Chapter One

The post went in harder than it should have.

Harmon drove it with the eight-pound maul, the way he had driven fence posts for fifty years, and the soil that should have taken it in six strikes took fourteen. He counted. He had been counting since Day 40, when he first noticed that the soil inside the line was changing. The count was one of the things he did instead of calling.

He was going to call today.

The post stood at the new edge. He squared it with the maul-handle, checked the line against yesterday’s post — the one he had driven at dawn on Day 144 — and found the new post twelve metres further out. Twelve metres, give or take. He paced it and wrote it on the tag he kept in his shirt pocket. 145 — 12m — NW quadrant. The handwriting was smaller than it used to be. His eyes were not.

The wheat inside the line leaned toward the centre of the field. The stalks on the far side of the new post stood straight. The stalks on the near side bent at what Harmon estimated was eleven degrees. He did not have a protractor. He had the Polaroid.

He pulled the camera from the canvas bag slung at his hip. The bag was older than his marriage. The camera was older than the bag. He framed the new post so the straight wheat and the leaning wheat both showed, pressed the shutter, waited for the print to come out the front. The motor whined. The picture slid out grey.

He tucked it under his arm while it developed and walked the line.

The line was what he called it. He had no other word. It was not a fence, because there was no fence. It was not a circle, because he could not see it. It was the place where, five months ago, his John Deere 8320R had slowed down for no reason he could diagnose, and when he climbed down to check the engine the engine was fine, and when he climbed back up and put his foot on the pedal the tractor moved again the way it should. He had driven that field for forty years. The tractor had never slowed.

The tractor had slowed.

He had walked back to the spot where it slowed and stood on it and felt his knees complain in a way he had stopped blaming on his knees three weeks ago. He had driven a fence post there. That post was now three hundred metres inside the line. That post was one of the ones that had fallen over in September when the wheat started bending.

He walked the full perimeter every morning. It took him an hour and forty minutes on a good day. He was sixty-seven. His knees were going to go anyway. They were going to go faster inside the line than outside it, and he had stopped walking inside the line except when he had to.

He had to this morning.

At the west edge, where the new post stood, he stepped across. One foot, then the other. The air did not change. The light did not change. The ground under his boot felt, the way it always felt when he crossed, like a staircase that had one more step than his body expected. He caught his balance and walked to the fallen post from Day 40 and put his hand on it. The post was half-buried. The soil had not buried it. The post had settled into soil that was compressing under its own weight.

He took a Polaroid of the buried post. He took a Polaroid of the wheat bending around it. He walked back out across the line. The staircase went the other way this time, one step short instead of one step long, and he stumbled, and he caught himself on the new post, and he stood there for a minute breathing with his hand on the wood.

He was going to call today.

The Polaroids were drying in the bag by the time he got back to the truck. He laid them on the passenger seat in the order he had taken them and drove the quarter mile up the cart track to the house. The house had been his father’s and his father’s father’s. The barn beside it was older than the house. He parked by the barn.

Inside the barn, on the south wall, was a board. On the board were nails. On the nails were photographs. The photographs were in a grid, five wide, going down. He had started the grid in a three-ring binder and moved to the board on Day 60, when the binder ran out of sleeves and he realised he was going to need a bigger system.

He climbed the stepladder and drove two new nails at the bottom of the grid. He hung Day 145’s photographs — four of them, the new post and the straight-and-leaning wheat and the buried post and the bending — beside the photographs from Day 144. He climbed down. He stood at the foot of the ladder and looked at the board.

One hundred and forty-five days of photographs. Five hundred and eighty-one Polaroids. A circle growing outward in the lower-left corner of the wall, because he had started in the upper-right and worked down the way you read a book.

He did the math he had been doing for weeks. Five months ago the line had been eleven metres across. This morning the line was — he used the tape measure on the truck, he used the GPS on the phone his daughter had bought him, he used the odometer on the quad when he couldn’t be bothered with the other two — the line was a circle three hundred and twelve metres across. The growth rate had been three metres a day in June. It had been seven metres a day in August. It had been twelve metres overnight. He was not a mathematician but he had been a farmer long enough to know a curve when he saw one, and this was a curve.

He looked at the board one more time. Then he went into the house to find the phone number.

The number was on a pamphlet his brother-in-law had given him in 1989, back when the brother-in-law worked for the Kansas Geological Survey and thought Harmon might have sinkhole trouble in the north field. Harmon had not had sinkhole trouble. He had kept the pamphlet because his wife had kept everything in a yellow accordion folder in the kitchen drawer, and after she died he had not thrown anything from the folder away.

The pamphlet said U.S. Geological Survey, Regional Field Office, Denver, CO and gave a number. He dialled it on the kitchen phone. The line rang and rolled to a menu. The menu offered him six options. None of the options fit what he was trying to report. He pressed zero and got a recording that told him he had entered an invalid selection and sent him back to the menu.

