“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 little 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 scarecrow’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 houseful 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 non-stop. 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, continuing to harvest ears as if hordes of locusts were swarming.
“Miss Katy seems right nice,” he 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 snakebelly road to his caretaker apartment, then down the soft and hazy river of 80-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 lingered 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 basket 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 saving 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 wallet 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 200 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 by 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.
CHAPTER NINE
Eggs over easy.
That was what Katy was thinking as she went down to the barn, just as the dust from Odus’s Blazer settled over the driveway. Gordon had a half-dozen guinea hens and they laid little brown eggs almost every day. The nesting boxes were arrayed across the front of the barn, screened with chicken wire tied in a series of hexagons. The nests had little holes carved in the front and covered with rubber flaps so the gatherer, in this case Katy, could reach an arm into the dark box and feel around in the straw for eggs. Gordon had explained the design discouraged possums, foxes, and other lazy ovum-stealing predators.
But that didn’t make Katy feel any better about reaching through those black little curtains that looked all the world like sharp, rotted teeth. At least she didn’t have to go inside the barn, where the goats had spooked her and Jett had suffered some sort of delusion.
The farm was too quiet. She’d expected a big change from the city, but she had imagined barking dogs, crowing roosters, badly-tuned tractors, and the rattle and clank of distant, rusty machinery. This was autumn. Where were all the chain saws turning hardwood forests into firewood?
The guineas were strangely hushed in their boxes and the goats watched her as they usually did, standing stiff-legged in the field, their beards drifting slightly in the breeze, ears flapping at the flies. In her mind, she imagined them skinned for meat, their oblong pupils regarding her from the slope of their skinned skulls.
She shook the woven basket farther up her left elbow and reached into the first nest. Gordon didn’t have names for the hens, so Katy thought of them collectively as “Martha.” The first one was ‘M,’ the second one ‘A,’ and so on. If they were fryers instead of laying hens, she couldn’t bear to name them. It was bad enough just eating their eggs. Even though they were unfertilized, it was hard not to think of the yolks as little abortion victims. She had never considered such a thing before, despite being a lifelong omelet lover. Funny how being on a farm made you more aware of and connected to the food, whether it was the seeds that grew into turnips or the steers that turned into ground round.
“My, M, you must be feeling your oats today,” Katy said, finding two eggs in the first nest. She laid them gently in the basket as M clucked in either motherly anguish or pea-brained hunger. Katy peered through the chicken-wired slot at A in the next box. All she could see was the serrated, black-and-gray pattern of the hen’s feathers. A’s head was tucked under one wing, making her look like a soft wad of thrift-shop rags.
“Okay, girl, here I come.” Katy reached her arm into the curtained slot. She felt around in the straw, finding nothing. Maybe A was sitting on her egg. The hens sometimes did that, driven by an instinct stronger than the memory of all the previous unhatched eggs that had gone before. Katy felt the soft downy feathers of A’s chest, and then slid her hand underneath.
She nearly broke her wrist snatching her hand free. Something coo
l and scaly had writhed away from her touch.
It wasn’t a chicken leg. This thing had rippled.
Did snakes eat eggs? Could one have crawled through the curtain, or dropped onto the wire from above and slithered into A’s nest?
Katy didn’t know, but she wasn’t about to stick her hand in to find out.
But what would Gordon say when he saw only two eggs in the refrigerator? He would ask why, and Katy would have to say “Chickenshit.” Because she was too chickenshit to stick her hand into the nests. And Gordon’s forehead would furrow slightly, accompanied by a gratuitous, understanding, demeaning smile, all the while his eyes saying, “I thought I’d found a replacement for Rebecca but all I got was this skinny Irish redhead who can’t even pluck an egg, much less a whole chicken.”
“Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit,” she said to herself. She had placed a moratorium on cussing because she didn’t want Jessie picking up the habit, but she was alone and who gave a good goddamn what the goats thought?
