The Croning

by Laird Barron

  This ancient farmhouse had been the Millers’ summer home until nine months previous when Don finally agreed to sell the Spanish colonial in San Francisco, which they had lived in and done business from two-thirds of each year during the 1970s, ideally situated as it was at the plexus of Michelle’s international travels. Don certainly preferred the hacienda in the city, a smaller, brighter, inarguably cheerier domicile, but ages ago his wife insisted they remove themselves to Washington State during the summers—the children required fresh air and an at least minimal exposure to nature.

  Of course, around 1980 with the kids going to college and both Don and Michelle receiving excellent offers from Washington-based institutions to work and teach, they’d divided their years nearly in half between the Bay Area and humble Olympia, with friends and associates by the gross pulling them in twain. Thus, the Millers never did quite become settled in either locale—an experience akin to migrating constantly between two familiar hotels on never-ending business trips.

  Now that quasi-retirement had segued into the real thing, it seemed prudent and sensible to relocate permanently. Living expenses were substantially lower and the country setting far more tranquil than in San Francisco. Finally, Michelle had expressed the ambition to conduct a genealogical survey of her ancestry, and the old farmhouse was literally stuffed with books and notes from generations as far back as the Huguenots’ expeditious retreat from Europe, although Mock family origins predated that era by an inestimable margin.

  Many a lazy afternoon found Don lounging in the porch swing, a glass of lemonade in hand, fanning himself with a good solid naturalism book while squirrels chattered in the trees and an occasional vehicle trundled past on the main road. The property, like most land in the Waddell Valley, originally belonged to a gentleman farmer, a Dutchman, who sold Yvonne Mock the parcel in 1902. God alone knew for certain when the house itself was built (however it was renovated twice), but rumor had it the foundation was laid in 1853, which placed it as one of the oldest surviving residences in Olympia. One could only imagine what its walls had witnessed. The surrounding field spread in an irregular rectangle for several hundred yards, hemmed by a rusty wire fence. Grass and wild-flowers and sapling birches overran the environs. Forested hills reared at the boundaries. Don’s black Labrador Thule went crazy chasing rabbits from one end of the property to the other.

  The closest neighbors were the Hertzes just up the road—a blond, ruddy family. Blonde wife; three or four blond, chubby boys; two blonde girls, the elder of the pair in junior high; all of them a matched set like a nest of goslings. Only papa Hertz with his rugged, sunburned face and unflinching Icelandic eyes seemed more than a Disney caricature made flesh. Dietrich was a dirt-poor dairyman, who’d sold off the majority of the acreage his dad, a second-generation farmer, had bequeathed as his legacy. Dietrich was down to a half dozen cows and the plot his house and barn occupied. A laconic fellow, he curtly tipped his hat to Don in passing and slid his gaze around Michelle, content to pretend she didn’t exist. She laughed and explained that was typical of salt of the earth, God-fearing men, certainly nothing for Don to bristle at. Besides, Dietrich appeared capable of ripping off her husband’s arms—My goodness, the size of his hands. Only auto mechanics, stonemasons and dairymen had hands like those.

  Misty Villa lay a quarter mile in the opposite direction. The greenbelt subdivision had gone in around 1969 and was populated by middle-class folks who lived in newish houses with vinyl siding and faux brick and rock exteriors. Don and Michelle were once acquainted with an architect who designed a modernized cabin at the end of one of the subdivision’s ubiquitous circle drives. They attended a few barbeques and cocktail parties, exchanged Christmas cards. The architect moved to Brazil in the early 1990s after being drafted by some corporation that built skyscraper offices and luxury hotels in the poorer regions of the world so the executives and business partners would have a clean, air-conditioned habitat while they organized and consolidated industry in developing countries. Dan something. The Millers hadn’t occasion to meet anyone else in the neighborhood; their friends lived chiefly inside the city limits of Olympia, Tacoma and Seattle, and to the four corners of the continent. They’d chosen the Waddell Valley precisely for that reason—close enough to whisk into town at a moment’s notice, but remote enough casual visits were unusual.

