The Farm

Chapter Seven

Mrs. McNeeley was outlining on the chalkboard, lecturing like she usually did with her back to the class. To the sixth grade English teacher, instruction meant breathing chalk dust and turning her pupils' brains to sawdust. Who the hell cared what a direct object was, or a plural nominative? Like anybody was ever going to need to know that stuff in real life.

But teachers like Mrs. McNeeley were great for those kids who were logging their time and sopping up free lunches while waiting until they could legally drop out. Like Grady Eggers and Tommy Williamson on the back row. If McNeeley had the sense to seat the kids in alphabetical order, the problem would cut itself in half. As it was, the two goons kept up a spitball barrage and a constant taunting of everyone around them. Like all successful goons, and most of that species had been gifted by God Grady and Tommy knew when it was time to play the angel, to let their faces go soft and wounded whenever another student made an accusation or complaint.

Like this morning when Tommy had made a grab for Jett's ass in the hall.

That kind of thing was flattering in the fifth grade, when you didn't have any ass worth grabbing, but now she was on the verge of becoming a lady, and as freaky as that was, she thought her body had some value. She had whirled and tried to kick him in that mysterious region between his legs, where all manner of lumpy, disgusting things dangled but at the last second he had twisted away and her foot bounced harmlessly off his thigh. Worse, he caught her leg while she was off-balance, tilted her over like DiCaprio going for Winslet in Titanic, or maybe Gable doing Leigh if you were lame enough to have watched Gone With the Wind, as she had. Tommy put his mouth close to hers, braces and all, and whispered "Not a bad move for a headless chicken."

Then he spun her in spastic imitation of a Spanish dance, the other kids laughing as she fell to her knees, and a nuclear orange anger had erupted behind her eyelids. She must have screamed because when the dust cleared the beefy assistant principal Richard Bell, known to the kids as Dicky Dumbbell, had sequestered Tommy away for a private counsel. Apparently sexual harassment wasn't a serious offense at Cross Valley Elementary, because Tommy had been right on time for first-period geography, and since Cross Valley was a small school, Jett was in the same class. Tommy had winked at her and given a twisted smile that held the promise of future humiliation.

The worst thing of all was that part of her had flushed some secret and forbidden woman region that craved attention but didn't know quite what to do with it.

And so the day had gone. Now, with McNeeley's sentence diagrams covering the chalkboard and the hands of the clock reaching wearily toward two, Jett was calculating how fast she could reach the door when the final bell rang. She closed her eyes and must have dozed because she saw a man in a black hat at McNeeley's desk, seven feet tall, moth holes in his frayed suit. He held a thick Bible in his left hand his pale right hand raised and miles beyond the sleeve of his too-small jacket.

"The possessive of a name ending in s is followed by apostrophe s, except, strangely enough, in the case of Jesus," he intoned with a voice as dark and loud as Revelation's thunder. "In that case, it's just an apostrophe by itself. That's according to The Chicago Manual of Style, brothers and sisters. Special rule for Jesus. Amen."

Jett's eyes snapped open and she found her head had almost banged against the top of her desk, the one with the greasy pencil slot and Suck Big Donky Dix carved into the surface.

McNeeley was finishing some monotone declaration or another, and the class had long since given in to fidgeting. Tommy made a bleating, goatish sound from the back of the class, causing McNeeley to turn. She stood with the piece of chalk in her hand, her eyes like milk.

"Did someone have a question?" she asked.

"Yeah," Grady Eggers said, raising his hand and lifting himself out of his seat. He was already five-ten and had the first signs of stubble, the kind of kid who was headed for either gridiron glory or the oily pits of auto shop.

McNeeley tugged at her cardigan and pushed her cat's-eye glasses up her long nose. "Mr. Eggers?"

"Does Jesus really get no s?"

"Excuse me?"

"I mean, why does he get treated any different? You said every rule applies to everybody the same."

Jett was wide awake now, no matter how drowsy she had been before.

"I don't understand," Mrs. McNeeley said, putting on her teacher's smile, the automatic response to anything that cast doubt on the textbook.

"You said Jesus was the exception to the rule."

The class grew silent. Even Tommy Williamson looked pensive, a rare expression for him.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Eggers. I didn't say a thing about Jesus."

"You said he don't get no apostrophe s, just an apostrophe." Grady sounded uneasy, on the edge of rage. "I heard it plain as day. Why come is that?"

"We were discussing when to use 'who' or 'whom' in the objective case," McNeeley said. "I don't see how our dear Lord and Savior could enter into it."

