by Alison Stine
“The Church?” I looked over at him.
Grayson pointed. “It’s right there.”
I pulled into a driveway before a house, indistinguishable from all the other houses. The lawn looked neglected, the grass matted and pale where it showed through snow. When we got out of the truck, I noticed most of the houses had patchy lawns. The cold had killed them, or the homeowners had given up. Newspapers piled on the porch of the neighbor’s place. I thought of Lisbeth’s house. Had they sold it, rented it? Was their porch filling up with snow?
On the farm, we didn’t pretend that we lived anywhere nice. Lobo barely mowed the grass, just a strip by the vegetable patch that he let get thick and high before he wrestled with it, and he only bothered so we could access the tomatoes. Most of the land had grown up into jewelweed, poverty grass, and thorns, gone its own wild way. The farmhouses looked like toys out in the country, dotted on the landscape, tiny pieces on a complex board game. Sometimes I used to comfort myself with the fact that if we let it go, left it all behind, nature would just take it back, bust weeds through the windows, shoot Virginia creeper down the halls. That was back when we had a summer.
We had reached the front door of Grayson’s place. I had helped him up the walk. He removed his arm from around my shoulders and said: “Thanks. This is good. Thanks for your help.”
“Are you sure you want me to go? You should at least take some of those vitamins with you.”
“That’s okay. Thanks. I feel like an idiot.”
“Well, do you still need wood?” Then I stopped, because Grayson had gotten the door open, and it had opened wider than he had intended, unveiling a dim and claustrophobic living room.
There were pizza boxes on the floor, more gray newspapers and stacks of mail, a smell of sour milk and dust. Clothes were slung over the back of the couch, the cushions rumpled with sheets. Someone had been sleeping there, in front of the dark fireplace.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Grayson tried to close the door. “Thanks again for your help. I can take it from here.”
“You live alone?”
He didn’t look at me. “The Church.”
“The Church?”
“My folks couldn’t find a renter for the house so...when they left with The Church, I gave up my place and moved in here.” He sighed, launching into something I could feel he didn’t want to tell me. “The plan was I would stay here and work until The Church got settled. But business at the restaurant hasn’t been great. My shifts keep getting cut, and you can’t walk anywhere from here. It’s not like there’s a bus. The plan was...” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“I guess I’m not doing so great here on my own.”
“Why were you chopping wood?”
“The bills were too high. They shut off the gas. I still have the microwave, for cooking.”
“But you don’t have any heat.”
That was the other thing I felt, standing in the doorway of Grayson’s house: a cold so sharp it cut me. A chest-hurting cold, cold that made it hard to breathe. That meant the heat hadn’t been on for a long time. Cold had crept into the folds of the drapes, into the cracks in the floor. I tried to imagine sleeping in that kind of cold, how it crawled under the skin.
I had been calling Lisbeth since the vans pulled away. Her daddy’s cell rang and rang. Her parents wouldn’t let her have her own phone—a worldly distraction, they said. Both Lisbeth and my mama, the two most important women in the world to me, were cut off from me. By men. Had Grayson been able to reach his folks?
I looked again at the clothes, the sheets and pillows on the couch beside the black and still fireplace, littered with ash. The sheets were flowered, which somehow made them sadder. The quiet of the house pressed down on me. I thought of my own house, empty, the farm growing quieter and quieter with each cold day. Grayson and I had both lost people.
“Get your stuff,” I said to him.
* * *
He protested but not for long. He apologized, as if he had done something wrong. Only fallen behind, that was all he had done. An empty milk carton could turn into a trash pile in days, I knew. Rust could take a tool left out overnight. Just for a little while, I told him. Till his foot began to heal. I had the space. And I had heat.
I helped him load up. He didn’t want to take much: clothes, books, a backpack with a beat-up laptop. “I should tell you,” I said when I saw the laptop. “We don’t have internet out at the farm. My mama and her boyfriend—they’re old-fashioned. And paranoid. They like the wilderness. Peace and quiet. Being remote. Plus, they didn’t want to pay for it.”
“Do you have cable?”
“No.”
I knew how it sounded. In a town that included The Church, this absence marked my family as the strangest of all. Mostly, even the dirtiest double-wide, the smallest shack, windows streaked with soot from the last cooker blowout, had a flat-screen: giant and blaring. Appalachian halos, Lobo used to call the blue glow that came from all the households watching TV at night. It must have made him feel good—superior—to have resisted this one pull, this single wicked thing.
“It’s nice,” I said. “You notice things in nature. But we’ve kind of been sheltered.” I thought of one of Lisbeth’s old neighbors, near the bar. They had broken windows, no time or money or inclination to fix them, but they also had a hummingbird feeder on a hook, which they always kept full of red sugar. “You get used to it.”
“Wait a minute.” Grayson hobbled back into the house. Soon he came back, one last box in his arms. Wires poked out.
“What is that?” I asked.
“A ham radio. It was a project for Boy Scouts.”
“You were a Boy Scout?”
“Not a very good one.”