  This morning, Thule lay snorting and whimpering on the kitchen tiles near the back door that let out to a covered walkway and Michelle’s greenhouse. Last night’s storm had arrived in furious glory. Rain poured down the windows. Wind slammed the roof and rapped the doors, whistled in the gutters and the chimney. The buzzing transistor on the counter reported heavy weather was here to stay—three or four days minimum. High wind and flood warnings had already been issued for Pierce and Thurston counties.

  Don sat at the kitchen table in the predawn gloom. He wore his bathrobe and a pair of fluffy slippers and sipped a mug of instant coffee. The porch light shuddered with each savage buffet and momentarily dimmed as if plunged underwater. He listened for the sound of Michelle stirring from bed to make breakfast in advance of the kids’ arrival, but she was still sleeping it off, for which he was thankful. She absolutely never slept in, unless she’d been drinking or taking heavy duty cold medication, and even then she usually dragged herself out of bed to carry on. Carry on, carry on, was Michelle’s motto and Don could only surmise this comprised a Mock family tradition.

  Don knew precious little about the Mocks beyond hints and rumors. As with Don, Michelle’s parents died young: Theresa Mock (none of the women took married names) from tuberculosis contracted during an adventure in China at the age of forty-eight, and Landon Caine by a stroke eleven years and one remarriage later. Don shook hands with the parents during his own wedding, the sole occasion he’d ever seen or spoken to them. Michelle had made it clear early on that her familial relations were strained. She wasn’t kidding.

  On Holly’s sixth birthday, Michelle flew her (but not little Kurt) to a family conclave in New England, but as for Don, besides his brief encounter with the parents, he’d only met a younger sister, and before that, an aunt Babette; a mummified lady who dressed in basic black. Her eyebrows were permanently inked in lieu of the real thing. Babette Mock grudgingly consented to meet Don after she discovered he moonlighted as an antiquarian and a journeyman bibliophile with expertise in geomorphic history. In her declining years (that dragged on for two and a half decades) Babette had frequently toured the West Coast for rare manuscripts, which sounded far more interesting than the reality. Unfortunately, Don had been unable to procure certain texts pertaining to geophysical anomalies and that was the last they’d spoken.

  There were several other aunts, a bushel of female cousins and Michelle’s stepmother Cornelia, but no uncles. Michelle’s twin brother Michael had served as an Army sniper. The military loved his hands; stone steady were those hands, those steely fingers that once tapped the ivories of classical piano. No Millers possessed musical talent to speak of, although most suffered an acute appreciation of the sublime art, and thus Michael fascinated Don.

  The subject of Michael inevitably provoked a melancholy sigh from Michelle. Mom wanted to ship him to Julliard. Damn it, Mikey, you decided to be a lifer in the military instead. Selfish bastard. He and eight other soldiers were lost in a helicopter crash during a mission near the South Korean border in the fall of 1952. An eerie analogue to how Don had lost his own father a few years earlier. Mock men die young, his wife said with grim cheer whenever he’d pressed the issue. Don had last spoken to her brother over the phone when he called for Christmas. They’d vowed to buy one another drinks when Michael’s tour in Korea ended.

  Sometimes Don pondered on the sort of man Michael would’ve become if the rocket had spun eight feet to the port side. He imagined the clean-cut boy from the pictures in Michelle’s wallet coming home, eyes a bit wiser, face worn from the jungles and the worry, dressed now in the formal wear of a Beethoven or a Bach in som
e dim concert hall, bent over the keyboard of a grand piano while the gentry in the gallery leaned forward in their massed and breathless silence, hanging upon the movements of those fingers poised to work their prestidigitation upon the sacred keys, those same fingers that cradled a walnut stock and squeezed the trigger on God knew how many targets, had instead curled tight and black in the heart of a conflagration and were reduced to dust.

  Don was uncertain if this was the reason Michelle had had a strained relationship with her relatives, most of whom, obviously, were passed on to the Great Beyond. In any event, they’d almost never visited, seldom called, just sent the occasional handwritten letter done in script so cramped and esoteric, it proved unfathomable to Don’s weak eyes.

  Michelle, as per her custom from the first date onward, kept mum, except to say her relatives were odd ducks, and better off in Maine and New Hampshire. According to Michelle’s admittedly vague accounts of her genealogical origins, the sprawling family tree sank its roots in the Balkans, and to a minor degree, Eastern Germany and obscure territories along the Pyrenees. Researching that tree had become yet another of her all-consuming passions and appeared as if it might keep her occupied until the Reaper came to collect his due.

