The Farm

Chapter Twenty-nine

Katy waited until Gordon excused himself from dinner. He'd eaten only half of his sauteed chicken breast and had barely touched his wax beans and sweet potato pie. Katy finished her own plate and began collecting dishes. Jett, who had remained sullen and silent throughout the meal, shoved her glass of milk away and crossed her arms.

"What did you tell your dad?" Katy asked.

"That's between him and me."

"Honey, remember the deal. We'll get through this together, okay?"

"Okay, I'll share if you share. What's the deal with this ghost you keep talking about?"

Katy dropped a piece of silverware as she stacked dirty dishes with shaking hands. "Nothing. I think I was just suffering delu sions."

"And a 'delusion' just happened to give you a black eye while we were gone?"

"I was up in the attic looking for something—"

"Something in a long wooden box, right?"

"No. I found a key. And I thought it might fit one of the bureaus up there."

"Well, I'll tell you what I found in the box. A scarecrow. Just like the one that used to hang in the barn. Not the one that's hang ing out there now. Somebody switched them."

"Why would they do that?"

"Maybe they needed to borrow the clothes."

"You didn't tell your dad any of this, did you?"

"I told him everything. The parts I know, at least."

"You didn't tell him I thought I was being haunted—"

"He loved that part. I thought he was going to laugh light into his coffee. Good old Dad. He can't handle any alternate reality un less it's caused by drugs."

"You shouldn't talk that way. Mark loves you."

"Yeah, but he loves drugs more. I could see it in his eyes. He's still just a sniff monkey, despite all the big talk about being strong for the good of the family. But you've heard that line plenty of times, huh?"

Katy left the room, dishes piled against her waist and smearing butter on her blouse. She didn't want Jett to see her tears.

They should get out of the house. Jump in the Subaru and drive down to Florida, stay with Katy's mom for a while, dig in the flower garden, and get sane. She needed time to sort things out. Rushing into a bad marriage was one thing, but dragging Jett along made it worse. And now she was hallucinating, or maybe cracking up.

Yet the smell of lilacs was real. It was strong in the kitchen, heady and thick, as if Rebecca had walked through the room only moments earlier. But Rebecca was dead. She'd had her head sheared off in a car crash. Rebecca wasn't keeping house any longer, nor was she brushing her invisible hair. No scarecrow lived in the attic. The man in the black hat was probably Odus, dropping in at odd hours to catch up on chores. Jett had merely seen a shadow, a trick of the moonlight, and her youthful imagination did the rest.

They couldn't both be going crazy.

But the goats were real. They were cunning and sinister and dangerous. Gordon talked of them as if they were family, and he showed them more affection than he showed his own wife and step daughter. He tended and nurtured his flock, but offered no warmth to the humans living in his house.

"Mom," Jett said from the doorway.

Katy was at the sink, elbow-deep in suds. The clock on the wall read a quarter till six. She'd been standing there fifteen minutes. Only two plates stood in the dish rack, and she could see her blurred reflection in the nearest one. For a flicker of an instant, she appeared dark-haired, smiling, eyes as mysterious as those in the locket she'd found in the attic. Rebecca's face had superimposed itself over hers, and a ragged rim of flesh encircled her neck.

She reached up to touch the wound, but found only the lump in her throat.

"You're blanking out again."

"No, I'm not. Everything's fine. We'll get through this—" Katy couldn't bring herself to finish. It was all hollow, the whole new life she'd tried to build was just a stack of cards waiting for a breeze. She despised cooking, and God had invented the dish washer for a reason. These clothes were too cheerful and bold, too goddamned chirpy.

She was trying to be someone else. Someone whose head had never been found.

"Jett, I think we need to leave."

"You mean go back to Dad's?"

"No. That wouldn't be right. But I can't stay in this house an other minute."

"What about Gordon?"

"I'll call him later."

Jett grinned, the first real joy she'd shown since moving to Solom. "Wow, Mom. I'm impressed. You've really got some fuck ing balls."

"So to speak."

"Oh, sorry. I wasn't supposed to cuss."

Katy turned off the water. She didn't even set the dirty dishes in the sink to soak. Let Gordon wash his own damn dishes. It was his house, after all. His and his dead wife's.

"Go upstairs and throw some things in your knapsack," she said, the weariness lifting from her body. "Clothes, toothbrush, pajamas. Just enough stuff for a few days. We'll come back and get the rest after I've had a chance to talk with Gordon."

Jett raced across the room and lifted her arm, open-palmed. Katy did the same and Jett leaped and slapped a high five. "You rock, Mom. I love you."