We drove away from the house. Grayson looked back only once. I felt a strange sort of sadness as he did. It was years ago, when I had lived there, before Lobo, before growing. I had collected cereal box tops for school; watched TV at night with my mama, wrapped in an afghan against her shoulder, listening to the neighbors’ fights through the walls. My own folks’ fights were over. My folks were over, stale as smoke.
But everyone fought in those hills.
We passed a decommissioned school bus on the side of the road. It had been spray-painted white, almost indistinguishable from the landscape, except for its blinkers flashing red. Someone knelt in the runoff next to the bus and fixed a flat tire. Inside, the bus was packed to the roof with blankets and boxes. They must have been running, fleeing somewhere. An orange cat stared at us out the back window, perched on an upside-down basket.
We had almost reached the farm before I spoke again. “Do you know where they went?” I asked Grayson.
He turned away from the window, looking at me.
“The Church. Your folks. Did they tell you where they were going?”
“No. Somewhere warm. That was all they said, all they were allowed to say, I guess. I wasn’t a member, so... They didn’t tell me much. But The Church had been planning this, sort of. Planning a move.”
“How were they planning it?”
“Well, they were preppers. They were stockpiling things. Guns and stuff. But they weren’t prepping for this. They were prepping for, you know—the end of the world. Brimstone. That’s a little different, I guess. They weren’t prepping for winter. Just a long, shitty winter. Winter forever.”
I stared back through the windshield. The road was a monochrome rainbow of white: new snow, gritty packed snow, and a slick salted tongue of ice. It was slow-going. I thought of Lisbeth around a campfire. I thought of her sleeping in her shoes because The Church had taught her that the world might end at any moment, and she needed to be ready to run.
Grayson said The Church had prepared with guns, believing the world would end with fire. When they left for Californi
a, Mama and Lobo had taken the one taped under the dining room table.
But there was still a gun buried in the yard.
4
I expected Mama and Lobo to be there, even after a year on my own. Every time I turned off the rural route onto the dirt and gravel driveway—more and more, mostly gravel and ice—my shoulders tightened. I braced for the anger and silence, my mama moving quickly from one drudgery job to the next, her fingers flying. No time for anything, even for me. No time for thinking about what kind of life this was, what we had gotten ourselves mired in. She never stopped, except when she didn’t move at all, when she collapsed, chemicals trickling through her blood, eyelids slammed shut like diurnal poppies.
I still thought I’d see Lobo near the house, mute and focused, chopping wood, the ax above his head like a lightning rod. Mama taking laundry from the line strung from the porch to the peach tree, shaking the dried clothes because they had stiffened in the cold. Some part of me was stunned not to hear the ring of the ax.
I pulled up close to the farmhouse. I could see it through Grayson’s eyes: gloomy and bare. When things broke, we didn’t really fix them. We wedged cardboard where the broken glass had been; we stuffed rags in the drafts from the door.
“Well, this is it,” I said.
Grayson didn’t say anything. I showed him inside and nodded at the woodstove. “I’ll get the fire going. That helps a lot.”
I found myself apologizing. Some of the rooms had been shut off this year, to avoid heating them. I told him not to open any closed doors. I told him that included the basement.
His eyes flashed immediately to the door. Small and peaked, under the stairs like a portal, the door to a kingdom.
“Just don’t,” I said.
He knew what my family did. He didn’t need to see it.
I put his stuff in Mama and Lobo’s old bedroom, slinging his duffel bag down on the bed, on the quilt they hadn’t taken. Get the memories out. Get it over with, I thought. I thought the room might as well be used. I opened up the curtains. A flourish of dust, like a flock of birds taking off. Had it only been a year?
In the yard below the window rusted an old bathtub, once used for watering cows. It was edged in ice. At the bottom of the tub was a puddle of darkness, frozen solid. Once I had seen a fawn bed down beneath the window. I had not wanted to open the curtains the rest of the way, not wanted to startle the deer into running.
It had been a year since I had seen a fawn alive.
Grayson wandered into the room behind me, cast thudding on the wood floors. He was a loud ghost. I left him to look around, and started a fire in the stove like I had promised. I waited until the kindling caught, then fed the first split logs in. When I heard the crackle and felt the warmth, I straightened.
“I’ve got to go back to my own place,” I called to him. “Unload a few things. Phones don’t work so great around here. If you need anything before I get back...” I paused.
“I’ll come down to your house,” Grayson said.
He couldn’t, not with that injury, but we left it at that. I drove home, wondering what I had gotten myself into.
I didn’t know him; I had just met him; I felt sorry for him. These long days, longer and darker since Lisbeth left—they would only get darker and colder still. Grayson knew what Lobo and my mama did for money, what I did. Everyone knew, really. But knowing and seeing were two different things. I had brought Grayson to the farm, endangering everything.
Now he knew where the farm was. Now he could find it, or lead someone to it, or tell the wrong person about it without even realizing what he had done.
I could hear Lobo’s voice saying these things in my head. But what was the danger now? The plants were gone; I had shipped them off. Harvested myself, done the finger-cramping work of trimming alone, though I could have hired waitresses from town—Lobo liked to use girls because our hands were small and quick, and waitresses always need money, he said. I had carefully hung the plants, cut in Y-shapes, onto clotheslines strung around the farmhouse to dry. For days, the house had smelled heady and dewy, like a fairy kingdom. I had weighed and spilled the piles into brown paper grocery bags. The bags felt so light—it was part of the magic feeling; money from nothing—the weed was almost weightless.
