“Bucolia” was shortlisted for the 2024 Best in Rural Writing Contest by judge Dr. Chea Parton. Learn more about the contest here.
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Tucked away in the center of a sprawling cattle paddock, atop a gently sloping hill just off of old Route 12, there was a rickety clapboard farmhouse of roughhewn wormy chestnut, painted gray with grime by the elements and untold years.
The Jerseys milled about all across the pasture, right up to the sagging threshold, their long-lashed doe eyes blinking slowly in the syrupy autumn sun that oozed through the threadbare canopy of the sugar maple, still standing sentry over the abandoned homestead.
The old farmhouse was something of a paradox of my youth: it was both ubiquitous enough to be an institution in my life, something I didn’t give much thought to the origins of, much in the same way a New Yorker wouldn’t think to ask the origin story of Times Square, and also such an enigma that I found myself wandering out along the overgrown feverfew thickets and cracked concrete culverts that ran alongside Route 12 anytime my feet grew restless, inevitably and inexorably carrying me towards the rotting split rail fence at the bottom of the hill. There I’d stare up at its roof, red with rust, disintegrating like a discarded tin can, and count the individual boards of its façade, tallying up the number of hand-beaten, oxidized nail heads that must desperately cleave them one to another, four to a plank. How many hours did I spend, as a boy, wondering over the floorboards of the porch, how the footfalls of generations had worn them down and polished them smooth, even as they fractured with frailty? How many times had its portico materialized in my dreams, closer to a corpse than a house, with crêpe paper skin stretched over skeletal framework, sagging, dry, and gray?
That fall, I was eleven. Gage Gatesy was my best friend, and we were inseparable. Gage went to the Baptist School up in the Boxwoods, and the other Gravel Gully kids and I went to the schoolhouse next to the Social Services office. My parents didn’t care for Gage’s parents; though they were the rough equivalent to county royalty, Mama often remarked that they had more money than sense, and Pa’d grunt his assent before muttering balefully about soup sandwiches. It was something of a hike across town to his house for me, but he had a brand new candy apple red Schwinn Sting-Ray that would carry him out of the hills of the Boxwoods, all the way along Main Street and through downtown, then fly down into the industrial ghetto of Gravel Gully toward my house by the factory runoff in only nine minutes. Only nine minutes on a banana seat separated our worlds, but the air up in the hills was rare, and Gage’s parents thought that his habit of palling around with the likes of me, eschewing his sweater vests and crisply pressed pants for denim workshirts and worn duck boots was a rebellious phase, something to be waited out, careful never to encourage our friendship by doing something as outlandish as inviting me to their Sunday brunches, but for propriety’s sake always tepidly inquiring about my parents, and the baby, and how school was going, and could I believe they could hear that new horn at the factory all the way up here?
During the summer, when my father arrived home from the plant, inexplicably swaying with stupor despite it only being 5:12, scented of furniture lacquer and hops, and started in on Mama, questioning what she did all day in that derisive tone of his, while she looked up from her laundry basket with doleful eyes, folding his coveralls one-handed and patting my baby sister, carefully balanced on her shoulder, with the other, wearing her weariness like a rumpled apron, it was easy for Gage and I to slip out the front door, pulling our trainers on as went, and saunter downtown to play jacks in the alleyway with the other factory kids.
In the fall, nothing was quick and nothing was easy. Before wading out into the growing twilight, there were socks to put rightside-out, and boots to pull on, jackets to locate and zip up to our chins. There were wet leaves to stomp off of our shoes so Mama wouldn’t fuss over bringing the outside in, and layers to shed like second and third skins when we came home. The Baptist School didn’t let out until 3:30, so with our time already limited before the streetlights popped awake in lieu of summer’s fireflies, Gage and I decided, in that unspoken way boys do, that it made more sense to just go out and stay out, instead of waffling between out- and indoors, sliding in the back door for an apple or a fistful of Twizzlers like we had all summer long, Mama grimacing with each trip as she watched our grocery money dissipate like morning mountain fog into Gage Gatesy’s rotund chambray-clad belly.
