AWOL

They’d all heard about it as kids. Nothing much went on in the little village. They were starved for excitement.

The Hessner farm sat about a quarter mile back from Township Highway 211, Tooms Rd. The road went nowhere; it stretched into, and ended in, a small wooded area less than a mile from its beginning. When Nate was young there was Old Man Hessner, his wife, and their son. Hessner’s wife came from McConnelsville, and, though much was never said or seen of her, she was a round, pudgy thing: quite homely. They kept their son, Courtney, out of school (the rumors why: that he had a chromosome abnormality, that his nature was too violent, that his face was too dreadful, etc.). Nobody made much fuss about the boy not attending school. In the 1970’s, people could get away with stuff like that: especially in a small village.

The Hessner house was a common farm house. It faced the road unthreateningly. Behind it was a big red dilapidated pole barn, usually with an old Chevy van parked in front of it. Farm machinery, most of it defunct, stood gloomily, quietly. Behind the barn was a corn field about the size of two football fields, half as wide.

Grotesque Old Man Hessner, Wes, tall and corpulent, had a face a mother couldn’t even love, accented by an edentulous, open-mouthed expression, which he seemed to perpetually display. Hair covered every exposed part of his body except the top of his head where only a large wart sprouted. Purple veins ran like tiny tree roots along his bulky nose. The sclera of his eyes was yellow, and one could not tell where his dark irises ended and his pupils began.

He’d visit Main St. sometimes to buy and sell at the market. People in the village avoided him if they could. If his outward appearance contributed to the fantastic nature of the rumors about him, his personality didn’t help either.

Nate, six years old at the time, walked in Duke’s Restaurant with his mother for lunch one winter’s day. Duke’s was a typical small town restaurant. A counter sat four; two booths and two round tables accounted for the rest of the seating. Francine Moore and her daughter, Katherine, sat and ate in a booth. The special was chicken and noodles. The smell was inviting: boiled vegetables, cloves, sage, garlic, and—of course—the chicken and noodles with cream soup.

Old Man Hessner walked in a while later, huffing and puffing, gruff as ever. He grunted, removed his heavy coat, and took a seat at the table by the window. Nate and his mother sat close to the kitchen. Nate ate vigorously. Wes faced him. Clara, the waitress, walked out from the kitchen and over to Hessner. She poured coffee for him. He grunted and pushed the cup away, spilling some on the old walnut table. “No,” he rasped.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hessner,” said Clara. “What would you like to drink?”

“I don’t want nothing to drink,” he said. “Give me some mush and eggs.”

Little Katherine Moore, a year Nate’s junior, stared at the bald and grubby man, barely eating. “Don’t stare,” Francine whispered to her daughter.

Hessner looked at them. He grunted again and said, “What’s a matter? Hasn’t the little girl ever seen a real man ‘afore? Guess the only man she sees much of is her daddy, huh?” Hessner smiled toothlessly. Robert Moore, Francine’s husband, was rumored to have lost his manhood after fathering Katherine.

Francine and her daughter quickly left the restaurant. Nate’s mom hurried him out into the nipping wind, too. He had not even eaten all his noodles.

The farm had belonged to the Hessner family for several generations. It had been a dairy farm where chickens were raised. Since Wes’s father died and he had taken over, he relied exclusively on corn for the family’s livelihood. Here was another reason for some of the ideas that developed about Hessner. Wes sold nearly all of his corn. He kept less than a bushel a year. This was because, some said, the Hessners were cannibals.

It was preposterous of course. Who would they eat? The population of the village was 302. If anyone came up missing somebody would notice; everybody would notice.

Nate’s older brother, Billy, explained to him: “He goes out of town to a big city to get them. He’ll drive to Columbus or wherever. He goes around trying to spot someone walking alone. He follows them, hits them with a tire iron or something and knocks them out. Then he drives his old van to where they are and throws them inside. He brings them back and the Hessners kill them and eat them. That’s why they don’t have chickens no more.”

Nate went to his father; he was frightened.

“Nonsense,” Nate and Billy’s father said. “You think it makes any dang sense that they sell all their corn because they eat people? Even if they did eat people, don’t you think they’d like a side dish, maybe?”

“Arthur,” Nate’s mother chided.

He laughed and continued: “They keep what they want of the corn and sell the rest. They probly need the money. Who doesn’t these days? Hell, maybe they don’t like corn to eat. Old Hess buys taters at the market—and tomaters and cucumbers… I admit: Hessner is not a pleasant old feller, but a murderer… a cannibal? Nonsense.”