But a nothing worth thousands of dollars.
Still, Lobo would have been angry that I had forgotten what our lives were like. What we could and could not do.
I parked the truck in the lower field by my tiny house, and unloaded the groceries and supplies. The house was built on a trailer Lobo had bartered off some guy for clones. He and Mama had liked the thought that the house could be hitched up to a truck and moved. When Mama and I had lived here, he had liked the idea that he could inch us ever closer. When I stayed on in the shack alone, she liked the idea that I could go.
But in all those years, the house on wheels had never moved.
Weeds had grown and died around the hitch, which was rusted. Some of the wheels looked stuck in mud, though I had kept the wheels full of air, at my mama’s insistence. Frozen, mud was becoming another substance entirely: solid, unforgiving as stone. You could crack your teeth on it. We used to have mud season in the holler, when the snow thawed and the river and the creeks swelled their banks.
Back then, mud was an annoyance. Mud got everywhere, drying, then crumbling on the truck floorboards, spackling my hair, sucking down my boots. Sometimes, in the kinds of springs we used to have, I felt I could taste mud in my teeth.
But we had never before had such hardness, such cruelty, from mud.
Inside the narrow entrance of my house, I took off my gloves. Not a lot of room left in the nooks and cabinets for the extra supplies. My eyes fell on the pile of mail I had dumped on a shelf and ignored the day that Lisbeth had called, telling me she was leaving. I had ignored a lot since then. Now I sifted through it. Junk, bills—those were still coming; despite the weather, companies still expected to be paid—a catalog, a postcard.
I glanced at the picture, a nothing image, a stock photo of palm trees, flat-fronted buildings, and a green lawn, then I turned it over to see the careful handwriting, printed like a child. Her handwriting. Mama.
She had written. She had found a moment away from him to write.
There was a return address on the postcard. Arcata, California.
I read the postcard. I pocketed it and got back in the truck.
* * *
Grayson was staring at the fire. He looked hopeful when I opened the farmhouse door. I thought again: What had I done, what had I done, letting a stranger come here?
I didn’t waste time. “There’s been a change of plans,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you have to go.”
He stumbled to get up, his boot clumping on the floor. “What’s going on?”
“I have to go somewhere, and you can’t stay here alone.”
“Well, when are you coming back?”
“It’s not like that.” I shifted in the doorway, my shadow casting a long finger into the room, a column of darkness falling over him. “I have to be gone for a while. I have to shut up the farm. I’m taking my house.”
I had not, until that moment, decided to take the tiny house. But it would save on hotels. It would be safer at night than sleeping in the truck, I realized, and I wouldn’t have to worry about squatters while I was gone. My mama and I wouldn’t even have to come back to the farm, if we didn’t want to, if he wouldn’t let us. I had certainly paid for the tiny house in my labor. I could pay for it again, if I had to, in cash, with the money from the last harvest. The harvest I had done myself.
“How’s that going to work?” Grayson said.
My hand was starting to feel heavy on the doorknob. “Look, I’m sorry but you have to go back home. Something’s come up and I have to leave.”
“What’s going on?” He wasn’t giving up. He
had nothing waiting for him. A cold house in an empty neighborhood. A job with no shifts. No car. He couldn’t walk very far with that cast. “Where are you going?” Grayson said.
“To go get my mama,” I said.
“Can I come?”
* * *
Lobo had buried the gun in the yard years ago, when Mama had moved into the farmhouse with him and was worried about me finding it. She and Lobo had had a big fight, screaming that rattled the windows. I hid in the woods. Lobo buried the gun and then forgot, or said he forgot, where it was, so when things were smoothed over again, when he had won that argument, or when he had exhausted and humiliated her from speaking up about it anymore, Lobo got a new gun at the gun show and duct-taped it under the table in the dining room.
This gun would not be so hidden from me, only from intruders, the sheriff. If a business associate got rowdy, it would be within reach. He needed something for protection, he said. All of the dogs had run away.
I knew where the old buried gun was. A handgun.
I had watched him bury it. The fight about it had lasted all day, and Lobo had buried it at twilight, Mama watching from the house, a shadow in the doorway, slender as a bat. He had buried it in the wild, unmowed yard below the house. I hid a few feet away, screened by whip-thin forsythia and joe-pye weed, prickers that sank their teeth into my legs. The coyote chorus was beginning at my back. Later that summer I would find a calf skeleton near that same spot, in a pile by a stump, clean bones folded like clothes.
But I didn’t know about bullets, where some might be around the farm. I could buy some, if I needed to—at a gun show, maybe at the flea market. Would I need to?
Grayson followed me out to the yard. The wind wormed its way under my collar. I picked up a shovel from its leaning place by the door, Grayson watching as I pushed my heel on the shovel, slicing into the earth. It was more difficult than I expected, more difficult than it should have been for September. The ground was hard. We could see our breath, and even the clouds of our breath seemed to carry snow.