It was an unusual stroke of luck, then, the first Saturday of October, that Gage’s cotillion class was cancelled and his mother was occupied running the completely un-ironic kissing booth at the Boxwood Baptist Fall Festival. A whole day all to ourselves after Labor Day wouldn’t come around again until the opening day of deer season, when all the menfolk would abscond into the hills with their Winchesters and our mothers would spend the day tidying their kitchens in confident preparation for the dirty work of processing their husbands’ spoils, hands dancing fretfully over freshly sanitized countertops with nervous energy at the distant sounds of igniting gunpowder.
Gage and I sat on the stoop of our four-square, fastidiously culling loose chips of mortar from between the red brick steps as we debated the best use of our unanticipated day of freedom, when the old house sprang unbidden to my mind.
“You ever been out to that old farmhouse on 12?” I asked, plucking the stem of sheep-sorrel I’d been chewing from between my teeth.
“The old Huntley homeplace,” Gage, ever the knowledgeable county boy, like he studied the county clerk’s records at finishing school, supplied. “Daddy been tryna buy that property for ages, but he says Tom Huntley’s a crotchety, spiteful ol’ thing won’t sell it. He wants to build a new house there under the maple with a big solarium and a bi-fur-cay-ted staircase.” He spat out each syllable like a foreign cuisine he found too spicy for his liking, the word grating uncomfortably against his clanging drawl.
For a moment I rolled the thought around in my head, considering it, trying to picture Emmaline Gatesy and her carefully Aquanetted-coiffure out among the cows and the overgrown pastures, the goldenrod springing up along the edges of her dignified antebellum that looked itself to have sprouted like some unruly weed from the foundations of the abandoned homestead. I shook my head, clearing the image from my mind, something too nonsensical and out of place to entertain.
“Daddy been leasin’ that pasture for damn near twenty years, said he wants to cut out the middle man once and for all,” Gage had continued on, unaware of my reaction, as was his way.
“Those your daddy’s cattle.” Comprehension dawned on me bit by bit.
“Somethin’ like two hundred head,” Gage said.
We had already begun to drift unconsciously toward the edge of town where the state-maintained roads gave way to rutted-out gravel, past the last vestige of modernity: the Bed of Nails salon where the gaggle of permed manicurists, with their hot pink talons curving tentatively around their Newports, perched on wrought iron benches just outside the aluminum door, its do-it-yourself sheet of reflective tint rippling with age and sun.
We turned onto Route 12 and my worn leather work boots, two sizes too big, flapped against the rock in time to the percussive beat of my childhood, a rhythmic criiinch-thwack-ksss. Fine dirt particles sprang up like ricocheting buckshot, a galaxy of stardust blooming in the early morning sunlight. Gage and I fell into step, easy banter darting between us about how my cousin Karl had started rolling his own homemade cigarillos with tobacco from Grandpa Kane’s field and what we’d do if we ever found the cache of smutty magazines that was rumored to be stashed away in a false wall panel in the basement of Boxwood Baptist.
“The high schoolers started a youth Bible study back when my daddy was a deacon, but turned out they were just meetin’ up to look at centerfolds while Pastor Donny’s wife made ‘em snacks. Some kinda genius, I tell ‘ya,” Gage rambled on, paying no attention, as was his way, to fact that I had peeled off from the shoulder, pulled as if by a tractor beam towards the fence, as the house came into view.
I sidled up to the split post, wrapped my arms around it, my boot resting on the bottom rung. The sort of frenetic buzzing that always filled my brain seemed to still whenever I was there, and I let my shoulders relax and sag while I filled my lungs with the fall air, just the smallest bite of frost painting my breath white against blue sky.
“Well? Come on then.” Gage interrupted my thoughts, and I looked over just in time to see him bend over, ducking between the fence rails, then striding confidently toward the base of the hill. Above him, the corpse of the farmhouse stared down at us. The barest breeze stirred an open second story window, and a shabby blue gingham curtain waved out of the gaping hole; I couldn’t shake the image of a tear sliding down the face of a skull.
“Gage!” I called, and realized I’d been holding my breath as he’d marched off, shocked at how quickly he’d covered so much ground. “What’re you doing?”
“Aw, c’mon, man, we all but own this place as it is,” he teased, but his words evaporated into the wind that kicked up now, carrying his voice far away.
