The Farm

Chapter Sixteen

Arvel remained calm when he found his wife sprawled on the kitchen floor. He'd been a volunteer firefighter for over a decade, ever since a liquored-up cousin had set one of his outbuildings on fire by dropping a cigarette in a crate of greasy auto parts. Arvel didn't know all the fancy techniques used by the Rescue Squad folks, but he'd watched them in action plenty of times. His favorite emergency tech was Henrietta Coggins, who was built like a cross between Arnold Schwartzenegger and Julia Roberts, except unfortu nately Henrietta had Arnie's chin and hairline and the Pretty Woman's nose and muscle tone. Despite this unsettling mix, she was cool as a September salamander when the pressure was on, and it was her voice that Arvel now heard in his head. He repeated the imagined lines to his wife as he knelt beside her and felt for her pulse.

"Hey, honey, looks like you had you a little mishap." Check pulse, don't know a damned thing about how fast it's supposed to be, maybe it's mine that's thumping like a rat trapped in a bucket, but yours feels mighty shallow. "But don't you worry none, 'cause old Arvel's right here beside you. We'll get through this and have you baking lemon cakes again in no time."

When Arvel had heard the noise from the kitchen, his first reac tion had been annoyance, because one of the guys on TV was about to get voted off the show. It was the guy with the bandanna who hadn't shaved; there was one on every reality show. Arvel could al ways tell which asshole was going to get cut loose, though it never happened in the first few episodes. No, they had to string the audi ence along and let all the viewers build up a real hate for the guy, which was made worse by the fact that he just might have a chance of winning. Which would mean another asshole millionaire in the world while folks like Arvel still had to get up at 6:00 a.m. and put in ten hard hours. Well, seven if he could help it. So he'd been working up a decent dose of spite for the asshole in the bandanna when the floor shook and thunder boomed in the kitchen, as if his wife had dropped four sacks of cornmeal. But since she couldn't lift even one sack of corn meal, that meant something else had dropped.

His wife, all 195 pounds of her.

Arvel put a cheek near her lips, making sure she was still breathing. He looked at the back door, where he'd seen the flicker of movement as he'd entered the room. He was almost sure it was some kind of animal, and he had been getting ready for a closer look when he saw Betsy laid out like Sly Stallone in Rocky, only Sly had managed to climb up the ropes and lose on his feet and Betsy appeared down for the count.

She was still drawing air, but her eyes were hollow and sunken. He lifted one eyelid, just the way Henrietta would do. Betsy's pupil was as tight as a BB. Her long skirt bunched around her knees, showing the purple road map of her varicose veins. Arvel felt the back of her head and found a raised place the size of a banty egg.

"You just got a little concussion, is all," Henrietta would say. She spoke in that slow, reassuring way even when the patients were unconscious. Once Arvel had heard her waltz a car crash victim through death's door with that same kind of talk.

Arvel didn't think he could pretend to be Henrietta anymore, because he wondered what would happen if his wife stopped breathing. "Don't die on me, now," he said, a line Henrietta would never use in a hundred years.

He went for the phone and dialed 911 with no problem, then found himself talking to the communications officer in Henrietta's words. "Is this Francine?"

Of course it was Francine, because Arvel knew all the commu nications folks from the scanner he kept in his truck. When Francine said "Yes, go ahead" Arvel took a deep breath and said "Sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if you could have the squad come down to 12 Hogwood Road in Solom. I've got a patient down."

"What's the emergency, sir?"

"I'm not no sir. I'm Henrietta. I mean, this is Arvel Ward." Somewhere in his glove box, he had a sheet with all the emergency response codes, but since his job was putting out fires or occasion ally directing traffic, he'd never bothered to memorize the list. All he knew was that, in car wrecks, "PI" meant "personal injury" and "PD" meant "property damage," and you hurried with the red light and siren for the first but not the second. So he said "We got a PI here, weak pulse, possible head injury. Plus something's burning in the oven."

"Hold on, Arvel, we'll get somebody right there. Are you with the patient?"

