Cells Divide

Adam Sommers

The rain poured down like there were no drops at all, just the unrelenting rhythm of a billion continuous streams saturating the lush mountains of extreme western Pennsylvania. The rain fell
as far as the eye could see, pelting into the green, rolling low mountains that looked primordial
with the fog caressing them and the stillness of the morning covering the land. There was much
stillness here on the edge of Pennsylvania, even in the rain outside of the misnamed Trove City.
There certainly was no Trove, and calling the sleazy fly-spit of a town a city was a joke. They
should have called it Farm City, or Soil City, for all the good land surrounding it. The earth was soft, rich and black. True, working the hills could be difficult; tractors and reapers didn't get along well with being tipped on twenty-or thirty-degree angles. But if you had the land terraced correctly, then the water drained to all parts of the fields, the crops stayed pretty dry and the tractors didn't tip over.

Let it rain, thought Edgar Dunlevy, glaring out from the wooden porch of his farm twenty miles east of town. The van was going to be here in a few minutes, so it didn't make much sense to start something only to have to stop in the middle. Instead, he patiently sipped steaming black coffee from his chipped, blue-metal mug as he surveyed the landscape from the porch of his four-room farmhouse. He was all alone here. No wife, no kids. The only time anyone else set foot on his land was when the van came once or twice a month or when it was time to reap and he hired a few locals to get the crop in off his five hundred acres.

Edgar was relaxed listening to the rain hammer nails into the roof as he leaned his long, bony
body against the doorjamb and tilted his head to one side the way a sentry might listen for
approaching aircraft. In that pose, Edgar Dunlevy looked like a scarecrow. Deep wrinkles in his
cheeks and under his mouth made him look far older than his thirty-seven years. His sandy beard
was scraggly over his jutting chin, and his gray eyes sometimes wandered in his head.

Never a very smart person, in school and certainly afterward, Edgar Dunlevy had moved here ten years ago to exploit his only talent: to grow things. As a teenager in New Jersey, he'd sown
vegetables in the back of his family's rundown house, and from just that eighth of an acre grew so much he couldn't give it all away. Looking at the rain, he realized how much he loved it. Without the rain there'd be no crop, without the crop no farm, and then what? Then he'd have to go live back East with his older brother and get some godforsaken job, probably at his brother's prison. Well, he'd tried that once and hated it.

Yes, the rain was just fine. It was wonderful.

Edgar let his weak mind drift to the image of his stronger and older brother. It was an intimidating, yet comforting, picture. Ever since he could remember, his brother Craig was there
to tell him what to do, threatening violence if thin, little Edgar disobeyed. But that was rare.
Edgar never minded doing his big brother's bidding. With a father who cared about nothing but his gin bottle and a mother who often lost her grip on reality, following Craig's orders gave Edgar a sense of purpose, and that made him calm.

He left off thinking about his brother when he heard the van struggling and slipping up the long hill from the county road. Even in the rain, Edgar heard the van coming a hundred yards or more before it pulled up in front of the house. The driver beeped the horn. Why in the name of Jesus Christ did he always honk? As if Edgar wasn't standing right there on the porch looking at him.

"Pull it 'round the shed!" he hollered angrily through the rain without immediately moving. There was no rush. Edgar watched the van crunch away to the large shed where he kept farm machinery of every description, then slowly went inside, got on his slicker and mud boots and sloshed his way across the muddy yard to help unload.

The driver of the van was a big man with a rounded belly, a wide flattened nose and triangle scar on his left cheek. Above his cheeks, small eyes looked out malevolently from their sockets, and above the eyes, a rather narrow and wrinkled forehead loomed. "Goddamn, shitload of rain out here," Timothy Dyson Hanks (known to all as Tango) said in a heavy southern twang. It was his way of saying howdy.

Edgar Dunlevy didn't go in for small talk, especially in the pouring rain. He looked at Hanks through the deluge. "Get the doors open and I'll see to the shed." Edgar heaved his shoulder against the heavy steel door of the shed, forcing it along the bent and rusted track as Tango Hanks opened the double rear door of the unmarked blue Ford Econoline 150. Together, he and Edgar
unloaded the cargo. "Dump 'em into the bucket," Edgar grunted as they hoisted the first of four
sacks into the front-end loader stationed just inside the shed. The job went quickly, and they had the van and shed closed up in a few minutes.

Tango Hanks was glad to have it over with and be on his way.

"Need to use the can, or anything?"

"Nah, I'll just get on back."

"OK."

"Probably see you by the end of the month."

"Uh-huh." Edgar didn't care. "Tell my brother hello, and he owes me three hundred dollars."

"I'll tell him, Edgar," the deep southern voice rumbled.

"Tell him, if he can find five thousand dollars, I can buy Henshaw's south field, two hundred
acres. It'd be worth having for us both. I could plant soybeans and make some more room for this," He jerked his thumb at the shed.

"I'll tell him that, too. You goin' out there today, in this?" Tango Hanks nodded skeptically toward the sodden fields.

"Nah, too dangerous. You get to digging in this soft earth, it could start sliding away from you in a hurry. Before you know it, you fall into the hole you're digging, the backhoe falls in on top of you and that's it," he grinned at Tango. "Rain ought to end by tonight; ground'll firm by Thursday. I'll take care of it then."

"It's OK to let it just sit?"

"Not ideal, of course, but I got no choice." Then Edgar changed the subject. "You stopping at that whorehouse 'fore you head for the interstate?"

Tango Hanks raised an eyebrow. So, old Edgar knew of his diversions. Well, what was the harm? Then it occurred to Tango Hanks that Edgar might be looking to tag along. "Yeah, I think I just might. You feel like dippin' yer wick?" "Nah, only asking is all." He paused before adding,

"Probably better if you didn't, though."

"There's no harm, not now anyway," Tango tried to sound nonchalant.

Edgar never argued. He said his piece and went on about his business. "As you like. See ya later."

"Yeah, see ya," Hanks blurted back, now annoyed. He didn't need reprimands from any old sodbuster. Dripping wet, Hanks climbed into the Ford, circled in front of the shed and headed
down the long gravel driveway to the county road, the wipers whack-clacking like mad, smearing
the windshield. Even with the stop at the Drop Inn, where he could let his clothes dry, he'd still be back in New Jersey by midnight.

Edgar went into the shed, threw a tarp over the bucket of the backhoe and decided to spend the afternoon with his tractor, cleaning it and loving the sound of the rain.