Hurriedly, I hopped the fence, looping one leg and then another over the top rung before dropping down to the other side, where I paused, crouching, as though I’d stumbled onto hallowed ground.
The earth was packed down hard beneath my feet, dry fault-lines cracking and branching like lightning after a markedly drought-stricken summer. I scrambled up over the Appalachian quartz deposits pockmarking the hillside, dodging hardened cow pies as I went. When, frazzled and panting despite the chill, I summited, Gage was already leaning casually against the base of the gnarled maple, back to the house, his attentions focused on a hangnail. A feeling bubbled up in my chest, then bloomed across my cheeks in a scarlet stain. Was it…indignation? Anger?
Gage raised a critical eyebrow. “Why’s your face all screwed up like that?”
“I’m not sure,” I answered honestly, my palms turned up limply in apology. “Gage, I really don’t think we should be here.” There was an unintended edge coloring my voice; I felt the orbits of the house’s skull façade boring down on me.
“What, are we gonna encroach on the cows? Them’s my cows anyhow!”
Now Gage gathered himself up, prideful, as if I’ve challenged him, and stomped up onto half-collapsed boards of the porch. They shrieked and groaned their protest at the intrusion, threatening with every step to give way and swallow him whole. In one swift motion, he dropped his shoulder, ramming it into the chippy white paint of the front door. The hinges wheezed, and the doorframe cracked, and my breath caught in my throat.
I’d read in the secondhand Encyclopedia Britannica my parents had purchased at the Social Service rummage sale last year that in addition to mummifying their dead, drying their bodies out in mounds of salt, the ancient Egyptians would remove the most important organs from the body, preserving them individually, before enclosing them in canopic jars for use in the afterlife. As I rushed into the house, desperate to stop Gage, half from fear of getting into trouble, and half because some deep recess of my soul held this place to be consecrated, like the ark of the covenant, something to be consider in awe and wonder, but too precious to look upon with the eyes of a mere mortal, I was arrested by how static the air had become once I entered the foyer, how vaguely hazy the stirring of long-settled dust rendered the scene, altogether making me feel as if I’d stumbled into a still-life.
Sheathed in white drop cloths yellowed by age and freckled with spots of mildew, roomfuls of furniture, preserved for their afterlife, the organs of this corpse, gathered in a ghostly phalanx in the parlor. Inside of me, a rising panic fluttered madly against my ribcage. “Gage!” My voice was sharper. “We have to go!”
“You’re the one wanted to come all the way out here anyway. Ain’t you ever wondered what this place’s deal was?”
He didn’t pause to allow me to respond, as was his way.
“As for me, I wanna know what Tom Huntley got his pantaloons so in a twist over. Nothin’ here but a bunch of old crap. Literally.” Gage looked down to his brand new boots in disgust, and scraped a sludgy mass of cow dung from the sole of one, dragging it across the scarred pine floor.
“Gage,” my voice rose, cracking in that way that it did sometimes in school that made my cheeks burn crimson. It had been a mistake to come here with Gage, to assume that he’d appreciate something as decrepit as this place, that he’d be mesmerized by the magnificent decay, get caught up in the wonder of what it had been. The mystery had been better; here, now, with Gage, watching him clean the shit off his boots, I felt as if we were desecrating the temple.
“Gage,” I whispered this time. “You ever see Raiders of the Lost Ark?” Last year, my birthday fell on the film’s opening weekend at the drive-in, and Pa had taken me as my present. We’d sat in silence in his old square-body, shot through with rust, while he stole swigs from a bottle wrapped in brown paper and I sucked distressed breaths through my front teeth as quietly as I could manage.
“Naw,” Gage said back, his words louder than felt appropriate during a breaking and entering. He spun in a circle, looking up at the ancient beams overhead; a cowbird startled out of an eve and the shadow of its beating wings danced across the crumbling plaster walls. “Daddy said it was sac-ree-ligious. Nat-zees stealin’ God’s chest of drawers and all.”
“Something like that,” I muttered. “You hear what happened when the Nazis opened up the ark?”
Gage sighed heavily, and I could tell he was tiring of this line of conversation, as was his way.
“The ghosts obliterated them.” The longer I kept talking about Indiana Jones, the more the apprehension gripping me eased.
