The Farm

Chapter Eight

Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church was a one-room wooden building that sat on a crooked row of concrete blocks. The white paint had curled away in places, and the thickness of the chips showed the age of the church. The grounds were well tended, and the waterway that gave the church its name ran barely twenty feet from the front door. A deep pool at the base of a short waterfall made for convenient dipping when baptisms were performed.

David Tester ran a Weed Eater around the wooden steps. Like most rural mountain preachers, he had a real job during the week. David owned a landscaping business, which never would have made it had it not been for the seasonal home owners who had nei ther the time nor the inclination to do their own yard work. David saw it as a sign from the Lord that outsiders belonged in Solom. Since the Primitives believed in predestination, David didn't have to worry about converting anyone. Their names were either listed in the Big Book or they weren't, simple as that.

Gordon Smith, the college professor, had asked him why his de nomination still held services when there seemed to be no ultimate goal. To David, the goal was to live right and to get along, and reg ular church services couldn't hurt. Besides, this was a community church, and though families could now pile up in a car and drive to one of the fancy churches in Windshake or Titusville, most of the locals preferred to go to the church where they had been raised. The congregation was aging, but that was true of all the old Baptist subdenominations. Seemed the kids didn't take to the Bible the way they used to, and David could hardly blame them.

The Weed Eater's thick fishing line plowed through the ragweed and saw briars that sprouted along the building's foundation. The buzz of the gas-powered engine echoed over the hillside and a veil of blue smoke lifted into the cloudless sky. The rotating line hit gravel and a rock spun free, bouncing off the plank siding of the church. Shredded vegetation stuck to the shins of David's jeans.

David was about to trim around the old cemetery stones when he noticed a small dark hole in the ground by the first grave. He killed the engine and his ears rang in the sudden silence. He knelt by the hole. The grave was that of Harmon Smith, a horseback preacher from the 1800s. Horseback preachers traveled from com munity to community in all kinds of weather, staying with a host family for a week or two at a time. David admired the sacrifice of such men of God, though Smith had been a little scattershot in his beliefs. He preached to all denominations and according to legend had managed to fit his message to each without ever slipping up by trying to save a Primitive or letting a woman wash a man's feet dur ing the annual Old Regular Baptist foot-washing ceremonies. Then he'd gotten what the old folks called "a mite touched" and had become devoted to the idea of sacrifice, even breeding his own life- stock to serve as Old Testament-style offerings.

The grave hole was probably made by a mouse. David looked around for a rock so he could plug it. A mouse's den probably had a back door, but David didn't think it was proper for a creature to be crawling all around in the preacher's bones. Harmon Smith had earned his rest.

David went to the parking lot and found a fist-sized chunk of granite. He tossed it up, enjoying its weight. David had been a pitcher on the Titusville High School nine and still liked to play church league softball. He was approaching the grave again when he saw the twitch of a dark tail as it disappeared down the hole. Too big to be a mouse. And it was scaly.

Sort of like a David told himself that no snake would burrow into the ground on such a sunny day. It would be on a rock somewhere, absorbing the heat. David ran across snakes all the time in his landscaping work. They were mostly harmless, though copperheads and rattlers lived in these mountains and water moccasins could be found along the rivers and streams. David held the rock by his ear as he approached, ready to hurl it if a serpent's head poked out of the hole.

A truck passed on the highway, slowed, and honked. David lifted his left hand in greeting without taking his gaze from the hole. The truck pulled into the parking lot. David knew how silly he looked, standing in the little cemetery with its worn gray stones, holding a rock like some kid who was afraid of ghosts.

He tossed the rock toward the creek. The truck door opened and James Greene, one of the church elders, climbed down from the seat. He wore denim overalls and a plaid shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thin forearms with silver, wiry hairs. Greene pushed his Atlanta Braves baseball cap off his balding head, wiped at the sweat, then returned the cap to its usual skewed resting place.

"Hi, Elder David," James said.

"Elder James," David said in welcome.

"You tending to the grounds?"

"Even Eden needed a little clip job now and then."

"Hmm." James looked at Harmon Smith's grave, which had a depression in the earth at the foot of the stone. "The grass grows best over him that sleeps with a clear heart."

"The joyous day is coming soon," David said. "The elected shall rise up and walk with the Lord."

James noticed the dark hole. "Hey, look at that," he said.

"Figured it was a mouse. It's about time of year for them to start laying winter plans."

"No mouse. That's a copperhead tunnel."

"I never saw a copperhead in a hole before."

"Of course you ain't. Smart, ain't they? A lot of people think snakes are pure, dumb evil, but they know how to sneak. Do you know if you cut off a snake's head, the snake won't die till sun down?"

"I've killed one or two in my time."