The bell gave its brittle cry of release, and the tension in the class dropped like a wet rope.

Jett gathered her books, hoping to make it to the next class before Tommy caught up with her. She felt faint, partly due to the vision she'd had of the man in the black hat. But Grady had apparently heard the man's words, though from McNeeley's mouth. Did it really count as a vision if two people experienced it, or did you chalk it up to the beginnings of mass hysteria?

In fifth grade health class in Charlotte, Jett had been subjected to the ever-popular drug scare videos. While most of the kids had snickered as somber narrators expounded on the dangers of evil weed, Jett had actually paid attention. Unlike the others, who wouldn't know a yellow jacket from a roach, Jett saw it as an opportunity to educate herself. She'd paid attention when the talking head launched into a tirade on acid flashbacks, in which a bad trip could come on weeks, months, or even years after the initial "exposure." Come right out of the blue, the narrator had said. Totally unexpected and without warning. Flashback sufferers often went to the hospital because they thought they were having a nervous breakdown.

The whole thing was starting to freak her out. It was possible that Grady, too, had dropped LSD. But that still didn't mean they would have the same flashback. And how could you "flash back" to something that had never happened before?

Gordon would probably know, but she'd rather eat a hot popsi-cle in hell than talk with him about anything in her personal life.

But which one was the hallucination, the scarecrow man she'd seen in the barn or the man in the black hat?

She negotiated the halls, weaving through kids in denim jackets with rolled-up sleeves, low-hanging pants, the girls wearing wide belts. Even here in the sticks, it seemed everybody knew about Old Navy and Gap. A bunch of brainless trendoids. Some of the redneck boys wore flannel, but they stuck to their own kind, stomping their boots as if to knock the cow shit out of the treads, sneaking pinches of Skoal between their cheeks and gums.

"What's the hurry?" came a girl's voice behind her.

Jett wheeled to face Bethany, who was as cool as Mentos in her short skirt and blue halter top with bra straps showing. "No hurry, I just have to do my homework before math class."

"But class starts in four minutes."

"That's what I mean. I don't want to disappoint Mrs. Stansberry. She's the only cool teacher I have."

"Did you sleep okay? You look like you're late for your own funeral. Or maybe your eye shadow's a little thick today."

"Thanks for the compliment."

"No, you're good. This Goth thing looks bitching. I wish my parents would let me get away with it."

"See, that's just it. You don't ask your parents, you tell them. Have to show them who is boss right from diapers."

"I'll bet yours were black."

"Well, not while they were clean."

"Ooh, yuck." Bethany crinkled her overly pert nose.

"What are you doing after school?"

"Feeding the goats."

"I hate those cloven-hoofed little monsters. They scare me."

Bethany laughed. "They're okay. The males, the billy goats, stink unless you cut their balls off. My dad has a metal band that you put around them, then leave it for a few weeks. The balls swell up and turn black and gross, and then they fall off. Problem solved."

Jett shuddered. She wasn't an expert in male anatomy, but she was under the impression that the testicles were the most vulnerable spot on their bodies. Which is why you tried to kick there in an emergency. But causing their balls to rot seemed like the sort of punishment that should be reserved for the very worst of them. Creatures like Tommy Williamson.

Jett decided she wouldn't complain about her own chores for a while. Sweeping the living room didn't seem so bad when compared to forking hay to a goat. "Well, I've got to get to that homework. Say hi to Chuck for me."

Bethany's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

"Your boyfriend. The Chuckster."

"You don't even know him."

"You told me all about him. Chuck steak, one hundred percent lean."

"And don't forget he's mine." Bethany frowned and turned, then was swept away in the tide of students. Jett looked at the clock on the wall. Two minutes to solve six math problems. And me rest of her life to solve all the rest of her problems.

September was a melancholy month for Alex Eakins. It was the month his childhood mutt rolled himself under the wheels of a FedEx van, the month he'd lost his virginity after a high school football game to a girl who later ditched him for a married man, the month his dad and mom separated, the month he'd been kicked out of Duke for lousy grades and attendance. Since he'd moved to the mountains and spent his trust fund on a little piece of south-facing land on the mountain above Solom, September had been a time of dying.

He sniffed the air, which was sweet with the sugar of red maples and crab apples. The stench of decay should have been there, but the only rot came from the black innards of his composting toilet, where bacteria performed its thankless job of turning shit to dirt. Nature was just beginning to accept that winter was on the way, that every living thing would soon be asleep or dead. He wondered which of those he would be.