"Not right now. I'm on the phone."

"I meant, is the patient in the house with you?"

"Yeah. She lives here."

"Okay, stay on the phone and let me give you some instruc tions."

"I can't leave her alone, and the cord won't reach. Tell them to hurry, and send Henrietta."

Arvel hung up. When he got back to the kitchen, he knelt over her again to check her pulse. The hand he placed on the opposite side of her body touched a wet place on the floor. He lifted his hand and saw it was blood leaking from somewhere just above her waist.

Arvel wondered if maybe Betsy had landed on a butcher knife when she fell, because it surely wasn't her head giving off that much blood. He tried to roll her over but she was too heavy. Finally, he lifted her enough to see a rip in her dress and the burgundy maw of a wound in her side, a few inches below her rib cage. It looked like some kind of bite mark, because the edges of the wound were stringy and jagged.

He looked once more at the back door, wondering what kind of beast had wandered in and taken a chunk out of his wife. And won dering why Digger hadn't raised holy hell, and if Henrietta would know how to handle something like this. Because, right now, with Henrietta's voice in his head or not, he couldn't think of a single comforting thing to say.

Jett dropped her book bag on the floor and dove onto her bed. Her heart was racing, as it always did when she was stoned. Pot was a stimulant, and the textbooks classified it somewhere between a narcotic and a hallucinogenic. It didn't make you hallucinate like acid did, but she'd never known acid to trick you into thinking you'd had a battle of wits with a goat. She swore to herself she wouldn't get stoned ever again. At least not until after Mom and Gordon went to sleep.

She was just kicking off her shoes when she heard the pounding on her door. "Jett?"

Great. It was Gordon. Just the thing to kill a good buzz. "Yeah?"

The door handle turned. Gordon must have decided to treat her with some respect, though, because he let go of the handle and said, "Can I come in?"

"Just a sec. Let me get dressed." She got up, threw a book and some paper on her desk, and slouched into her chair. She hooked headphones around her neck and punched up some Nine Inch Nails, just to piss off Gordon, though she preferred Robyn Hitchcock when she was stoned. No time for the Visine in her desk drawer. She'd just have to bluff it out.

"Come on in, it's unlocked" she said, deciding not to call him on his turning of the knob before she'd invited him in.

Gordon walked in as if he were a professor and Jett's bedroom were the classroom. Lecture time. "Why aren't you helping your mom with supper?"

"I have homework." She nodded at the book on her desk.

"Oh." He looked around, as if he'd never seen the room before. His eyes stopped on the movie poster of a gaunt and pale Brandon Lee from The Crow. "We haven't had time to get to know each other, Jett. It's important for me that we get along. Important for both of us, I think. It will make things easier on your mother."

"Mom's been kind of weird lately."

"She's trying hard to make this work." Gordon acted like he wanted to sit down, but her bed was the only suitable surface in the room besides the floor, and Jett couldn't picture him sitting on either of those. He fingered the knot of his tie. "I think we ought to have a father-to-daughter talk."

She opened her mouth but he held up his hand to cut her off. "I meant that as a figure of speech. I don't want to replace your real father. But we do live under the same roof and we need to lay out some ground rules."

"Besides the 'no drugs' thing."

"That's for everybody's peace of mind especially yours. We have high aspirations for you, Jett. I never thought I'd have some body to carry on the Smith tradition."

"But I'm not a Smith." Jett wondered if Gordon was stoned on something himself, because he was making less sense than she was. From the way he hovered over her, she could see straight up his nose to the black, wiry hairs inside.

"We're still a family. I know things have been a little rough on you, having to make new friends and acclimate yourself to this old farmhouse. It's a major transition from Charlotte to Solom."

"Yeah, they don't have no goats grazing along Independence Boulevard."

Gordon's lips quavered as if he were trying to smile and failing. "That's 'any' goats."

"Any goats. Like, what's their deal?"

"Deal?"

"Your goats act like they own the place. I know they're supposed to be stubborn, but they're kind of creepy."