"Some of them churches in Kentucky handle snakes during worship service," James said. "Pretty damn stupid if you ask me."

"There's a verse in the Gospel According to Mark that says if your faith is true, you can take up serpents and they will not harm you."

"Still sounds pretty damn dumb to me. Pardon my language, Elder David."

David kept his eye on the opening to the hole. He was trying not to think of the snake twisting through the moldy rib cage of the itinerant preacher. That seemed like a blasphemy that God would never allow. Maybe David could set some kind of trap for it, restore things to their proper order. If it be God's will, of course.

"I hear the Carters left the congregation," James said. "Took up with the Free Willers."

David wiped the sweat and stray bits of grass from his face. "Yeah. I talked to Benjamin Carter about it. He said with all the trouble going on in the world, he needed extra reassurance. Said it wasn't enough to just sit back and hope you were one of the saved. Said he felt better if he took matters into bis own hands a little. Of course, Rosie went along with him, like a good wife will."

"We're down to two dozen members, Elder David."

David nodded. Since the Primitives didn't believe in missionary work, there was no call to go out among the people and recruit new members. The younger generation had drifted away from all the churches, not just the Primitive subdenomination. Sometimes David watched those showy evangelists on television with their silk neckties and stiff hair and felt a little jealous. He wondered how he would fare out there onstage, where you felt the Spirit work in you as you exhorted others to take Jesus Christ into their hearts and be born again.

The Primitives had already been born into grace, according to their statement of beliefs, so believers had little to do besides wait around for the Rapture. Of course, the rituals at church helped soothe worldly troubles. And services offered fellowship, too, something still a little rare in the mountains, with the closest Wal- Mart over fifty miles away. The Solom General Store had a potbel lied stove and a little dining area, but loud tourists with their cell phones and cologne had altered the store's atmosphere, and in some ways, their money had taken it out of the hands of the community.

"The Lord will take care of it," David said. The collection plate had yielded more metal than paper over the last few months. David didn't preach for money, though he did accept reimbursement for the gas and equipment he used to maintain the church grounds.

"Folks around here could use a good miracle or two," James said.

"Amen to that." David fixed his gaze on the hole, which glared right back like a cold ebony eye.

Sarah Jeffers came to her senses in a dimly lighted room. At first, she thought she was in her bed on the second floor of the old family home by the store, because the light through the window had a late-Sunday-morning quality. Sunday was her sleep-in day, and her headache might have been caused by a couple of tall after-din ner sherries. Her eyelids were heavy, so she listened for the ticking of the antique grandfather clock downstairs. She heard nothing but a faint, irregular beeping.

And the smell was all wrong. Instead of aged wood musty quilts, and cats, the room had the crisp tang of antiseptic. She opened her eyes and blinked her vision into focus. The walls were white, unlike the maple paneling of her bedroom. The pillows were encased in vinyl and the bed was angled up like a lounge chair at the side of a swimming pool.

"Back among the waking," a young woman said. "How do you feel?"

"Get me a doctor," Sarah said.

The woman smiled. "I am a doctor. Dr. Hyatt. You're in Tri- Cities Regional Hospital."

Sarah closed her eyes. Doctors were supposed to be male and gray-haired. How could this urchin know the least little thing about the workings of the human body? She didn't look old enough to have ever dissected a frog, much less gone through medical school.

"One of your friends found you at your store," Dr. Hyatt said. "You were unconscious."

"And that's a bad thing, right?"

"A sense of humor. Good. 'Laughter is the best medicine' is not just a section in Reader's Digest. The claim also has some research backing it up."

"Then tell me a good one so I can laugh my way out of this hun- dred-dollar-an-hour prison cell. Let me out of here."

"It's not that simple, Miss Jeffers. It is 'miss,' isn't it?"

"I can't lay around here during store hours. I got customers to see to."

"We ran some tests while you were unconscious. You had symp toms of a stroke, but your EEG and CAT were fine and your blood pressure is that of somebody thirty years younger."

"Tests? Who signed for them? And why are these wires sticking in me?"

"The gentleman who called 9-1-1 said you had no next of kin. We followed the usual procedures for treating an apparent stroke victim."

"But I ain't been stroked, have I?"

"Not that we can tell. We thought you might have suffered a blow to the head maybe by a can falling from a top shelf. Or a robbery. But the register was untouched and the store appeared to be intact. Your friend called the sheriff's department and they checked it out. And you have no visible marks."

Sarah struggled to sit up, saw black spots before her eyes, and decided to try again a little later. "I hope somebody locked up. Half the merchandise will walk off otherwise."

"The deputies will take care of that. Your job is to get better."

