Jook's Refrain: A Silo Story

Among the Sleeping - Silo 20

Jook hated everything about his job – everything that is except the silence. As long as he could remember, every waking moment of his life had included the constant din of his fellow workers in the down below. The sounds of shovels and hoes, complaining overworked joints and muscles, the growling stomachs of underfed children and those soon to be planted in the rich brown earth combined to create a constant dull roar – background noise that could not be ignored.

No one else wanted Jook’s job and he was glad. Yes, he had the unwelcomed task of checking the places in the farm of those who had been planted. Almost each day, a family from above listened as a priest extolled the gift their deceased loved one would now give to the rest of the Silo.  Scattered among the rows of tomatoes and carrots, barren mounds marked where some mother, father, son or daughter slept in the earth.

He had asked his mother one time, before she joined the ‘sleeping’, why the priest called it such a thing. “It allows us to pretend,” she had said. “Pretend these mounds are something more than they are.” Jook’s father hushed her before she continued, but his son knew she was right. There wasn’t much left outside the noise and pain of their existence save pretending. Pretending they were not slaves to those above in the forbidden levels - pretending there really was such a thing as beyond the up-top – pretending there was a place with room and quiet and rest – pretending beneath those mounds lay anything besides decaying corpses.

Just before every dimming time, Jook had the task of checking the mounds. His job was to ensure each one was clearly marked, monitor the decaying process, and determine when the one laying beneath the mound had ‘slept’ long enough to be tilled back into the ground so the enriched soil could provide more tomatoes and carrots. He didn’t care how many good words the priest said over the sleeping before family and friends piled dirt over their deceased loved ones, Jook knew what lay under those mounds - nothing but fertilizer. During his shift each dimming time, with no funerals and no sounds of laborers, his job did offer one at least one benefit no amount of chits could buy, as though any in the down below received compensation for their toil.

The one thing tomatoes and carrots and mounds offered was silence. The bright time might be full of life but it also offered nothing but noise. Here, Jook could hear himself think. Rather than labor to filter out the sounds of 40 odd levels of misery and complaint all he had here was the mounds, and the crops, and the silo. All he had was silence.

“Hey, are you listening to me?”

Jook turned to the source of the interruption and frowned. “Leave me alone, will you,” he said to the intruder. “Okay, okay,” replied the girl he could now make out to be his shadow.

He didn’t want one but the level boss had made it plain that her tagging along was not an option. The quiet made this task bearable, even welcomed. Nia either didn’t grasp the value of the quiet or care. After months of being allowed to work without a shadow he now had one who would rather talk than eat. In truth, Nia talked no more than anyone else he could have been paired with but silence was why he chose to work among the mounds and any talk was too much talk.

The sound of a pipe clanging against the lift railing shattered what remained of the quiet of the down below. It had been many cycles since that alarm had last sounded and nothing good could come from it. Jook and Nia quickly assumed the position they knew they must as their level boss appeared from the shadows. “Nia,” his voice rumbled across the scattered mounds and neat rows of vegetables, “you are required for the legacy.”

Nia turned to face Jook, her hands thrust behind her. She looked at him, her eyes pleading with him to save her, knowing there was nothing he could do. Nothing she could say. The level boss clamped crude shackles around the young woman’s wrists, turned her to face him, and then led her away. Somewhere amidst the shadows, a clanging sounded again and Jook heard the lift complain and then grudgingly begin its upward journey. He listened intently until all was once again silent, now wishing it was not so.

Jook shuffled through the rich soil to a mound that was all but ready to be tilled. Memories of his mother swept over him. More times than he cared to remember, his mother had been called away just like Nia. He could see her even now, barely older than Nia, in shackles riding that lift to disappear to the up-top only to return a few months later, her belly round, breasts full, and a little more life gone from her face. Then came the cries of giving birth and the life brought forth. If it was a boy like Jook, the newborn was left below to grow up and labor in the dirt farms. No baby girls were allowed to stay behind. Where they were taken and what happened to them, no one knew. Nia had been a rare female to spend her life in the down below and now she was gone. She would return but like his mother never be the same.

Now the silence smothered Jook and he missed the sounds of life, however miserable it may be. Jook started to walk toward the next mound and paused. There was that sound again as though the silo itself was speaking to him. Not really speaking yet something more. Jook whirled to look at his mother’s mound then turned away. No one was there, not even sleeping. The sound reverberated again from beyond the last row of the dirt farm. There was a rhythm to it like when the pipe fitters hammered in unison or laborers in the farms swung their hoes as a unit. Along with the rhythm, Jook was sure he could hear words. They weren’t intelligible but rather primal having meaning in spite of his inability to understand them.

Where had he heard that sound before? He looked again at his mother’s mound and remembered. It was the same rhythmic sound she had made just before her many trips to the up-top finally left her with no more living to do.

“What are you trying to say,” he had asked her as she closed her eyes that one last time. “Not saying anything my son,” she whispered. “Some things are too deep to say. Some things have to be felt. Some things just have to be sung.”

Jook had asked his father many times since what his mother meant only to receive a blank stare in return.

Light began to return to the dirt farm and the first sounds of what would soon be a cacophony of hoes and shovels and labored groans filtered down from the levels above. As he completed his last round, Jook found himself joining the silo in a duet of complaint – almost like together they were trying to get his fellow laborers to hear a new sound. But as he passed them back to his dwelling, all that remained was the grating rumble of people who had long since resigned themselves to tilling the soil of the sleeping.