Alex had embraced organic gardening as a lifestyle, earning enough by selling produce at the county farmers' market to pay his property taxes. He had studied all the latest sustainable building techniques, and his own house was a mix of technologies both primitive and new. Since he lived off-grid and wasn't beholden to the building inspection and permitting process, Alex had used cob and straw bale construction for part of his house, which was cut partly into the bank. From the outside, the structure looked as much like an aboriginal mud hut as anything, but it was incredibly energy efficient. A small cluster of solar panels on the roof ran a dorm-sized refrigerator, and a woodstove system circulated hot water through the house. Alex had fixed a generator to a paddle wheel in the creek that gushed along one side of his property. The generator, along with a miniature wind turbine, fed a bank of alternating-current batteries, so he was covered no matter what the weather.

The system was put together in the aftermath of Y2K, when all the doomsayers had realized the world wasn't going to end after all and had sold their survival gear. Well, the world may have ended already, for all Alex knew. Because it was autumn again, and the tomatoes were turning to mush on the vines and the corn was getting hard. The cool-weather greens like collards, spinach, and turnips still had a few weeks to go, but soon enough the market would close for the season. Alex had a truckload of pumpkins to sell for Halloween, and one more good haul of organic broccoli, but after that, he would have to go back to work. Or else sell a little of the marijuana he cultivated.

But that meant dealing with people.

The same idiotic people who had driven him to the isolation of his mountain retreat Despite the added pleasure of end-running the government and the lure of the world's last free-market economy, selling dope was almost as much trouble as having a square job.

Alex dumped a bucket of table scraps onto his garden compost heap and looked over the valley below. The trees were just starting to turn color along the highway, where the roots were stressed by construction and carbon monoxide. A gravel road ran past the Ward and Smith houses before disappearing into the thicket and winding up to Alex's house. The road got a lot bumpier and rutted past Gordon Smith's, because Alex believed in inhibiting curiosity-seekers. Not because he was antisocial as his mom had claimed or a stubborn asshole as his dad had believed but because he didn't have the patience to deal with accidental tourists and uninvited guests. Plus, the government might have an interest in finding him.

Besides, he wasn't antisocial. Just ask Meredith, the earth chick he'd met at the farmers' market who had occupied half of his bed on and off since April. But April was a green month and October was red and golden, so he expected her to light out before the first killing frost.

Her voice came from the wooden deck. "Honey?"

Honey. That reminded him, next year he planned on setting up a honeybee hive. With all the pests that attacked honeybees, the real stuff was getting more and more valuable. Alex was sure he could do it right, and have the fringe benefit of his own tiny, winged army of blossom pollinators-

"Alex?"

He put down the scrap bucket and picked up the heavy hoe. 'Yes, dear?"

"Are you mad at me about something?"

"Of course not." Down below, through the trees, a thread of gray smoke rose from the Ward chimney.

"You only call me 'dear' when you're mad at me."

"That's not so."

"And you say it out the side of your mouth, like you're talking on automatic or something. Like you're miles away."

Gasoline was pushing two-fifty a gallon, thanks to the military-industrial complex that ruled the country, and that had to be fac-tored against the profit from a load of pumpkins. Maybe he'd drive the load to Westridge. The college kids had plenty of money. He should know, as much grass as he'd peddled to them over the last couple of years. "Everything's fine, dear."

"See? There you go again."

"Huh?"

"You said 'dear' again."

He turned and squinted up at the deck. The day was bright, though cool. Meredith stood in a gray terry-cloth robe, her blond hair wet and steaming. No doubt she was nude beneath, and Alex thought of those nipples that were the color and consistency of pencil erasers. He could almost smell her shampoo, the hippie-dippy expensive stuff she bought at the health food store. He tight-ened his grip on the hoe.

"Sorry," he said. "I was thinking about autumn."

"Like, fall?"

"Yeah. Everything's dying but there's a promise of rebirth. It's metaphorical."

"Alex, have you been in the stash?"

"Did you know that most leaves aren't really green? The chloro-phyll in the leaves masks their true color, and when the growing process slows down for autumn, the chlorophyll fades and the true color emerges. It's the process of dying that finally reveals the leaf. So all that green, happy horseshit is a lie."

"Alex? Are you okay?"

Sure, he was okay. He had been okay for years. Marijuana was his antidepressant, and his crop kept him supplied year-round. He also traded on the black market to support his other little hobby-the one locked in the walk-in closet downstairs-but figured he'd probably get caught one day and the cops would seize his land. All because he liked to smoke a little weed, which was none of the government's business besides the fact that it kept Republicans in office. At least weed was honest, though the system wasn't. Weed stayed green, even after it was dead, even after you smoked it and it grew a bouquet of blossoms in your head. True colors, for real.