The black spots coalesced behind her eyelids, turning into a shadow, a man in a black, wide-brimmed hat. She reached out for the doctor's arm and clutched it, afraid the image would still be there if she opened her eyes. The beeping accelerated.

"Are you okay, Miss Jeffers?"

"I seen him," she said.

"Your friend? He said you were unconscious, but you might have been partially aware of what was going on. It's not unusual during a fainting spell."

"No, before that. I seen him." Suddenly she wasn't in such a big hurry to leave Titusville and go back to Solom.

"Just breathe regularly," Dr. Hyatt said patting Sarah's hand until the beep marking her pulse became steady again. "Rest up. You're not going anywhere for a little while."

That sounded good to Sarah. She closed her eyes and tried to block the recurring image of the man tilting up his chin until the wide brim no longer hid his face.

Or what was left of his face.

Odus had stayed with Sarah for a couple of hours, but when the doctor reported that she was awake and alert, yet refusing visitors, he'd driven his Blazer back to Solom and the Smith farm. He had agreed to help Gordon put up some corn, though it hadn't quite gotten frozen enough to harden for feed. Now, ripping and twisting the brown ears from their stalks, he decided that Gordon's crops were Gordon's business, as long as the man paid cash. Odus was thirsty after the fright Sarah had thrown into him, and he'd picked up a quart of sipping whiskey from the Titusville liquor store. A few hours of September sweat and he'd have earned a sip or two.

Gordon usually left the grunt work to Odus, but today the pro fessor was pitching in, working the rows right alongside him. They filled bushel baskets and carried them to the end of the row where Gordon had parked his riding lawn mower. Gordon didn't own a tractor, though a metal relic from the horse-drawn days gathered rust between the barn and garden. Odus was thinking about what Sarah had said, about the man in the hat, when Gordon spoke.

"Guess it's time to take down the scarecrow," Gordon said.

Odus looked up at the form on the wooden crossbar whose head stood a good two feet above the dried blooms of the corn. It wore an old straw-reed hat that had been bleached by the sun and mottled gray by the rain, tied with twine to the feed-sack face. People in Solom were peculiar about their scarecrows, treating them like family members, using the same one from year to year. Odus had always thought it was some sort of good-luck ritual. The habit was to store the scarecrow in the barn, where it would hang on the wall and watch over the livestock during the long winter. Odus had been working for Gordon three years, and knew the usual time to tuck the straw man away was in late October, when the nights grew short and the wind rattled strange syllables in the leaves.

"A little early yet, ain't it?" Odus asked.

Gordon put a gloved hand over his eyes and scanned the clear sky. "There's a storm coming."

"Don't believe so. The birds aren't quiet and the mice are no busier than usual."

Gordon pulled off his glove, fished a handkerchief from his jeans pocket, and wiped his glasses. His eyes were glittery and un focused, and he looked lost. "I'm talking about a different kind of storm, Odus."

Odus plucked another ear and twisted it free with a crackle of ripped vegetation. He tossed it in the basket, then moved the basket a few feet forward.

"I don't know anything about that," Odus said.

"Do you know the scarecrow is more than just a trick to keep birds away?"

Odus didn't like the way Gordon's soft eyes looked past him to the pastures beyond. "Well, I'm not so sure they even do that worth a darn," he said. "I had to replant three times this spring. The little thieves just swooped on in here like nobody's business."

Gordon kept on as if he'd not heard Odus, who imagined that this was how the professor got when he was lecturing in the class room to a bunch of stoned-out rich kids. "The scarecrow is as old as domesticated crops. Way back to Babylonia, which many schol ars believe is the Garden of Eden of the Bible."

"I'm not much on history books or the Bible." Odus tore a cou ple of ears of corn free, reveling in the sweet starchy smell. "The first tells you what went wrong and the second tells you why. I pre fer to stay uninformed, myself."

Gordon put his glasses back, which eased Odus's worry a little. Odus realized what Gordon's naked eyes had reminded him of: the goats. They had that same heavy-lidded unfocused stare.

"The scarecrow wasn't always an outfit of clothing stuffed with straw," Gordon said, returning to work. "In the old days, a live man was tied in the garden."

Odus glanced at the professor, figuring the man was putting him on. Gordon's face was as steady as always. Come to think of it, Gordon had never cracked a joke. He seemed unable to laugh and even a smile looked like it hurt him some. "To keep birds away?"

"Well, that it did. Except other animals came, especially at night. A helpless man in the wilderness drew a lot of predators."

"Why did they do that? Punishment?"

"More than punishment. Sacrifice. A gift to the harvest gods."

"Sounds like something a heathen would do."

"It was widely practiced in many cultures. Germanic tribes used to spike their victims to a tree. In the South Seas, witch priests claimed their island deities called for sacrifices to appease their wrath. African kings killed those magicians who failed to bring the rain. The ancient Greeks had all manner of sacrificial victims, both to Diana, goddess of the hunt, and Ceres, the harvest goddess."