He hung up. He stood at the kitchen counter with the pamphlet in his hand.

He had been standing at the kitchen counter with the pamphlet in his hand for five months. He had told himself, in June, that it was probably something weather-related and would pass. He had told himself, in July, that the county extension agent would laugh him out of the office if he tried to describe it. He had told himself, in August, that his daughter would think he was losing his mind and would drive down from Wichita to put him in a home. He had told himself, in September, that he would figure out what it was on his own. He had driven to Hays in October and sat in the public library for three hours reading about gravity and soil compression and none of it had fit and he had driven home and not told anyone.

He was going to tell someone today.

He put the pamphlet in his shirt pocket with the tag. He got back in the truck. He drove the seven miles to town.

The feed store was the only place in Greensburg with a phone he trusted. His own line had been unreliable since Day 90 — calls dropped, static, the dial tone cutting in and out in ways the phone company could not explain and had stopped trying to. The feed store phone was on the back wall behind the counter and had been on that wall since 1974. The proprietor was a man named Gil Bennett who had gone to school with Harmon’s wife and who did not ask questions.

Harmon nodded at Bennett. Bennett nodded back. Harmon walked to the phone. He pulled the pamphlet from his pocket and dialled the number again.

He pressed zero four times in rapid succession. The menu gave up on him and put him through to a human.

“USGS Denver, how may I direct your call.”

The voice was a woman’s. It was tired in a way that told him it had been a long morning at the desk she was sitting at.

“My name is Tom Harmon,” he said. “I’m calling from Kiowa County, Kansas. I own a section of wheat ground outside Greensburg. I’ve got a problem on my land that I think is a gravity problem and I’d like to speak to somebody who knows about gravity.”

There was a pause on the line.

“Sir, this is the U.S. Geological Survey. We handle earthquakes, volcanoes, water, minerals. Gravity isn’t really —”

“I’ve had it for a hundred and forty-five days,” he said. “I’ve got five hundred and eighty-one photographs of it in my barn. It started the size of a living room and it’s now three hundred and twelve metres across and it’s grown twelve metres overnight. Wheat inside it leans eleven degrees toward the centre. The soil compresses under its own weight. My tractor slows down when it crosses the boundary and speeds up when it comes out.”

Another pause. Longer.

“Sir. Can you hold, please.”

“Yes.”

He held. He stood in the back of Gil Bennett’s feed store with the phone to his ear and watched Bennett weigh a bag of chicken feed for a woman in a green coat. The hold music was a version of a song Harmon thought he remembered from the radio in his truck. The woman paid in cash. Bennett counted the change.

The line clicked.

“Mr. Harmon. My name is Miriam Kessler. I’m a geophysicist with the Survey. I’ve just been handed your file. Can you describe for me — as precisely as you can — what you mean by my tractor slows down when it crosses the boundary.”

He closed his eyes. He was going to say this right because he was only going to say it once.

“There’s a line in my field,” he said. “I can’t see it. It’s a circle. The ground inside the circle is heavier than the ground outside. Things that cross the line slow down. Things that stay inside get heavier. The wheat bends. The posts sink. I’ve been walking the perimeter every morning for five months and it has never once gotten smaller. It has only ever gotten bigger.”

“Mr. Harmon —”

“I’m not done. I think it’s killing my land. I think it’s going to reach the highway in about a year if it keeps growing the way it’s growing. And I think it’s growing faster than it was last month, which means it’s going to reach the highway sooner than that. I’ve been trying to figure out who to call about this for five months. I’m calling you because the pamphlet in my wife’s folder had your number on it and I don’t know who else.”

He stopped. He listened to the silence on the line and tried to read it.

When Miriam Kessler spoke, her voice had changed. It was not tired anymore.

“Mr. Harmon,” she said. “Please don’t hang up. I want you to stay on this line while I walk down the hall. I’m going to put you on hold for ninety seconds. When I come back I’m going to ask you for your address and your email and I’m going to ask you to send me whatever data you have. Please don’t hang up.”

“I’ve got photographs,” he said. “I’ve got a seismograph readout from a unit my brother-in-law sent me in August. I don’t know how to email a photograph. My daughter knows how.”

“Can you reach your daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Reach her. I’ll hold.”

He stood in the feed store with the phone in one hand and took his cell phone out of his pocket with the other. He thumbed through the contacts. He found his daughter’s name. He had not called her in four months. He pressed call.

She picked up on the third ring.

“Dad?”

Harmon looked at the board in his mind — five hundred and eighty-one Polaroids, a circle growing outward, the wheat bending, the posts sinking, five months of not telling anyone — and he said the sentence he had been practising since June.

“Sarah. I need you to come home. I need you to bring a computer. I’ve got a gravity problem and I’ve had it for a while and a woman from the government just asked me to email her some pictures.”