Meredith smoked it, too, but only before bed, because it made her terribly horny. In fact, Alex often wondered if that was the sole reason she had stayed over that night in April, and then the next night, and before the end of the week she'd begun leaving her clothes in his dresser. And that, as any guy knows, had been the time to say he wasn't sure they were ready for such a commitment, but another joint and Alex had his head between her thighs and, well, he supposed it could be worse. At least she could cook vegan meals.

He smiled up at her, or maybe he was grimacing from dawn's glare in his eyes. "I'm fine," he said. "I was just wondering whether to take the pumpkins down to the college or try my luck at the market."

"The market's been a little slow, and some of the other vendors will probably undercut you. Better to go where there's no competition."

"Makes sense." Meredith had been a business major, graduating cum laude the year before with a degree in marketing. Alex had majored in botany, but all he'd learned was how to grow some high-class, kick-ass grass. And how to flunk out and disappoint his parents.

"Are you going into town?" Meredith asked. "Town" meant Windshake, the Pickett county seat, which was fifteen miles away. No one thought of Solom as a town, though it had a zip code and post office. Windshake was where people did their serious shopping, and the Solom General Store was a place to pop in for vegetable seeds, or a bag of Fritos corn chips and a Snickers bar when the munchies got extreme.

"Maybe later," he said. He never wore a watch, and if he had to get a part-time gig for the winter, that meant showing up according to some corporate master's rigid timetable. Time was flexible and shouldn't be tied down to numbers. Like, this was now and later was later, and yesterday was like the ashes and grunge in the bottom of the bong. And tomorrow was, like, maybe a pot seed or something.

"Well then, what do you want to do this fine Saturday morning?" Meredith leaned over the deck, letting her robe fall open and offering a generous view that rivaled the glory of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

He grinned, or maybe a gnat was flitting near his eyes. "Roll one and I'll come up in a minute."

She smiled. "Breakfast in bed?"

"Sure-" He started to add "dear," but caught himself.

Meredith padded across the deck Alex had built with his own two hands using wormy chestnut planks he'd taken from an abandoned barn. Maybe Meredith belonged here. She was organic in her way, wasn't spoiled by modern conveniences, and had grown on him over the months. He just couldn't understand why, as she'd talked to him, his grip on the hoe had tightened. He looked down and saw that his knuckles were white.

"Yes, dear," he whispered, chopping at a plantain that had taken root by the garden. Plantains carried the same blight that killed tomatoes in wet weather. They were evil weeds if God had ever made such a thing.

Alex had lifted the hoe for a second blow when he saw a skewed stand of stalks at the end of his garden. Something had been in his corn. He stepped over the rows of broccoli and walked past the beds of young collards, his blood rising to a boil. The corn had been trampled and the tops were bitten off a number of the plants. Deer sometimes came through the woods to feast on the garden, though their visits had dwindled after Alex had picked up a tip from a fellow organic gardener. A little human piss around the garden's perimeter kept deer away, because as dumb as the dark-eyed creatures were, they'd been around long enough to associate people with murder.

This wasn't deer damage. Because a slew of stalks were littered along the fence that separated his property line from the Smiths'.

Alex was ambivalent about fences, since Starship Earth belonged to everybody, though he'd made sure he knew his property boundaries after the survey was complete. He believed in the laws of Nature, but that didn't mean the rest of his nasty, grab-ass species did. They believed in pieces of paper in the courthouse, or pieces of paper in banks, or pieces of paper in Washington, D.C.

But, piece of paper or not, one thing was for sure: goats couldn't read, and even if they could Alex would bet a half kilo of homegrown that they would ignore what was written on the deed anyway. He kept a tight grip on the hoe just in case one of the weird-eyed bastards was still around.

The wire fence was bent just a little, as if something heavy had leaned on it. Heavier than a goat, by the looks of it. Alex hesitated. He tried to live in harmony with the world even if six and a half billion hairless apes threatened to make the place uninhabitable. He could either go down and have a talk with Gordon Smith or he could crawl over into enemy territory and administer some mountain justice.

"Alexxxxxx!" From the purr in Meredith's voice, Alex guessed she'd already fired up the joint. He dropped the hoe.

"I'll be back," he said to the woods beyond the fence.