"Did they really believe it?"

"Blood makes the best fertilizer," Gordon said.

They were closer to the scarecrow now, and the coarse fabric of its face suggested a scowl. Odus couldn't be sure, but it looked to have changed position on the crossbar, its arms hanging down a lit tle lower. Ragged gloves had been attached to the flannel shirt sleeves with baling wire, and Odus thought he saw one of the gloves lift in a beckoning motion.

"The scarecrow is dry," Gordon said. "And it thirsts."

Odus swallowed hard. He thirsted too, and hoped the quart of bourbon would be enough to wash down the vision of the scare crow's wave.

"Well, I think we got enough to tide the goats over for a few days," he said. "Maybe we should leave the rest of it to cure a little more."

"The goats shall multiply if the blood is pure," Gordon said as if reciting the words to some bizarre sermon. The man had a house ful of books, and being a descendant of Harmon Smith was plenty enough excuse for being a little off.

"Looks like they've done plenty enough multiplying already. You'll need to cull the herd before winter, or you'll be spending a hundred bucks a week on grain. The does have been pretty much in rut nonstop. And you know how the bucks are, they start trying to stick it in anything that moves from the time they're three weeks old."

"The herd is a blessing," Gordon said ripping down ears of corn with both hands and tossing them toward the basket. One ear missed and bounced against the hilled furrow. Odus bent to pick it up, and when he stood, he saw the scarecrow lift its head.

The afternoon sun glinted off the ivory eyes. Before, the head had sagged, as if its owner was weary from a season on the spike, and its eyes had been hidden in the shade of the straw hat's brim.

"Really, Mr. Smith, I think we got plenty."

"What do you think of my new family?" Gordon asked, contin uing to harvest ears as if hordes of locusts were swarming.

"Miss Katy seems right nice," Odus said. "And your daughter— I mean, your stepdaughter—"

"She's my daughter now," Gordon said. "She's part of this place."

"Well, she seems nice, too. She stands out a little, but she don't seem a bit of trouble to me. You know how kids are, they just need to find their own way in the world."

"They shall be shown the way," Gordon said, lapsing into that sermon-voice of his, but Odus wasn't paying attention. He was watching the scarecrow, expecting it to loosen the ropes that held it to the crossbar, wriggle to the ground, and drag itself off to quench its thirst.

The bushel basket was full again, and Gordon stooped and picked it up by its wire handles. "Know them by their works, not by their words," he said.

"Sure, Mr. Smith. Whatever you say."

"I think we've picked enough for today."

Odus hoped his sigh of relief passed for a tired gasp. Gordon would slip him a tax-free twenty and Odus would be doing some slipping of his own, first down the snake-belly road to his caretaker apartment, then down the soft and hazy river of eighty-proof Old Mill Stream.

"But we still need to take down the scarecrow," Gordon said.

The scarecrow's form had slackened again, as if it were made of cloth and silage after all. Odus wasn't in the mood to touch it. This had been Harmon Smith's land, after all, and though the Circuit Rider hadn't been seen in a decade or so, sometimes bad air lin gered long after a dark cloud had drifted away.

"I've got to be off to Titusville," he lied. "Sarah Jeffers took a spell and she's up in the hospital. I ought to check in on her, seeing as how she got no kin."

"Sorry to hear she's not well." Gordon dumped the bushel bas ket into the wheelbarrow, which was overflowing with green- wrapped ears of corn, the tassels and tips of the shucks burned brown with frost. "Come back tomorrow and we'll take care of the scarecrow."

"Sure thing, Mr. Smith. Can you pay cash today instead of sav ing up my time until Friday?"

"Of course." Gordon removed his gloves and laid them across the staves of the wheelbarrow. He thumbed a twenty from his wal let and handed it to Odus. As Odus's fingers closed on the money, Gordon grabbed his wrist and pulled him off-balance. Though Odus weighed two hundred pounds, Gordon had leverage and an advantage in both height and weight. Odus found himself looking through the distorted left lens of Gordon's eyeglasses. Again Odus was reminded of the goats, and the professor's pupils seemed to take on that same narrowed and flattened aspect.

"Know them toy their fruits," he said, his breath rank with pipe tobacco and garlic.

Odus nodded as Gordon released him, then tucked the money in his pocket and headed toward the gate. He took one last look to make sure the scarecrow still hung on its stake. It did though the ragged brim of its hat was angled even lower, as if the stuffed head had dipped in a prayer of resignation.

He climbed in his Blazer and drove away as the goats came down from the pasture to see what Gordon was serving for lunch.