“What are you even talkin’ about right now, man?” As he said it, Gage flopped down onto the draped specter of a couch, sending a mushroom cloud of dust ballooning into the air. His sneeze—the booming, forceful sneeze of a child used to taking up space wholly unapologetically—for a moment obscured the cracking sound of the joists beneath the floorboards, and the very next moment, all that was in the spot Gage and the sofa had been was a flutter of drop cloth disappearing down into a jagged hole in the floor. The crash echoed across the parlor, and more cowbirds clamored out of the eves, giving voice to their displeasure.
“Gaaaage?” I inched toward the hole, dropped to my knees, leaving two smooth tracks in the dirty floor behind me. On my stomach now, a shard of pine dug into the meat of my fingertips as they curled over the edge of the splintered hardwood and I peered down into the darkness. A dozen feet below, Gage was curled into a ball on a dirt floor, the couch, its faded pink damask exposed, cracked cleanly into two halves, only a few shredded strings of upholstery joining them.
“You know how to say anything else anymore?” Gage spat the words at me, then inhaled sharply. “Damn. I think my leg’s broken.”
The flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks don’t attract much attention so far out of town, but the cows were none too impressed with the scene. I drifted uneasily to the edge of the front yard and watched from the shadow of the sugar maple as a firefighter, in full regalia, carried Gage down the front steps of the house and deposited him onto the waiting stretcher. His face was pale and sweaty, and his clothes were white with chalky dirt. His parents pulled up in the Lincoln just as the gurney was being loaded, and Emmaline Gatesy launched into a series of high-pitched hysterics, her lace-trimmed gloves clenching the outstretched hand of the paramedic who helped to hoist her into the back of the ambulance. Vince Gatesy climbed slowly from behind the wheel and, to his credit, stood stoically, hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks, gazing up at the farmhouse. The sky had begun to darken with impending twilight, and with the shadows stretching across the hill, I had not even noticed the man who now moved toward Vince.
Frankenstein with a cowboy hat. His face was broad and streaked with deep wrinkles, the thin skin folding in on itself like gauze, his lips drawn tight across his teeth. He lurched as he walked, stiff, and the severe angle formed by the fulcrum of his spine and neck forced his head downward, and his eyes strained upward uncomfortably as he made his way out of the shadows.
“Tom,” Vince acknowledged, without shifting his gaze from the house.
Tom Huntley opened his mouth to speak, but Vince spun on the heel of his brown leather dress shoe, grinding it into the dirt, and dropped his face close to Tom’s.
“This is unacceptable,” he hissed, and set off back toward the Lincoln at a brisk clip. He nodded in my direction, issuing me a curt, “Junior,” and then the engine roared to life and the deep blue of his Continental disappeared down the hill, following close behind the ambulance.
As the firetruck, too, began to pick its way down the hill, around the quartz outcrops and the smatterings of cattle, I awkwardly shifted, and Tom’s eyes lit on me, aware of my presence for the first time. I turned away from the house, a pang of something like grief sweeping over me, and made for the hill.
“Boy!” a dry, clear voice called out.
I squeezed my eyes shut, wincing, then turned to face Tom Huntley.
“What was it you’s doin’ in my house here today?”
I tried unsuccessfully to swallow the frustration that had been building since the moment Gage folded himself in two and climbed through the fence that morning, but instead I felt bitter tears pricking the backs of my eyes. Tom raised his bushy eyebrows at me, and I sank to the ground at the base of the tree, the story spilling out of me despite my best efforts. I told him everything: the strange, comforting affection I felt for the farmhouse and how I’d felt that I’d looked behind the proverbial curtain, somehow stripping it of its stoic mystery, disrespected its magic, and how Gage had fallen through the floor and the gleaming tip of his fibula was blindingly white as it protruded through his calf, and to please, please, please not tell my Pa about any of this because I was bound for a whooping when he caught wind of it. I clamored desperately against myself, willing my mouth to stop moving, my tongue to cease molding the words, but by time I’d poured it all out, I found myself bewildered at the squall the escaped my lips and the torrents of angry tears staining my cheeks. I pulled the cuff of my flannel down over my first and roughly brushed it across my face, sopping up so much salty embarrassment. Tom was still standing stooped, his face placid, and he graciously looked away as I wiped the snot from my top lip.
