The Ditch That Carries the Water
On Invisible Labor and the Faces We Build Over It
The American small town loses its population the way a body loses sensation: one specific thing at a time, starting at the extremities. A storefront on Main Street goes dark. A house on Elm Street stops showing light in its windows after nine. The school enrollment drops by four students in September, and the drop is too small to count as a crisis and too large to ignore, and nobody counts it and nobody ignores it and the town absorbs the loss the way a hand absorbs the loss of feeling in one fingertip: by continuing to function, by compensating with the fingers that remain, by not mentioning it.
Decker, Ohio is a fictional town. It exists in my new novel, The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins, published this month by David Boles Books Writing and Publishing. Decker sits in the flat land between Columbus and the Pennsylvania border, population four thousand and something, the something fluctuating with births and departures. The departures outpace the births by a margin visible in the empty storefronts and the houses whose windows go dark one by one.
Decker is fictional. The pattern is not.
The 2020 Census recorded 1,363 incorporated places in the United States with populations between 2,500 and 5,000. Between 2010 and 2020, 58 percent of those places lost population. The losses were small in absolute terms. Dozens of people, sometimes hundreds. The towns did not collapse. They thinned. They lost a storefront, a family, a church congregation, a volunteer fire department roster, a baseball team’s worth of children, and each loss was absorbed and each absorption was a diminishment and the diminishment was the pattern and the pattern had no name because naming it would have required someone to stand in front of the town and say: we are becoming less.
The Borrowed Saint is a horror novel. Its protagonist, Asa Greer, is born in a town like this and discovers at the age of five that he can change his face by copying the bone structure of anyone he observes. Each transformation costs him a sensory capacity he will never recover. Over fifty years, he consumes more than a hundred faces, ascending through political consulting into institutional power, building performed personas that generate trust the way a furnace generates heat: mechanically, from borrowed fuel, producing warmth that is real to the people standing near it and that costs the furnace nothing it notices until the structure begins to crack.
This is a horror novel. Its mechanism is supernatural. Its subject is not.
What the book examines is the face we build over the work, and the distance between the face and the work, and what happens to the work when the face is the only thing the public sees.
Every small town on the plains knows this distance. A mayor speaks at the ribbon cutting. A water treatment operator tests the samples. One face makes the newspaper. One face fills a logbook nobody reads. Citizens drink the water and vote for the mayor. Water does not know who the mayor is. Mayors do not know what the water contains. Operators know both, and the knowing is the ditch, and the water flows through it, and nobody applauds.
In The Borrowed Saint, a character named Harlan Moeck occupies this position. He appears three times across five decades. In childhood, he is the boy who picks up a dropped pencil because the floor is not where pencils should be. In middle age, he is a municipal water quality spokesperson on local news, explaining filtration protocols to an audience already thinking about dinner. At a conference table on the thirty-second floor, he is the deputy director of environmental compliance for a regional watershed authority, speaking about aquifer recharge rates to people whose funding decision was made before the meeting began.
Harlan does real work. Invisible work. Work that keeps nine hundred thousand people’s water clean and that is never credited, because crediting it would require the institution to admit that the face it presents to the public and the labor that produces the public’s safety are performed by different people, and the admission would be an architectural problem, because the institution’s authority depends on the public believing that the face and the labor are the same thing.
Prairie Voice has spent years examining the hidden systems of rural and small-town America: the data centers drawing power from wind farms on land that used to grow wheat, the rendering plants processing the aftermath of industrial agriculture, the refugee resettlement programs quietly sustaining towns that would otherwise fall below the threshold of viability. These systems share a quality with Harlan Moeck’s water treatment: they operate below the level of public attention, they are maintained by people whose names do not appear in coverage, and they produce results that the public consumes without awareness of the labor that produced them.
The Borrowed Saint takes this dynamic and makes it literal. Asa Greer builds faces the way institutions build public personas: feature by feature, calibrated for the response the audience requires. His most effective invention is performed goodness, a face so convincing that audiences worship it on contact. The warmth their trust generates is narcotic. His body is allergic to it. Every deployment burns, the inflammatory response arriving earlier each time, until the margin between the face the world needs and the face his body can sustain narrows to minutes.
Horror, in this book, is not the face-shifting. It is recognizing the mechanism. It is sitting in a room where a practiced surface is generating trust and realizing that the trust is landing on an architecture, on a construction, on a composite built from borrowed material, and the person doing the work that justifies the trust is somewhere else, in a basement, at a treatment plant, in a logbook, in a ditch.
Harlan Moeck digs the ditch. Water flows. This book is dedicated to him and to every person like him: the good men and women whose labor sustains the systems that the public credits to the faces standing in front of cameras. Ditches are real. Water is real. Applause goes to the face.
The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins is available now from David Boles Books Writing and Publishing at BolesBooks.com. Kindle eBook and paperback.
David Boles is the author of The Borrowed Saint and the publisher of Prairie Voice.