tait, the author of this piece, is a finalist in the 2022 Newcastle Herald Short Story Competition. Read the full list of finalists in this year's Herald Short Story Competition by visiting the Newcastle Herald website.
