Day 2: The Empty Harvest

 It all started the morning of the first light frost. Aunt Gale sent me out gather the last tomatoes of the season. 

"Stomp the plants down when you're done Rachel," She hollered out the kitchen window. The grass was crisp and sparkling as I marched out past the chicken coop pulling my jacket shut. I could hear the harvesters running in the fields around the farm house.  Aunt Gale lived in the last house at the edge of town. Which meant if you wanted to even see town you had to drive a good twenty minutes. She was old enough to be my grandmother but would put a work horse to shame. 

I'd been out here all summer working the farm with my cousins. Our hard work meant good produce for our family's and an excuse to start school late. Aunt Gale took special pride in her garden near the house. The fields would be harvested and sold, but the garden was for our personal use. It had the best tasting tomatoes and carrots I had ever had. We had been enjoying wonderful salads and roasted vegetables for the last month and a half, but when I reached for that first tomato I knew something was terribly wrong. 

The shiny red skin was beautiful and dewy but the moment my hand closed around it, it crumbled. I mean it just cracked and broke up in my fingers. The inside was as dry and hollow as a walnut shell. It was brown and dusty inside as the dirt roads in mid July.

I blinked and tried another only to have the event repeated. They looked perfect, but each one was as hollow as the first. I opened my mouth to call Aunt Gale but my cousin David beat me to it. 

" Aunt Gale!" He sounded panicked as he baled out of the rusty pick-up he has just driven from the potato field.  He didn't even see me as he scrambled into the house.

 I couldn't make out what they said to each other except Aunt Gale saying, "Show me," in her stubborn, boots in the mud, way. She and David walked over to the bed of the pick-up, David worrying his gloves as I trailed behind. 

He had brought several cardboard boxes full of potatoes from the field and every single one was open to a hollow center the same as the tomato that lay forgotten in my hand. It made no sense. We had harvested bushels of perfect potatoes only yesterday.

"It's the same field as yesterday," David said wringing his gloves again. Aunt Gale was silent and stern as she handled a potato. Other's began to pull up to the house in their rumbling trucks. 

Every crop was the same. Hollow. 

Everyone was ready to shrug it off as a strange after effect of the frost, or some foreign pest, that is, until lunchtime. All the produce in the icebox crumbled to dust when cut. Apples collapsed when bitten into. Phone calls from neighbors and friends confirmed, all fresh produce in the county had succumbed to this peculiar blight.

We became an overnight sensation. Reporters, scientists, even federal investigators were stirring up dust for the next month. The church was packed the next few Sundays with people looking for explanation or peace. 

No one had any answers. Three weeks after that first tomato there were still no reasons for "The Empty Harvest" as people were calling it. The only person who didn't seem at least a little shaken was sturdy old Aunt Gale. While she watched the people around her spin their wheels in frustration she washed dishes, made meals, and hung laundry. "Life keeps moving," she would say as she knocked mud from her boots. I figured as  long as she could whether the weirdness, then so could I. 

It was only after the fuss died down that I noticed Aunt Gale behaving a little strange. She started locking the shutters well before dark. I found funny looking knots of grass tacked near the doorways in all the rooms. She even let the barn cats in the house at night which was strictly against the rules. On our weekly trip to town we always came back with an extra canister of salt. It spooked me a little but I let it ride. 

But the morning I watched Aunt Gale march into the woods with a strangled hen in one hand and enough salt to cure a pig in other, I knew there was more to "The Empty Harvest" than anyone thought.