Farmer Lock: When the Work is Done
Clay Turner found the knife wedged behind a warped rafter in the hayloft, where his father used to hide his whiskey. It was a simple thing. Maroon linen Micarta handle and a 1095 spear point blade. FARM & FIELD, it read. Clay didn’t need reminding where he stood.
His father, Harlen Turner, had gone out after a storm to check on a calf and never came back. They found the body two days later, like he’d lain down for a nap and forgotten to get up. No one called it strange. Men wore out, same as plows and fence posts. Just took longer.
Clay’s mother, Ruth Turner, had hands like weathered cotton and eyes that had seen too many seasons come to nothing. She held the house up more by will than lumber, rising before first light and boiling coffee strong enough to clean rust off a nail. She never raised her voice, never left the porch on Sundays, and never once asked Clay what he saw out there in the fields. Only whether he’d be home by supper.
Clay didn’t tell anyone about the knife. He just pocketed it and went back to weeding the beans. It was a Farm & Field No. 99, what folks called a Farmer Lock. The name settled on him like dust. Felt right in the hand. Like it had always belonged.
The knife opened as if fresh from the tube, smooth and easy. Clay used it that summer for everything. Peeling apples. Cutting twine. Anything that needed cutting. Quiet work. Steady hand. No fuss.
Sometimes he caught himself thumbing the closed blade in his pocket while watching the air shimmer over the fields, the sky bleached out to the color of old linen. It made him think of things he couldn’t quite name. Not fear exactly. Closer to being watched.
Then the rains failed.
By August, the fields were baked flat. The Turner farm looked no different than the photographs his uncle Merle kept in the attic. Dust storms. Dry creek beds. Barn cats gone lean.
Uncle Merle was the kind of man who kept old photographs in brittle envelopes and never said more than he had to. One photo showed a man no one could name, his face blurred by photo age or motion, holding a knife that looked just like Clay’s.
After the war, Merle had come back to the family farm but settled in the attic room and stayed there, mostly quiet, mostly forgotten, like a misplaced page in the family Bible. It was Merle who once said that every man in the Turner family had one good season in him, and one bad one that never ended.
Clay still walked the rows each day, the Farmer Lock always in his pocket. He didn’t open it much anymore. There wasn’t much to cut.
One morning he found a crow perched on the weather vane. It didn’t fly off when he approached. Just looked at him, steady. Clay took out the knife. The crow blinked. Slow. Then it flapped off, leaving a single black feather on the sill of the granary.
Clay picked the feather up and tucked it into his shirt pocket. He didn’t close the knife. Not right away. It wasn’t the first crow he had seen that summer. But it was the first one that waited to watch.
When fall came, nothing was harvested. The land gave nothing back. But folks said they still saw someone out there, moving slow along the rows. The whites of his eyes gone red.
And then Clay was gone. Boots by the back door, dusted with straw. Bed made. Field gate hung open. They looked for him, neighbors and cousins and game wardens, but there were no tracks. No sign. Just silence. And heat.
Some said the heat got to him. Others said he’d finally turned into his father. But Ma Turner knew better.
When the farm was sold for tax arrears in the third winter, Ruth’s sister, Evelyn, came to help her pack. They moved room by room, taking what they could, leaving behind what they couldn’t. In the kitchen, Ruth opened the drawer beneath the sink and felt for the edge of the floorboard that never sat quite right. She pried it up and looked at what lay underneath.
The knife was there, just where she had found it one morning after Clay vanished. Closed and clean. Wrapped in a piece of leather.
Boys with knives like that don’t come back in from the field. Not unless the work is done, Ruth thought to herself.
She didn’t touch it. She looked for a while. Quiet. Evelyn was waiting at the door with her coat on. Ruth stood, pressed the board back into place, and left the house for the last time.
As for Clay, no man could say for certain. He was never found. Never buried. But neighbors swore they saw his figure moving through the fog at dawn, boots crusted with dirt, knife in hand. Some said the blade still caught the light, even when the sky was full of dust.
And though the fields lay fallow and the house sank crooked into the earth, the wind that passed through those acres still seemed to carry his name, like it had learned it. The knife waited quietly, closed and clean, holding its secret until the work was done.