She looked around for something to poke into the nest. Maybe if she could get A to move, she would be able to see the snake. Or whatever it was.
God, please let it be a snake, because, sure, they are scary as seven hells, but at least snakes live and breathe and are listed in zoology catalogs.
Katy was about to give up, to go out into the cornfield to find Gordon, when she remembered the pitchfork inside the barn. She hadn’t mentioned the scarecrow to Gordon, because he would have laughed. And she had been scared out of her wits by Jett’s strange bout of amnesia. And then there was the goat that had somehow locked itself in the loft.
The barn was a place to avoid. Nothing good seemed to happen there. Just ask all the livestock that had been slaughtered over that straw-scattered floor, that had been decapitated and strung up on chains and turned from livestock into deadstock.
But the pitchfork was a weapon. If she could hoist a skewered snake before Gordon, show off her grit and determination, then perhaps Gordon would at last accept her as a suitable replacement and draw her into his arms at midnight, accept her and take her and finally make her his wife.
Besides, next to a confrontation with a snake, a little trip inside the barn was nothing. The pitchfork was hanging twenty feet from the front sliding doors. She could be in and out with barely enough time to smell the trampled manure. And once she had the pitchfork, even a goat wouldn’t scare her.
She set the basket on top of R’s nesting box and went to the sliding doors. The oaken, crudely planked doors were suspended on rusty wheels that rolled across a steel track overhead. The left one was partially pulled back, and cool air wafted from the opening. The mid-morning sun cut an orange sliver into the darkness, but the great, hulking black beyond gave off an almost palpable weight, like oily water held back by a dam.
Twenty feet. Ten steps max, each way.
She leaned against the edge of the left door and shoved. It slid across its track with a metal scream. The sun poured in at her back like a sacred ally. She was sweating, though the temperature was in the fifties. She looked into the pasture. The goats seemed curious and faintly amused.
“Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit.”
Katy squinted into the barn, trying to locate the pitchfork on its wooden-pegged resting place.
Twenty feet. She could be there and back before you could say “Children of the Corn, Part Thirteen.”
Now she saw it, hanging among some coils of rope, a thick length of rusted chain, a strange set of clamps that looked like a medieval torture device, and a crooked-handled scythe whose blade was brown with age. She didn’t remember the scythe from before, but it didn’t look like an effective weapon against a snake.
She stepped into the barn, breath held. Eighteen feet to go. No biggie. Six yards. Not even as far as a first down in football, and she didn’t have eleven steroid-inflated males trying to stop her. All she had was her fear.
Another big step and she was on the dividing line between sun and shadow. One of the goats bleated behind her, and it sounded terribly like laughter. Another joined in, and another, and Katy screamed as she ran, “Chickenshit, chickenshit, CHICKENSHIT!”
Then she had her hands around the rough, grainy handle of the pitchfork and she was pulling it from the wall and it felt good and right and powerful and she could take on any damned snake in the world and she was already halfway back to the bright square of the barn door when she happened to look up at the wall above the loft stairs.
There hung the scarecrow, fully articulated, its straw planter’s hat resting on the gunnysack head, the bone-button eyes catching and reflecting the sun, burning like autumn bonfires, staring bold and red and hellish, and Katy don’t know what she screamed, it may have been “Chickenshiiiiiiiit,” but the sound was swallowed by the dry timber of the walls and the hay bales above and the packed dirt below and the pitchfork bounced to the ground and Katy was running across the yard toward the house where Gordon’s dead wife might be drifting around the kitchen and tears were streaming down Katy’s face, the goats were joined in a chorus of gleeful laughter, a snake was in the henhouse, but all she could think of was the two eggs in the basket, those sad orange yolks and twin chicks that would never be born.
***
Mrs. Stansberry had to stay after school for a meeting, so Jett rode the lame-o school bus home. She sat near the front with the first graders because she didn’t want to be teased by Tommy Williamson and Grady Eggers, who sat in the back and ruled their keep like warlords. Grady had toned down a bit since yesterday, when he and Jett had suffered their mutual acid flashback in English class. But Tommy was still Tommy, and he tried to play grab-ass with her whenever she wasn’t paying attention and drifted within reach.