At long last, he exhaled forcefully, and held his gnarled burlap hand out to me. I gathered myself up, then put my hand in his, shocked by the tumorous arthritis bubbling under up under the knuckles. Once I was on my feet, he began shuffling down toward the road, and I followed obediently. We climbed down the hill in silence, me holding my breath at each obstacle he toddled over. When our feet met the gravel of Route 12, he spoke again.
“You from the Gully?”
“That obvious?” I asked, eyeing the patches on the knees of my threadbare jeans.
“Lucky guess,” he grumbled. We began moving back toward town at our limping pace, and he cleared his throat. “Y’know, my baby brother was born on that ol’ couch.”
I recoiled, and Tom laughed, a youthful, bright laugh that sounded like sleigh bells and not at all like the guttural rock tumbler laugh I’d imagine a haggard mammoth of a man who looked to have been raised up on chewing tobacco and moonshine might have.
When Tom spoke, it was with a clarity of voice that felt like a cool spring washing over you, with words so plain and beautiful they formed a windowpane to gaze through. He and his baby brother, the bookends, his Ma called them, along with his five middle sisters had all been born in the Huntley homeplace.
“My great-granddaddy built that house, but even then it was old; he pried the boards one by one off an old tobacco barn what once stood in that same spot. By time we all came along, she was brittle. Fragile like a baby bird, Pa said, and he set to fixin’ ‘er up, but then he dropped dead outta the blue one fine spring day—the paper said it was tainted shine—and Ma couldn’t catch a moment’s breath as it was with all us ruffians climbin’ the walls. So she sort of just…packed us all up one day and left her settin’ there to rot.” Emotion colored Tom’s voice, and I stared down at my boots, waiting for him to recover.
His siblings had all gone now: Evan in the war, Evangeline in childbirth, Mary at the hands of an abusive husband, Gertrude had succumbed to bowel cancer, baby Nell died of whooping cough, and though his Ma firmly held until her dying breath that Hazel had drowned in the Hudson River, Tom, and everyone else for that matter, believed she had gotten mixed up with the mob and disposed of in due course. “As was their way,” he concluded, and I nodded sagely, though admittedly I knew nothing about the ways of the mob.
Even as it fell into disrepair, he said, he couldn’t bring himself to sell the house, even when Vince Gatesy came calling with a gobsmacking offer. “He likes to call me a money grubbing landlord,” Tom guffaws as the sole of his shoe flaps in the breeze from his stiff gait. The land lease checks came on the first of every month, and paid for Tom’s trailer on the back of the property, his insulin, and enough gas to carry him to and from the VFW each week for Bingo.
Tom told me in delicate, affection-filled words about each room of the house, its memories and quirks, the yellow and white striped wallpaper in his parents’ room, with rose cameos that Gertrude swore smelled of actual roses, the knot in the wood paneling of the linen closet that looked like Jesus. Tom and Evan had bunked up together in the attic, where they hung his grandmammy’s quilts along the pitched ceiling to keep the cold out, and a troop of raccoons took up tenancy in the rafters.
“Martha,” he said, smiling. “She was the head honcho. Bigger’n the rest, and prettier, too. Every November, they’d move in and build a great tinderbox of a nest in the walls. Purdy good roommates, far as me and Evan’s concerned, kept to themselves but for a bit of excited chatter now and again. They’d move back out when the ground began to thaw out each spring, when Martha was swole up with kits—whore of the holler, Ma’d call her—and she’d climb down outta the tree out front to show ‘em off to me when they’s big enough. Just me, she didn’t trust nobody else, not even Evan. Me an’ Martha, we were odd bedfellows.” His eyes crinkled up at the edges with delight. “Musta been…eight, nine years. Longest relationship I ever had!” He guffawed again, paused, slapped his knee at the joke.
“Then what?” I asked, as we made our way past the Bed of Nails, its windows dark.
Tom’s voice went misty. “One day she was out in the paddock, circling. I watched from the window ‘til it’d been somethin’ like two, three hours. I walked out there with my shovel to gather up some cow patties for the fire, stopped over to check on her. There was white froth all over her face, her eyes her buggin’ out of her head.”
