The Farm

Chapter Five

Mouse doodie.

Sarah Jeffers ran her broom along the baseboard of the counter. The counter stood by the front door of Solom General Store and was dark maple, the top scarred by two million transactions. Most of the lights were turned off for closing time, and the dolls, tools, mountain crafts, and just plain junk that hung from the ceiling beams threw long shadows against the walls. After all her years as proprietor, the aroma of tobacco, woodstove smoke, Dr Pepper, and shoe polish had seeped into her skin like balm.

The store had been built during the town's heyday just before World War I, when the timber industry made its assault on the local hardwoods. The train station had been a bustling place, bringing Sarah's grandparents to the mountains from Pennsylvania. The Jeffers, who had once gone by the family name of Jaffe, built the store from the ground up, collecting the creek stones for the foun dation, trading and bartering for stock, even breeding their own workforce. They were Jewish but no one paid that any mind, because they kept closed services in their living room and the store remained open on both Saturdays and Sundays.

When the forest slopes were nothing but stumps and the timber cutters moved on, the sawmill shut down. After that, it was like the hands ran backward on the clock. The earthen dam slowly eroded on Blackburn River, and the little housing settlement that sprang up around the mill began succumbing to the gray and ceaseless weight of gravity. Though the first Fords had made occasional visits over the dusty mountain roads, mostly driven by lumber barons who wanted to check on their investments, the town's slow exodus was almost entirely via horse-and-wagon. By the Great Depression, Solom was little more than a whistle stop on the Virginia Creeper railroad line. Then came the great 1940 flood, sweeping away the station and a third of the remaining houses, killing a dozen people in the process.

Sarah's grandparents died within weeks of one another, and the three children fought over who had to stay and run the store. The short straw belonged to Sarah's father, Elisha, who promptly took on a Primitive Baptist wife, Laurel Lee, because she knew addition and subtraction and silence. Through it all the general store stood on its little rise above the river, the stock changing with the times. Chesterfield tobacco pouches and Bugler papers gave way to Marlboro tailor-mades, horehound stick candy disappeared from the shelves in favor of Baby Ruths. A Sears & Roebuck catalog by the register once allowed a mountain family to order practically anything a New York city slicker could buy, but that had been re placed by a computer during the Clinton era. Sarah didn't trust it, had even named it "Slick Willy" and suspected it of swallowing a dollar once in a while, and the screen stayed black unless Gretta, the thick-ankled college student who worked part-time, was on the clock.

The computer was one of the few modern touches, besides the sheer volume of cheap imported crafts designed to look folksy. The wall adornments—rusty advertising signs, farm implements, and shelves of old ripple glass bottles—furthered the illusion that the general store was lost in time, a nostalgic reminder of more carefree days. Sarah didn't buy the illusion, but she sold it. Times were better raking in leisure dollars than dunning the local folks for nickels.

Sarah had grown up in the store, dusting the shelves and tally ing pickled eggs in her plain cotton shift. She remembered when the store's first indoor toilet was installed, and though as a four- year-old she'd had a great fear of the roaring flush of water, shed had an even greater fear of hanging her bare bottom over that stinky black hole in the outhouse. Even back then, she'd pushed a broom, and had asked her mother about the numerous little black needles amid the stray hair, spilled sugar, dried grass, and dirt.

"Mouse doodie," Laurel Lee had said. "A mouse goes to heaven in a country store."

Sarah had always thought of those mice as happy, blessed creatures, scurrying under the floorboards, worrying their way through sacks of feed grain, chewing into the corners of cornflake boxes. But after nearly seventy years of sweeping up their damned doodie, she was about ready to wish them to a Baptist hell.

But at least the mice gave her something to blame when strange sounds echoed through the aisles. She didn't like being in the store alone, but she could barely afford her two part-time helpers. So she'd spent the past decades running the broom, ignoring the evi dence of her ears, and not thinking about the scarecrow man.

The bell over me screen door rang. It was ten minutes after seven, past closing time, but she hadn't locked the door. The porch light bathed the deck in yellow light, and Sarah squinted against it at the bulky shadow.