The bus was half-empty when it reached her road. She wrestled her book bag down the steps and the bus was pulling away when Tommy called from the rear window. “Hey, shake it for me, Plucky Duck.”
She flipped a middle finger without looking back, then checked the mail. Phone bill, Mom’s October issue of “Better Homes & Gardens,” a seed catalog, a Honda dealership circular. At the bottom of the pile lay a crisp white envelope. She recognized the handwriting right away. Dad’s.
Jett slipped the letter into a pouch of her backpack, her heart racing. The sun felt brighter and warmer somehow, and the wildflowers along the ditch were more colorful. She skipped a few steps, scuffing the toes of her black boots on the gravel. The Wards’ dog barked at her, and she resumed walking, albeit at a faster pace. She didn’t want creepy old Betsy Ward to call to her through the kitchen window.
Betsy wasn’t inside the house this time. She was down by the little garden shed, holding a pair of hedge clippers. The shed was by the ditch and Jett would have to walk right by her. She kept her eyes on the rocks in the rutted road, wishing she could will herself into invisibility like Sue Storm of the Fantastic Four comics.
“Good news?” Betsy said.
“No, just some magazines,” Jett said, figuring she could stop for twenty seconds and go on her way without seeming rude.
“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t wear make-up.”
Jett had been raised to respect her elders. Except, as Mom had said, when they were obviously full of crap. “Mom says it’s okay.”
“You come from Charlotte, I hear.”
The old woman said it in a knowing manner, as if Charlotte were the only place you could buy black eyeliner and purple hair dye. “I was born there.”
“What do you think about Solom?
Jett shrugged. She saw little point in telling the truth. Betsy probably saw the world beyond the county borders as a strange and unholy land, fraught with terrorists, gangland shootings, adult bookstores, and kids dressed in black. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “Kind of quiet.”
“Be glad of the quiet.”
“Well, I’d better get home. My mom’s expecting me. Been nice talking to you, Mrs. Ward.” Like hell.
Jett was already on
her way again when Betsy’s next words stopped her. “See the horseback preacher yet?”
“Preacher?”
Betsy was grinning like a possum that had just eaten a dozen hen’s eggs. “About the time of year for it. He comes galloping into town to grab mean little girls and boys and drag them off to the jangling hole up on Lost Ridge.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Ward. I don’t go in for spook stories.”
“You will.”
Jett hurried on up the road, Betsy Ward’s cackle behind her. She couldn’t help eyeing the barn on her way to the house. She didn’t believe in spooks. She only believed in hallucinations.
If she had a joint, she would have sneaked into the bushes and fired it up, despite her promise to Mom. Solom was making her uptight, and she didn’t like it. And why be uptight when nature offered several substances that served no other purpose but providing artificial relaxation? And where nature came up short, chemists had picked up the slack and came up with a whole alphabet soup of drugs. She had never tried ecstasy or angel dust, but those substances had floated around the big consolidated schools of Charlotte.
Good one, birdbrain. Try to kill the anxiety of a drug-induced hallucination by taking more drugs. Sort of like drinking yourself sober. Sounds like something Dad would dream up.
Instead of running from her problems, she could face them head-on. March right into the barn and up those stairs into the loft, hammering the hell out of her boot heels so the monster or the seven-foot-tall creep or the carnivorous goat would know she was coming and—
Actually, the joint was starting to sound better and better. But she didn’t know how to score in this backwoods tractor graveyard. She’d probably have to be friends with rednecks like Tommy Williamson if she ever wanted any connections. The thought made her shudder.
Mom’s Subaru was in the driveway, as usual. Mom was becoming a real homebody, a change for the weird. “We don’t have to change who we are,” Mom had said, when convincing Jett that marriage would be a positive move for both of them.
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