"They're more pets than anything. They won't hurt you."

Maybe they won't hurt you. But you're part of this place. Maybe they think I'm some kind of alien freak, come in from the outside world to threaten their way of life.

As soon as the thought arose, Jett dismissed it as silly. The goats were weird, that was for sure, but they were just shaggy, cloven- hoofed, goofy-eyed animals when you got right down to it. Nothing to be afraid of. Even if they ate your dope and looked at you as if you were a germ under a microscope.

"Your eyes are bloodshot," Gordon said, sniffing the air and causing his nostril hairs to quiver.

"Yeah. I'm not sleeping very well."

"I thought you'd be settled in by now."

"Bad dreams. There's this man in a black hat who—"

Gordon took an abrupt step backward and accidentally kicked her backpack with his heel. The zippered section was open, reveal ing the dull glint of her pot Baggie. She expected Gordon to give it a once-over, but he regained his balance and said in a near whisper, "A man in a black hat?"

"Yeah, and an old-timey suit that's all black and worn out, like it had been picked over. I can't really see his face, it's like the brim of the hat throws a shadow over it." Jett didn't mention that she'd seen him three times: in the barn loft, in English class, and in the boiler room at school. If the man was Teal, then Gordon might know something about him. But if Jett's acid trips had eaten a permanent hole in her brain, she didn't want to arouse any suspicions or she might end up in lockdown at a psychiatric ward. Not that a vaca tion would be all bad, but Mom was already a basket case and that might send her over the edge. And good old Dad would probably drop his job and his new girlfriend and make a beeline to Solom to straighten things out, fucking everything up in his usual bumbling way.

"I won't lecture you on the chemical changes caused by substance abuse," Gordon said. "Drugs can do permanent damage. Hallucinations, confusion, memory loss."

Jett nodded absently, focusing on the brittle grind of Trent Reznor's voice leaking from the headphones. And don't forget that good old side effect of 'fun. So quit fucking lecturing already.

"Okay, Gordon. I promised you and Mom I'd stay clean. No sweat."

Gordon reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, as if he'd been studying parental techniques in a textbook. "Hang in there, Jett. We'll make this family work."

"I know. But I'd better get back to this homework."

"The satisfaction of academic achievement is the best drug of all."

Whatever.

He paused at the door. "Dinner in fifteen minutes."

After he left the room, Jett locked the door and popped the Nine Inch Nails out of the Walkman. Hitchcock's "Element of Light" was the ticket now. She retrieved the Baggie from her backpack, sprinkled a pinch of grass in her aluminum-foil pipe, and carried it with the lighter to her window. She eased the window up and the evening chill sliced its way into the room. If she took small puffs and exhaled through the gap, then even Gordon's big hairy nose couldn't detect the scent.

Beyond the glass, the world was dark and still. Even the insects were tucked away, as if hungry predators roamed the night. The stars were scattered like grains of salt on a blue blanket, the quarter moon sharp as a scythe. The mountains made sweeping black waves along the horizon. She had to give it to Solom on that count: it had Charlotte beat all to hell on scenery.

She was about to thumb her lighter when she saw movement out in the cornfield. The tops of the dead stalks stirred. She expected a wayward goat to walk out from the rows. The animals were renowned for breaking through their fences. The Fred-faced fuckers never seemed to get enough to eat. They probably chewed in their sleep.

But it wasn't a goat. It was a man. In the scant moonlight, she could just make out the brim of bis hat. The brim lifted in her di rection, as if the man were staring at the window.

She looked down at the dried leaves in the curled bowl of the pipe. "Hallucination, my ass," she said.

Jett sparked the lighter and touched the flame to the weed, in haling deeply. She planned on losing her mind, at least for a little while. Because if her mind was gone, then she wouldn't have to re member. And if she didn't remember, then the man in the black hat didn't exist.

Drug problem.

Oxymoron.

Drug problem equals no problem.

She closed her eyes and let the smoke seep out her mouth into th e Solom sky.