"Howdy," she said. It was still tourist season in the mountains, though the Floridians and New Yorkers were usually tucked away in their Titusville hotel rooms by now, afraid of getting a mosquito bite, or else squirreled away in their Happy Hollow rental cabins at $150 a night. The kayak and rafting trade from Sue Norwood's lit tle shop had boomed a little along the river, helping me general store keep its head above water. Seemed like every time the busi ness wanted to sink down to the sandy bottom and take a nice, long nap, some moneymaking scheme came along and dragged it back to the surface for another gasp.

The shadow stood in the door, hands in pockets, the head ob scured by an outdated hat with a wide brim. All Sarah wanted was to get a little of his money and send him on his way in time for the latest rerun of Seinfeld, delivered via her little satellite dish.

"Can I get you something?" she said, glad to be shut of mouse doodie for the moment. Her voice had developed a mountain twang over the years, partly unconsciously and partly to help sell the illusion.

The figure shuffled forward. People in these parts, even the vis itors, usually answered when addressed. But occasionally a creep came through looking for the best place in the neighborhood for fast money. She did a mental calculation, figured she had maybe eighty bucks in the register. Worth killing somebody over, these days.

Sarah leaned her broom against the counter, flicking her eyes toward the shotgun she kept on the second shelf beneath the regis ter. The shotgun was well oiled but hadn't been fired in twenty years. Currently it was covered by stacks of the High Country News, a free weekly that was such wretched oatmeal she couldn't give it away. She'd hidden the newspapers, not wanting to disap point the friendly young man with the crew cut who delivered them early Thursday mornings. She figured there were at least two months of bad copy between her and the firearm.

She'd have to talk her way out of this one. "Got a special on canned ham," she said. "Nine dollars. Let the missus take an evening off from the kitchen."

Nothing, not even a grunt. The man was three steps inside. She wished she'd left more lights on. It was the electrical cooperative's fault. In her father's day, the Blackburn dam had a generator, cranking out enough juice to light up the store and two dozen homes. Then the co-op came in and hooked five counties together, and you had to be on the grid or off, no in between. After that, the power bill had gotten higher every month.

Sarah could make out the man's form now, the collar of his coat turned up even though the fall had yet to turn chilly. The front brim of the hat was angled down, keeping the face in shadows.

The stranger stood there, his breath like the whistle of a distant train. Something creaked in the hardware section, in the back cor ner of the store that Sarah avoided after sundown. Things went wrong in that corner: alakaline batteries leaked boxes of nails busted open for no good reason, the fingers of work gloves some how grew holes. Her father had sold guns, and the ammunition used to be locked away in that corner, but one afternoon some of the bullets somehow got hot and exploded, sending lead fragments whizzing over the heads of the customers. Sarah wished for a magic bullet right now, one that would knock the stranger's hat off his head.

Because the hat didn't belong.

"Your first trip to Solom?" Sarah said, keeping her voice steady. She eased toward the counter, closer to the register and the shot gun. She'd been driving some tacks into the shelf so she could hang her metal signs, the ones that said a bad day of fishing beats a good day of work and I ain't old, I'm just experienced. She leaned on the counter with one elbow, her other arm reaching for the hammer. It felt good in her hand.

"You staying up at the Tester B-and-B?" she asked the mute man. "Or the Happy Hollow cabins?"

Sarah brought the hammer closer to her hip, imagining its arc as she brought it into the dark, unseen face. Her lips creased into the tired, welcoming smile she gave to first-time customers, an expres sion meant to elicit pity and a desire to help out a little old lady by giving her money. "You ain't from around here, are you?"

The stranger stepped into the light, lifted his hat, and smiled. "Once I was," he said, in a voice as patient as a river and as deep as a subterranean cavern. "But that was a while back."

Sarah dropped the hammer, nearly breaking her big toe.

Jett didn't have an appetite, so Katy put her to bed early after checking for signs of drug use. Her daughter's respiration and pulse were slightly elevated, but that could have been from the fright. Jett's eyes weren't bloodshot but were wild and frantic, and they kept flicking toward the corners of her room and the closet door.

"He was tall," Jett said. "Wearing black, with an old hat."

"Let's talk about this after supper, honey."

"Can I leave my light on? Please?"

"Sure."