  Numerous photographs of the Mock clan decorated the parlor; more were scattered about the house on the landing and in various alcoves—the formal kind where the men stood rigid as wooden posts in top hats and coattails, and the women sat primly in dresses with bustles that made their rumps resemble cabooses; everybody posed and shot against featureless backdrops. An austere and decidedly unfriendly lot, judging by their sallow, joyless faces.

  Don’s own family were Midwesterners, lapsed Catholics, mainly. His younger brothers were long-retired attorneys. His elder brothers, now dead and gone for several years, or so the rumors had it, were odd ducks who’d gone the route of iconoclasts and professional dilettantes; however most of the family worked in law offices, museums and private schools. Lots and lots of curators and English professors in the Miller line. He joked that family reunions resembled conventions of J.R.R. Tolkien fanatics; everybody wore tweed, smoked a pipe and smelled of chalk dust.

  The most interesting of the lot were benevolently eccentric and this disappointed him. All of the truly remarkable persons, persons of zest and vibrancy had died, like his parents and war-hero grandfather, or vanished, like his elder siblings, consumed by time and life unceasing. Maybe that was one’s reward for coloring outside the lines. His attraction to eccentricity, while being somewhat of a fuddy-duddy in his own affairs, was likely the secret to sixty years of marriage with Michelle. She was precisely loony enough to keep his heart racing.

  Cold hands fell upon his shoulders and he spilled coffee onto his robe. Michelle kissed the top of his head where the remnants of his hair held the line. “Whoops. Better trim that hair in your ears, yeah?” She tweaked his lobe to accentuate her point. “I’m going to get dressed. Put more coffee on, will you? And peel some potatoes. There’s a dear.”

  “Ack!” Don wiped at the widening stain. “For the love of Pete, don’t sneak around like that! This isn’t the jungle, y’know!” He called after her shadow as it floated up the staircase.

  4.

  Saturday was also Don’s day to walk the dog around the tree farm on the other side of Misty Villa. He dressed in sweats and a windbreaker and pocketed a can of pepper spray as a precautionary measure. The packs of roaming neighborhood dogs were unpredictable and vicious, thus a circuit of Schneider’s Tree Farm was as potentially fraught with peril as stuffing ham sandwiches into his backpack for a hike across the Serengeti. Don knew this because he had seen them cruising the byways and the unfenced yards—a border collie, a poodle, a beagle (although Don suspected the beagle was just along for the ride) and two or three mixed breeds—and, more succinctly, because the pack had once chased him from the mailbox to his front porch.

  The quarter-mile walk went slowly, Thule hell-bent on sniffing every bush in the ditch and then hiking his leg for a squirt.

  The subdivision was arrayed around the streets of Red Lane & Darkmans like a body on a crucifix. The biggest and boldest house in the neighborhood belonged to the Rourkes, half a block in. Barry Rourke was an executive for AstraCorp (and thus one of Don’s current bosses), his wife a semi-retired cellist and fulltime gadfly who played with the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, and their home was very old and ponderously stylish; a Victorian number raised months after the First World War. Then Red Lane and Darkmans were the only lanes, and made of good, honest dirt. The woods had lain even deeper and darker in those days when wolves roamed the forest, and black bears and cougars from the hills, and according to the coots at the Mud Shack, the occasional escapee from Wharton House, the old asylum that got shut down in the ’90s. The wolves were long gone, the feral inmates shipped off to Western or wherever, but coyotes still laired in the woods; deer, and of course the packs of dogs that swelled with the inevitable wave of abandoned pooches each frantic tourist season and encouraged people of wisdom and prudence to arm themselves for the daily stroll.

  The Rourke manse and environs had history, all right, were fairly steeped in it like an old blackened tea bag left to wither at the edge of a saucer. Don had several occasions to venture inside the house during the late ’70s and early ’80s—Kirsten Rourke threw frequent and lavish parties and because Don was a minion of AstraCorp at the time, Michelle was invited into the Friday afternoon pinochle club for awhile, and of course, Rourke invited Don over periodically to indulge his impulse for slumming with the help. The place was imposing and decorated in a museum-quality fashion that discouraged touching a blessed thing on pain of arousing the housekeeper’s ire.