"A hug and a kiss aren't cool enough?"

Jett hugged her and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. "Ooh, gross, Mom. Where did you get that stinky perfume?"

"I'm not wearing perfume."

"Smells like flowers."

"Must be the cinnamon I put on the sweet potatoes."

"Whatever. Let's blow this nutty little peanut shack."

Katy followed Jett up the stairs, wondering if she was making another mistake. She had probably stayed in her relationship with Mark several years too long, but what if she was skipping out be fore she'd given Gordon a chance? No doubt Gordon could explain e verything and ease their fears, show them that ghosts weren't real and scarecrows were nothing but straw and cloth.

No, he'd had plenty of chances. Katy couldn't love him or even trust him, despite his pledge to protect her and take care of Jett. All she had to do was imagine his face during that morning they'd had intercourse, when he'd opened his eyes and seemed shocked to find h er on top of him. As if he was expecting someone else.

Besides, as Jett would say, Solom was one seriously fucked-up piece of real estate.

Alex fired up a bowl of sweet, homegrown weed and puffed it until his lungs were scorched. Despite the pleasant buzz from the smoke, Alex couldn't relax. Something heavy was coming down in Solom. He had a feeling it wasn't the secret agents he'd always feared, or the Internal Revenue Service coming to seize his land as punishment for his income tax evasion. No, this had all the vibes of a world-class cluster fuck.

Alex had convinced Meredith to stay in her apartment near the college. Despite her physical gifts and generosity, Alex liked his space. He needed to get his head together, which seemed to be a full-time job these days. He put the pipe away and went outside to check on the garden. The garden did what drugs and sex couldn't do: it filled him with a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Growing good crops, especially mythical mother-lode mind-fuck marijuana, was about as close to God as a human being could get. Crops made the world a better place, especially dope, which was the equivalent of Eden's apple when it came to granting wisdom. As a fringe benefit, self-reliance also stuck it to the Man, because the government couldn't tax such products.

Alex peeked through the curtains to make sure nobody was watching from outside. Dope possessed the strange power to make him feel bulletproof and paranoid at the same time. Behind the safety of locked doors, he was master of his fate. When he stepped under the big sky, all manner of rules and laws took effect, whether they were natural or contrived by the two major political parties to ensure that nothing changed that all the stars stayed fixed in the heavens and all the crooks in Congress defended their incumbency.

Looked safe outside. No cops, no Weird Dude Walking. The sun was about half an hour from hitting the tops of the trees on the western mountains. In September, dusk arrived quickly and the shadows stretched longer and longer until they tangled in dark armies. It was nearly six o'clock, which meant the bell in the steeple of the Free Will Baptist Church would soon sound its Sunday call. Birds twittered in the surrounding trees, as sacred a music as any that had ever droned from a church organ. If the birds were talking, that meant everything was normal, despite the eerie flutter in the pit of his stomach.

Alex went out onto the deck, binoculars in hand. Through a cut where the road wound among the trees, the Smith farm was visible. Focusing the lenses, he saw me new Smith woman, the redhead walking toward the barn. Alex didn't like spying, because it was too close to what the CIA practiced against its own citizens. But survival instinct told him there was a big difference between being nosy and being informed. As he watched the redhead veered to ward the fence, then pulled back as a clutch of goats came trotting toward her from the rear of the barn. Probably the same damn goats that had eaten Weird Dude Walking.

Alex shortened the lenses so he could scan his fence line. The spot he'd repaired near me garden was still intact. He'd fantasized about planting some sort of booby trap, maybe a razor-studded spring that could be triggered by a trip wire. But the fence was technically on Smith property, and that would be crossing the line. Neighbors deserved a little extra tolerance, even if their livestock fed on old preachers as if they were a Jesus biscuit in a Catholic chow line.

Alex put down the binoculars. All was right with the world, at least his portion of it.

Then he saw the shed.

The doors were open, one of them hanging askew on a single hinge. The grow bulbs threw their blue-tinted light against the greater might of the orange sun. Something had forcibly broken in, or maybe out. Except there was nothing in the shed but...

Thirty-seven beautiful creatures. His babies. His family.

Alex hurtled down the deck steps three at a time, the binoculars swinging from the strap and banging against his chest. One of his paranoid fantasies was that someone would learn about his hobby and try to rip him off, a fellow stoner who didn't groove on the righteousness of karma. That's why he was careful in choosing his customers. And the government was to blame for criminalizing a harmless flower and linking it to violence and theft, when it was put on earth to be shared in peace.