Nate’s mother said to his father later on that night: “He doesn’t buy any meat at the market, Arthur. He is such a nasty man. I mean…”

“Oh, dear, do you really believe…”

“Arthur, why don’t we ever see Mrs. Hessner anymore? And we’ve never seen their son. It is strange.”

“Yes, it’s strange, but… Look, I’ve told the boys to steer clear of that house and Wes Hessner. I don’t think we need worry,” Arthur ended the discussion.

Later, when Nate was in third grade, his brother Billy told him: “So what he does with these people that he finds in Zanesville or Columbus or wherever is: he takes them to the farm, they kill ‘em, cut up the bodies, and they have cookouts. Cannibal Cookouts!

“In the summer, when the corn is high, he hunts them before killing them. They are knocked out when he brings them to the farm. He drags them out about thirty or forty yards in the cornfield. He walks back out and stands behind his barn, facing the corn with a pitchfork. He waits, and as soon as he sees the corn moving around, he knows it’s time to hunt. He watches for the stalks to move. Usually the person starts bawlin’ anyhow and Old Hess can just listen for ‘em. He walks real slow, making hardly no noise, and he makes his way through the field, ‘till he sticks ‘em with his pitch fork. No one’s ever got away.”

“Shut up!” Nate snapped. Billy grinned and continued.

“I’m serious,” he said. “That’s when the Hessners have their big parties, their big cookouts, when the corn is high and they can have their fun. Jimmy Carpenter told me he was riding his bike on a trail off Spencer Rd. last summer. He ended up real close to Hessner’s cornfield. It was late in the day, dusk. Jimmy said he heard screams. After the screaming he heard laughing, hooting and hollering. He said it was a sick kind of laughing and yelling, like you’d hear at a loony bin or something. He never got a good look at anything because he took off—he was scared. I heard there were more of them, too, not just the old man and woman and their son. Word is they got family over in Claysville. I heard when they have their big hunts and cookouts there is about seven of ‘em there. They like the brains the most, people say. They eat everything, but brains are their favorite. They skewer them and make kabobs—Brain Kabobs!”

But no one believed mass murder and cannibalism existed in the little village. The Sheriff never even went out to Hessner’s. Hardly anyone ever drove on Tooms Rd.

A couple years later, in 1982, Wes Hessner died. Nate was eleven and had a one year old brother named Gary by then. The talk about the Hessners all but stopped.

But only for a while.

When Nate was fifteen, talk about the Hessner house returned. This time, he heard it from little Gary first.

Nate was walking him home from school; Gary was singing something under his breath. Nate could only catch some of it.

“… cornfield… don’t you go… of the scarecrow… your worst of days… don’t you know… they’ll eat your brains…”

“What is that?” Nate asked. “What are you singing?”

“The song about the scarecrow,” little Gary said.

“What scarecrow? What are you talking about?”

“The scarecrow in the cornfield,” he said. “The one that kills people—the one that eats the people’s brains.”

Now it was all over the school, teenagers trying to scare younger kids mostly. The new story was: Courtney Hessner, now a young man, had continued his father’s traditions. He had also taken things to a new level of gruesomeness. No one ever saw him in town. Nobody even knew what he looked like. A relative—supposedly from Claysville, a skinny little lady who reminded one of a lizard—visited the market for the Hessners. She bought cucumbers, tomatoes, and such; she sold the corn. The farm had grown. Apparently some others from Claysville had migrated. The summer cookouts became larger and crazier, now with six or so in attendance, Courtney presiding. Like his father, Courtney drove to Columbus and other cities to find his victims. Courtney was more elaborate than Wes in the later proceedings, however. He had a mask that looked like the face of the scarecrow in the movie: The Wizard of Oz. Wearing his mask, he would drag his victims to the middle of the cornfield. He’d walk out of the corn, and wait for the cornstalks to move in any unnatural way—wait for the confused cries of his prey. Then he would hunt. He didn’t use a pitchfork. He used a scythe, the weapon of choice for the Grim Reaper. Courtney didn’t slink silently into the cornfield like a phantom, as his father had done. The second the corn moved or a cry was heard, he’d begin singing the Scarecrow’s song from the Wizard of Oz.

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain

Courtney would then dance into the field, singing loudly and maniacally. He would toy around, eventually decapitating the victim with the scythe’s long sharp beard. Then he’d gallop back to the barn with the removed head, his deranged family cheering. Awaiting him would be a grill made of bricks, flames dancing within, and skewers lined up on a large plate—tomatoes and cucumbers already impaled by the sharp skinny pieces of wood. The Hessner clan would split the head open using a cleaver. Then they’d remove and skewer the brains, browning them a bit on the grill. After the delicacy was consumed, Courtney would carry the headless body from the cornfield, and they would cut, cook, and eat the rest, stuffing any leftovers in a big freezer.