My stomach dropped. “Rabies?”
“Yessir,” Tom said sadly. “I walked up to her, but she didn’t recognize me. She started snarlin’. I had the shovel right there in my hand. I remember my knuckles turnin’ white I’s grippin’ it so hard. I knew there was no comin’ back from that. But I kept thinkin’ of those kits up in the tree, and how she trusted me, and I…I…” The old man’s voice faltered. “I couldn’t do it. She ran off into the treeline and I never saw ‘er again. Kits all starved to death. And Martha. I know she suffered. She was rabid, wasn’t herself. Sometimes I dream about her. Foam drippin’ down her black lips. I shoulda done it myself. Didn’t.” The night stretched out between us, a wide black gulf. “Aw, well,” Tom finally said. “We all got regrets.”
We stopped outside my house. “This you?” Tom asked, and I gave a curt nod. Through the window, I saw Mama craning her neck over the faucet, keeping watch for me. I was very, very late.
“Well, you take care then, young man.” Tom tipped his hat and ambled off out of the circle of yellow light cast by the streetlamp, into the dark.
A few weeks later, Vince Gatesy requested I tag along to the county courthouse, “just in case you’re needed,” he said, and so gingerly I climbed into the backseat of the Lincoln with Gage, his crutches splayed out across the bench. I ran my hand obsessively over the gray leather of the seat as a song about God’s redeeming love wafted at a whisper from the radio. In the front of the car, Emmaline smoothed her teased blonde blowout down with deft fingertips. When she caught my eye in the sun visor mirror, she smiled wanly; the prim ballerina pink of her lipstick matched her dress. Gage folded his hands in his lap, and I did the same. I’d never been invited into their car before, and I wished I had ironed my shirt, here among the scent of starch and crisply creased cuffs and the gray leather.
From what I understood, in many small towns this side of the Mississippi, the courthouse is a picturesque affair, all character and charm and antique roll top desks from the Confederacy. In Bear Lick County, the costs to restore the original antebellum structure after the Xerox machine caught fire in ‘76 proved too great for the rural county seat to bear, and they razed the whole thing, then erected a square cinder block monstrosity in its place, which left the ornate fountain in the courtyard out front looking terribly incongruous. When it was suggested a local artist paint a mural of a black bear family roving the perimeter of the courthouse in a bid to soften the prison-like aura, the powers that be had acquiesced, and now the juxtaposition of the fountain, the sterile cinder block, and the unexpectedly cartoonish bears flooded me with secondhand embarrassment as we formed a slow-moving contingent behind Gage and his crutches. The sound of an engine backfiring erupted through a cloud of thick black exhaust, and a haggard pickup comprised almost entirely of oxidized metal, with holes burned through the rusted edges like a moth-eaten sweater swung into a parking spot behind me, and I knew without looking that it was Tom Huntley.
We gathered in the fluorescent lighting of the judge’s chambers under an industrial drop tile ceiling: Emmaline and Vince Gatesy, Gage, Tom, and me. It wasn’t the pomp and circumstance I’d expected; the judge wore no robes, there was nary a leather-bound book to be found, and we all sat in rigid ladderback chairs, Vince, Gage, and Tom right in front of the judge’s desk, Emmaline and I off to the side. Gage stared down at his lap, and his father draped his arm casually around the back of Gage’s chair. Tom sat staring straight ahead at some spot behind the judge’s head, but every now and again I thought I caught sight of the slightest quiver in his lip.
In most jurisdictions, I’d reckon the judge would have had to recuse himself, as Vince Gatesy was his doubles partner at the Boxwood Country Club, but over the years I’ve come to find that the rules tend to be more flexible when you’ve got silver cufflinks and Italian shoes.
“The Gatesy family is requesting $2782.38 in compensation, related to Gage Gatesy’s hospital stay, ambulance fees, physical therapy costs and other miscellaneous damages, which arose resultant of the incident on and in the days after October 2, 1982. Do you understand these claims, Mr. Huntley?”
“Yes, but them kids was on private property—”
“That we have a lease on,” Vince corrected, wagging a finger at Tom.
