On the Last Day of September

The backhoe rested its muddy treads on firm earth beside the soybean field. Days before it had gone back into the woods to dredge a fetid bog, and a dried cake of muck clotted the massive steel belts, turning them a pale brown. Resting there, driverless, its arm like the neck of a dinosaur rose up and crooked down to the bucket with its pneumatic mandible. I walked around it, confident as though it were dead, the little cabin locked tight and another padlock on the gas-cap. The weight... The weight was a soundless presence under the blue sky. The very silence of it exuded a form. It neither shifted nor creaked in the stiff wind but resolutely slept. And as I rang my knuckles against the bucket it did not ring back nor make any sound... only resolutely slept. And for that it seemed the machine was not meant to move at all, a statue only, something incapable of motion, a bone of the earth cracked and thrust up into the sunlight, or the fossil of the first mammoth redwood trunk that grew for a million years and now had weathered away every weak ring and fiber, leaving only this craggy relic of its most impassive heart. It was a stone arch in a desert valley. Immobile, and never meant to move. It shrugged off the wind and was. Beautiful and uncaring as the stone breast of a mountain. The treads could have been a single fused mass, rigid as bricks and mortar, welded vertebrae. I hoisted myself onto the machine's back for a moment, enjoying the vantage of the rippling soy--bronze, but nothing like a statue--but I must also have felt the remnant ghosts of violent mechanical life remembered in the metal, for I suddenly grew disquieted and climbed reverently back down.

We made this beast, it works for us. But in the snarl of armored hoses and the bucket's toothy maw lies the harsh truth. This was a creature of the Inanimate, made to rend and demolish without pain or regret, to do the work of fifty heartless men. Or fifty with a purpose. Or one building a world. Like most awesome, inhuman beings it was only safe in its dormancy--awake and roaring it would return to existence a dangerous toy. Later that evening a lone man with a flatbed trailer arrived to take the backhoe away. We all stood in the driveway, safely distant, watching it rumble toward its perch, where it teetered briefly on the trailer before folding itself once more into sleep, a dragon gone to roost. And when the tiny mammal crawled from its head the others clapped their favor for him, filling the dusk with transient sounds, constructed by fragile, fluttering hands.