All of this was nonsense, and, besides young children, it was only in fun that anyone listened to any of it. Still, Nate and Billy decided to drive by the Hessner’s place one summer evening. Nate was sixteen, his brother eighteen. They took their dad’s ’79 Mercury. They must’ve driven—crept really, with the lights off—by the Hessner farmhouse twenty times. They heard nothing, saw nothing. There were no signs of life, or death, that summer night.

“Larry Piper said he saw my car drivin’ real slow round Tooms the other night,” Nate’s dad, Arthur, said to the boys at dinner a few nights after their excursion. His mom looked askance at them and passed the potatoes. They were having meatloaf with green bean casserole and fresh baked biscuits. “You boys ought not be fiddlin’ round the Hessner place. You’re both too old to be listening to silly stories. Just leave the Hessners alone. If there was something a-goin on up there, don’t you think you oughta stay away anyhow? Specially with my car. Billy, you won’t be using the Mercury for the rest of the summer.”

“Dad,” Billy whined.

“Nope,” his father said. “Now keep cryin’ bout it and I won’t let you use it at all no more.”

Billy left for the Army the next summer. Nate was to begin his senior year in high school that fall and would then join the Army, too.

Nate thought little of the Hessners that year. He had a girlfriend; little Katherine Moore had grown up to be quite the town-beauty. His mind was occupied by warm memories and promising fantasies of the last time and the next time Kathy would let him take her clothes off at her house. Robert Moore had left for California by then. He kept in contact with Kathy but could no longer keep up the façade of being heterosexual.

Nate corresponded with his brother. Billy had gone through jump school and was now stationed in the Canal Zone in Panama. Manuel Noriega was causing problems, and Billy was probably going to see some action. A U.S. invasion of Panama was becoming inevitable.

Nate graduated from highschool on June 7^th and was scheduled to enter the United States Army on July 20^th, 1989. He hoped to be sent to Panama to aid in the expected invasion. He would go airborne as his brother had.

On Wednesday, July 19^th Nate’s parents drove him to a Holiday Inn, minutes from Port Columbus International Airport. The following morning, he was to board a flight for St. Louis, Missouri, where he would then take a puddle-jumper to Fort Leonard Wood Army Base and commence basic training. The family said their goodbyes with Mom sobbing, Dad smiling, and Gary glancing around the streets of Columbus. Nate stayed firm; he was going to be a soldier.

Nate walked from the hotel to a pizzeria across the street, had a slice and some cola. Anxious, he went to a nearby park. He walked along a bike trail and thought about his future: the near and the distant. He thought about Panama—what would it look like? Could he make it through jump school in Georgia and get into Billy’s Battalion? He thought about Kathy, pretty Katherine Moore: would she really wait for me? He thought of his past—growing up in the little village. He thought of his mother, his father, and little Gary. He thought about Katherine’s gay father. He thought of the Hessners. And—strange as it seems, and though he was 81 miles from Courtney and the Hessners’ place—he felt their presence.

And it was more than a frivolous foreboding.

Hearing a rustling in the foliage to his right, he turned to look; then an immediate, sharp, and searing pain in the head seemed to shoot straight into the middle of his brain. Then nothing…

He knew where he was as soon as he came to. He was disoriented, of course, but he could smell the earth. He laid there, his body trembling and contorted between stiff things shooting from the ground. I know where I am.

Nate’s upper body hurt badly, like a thousand needle-nosed pliers were pinched shut on each muscle, nerve, and tendon of his neck and shoulders. He thought for a moment that there must be a blade stuck in his skull. He did not cry out. He knew better.

It was early evening, so he knew it was already the 20^th. He had missed his flight for Missouri. I am AWOL, he thought. He opened his eyes. The things coming from the ground were indeed stalks of corn. The corn was high that year, over ten feet from ground to tassel tip. He could see the sky between the stalks; it was dark pink with purple clouds.

He pressed his body slightly off the ground. The pain in his head became unbearable. He collapsed; leaves and silk tickled his ears and face. Can’t disrupt the corn. He heard nothing.

He attempted to gain his bearings while motionless. He located the setting sun. To roughly the opposite direction of it—to the northeast—that was the direction he wanted to go: away from the barn, away from the brick grill, away from the skewered tomatoes and cucumbers, away from the singing scarecrow, away from the cannibal cookout. He wanted to somehow move toward Spencer Rd.