Jett had never been afraid of the dark, not since the age of three. Katy felt guilty for leaving her upstairs, but she had to salvage din ner before Gordon arrived. She was reluctant to tell Gordon about the incident. As conservative as he was, he would want to search Jett's room. It was a showdown in which everybody would lose. Besides, Jett said she had quit drugs, and Katy gave her daughter the benefit of a doubt. People changed, and they changed a lot faster when they were new and still learning to be people.

Suppose there had been a man dressed in black? Katy had heard the boots walking on the loft floor, and they'd sounded much louder than goat's hooves. She didn't want to think about it. A goat made more sense than a stranger in black. Odus Hampton wouldn't have skulked around, he would have called out in his friendly but deferential voice.

"Why don't you read something?" Katy said going to the book shelf. "How about a comic book? 'Sandman.' That sounds like it could put you to sleep."

"Mom, you're so out of it."

"Music, then?" She scanned the row of CDs. Jett had raided Katy's collection and plucked some of the most rebellious titles. Here was Patti Smith, the manic street preacher warning people away from the golden stairs of heaven. Kate Bush, a reclusive genius whose voice could seduce and excoriate in the same breath. Siouxsie and her Banshees, who smothered you with sonic layers that were as sweet as funeral flowers. The Psychedelic Furs with their manic saxes and dismal lyrics. Jett had some newer music that Katy was unfamiliar with, Angelfish and Bella Morte.

Katy knew what it was like to be twelve. She'd been there once, and not so long ago. Decadence and doom seemed like perfectly reasonable pursuits for a girl on the verge of becoming a woman, as long as it was confined to the realm of rock 'n' roll. But, in a quirk that secretly pleased Katy, her daughter had also sneaked a lot of upbeat guitar pop out of Katy's collection: the Replacements, dBs, Let's Active, Tommy Keene, and Robyn Hitchcock.

"I just want to lay here and think," Jett said.

" 'Lie here,' " Katy corrected.

"Yeah, I was going to say that, but I'm not lying. I really saw him."

Katy sat down on the edge of the bed and felt Jett's forehead. Clammy, no sign of a fever. "Okay, we'll see about whether you're up to school tomorrow."

I want to go to school."

"New friends, huh? A guy?"

Jett twisted her lips into a "yuck," but her eyes narrowed into a secretive expression. Without her dramatic eyeliner and face pow der, Jett looked innocent and girlish. Her careworn teddy bear, Captain Boo, was tucked against her chin. If only those who judged her by her boots and chains and dyed hair with the purple streak could see her like this, Katy thought, maybe they'd give her a break.

Like that would ever happen. Katy had a hard enough time keeping Gordon off Jett's case, which had nearly been a deal- breaker after his sudden proposal. It was only after Gordon agreed to give it some time and let Jett deal with the transition in her own way that Katy accepted. Jett even admitted she wasn't a serious Goth. Hers was more an act, a Goth Lite traveling show that would have been tiresome to her if it didn't upset some people so much.

That was the part Katy understood and supported. Despite her former career as a loan officer, very little else about her was ordi nary. She'd always had an unhealthy self-image, the scrawny red head with freckles, and she'd compensated by going out of her way to be a "somebody" in school. Sometimes that meant beating out a girl on the volleyball or cheerleading squad, and a couple of times she'd resorted to stealing one of the more popular girls' boyfriends. Because she considered herself unattractive, she had to engage in behavior that was a little more extreme than that of her competi tors.

So she could cut her daughter some slack. Besides, Katy wasn't exactly jumping into her new role as farm wife as if it were a second skin, despite a newfound fondness for Smith family recipes.

She pulled the blankets up and kissed Jett's forehead. She thought about asking if Jett wanted to say a prayer, then realized how phony that would sound. Jett would shoot her down by asking how come they never prayed in Charlotte. And, she'd add, what was so freaking great about Solom that deserved special thanks?

"I'll come up after supper and check on you," Katy said. "Or you can come down if you feel up to it."

Jett turned to face the window, hugging Captain Boo tightly. "I'll be here. Unless he comes to get me again."

"Honey."

"Never mind."

Katy rose from the bed. If she had the guts, she would tell her daughter about the mysterious figure she'd seen in the kitchen, the wispy form that had vanished in the pantry. But Katy wasn't ready to admit that the vision was real. No footsteps had sounded on the stairs when she was home alone, and the sudden scent of lilacs hadn't drifted across the kitchen whenever she performed a domes tic task. This was an old house, that was all, settling wood and seeped-in aromas. Maybe she'd leave her own mark for the next generation: blackened cabbage and funky salmon.