  One could scarcely move in a straight line without tripping across metastasized lumps and growths in every cavernous room, the benighted accretion of ineffable superiority through breeding and fortune: Circassia walnut Victrolas dredged from the wreckage of East India Company outposts; Flemish oak paneled armoires brought West in the face of marauding red devils; wicker baskets threaded by the cracked fingers of villagers long subsumed unto the dull gray chalk that collects as a mantle over everything everywhere; oil paintings from estate sales and private auctions; Ming vases and Tiffany lamps; Kirsten’s million-dollar shoe collection, an affectation she’d contrived after following the exploits of Imelda Marcos. Rourke collected Western European medieval art—swords, shields, ragged banners and a library of withered books behind glass. Rourke knew a bit of Latin and recited Olde English poetry when he got drunk, or, as Don suspected, when he pretended to be drunk.

  Rourke had been an affiliate member of the John Birch Society; an amiable elitist, a masterful badminton player with a savage left-hand serve. He subscribed to Foreign Policy and a clutch of peer-reviewed journals pertaining to historical research societies of which Don had scant knowledge.

  Back in the day when everyone was young and busy, sometimes Don had seen one of the Rourkes in passing when he walked down his own long bumpkin drive to fetch the mail or the paper from the roadside mailbox, the old star route, as the postal workers dubbed them—Kirsten cruising in her Jaguar, squiring the two-point-five children (twins Page & Brett, and Bronson Ford the adopted boy from a village in Angola) to or from recital (soccer, ballet, gymnastics, chess club, etc); or Rourke, in his mega-sized diesel pickup, which sounded like a piece of industrial equipment idling in the yard on blustery mornings—and he would wave or nod in greeting. If the elder Rourkes weren’t too preoccupied they’d usually return the favor. The platinum blonde girl had regally ignored him (her brother, also a blond, died tragically; Don never heard the particulars), although Bronson Ford sometimes turned in his seat to stare through the rear window, impassive as a totem mask.

  The dry breeze quickened as Don trudged by the Rourkes’ iron gate. When had he last spoken to them? Ages—Kirsten was shriveled as a prune. Don chuckled wryly. Ah, but haven’t we all? Too late to speak with Rourke now, anyway. The smug bastard had vanishe
d in the Olympic Mountains years ago. Very mysterious circumstances. There were rumors of banking scandals, embezzlement, a Cayman Islands account. A number of folks agreed Rourke probably parachuted out of his loveless marriage and collapsing business empire and ran out the clock on a tropical beach.

  Don scrutinized the lengthy gravel drive, the looming outlines of the house and the dazzles of glass and metal through the hissing trees. Shadows rose and fell like inhalations and a man, probably a gardener, in a shiny red shirt flickered briefly across a swath of razor-precise green lawn and vanished when the shifting branches clasped leaf to leaf.

  Don and Thule continued down to the cul-de-sac and its trio of pedestrian homes. A footpath curved into the shallow copse of alders and termite-bored stumps of fallen pines and a man had to watch his step for the all the mounds of dog- and horseshit. About two hundred yards farther on, the trail intersected a dirt road, a combination of rutted gravel and mucky sand, that divided and divided again like the spokes of a wheel and cut numerous paths through the many acres of tightly packed dwarf evergreens; none crowned more than eight feet tall; a veritable forest of Christmas trees.

  The farm had been around since forever; it was a formidable enterprise bordering a stretch of the distant Yelm Highway and sprawled inward from there in the shape of an irregular fan some four miles wide at the junction of its service road and the path from the Misty Villa Home Owners Association. The road was popular with joggers, dog owners and rowdy teens on dirt bikes. Dirt bikes, four-wheelers and the like were expressly forbidden, not that such edicts ever discouraged kids hopped up on testosterone, and drunken rednecks who’d achieved the adult instar stage, from roaring around the track after dark, tearing up the place and leaving beer cans everywhere.

  A wooden sawhorse with a peeling gray placard was jammed upside down into the teeth of a row of trees near the entrance. The placard shouted in huge, black letters,