He ran the fifty feet to the shed and looked in, barely able to breathe. Most of the pot plants had been ripped up by the roots, though a few bare and broken stalks poked toward the ceiling like skeletal green fingers. Stray leaves lay scattered along the floor, and one light fixture had been torn from the wall. The black plastic sheeting beneath the buckets was ripped and gouged. And on the cinder blocks that served as a step was a mucusy gray-white smear that could only be one thing.

Goat shit.

The fuckers had trespassed onto his land, broken into his shed, chomped down on the fruit of his labors. He didn't know how they'd circumvented the fence, but the ground was scarred by cloven-hoofed footprints. Alex, his heart pushing broken glass through his chest, followed the tracks behind the shed to the fence. There, the wire had been trampled as if pressed down by a great weight, dragging down several locust posts. The wire was pocked with tufts of goat hair, and the musky stench of a rutting billy tainted the air.

On the Smith side of the fence, leaves had been scuffed and scooted around. Clearly evident against the dark humus was the imprint of a horseshoe. As if some rider had urged his horse to stomp down the fence and allow the goats access. Maybe the horse had even kicked in the shed door for them. Alex was sure that, if he checked beside the padlock, he'd find the arc of a horseshoe em bedded in the wood.

Alex wondered if Weird Dude Walking was no longer walking. Maybe he'd mounted up in order to make better time. On whatever road he was headed down.

Didn't matter.

The Dude had fucked with private property. And so had those creepy-eyed, stink-making, beard-pissing goats.

The Bible said to forgive trespasses, but Alex didn't hold to the Bible. In Alex's belief system, trespasses meant one of two things: either you build a bigger fence or you go after those who didn't re spect boundaries.

Alex went back to the house, to the walk-in closet that held his arsenal. There was hell to pay and Alex planned on delivering the invoice.

He only takes one.

That had been the way of Solom for as far back as the legends reached. All a body had to do was keep his head down, stay inside, and wait for somebody else to get claimed. That philosophy had served Arvel well for sixty-eight years and counting. As a boy, when he'd first seen the Circuit Rider on the little goat path that led to his Rush Branch fishing hole, he had managed to escape for some reason. He'd tried to tell his dad, a no-nonsense, up-with-the- sun Free Will Baptist, about the encounter, but Dad cut him off at the first mention. The Circuit Rider wasn't real, and that was that, and no amount of blabbing and blubbering would change that. Except Dad's wrinkled-raisin face had grown as pale as a potato root, leaving Arvel to figure that Dad must have had his own little run-in with the dead preacher.

Arvel had kept himself scarce for the next two days, feigning a bellyache so he wouldn't have to go to school or do chores. That wasn't much of a stretch, because he was so nervous he puked every time a spoonful of food hit his gut. From the bedroom he shared with his brother Zeke, he could see the Smith barn, and under the moonlight shadows sometimes moved in the hayloft. He'd clamp his eyes tight, but one of them would end up creeping open like the lid of a vampire's coffin. He didn't sleep much those two days.

Then, his brother didn't come home from school. The county schools had buses, but the Wards and other kids in their area had to walk a mile down to the river to catch one. The bus stop was a fa vorite spot for shenanigans, with a dozen kids of different ages killing time with jokes, pocketknife stretch, and the occasional round of post office or show-me-yours-and-I'll-show-you-mine. Zeke had taken up cigarettes, another favorite pastime at the bus stop, but none of the other kids dared smoke. Of course, that made Zeke the idol of the dirt-road neighborhood, but he also knew he would get his rear end worn to a pile of rags if the folks caught him. The kids said he showed them the pack of cigarettes that morning, unfiltered Viceroys in a shiny pack he must have swiped from the general store.

As big a show-off as he was, Zeke thought he'd best slip off into the woods to do his puffing. Arvel guessed his brother was just as afraid of coughing and hacking in front of the others as he was of being spied by an adult. Whatever the reason, Zeke went into a lau rel scrub and lit up. The kids watched for the trail of smoke to be sure that Zeke wasn't joshing them, then turned their attention back to their games. It was only when the bus rolled up and one of the kids hollered Zeke's name that they realized he'd been gone way too long to just smoke a cigarette.

Arvel's best friend, J.C. Littlejohn, had gone into the laurel to find Zeke. The bus driver honked and the other kids shouted names, according to J.C, but Zeke didn't come out of hiding. J.C. found him sprawled on the ground, belly down, the moist butt of the Viceroy inches from his lips, the ember on the lit end burning a hole in a dead leaf. Zeke's Kedd sneaker had lodged in a protruding root and he'd tripped. Freak accident, the county coroner said. His forehead hit a tree trunk and snapped his neck back, killing him instantly.