Gordon sat by the cold fireplace, a book in his lap called The Airwaves of Zion by Howard Dorgan. Gordon had explained the significance of backwoods gospel radio shows on tiny AM stations, but Katy had nodded enthusiastically while her mind wandered to the fresh asparagus and dill weed in the refrigerator. She'd left the room at the earliest opportunity, and she'd returned to find him dozing. His head was tilted back on the Barcalounger, a delicate snore rising from his open mouth. Katy had never noticed how pale his neck was beneath his closely trimmed beard. His hands were soft, with the fingers of an academician, not a farmer. He had the drawn and wrinkled cheeks of a smoker, though he owned a pipe merely as an affectation. He'd only smoked it a half dozen times since they had been married which was good because the smell of the rich tobacco made Katy's head spin.

It was rare that she had a chance to study him in daylight. When they were together, his eyes dominated her, and she felt herself paying attention to his every word. That same power had brought Katy under his spell when he'd delivered his presentation on Appalachian religion at that Asheville seminar.

Looking back on it, she realized she'd been lectured, not conversed with. And she had been the student eager to please, sitting on the edge of her seat, face warm at the prospect of proving her worth as a listener. She found herself flushing now, standing over his sleeping form, bothered that she was only on equal footing when Gordon was unconscious. Even in bed…

She didn't want to think about bed. Their sheets were way too clean and smooth, each spouse's side clearly marked. A stack of hardcovers on Gordon's dresser, a water glass, and a case for his eyeglasses. A box of Kleenex on Katy's side, along with a bottle of lotion, a candle, and a pack of throat lozenges. In her drawer lay birth control pills, clothing catalogs, Tylenol PM, Barbara Michaels paperbacks, lip balm, and beneath all that feminine detritus, Katy's vibrator, her longtime romantic partner in Charlotte. A monogamous and loyal lover, always attentive, considerate, and sober. Everything that Mark wasn't.

Katy was afraid Gordon would find the vibrator, but Gordon hadn't exactly set the marital bed on fire, either. In fact, he'd not even struck a match.

Maybe professors of religion had to take a vow of celibacy. Though Katy had no moral qualms on the issue, she wondered if premarital sex should perhaps become a legal requirement. After all, you might say "I do" even when the person standing with you before the priest might be thinking "I never will." Mark had been a real believer in premarital sex, to the tune of two or three rounds per day. He called it the "Protestant sex ethic," though Mark had been about as Protestant as a pope. His ardor hadn't dampened once they had tied the knot and the beautiful miracle named Jett had slid down her vaginal canal. Still, the years had left a growing gap between them, and late-night whispered secrets had given way to accusations and aloofness.

But that's not why you divorced him.

Katy walked away from the fireplace. She had more pressing matters at hand than a good wallow in the swamp of regret. Like the butternut squash in the oven.

She found herself thinking of it as the "fucking butternut." Katy made a conscious effort to quit cursing when Jett was a toddler, after the first time she'd heard Jett burp, sit propped up on her wadded diaper, and say, "Fuck." With a toothless grin that melted matronly hearts all the way back to Mesopotamia, Jett had declared her intelligence and the simultaneous importance of surroundings on her upbringing. But Jett was on her way home from school, either by bus or with the trustworthy Mrs. Stansberry up the road.

So Katy felt comfortable saying it aloud, but not too loudly. "Fucking butternut," she said, as she grabbed her pot holder and reached for the oven door.

The whisper that skirled from the pantry was probably nothing more than the September breeze bouncing off the curtains and playing around the room, carrying the autumnal scent of Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, and pumpkin. But it sounded like a word. Or a name.

"Kaaaay."

Katy grabbed a spatula between the thumb and mitt of the pot holder and spun like a ballet dancer after three shots of whiskey. "Who said that?"

She was annoyed both at herself and at whatever trick of physics had made her panic.

Her heart fluttered, and an uneven rhythm pounded in her ears, like when the natives were asking King Kong to step up to the altar and accept their drugged sacrifice. Fay Wray in the original, Jessica Lange in the De Laurentiis version, and Naomi Watts as the hot blonde du jour in the Peter Jackson remake.

"Kaaaaaaaaay"

"Go away." Katy held up the spatula like a hatchet, hoping to ward off the invisible thing in the corner of the kitchen. Gordon's first wife didn't belong here anymore. She was dead. Rebecca didn't exist.

This was Katy's house now.

And Solom was her home.

Something stirred in the attic. Damned mice. She'd have to speak to Gordon about them.

Later. First, she had a meal to prepare.