Odus took a drink of Old Crow, the best four-dollar bourbon around. Preacher Mose didn't bat an eye as the man pulled the bot- de from the hip pocket of his overalls, though it was the first time anyone had ever brought liquor into the church during his tenure. Mose almost reached for the bottle himself, but figured now wasn't a good time to let his principles slide. They sat side by side in a front pew of the church, staring straight ahead as if expecting a ser mon from the silent pulpit.

"Now do you believe me?" Odus asked.

"I believe in the Lord and just at the moment, that's the only thing I believe in."

"That was him. Harmon Smith."

"People don't come back from the dead."

"I thought that was what the Bible was all about. Hell, if you don't get resurrected, then why miss out on all the fun of sinning?"

"That happened in the Bible," Mose said. "This is real life."

"Fine words, coming from a preacher."

Mose still had the hammer in his hand. He hadn't relaxed his grip since the mysterious figure had appeared at the church door. The man in the black hat stood there for the space of three heart beats, his head tilted down, face hidden. There were holes in his dark wool suit, and the cuffs were frayed. The flesh of his hands was the color of a peeled cucumber. He turned up one palm, like a beggar seeking alms. Neither Mose nor Odus had spoken, and the man finally lowered his hand and stepped out of the church without turning.

Or moving his feet, Odus thought. Except now he couldn't be sure what he'd seen or if he had merely imagined the whole scene. By the time he'd finally unlocked his muscles and run to the door, the strange man was nowhere to be seen. Despite his poor church attendance and his fondness for illicit activities, Odus was true to his word, which was why his reputation was good among the peo ple who hired him for odd jobs.

"What are you going to do about it?" Odus asked.

"Do? Why does anything have to be done?"

"You know the stories."

"That's just a folktale, Brother. I can't give it any credence. I'm an educated man."

"Well, a preacher has to believe in miracles, so what's to say a bad miracle can't happen now and again?" Odus sipped the bourbon again as if he'd been giving the matter a great deal of thought over the course of many pints.

"Okay, then," Mose said. "Just supposing—and I'm doing this like maybe I was writing a spooky movie or something—supposing Harmon Smith did come back to life after two hundred years? What would he want? What would be the point? Because he'd have been swept right up to Glory when he died, and wouldn't have any reason to come back."

"Except for the oldest reason ever."

"What's that?"

"Revenge."

"The church records say he died in an accident. He had no rea son not to rest in peace."

"What else would you expect them to say, Preacher? That he got conked on the head and thrown in the river because he was doing missionary work?"

"A folktale, I told you."

"The Primitive Baptists didn't cotton to Harmon Smith's ideas. Neither did the Free Willers."

"We believe in salvation. Why would our people want to kill him?"

"Ask Gordon Smith. He'll tell you all about it."

Mose ran his thumb over the head of the hammer and stared at the wooden cross that hung on the wall behind the pulpit. "If I told you something, would you think I was crazy?"

"No crazier than you think I am."

"I saw the Circuit Rider when I was a kid. He snuck up behind me like a shadow one afternoon while I was skipping stones down at the trout pond. I thought he was going to grab me, but he just shook those long fingers at me. I ran all the way home and didn't go outside for a week. That was about the time that Janie Bessemer took infection from a cut foot and died from blood poisoning. I al ways thought it was the Circuit Rider's doing."

Odus took a deep gulp of the Old Crow and coughed. "I was wrong. You are crazier than me."

Mose stood up. "I'd better get this molding nailed down before dark so it will be ready for services tomorrow."

Odus grabbed Mose's arm. "Didn't one of the disciples deny Jesus Christ after the Last Supper?"

"Peter. Jesus predicted Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed."

"Maybe you're like Peter. You believe in Harmon Smith, but you're not going to admit it to anybody."

Before Odus could answer, the air of the church sanctuary stirred. A crow swooped down the aisle and landed on the pulpit, where the black bird shook its wings and regarded them both with eyes like dirty motor oil.

"Know them by their fruits, Preacher Mose," Odus said tilting the bottle once more. "You never know which one of them's going to turn rotten."