And Arvel's first thought upon hearing the news: I'm glad the Circuit Rider took him instead of me.

He was having a similar thought now. Betsy had come home from the hospital and was going to be just fine. That was the trou ble. Arvel had been hoping that Betsy would be the one the Circuit Rider took this time. Not that he wished ill of Betsy, but after all these years, he was still so sweat-shaky scared of the Circuit Rider he'd rather die a thousand different ways man end up done in by the Circuit Rider. Because them that the Circuit Rider claimed had a way of showing back up.

Arvel had seen his brother a decade after his death, when Arvel was newly married and had taken over running the farm after Daddy's final stroke. Arvel made a habit of keeping watch on the Smith barn, and his adolescence was haunted not by his brother's fluke accident, but by the shifting wedges of darkness that seemed to cavort just beyond the sunlit windows. On a cold March morn ing, when Arvel was on his way to slop the two hogs, Zeke was standing by the collard patch, barely visible, wreathed in the fog as if he were woven into it. His head lolled to one side like an onion hanging by a piece of twine.

"Soon as he finds his horse, you can come join me," Zeke said, the words seeping out of the mist as if growing up from the dirt. "Gets lonely over here waiting."

Arvel dropped the slop bucket, splashing sour milk, table scraps, eggshells, and apple peels on his jeans. He ran back into the house, where Dad saw the smelly clothing and whooped him for spilling the slop. Dad sent him back out to retrieve the bucket, and Arvel had no choice, you didn't cross Dad on pain of death or worse. Zeke was gone when he reached the spot by the collards. Arvel didn't look too hard for his dead brother. Instead, he found an excuse to hang around the house or work in the barn for the next several days, only venturing to the garden in broad daylight.

And even through the fear of that encounter, another thought had pierced through like sunshine through a church's plate-glass window: I'm glad it was him and not me.

Which is the same way he felt when he'd come into the kitchen and seen Betsy sprawled on her back by the stove. The gouge in her side was the mystery. The Circuit Rider wasn't known to mutilate his victims. Sure, they didn't die pretty, but almost always whole. Some said that Rebecca Smith had been taken by the Circuit Rider, but Arvel figured that was just a plain old car wreck on a twisty mountain road. Harmon Smith hadn't been seen in the days leading up to her accident, and it hadn't really fit the pattern of the preacher's rounds.

But he was back now, that was for sure. The first night that Betsy was confined in a Titusville hospital room, Arvel had lain awake until 3:00 a.m., listening for the sound of hoofbeats outside, his heart jumping every time Digger let out a bark. Once he'd gone to the window to check on the Smith barn, but the windows were dark and the moon was buried behind the clouds. Last night, he'd curled up on a couch in the hospital waiting room, a magazine in his lap as if he were expecting a diagnosis, and had napped just enough to have a nightmare of the Circuit Rider chasing him down the goat path from the fishing hole.

He poured a cup of tea for Betsy and checked the lock on the back door. He didn't know if locks would keep the dead preacher out. For all he knew, the door had been locked when Betsy had her little accident. She had no memory of falling or hitting her head, only a headache she compared to the one she'd had the morning after Arvel got her drunk on moonshine and became engaged to her the old-fashioned way.

Betsy was local, half Rominger and half Tester, and she knew about the Circuit Rider, like everyone else who grew up in these parts. She didn't talk about it, and didn't seem to connect her acci dent with the preacher's return. So there was still a chance that Betsy was the intended victim. The preacher could certainly do worse: Betsy was a decent cook and didn't run her mouth too much, she was beholden to men and honored the local traditions. She could can a mean batch of relish or sauerkraut, wasn't above butchering a chicken, and put up with Arvel's rumblings about once a month when he needed satisfaction. Arvel didn't know exactly what the preacher did with them after he got mem, but he didn't want to find out. All he knew was if he survived this time, he probably wouldn't live long enough for another turn of the Circuit Rider's wheel. And that was plenty fine with Arvel.

This was Sunday, the very day Harmon Smith had been killed all those years ago. If ever there was a day for the preacher to carry a grudge, this would be it. And no doubt Zeke would be out tonight, maybe hanging around the garden carrying a hoe or flitting through the apple orchard like a shredded kite.

He added a spoonful of sugar to the tea and carried it up the stairs, glad that he wouldn't be alone tonight.