"If it really was a man, Gordon will probably know him," Katy said, not quite believing her own words. "He'll know what to do."

"

Sure, Mom." Jett didn't believe her at all. " love you."

"Love you too." Sounded like she almost meant it.

Katy went downstairs into the kitchen, where she scraped the cabbage into the garbage. Perhaps she should dump the mess outside, but she wanted to get something on me table before Gordon showed up. She rummaged in the fridge, then with a sigh retreated to the safety of the freezer and a microwave TV dinner. Gordon's first wife, Rebecca, had never used a microwave, and Katy sus pected the one she brought from her Charlotte apartment was the first to ever emit radiation in this house. Perhaps this meal was an affront to the generations of Smiths who had gone before.

"Get used to it," Katy said.

Something crashed in the pantry.

"Wonderful." She punched up the proper cook time on the key pad of the microwave. She couldn't handle cabbage but she was magic with instant meals.

With the microwave whirring behind her, she went to the pantry and pulled back the curtain. The aroma of lilacs was so strong it was like a slap in the face. Rows and rows of Mason jars lined the shelves, containing raspberry preserves, chow chow, sauerkraut, and a dozen other goods all expertly canned by Gordon's first wife. Enough to last a nuclear winter.

On the floor, juice leaking from shards of curved and gleaming glass, was a jar of pickles. Broken like the spaghetti sauce. As Katy knelt to pick up the largest pieces, she felt the curtain stir behind her, as if someone was through with business in the pantry and had chores elsewhere.

Jett listened to Mom banging around in the kitchen. She tried to muster a little sympathy, because Mom was trying to be some kind of trophy wife and didn't have the sense to recognize it just wasn't in her blood. Mom had just been plain uncool lately, a slave to the kitchen, fussing over the house, keeping dirty laundry off the floor. All to please Gordon, a man who wouldn't notice his slippers were on fire unless somebody turned a hose on him.

She tugged her Walkman from the lower shelf of her bedside table. She almost wished she had a joint. That would go over well with the Cure whispering through the headphones, Robert Smith going on about how he couldn't find himself even when he was in love with someone happy and young. No wonder, he should ditch the "happy" part and find a real woman. Jett would gladly volun teer.

After all, Jett was a drug-addict loser who had finally gone so far over the edge she was imagining mystical encounters with giant scarecrow men. If she had been stoned, she could have laughed it off. But she had promised Mom that drugs were a thing of the past, a habit left in Charlotte, and she was determined to keep the promise. If Mom could change, so could Jett. Though it looked like neither of them were changing for the better.

The front door closed downstairs, and over the guitar solo she heard Gordon's belly-deep professor's voice delivering his standard catch phrase. "Where are my favorite girls?"

Jett wormed deeper beneath the blankets. Gordon never entered her room after she was in bed thank goodness. That was one advantage of his being a religious guy. He had some weird Old Testament code that kept women in their place but also placed them on an altar. Mom had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. After Dad's neglect, any sort of attention was a cause of mindless joy for her. Not that Dad was a bad guy. He just had his own fuck ing shit to deal with, truckloads of it, and Jett wished she could call him right now. She needed somebody real to talk to, somebody who would understand about stupid scarecrow men.

But what would she tell him? She couldn't really remember. The whole thing in the barn seemed like a bad acid trip, and Jett knew about acid because she'd dropped it a second time at Melissa Sanderson's fourteenth birthday party. She'd spent the whole night hiding under Melissa's bed, talking to the dust bunnies. The weird est thing was that the dust bunnies had talked back, and they even acted like bunnies, hopping around, frolicking, twitching their lit tle whiskers. But that was a lifetime ago and a whole other person. That had been a stupid, skinny kid trying to fit in with the crowd.

Now she was trying to fit out of the crowd.

She cranked the Cure up to full volume and put the blanket over her head so Mom would think she was asleep. She wouldn't sleep. She didn't dare. Because, if she closed her eyes, she might see the tall, dark man with the sickle.

Somehow, morning came just the same.