Every movie Nate ever saw with chases through cornfields, Children of the Corn especially, flashed through him. He thought of countless helpless people crawling and running through rows of corn while a deranged killer stalked, yearning for blood (in this case brains and blood). He, curiously, thought of how Ray Bolger had looked as the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz. He thought of Courtney with his big scythe, waiting patiently for him to move the corn or make a noise.

He began to crawl, trying like hell not to make the corn move. He contorted his body and managed to move a few feet. The throbbing wound on his head made the already onerous task nearly impossible, but adrenaline pushed him forward. As he reached his right arm between two stalks and tried to plant his hand in the dirt, his elbow gave way. Crashing to the ground, the corn falling in opposite directions, he heard it…

I could wile away the hours
Conferrin’ with the flowers
Consultin’ with the rain
And my head I’d be scratchin’
While my thoughts were busy hatchin’
If I only had a brain

And he just kept singing those same six lines. Courtney’s voice was a rotund baritone. Other noises, shouting and yelling, came from the house. Nate heard Courtney enter the cornfield.

Nate pushed himself up on his feet. The pain that had been so severe was nearly gone. He started to sprint in the general direction of Spencer Rd, tripping several times on the stalks.

Courtney had entered the corn at full speed, circling toward the rear of the field. The singing no longer came from behind Nate. It came from his right side for a moment, and then he heard it ahead of him. Before he thought to turn around, he had reached the end of the corn. Spencer Rd. stretched across the landscape, only about 1000 feet from where he stood. He would have gone straight for it, but standing about ten feet in front of him, in the green grass that seemed black in the faint night light, was Courtney Hessner. The mask looked just like the scarecrow’s in The Wizard of Oz.

Courtney was still singing. He held the scythe like a tap dancer would hold a cane. He twirled and kicked the air. He jumped and clicked his heels. Nate tried to move, but he just kept watching Courtney dance. The masked murderer broke into a wild gallop, leaning back and kicking his legs high over his head. Nate turned and ran the opposite direction. He fought his way through the cornfield. He became hopeful: keep the singing behind me. Then other noises were audible: the chattering and laughing of the Hessner clan. Courtney wasn’t catching up with Nate, but they were headed in the wrong direction—right to where a bunch of crazed cannibals were waiting for their cookout: for their brain kabobs.

Nate burst out of the corn and into the yard. The familiar old red barn came into view. He kept running. He veered left as his eyes darted down to the brick grill. Then he saw them. If Old Man Hessner had been ugly, these things were repulsive. He recognized the lizard lady. A man in overalls chopped at human body parts on a short tree stump with a shiny cleaver. Another hideous man grinned and grunted as he engaged in what looked like sodomy with an equally hideous female. She squealed like it was painful but glared at Nate with a Hessneresque grin. She had the same purple veins running along her nose. Her breasts were exposed; they hung from her body like burlap sacks full of sand as she bent over to let her apparent relative enter her in that unnatural way. Two small Hessners played with the body parts of what Nate took for a cat. The smaller of the two imps was whacking the other on the head with a disembodied paw. The larger one was bending down, tying the dead cat’s tail around his cohort’s right leg. A couple repugnant teenagers sat on chairs. They stared at Nate and, to his surprise, ate corn on the cob.

Nate sprinted away from the morbid scene. Tooms Rd. curved in front of the house. His recent runs to prepare for the Army had paid off.

He looked back and saw Courtney, wearing his scarecrow mask and carrying his scythe, still singing. The maniac stopped running—stopped singing. He gave a dejected sigh, dropped the scythe, and threw up his arms. He spun around and kept on spinning toward his family, flailing his arms and legs hysterically.

Nate kept running. He didn’t slow down until he saw Spencer Rd. After cutting through a grass field and eventually reaching the pavement, things became foggy. He flagged down a ride after walking a bit. The car took off and he lost consciousness.

Nate never entered the military. He skipped town. His mother and father were disappointed. Mom soon forgave him, but Dad never did. In December of ’89, Billy was one of only 23 men killed in Operation Just Cause, The United States’ invasion of Panama. He served valiantly in the 3^rd Battalion, 504^th Parachute Infantry Regiment, but it had resulted in his death.

Nate told no one of the experience at the Hessner’s. He followed in the footsteps of his high school sweetheart’s father—not in sexual orientation but in moving to California. Nate and Kathy keep in contact on a social networking website to this day. She still wonders why he moved away and didn’t go in the Army. His little brother, Gary, became an architect in Chicago. Nate visits him sometimes but refuses to visit Ohio. He also does not eat corn.