The old men on the porch used the word without ever explaining it, the way people do with weather, debt, or grief. They said the whooperups were bad this year, said you could hear them working the field edges after dark, low and rolling like something turning over in its sleep.
As a child, I assumed it was another name for wind passing through the grain, the particular sound of a poor crop year announcing itself before anyone wanted to admit what was coming.
My grandmother corrected me only once. Near the end of her life, when sleep and memory had started taking turns with her, she said the fields kept accounts. Every harvest removed something, and every planting promised it back. Most years the balance carried forward quietly. Some years, she said, the land decided it had waited long enough.
The whooperups were what you heard when the account was being collected, moving from field to field with the slow confidence of people who already knew what they had come for.
I forgot the story until this September, when the eastern rows emerged pale and brittle while the rest of the corn stood healthy. The dogs refused to cross the tree line after sunset.
A week later the sound began, low and almost too deep to hear, with a repeating cadence that suggested conversation. Sometimes one rolling note would travel the length of the field and another would answer from the far side. Fence posts vibrated. Water in the livestock trough formed rings even when the air was still.
Last night the sound reached the house. I remembered enough of my grandmother’s instructions to leave every light off and keep my feet on the floor. The porch boards hummed beneath my palm while something circled the house twice, pausing beneath each window. Then the sound changed. I could not understand the word it formed, though my body recognized it with the same unpleasant certainty that comes when someone calls you by a childhood nickname no stranger should know.
At sunrise the eastern rows stood taller than the others, straight, green, and heavy with perfect ears. The soil beneath them was black and rich enough to stain my hands. Nothing else appeared disturbed until I checked the family cemetery beyond the orchard and found every stone sunk several inches deeper into the ground.
Since then, the fields have continued improving by the hour. Fruit has returned to dead branches, blight has vanished from the lower pasture, and the well tastes sweeter than it has in decades.
I am beginning to understand why my grandmother never described the whooperups as evil. She only said that when they made a place prosperous again, someone living there should start wondering what had been entered into the ledger under payment.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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