“Not on the house, you don’t, Vince! I don’t see how—”
The judge interjected. “After reviewing the statements of the Gatesy family, the witness, and the defendant, this court does rule in favor of the plaintiff. You are entitled to appeal this judgment within 30 days, pending deposit of the appeal bond in the amount of $2782.38 with the clerk of the court. Do you understand this as well?”
Tom dropped his voice, nearly to a whisper, and peered up at the judge from under his caterpillar eyebrows. “C’mon now, Tanner, you know I can’t pay that.” There was a hint of desperation in his words, and I had to look away.
The judge opened his hands, palms to the ceiling. “Tom, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
Tom’s head drooped and when I looked up he was chewing his bottom lip. The swollen knuckles on his hands flexed around the straw hat we was rolling and unrolling, over and over again. He glanced over at Vince, who stood and clapped Gage on the back, prompting him to do the same. Tom murmured something as he rose, and Vince turned to the judge again.
“Now boys,” he held his arms out at his sides. “I’ve got an idea.” He smiled at Tom. “Let’s make us a deal.”
I never heard from Gage Gatesy again.
Black Friday fell on November 26 that year, and shortly after Mama left the house at sunrise to try her luck at the discount bakery store on Reed Street, I tiptoed out of the house as well. My gut was heavy with dread, but I’d manage to pull on my nicest jacket and pants, the ones I wore to Christmas Eve service. They were a few sizes too small, and the wind ruffled up my pant leg, chilling my shins. I silently cursed the fact that I’d worn this outfit, but something had compelled me to, like how even though he had surely known the whole charade was a ruse, Tom Huntley had still worn his finest pants to the courthouse. So there I was, in the late autumn twilight, in my too-small suit, dressed for a funeral. I kept pace with the streetlights as they extinguished themselves in a row, radiating out from Main Street toward the outskirts of town where the asphalt dematerialized into gravel and the feverfew had died off for the season. I plodded slowly, simultaneously pulled toward the farmhouse like a magnet and hoping never to arrive.
When I did, I smelled the acrid diesel of the bulldozer even before I caught sight of it climbing the hill. I inhaled sharply and steeled myself. I wondered if this was what family members felt as they stood vigil at the deathbed of a beloved grandfather while he wheezed his last breaths, this heaviness, this refusal to believe that reality was unfolding as it was. I kept my eyes on the ground as I hiked up toward the Huntley house, and when I began to scramble up the final ascent, the sound of bewildered voices came into focus. Assembled there at the top of the hill were a handful of hauling trucks, skid loaders, and various and sundry other pieces of heavy equipment, headlights blazing against the quickly brightening sky. A dozen men in hardhats and reflective vests stood together in a clump, gesticulating wildly toward the house. I followed their gaze, and dropped to my knees, the air knocked loose from my lungs.
There, in the shadow of the gnarled old sugar maple, nothing remained but the charred footprint of the farmhouse and a few tenacious embers still gnawing their way through ancient beams wrought black by smoke.
“Glad you could make it, gentlemen!” Tom called brightly to the demolition crew, cackling. He was perched in a hickory rocking chair under the tree, cowboy hat askew on his broad head, a sheen of sweat painted across his forehead. Beside the rocking chair sat a bright red plastic gas can.
Tom’s eyes lit on me as I climbed to my feet, and he nodded his acknowledgement. His words were so soft on the morning breeze I’ve spent my whole life wondering if I actually heard them at all. “This time I done it myself.”
He gathered himself up as tall as he could, turned, and hobbled off toward the sunrise, leaving a smoking black crater and a little boy dressed for a funeral bobbing in his wake.
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(Photo: Jim Choate/flickr.com/ CC BY 2.0)
The Ol’ He Said, She Said: How to Write Stronger Dialogue
Sunday, April 13th, 2025 1pm EST/ 6pm GMT
The first online writing seminar of the year, “The Ol’ He Said, She Said: Writing Stronger Dialogue” will look at how to create more natural-sounding dialogue, as well as improve the mechanics around speech. The seminar is free for WRITER or SUPPORTER subscribers, or $15 for everyone else. More information can be found here.
- Bucolia by Danielle Barr - March 6, 2025