Dolores Park, San Francisco


He was not aware of the middle of the night calls. They went straight to voice mail. 
“You’re probably getting calls from the hospital," said an 0100 text from his daughter. 

Huh?

There they were, marked with a red dot on the call list. Above other voicemails never checked, incoherently transcribed, except the call back numbers. 

The first one mentioned Hit in the head with a door. 
Then, skull fracture, operation, stable and alert, no movement or sensation in left leg and foot. 

Phone calls in the middle of the night are phone calls in the middle of the night.

After conversations, transferred calls, a talk with a friend actually standing in his room, they make an abstract picture out of all the words. A carabiner on an exercise device secured to a door let go with elastics fully stretched and hit him on the head. Pieces of skull pushed into his brain. All had gone well in the operating room. The docs patched things up with titanium screen and a couple dozen stainless steel staples. (The titanium will not set off airport metal detectors, someone helpfully added.) Antibiotics and Oxycodone and Tylenol. No feeling in the left leg. Can't move his left leg. 

They flew to San Francisco that morning. 

                                                                   **************

His apartment in the Mission rates high for city walkabilty. It was only a few blocks to his room at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. (Yes, that Zuckerberg.) So convenient, but after two days the action shifted to the California Pacific Regional Rehabilitation Center two miles west. Sister and Dad went along on the ambulance ride. The docs predicted a stay of two weeks. At that point imagining going from a paralyzed leg to walking in two weeks was a stretch, but that's what happened. In fact it was less than two weeks. 

One route between the apartment and the physical therapy hospital ran along several blocks of Castro Street, ground zero for LGBTQ etc. culture in the city. At the angled intersection of Castro and Market where electric trollies glide on rails, an enormous pride flag flies over Harvey Milk Plaza. So Omniscient, that flag,  and the sights we did see. 

A man shaved head to toe, naked and oddly orange skinned, maybe dyed, leaned against a Path of Gold lamp post, cool as a Creamsicle. A man of chocolate skin, pubic hair white as snowy egret, limp lugged a briefcase up Castro. What sir, of cow and human skins equal wrinkles, do you carry in that briefcase? 

Do you know what? On these streets, they honor writers! Pedestrians tread the bronze memorials embedded in Castro's sidewalk: Virginia Woolf, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, W.H. Auden, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin were some. 

Back EastWashington's blue suited black shoed political/criminal caste directed assaults against their own country. But in this place was the feeling how mightier these pens than their swords. 

                                                 Virginia Woolf on Castro Street

                                                                   ************
They got acquainted with the neighborhoods. Learned to avoid the blocks where people knotted around wishing wells of vials and bottles. They walked to Gus’ for groceries. The El Paraiso Cafe for burritos. Tartines for yogurt and granola. Ajax's for coffee. Mr. Pickles for sandwiches on the way to the hospital. At Dolores Park Cafe, the courteous and careful self driving Waymos appear to outnumber human driven cars. (There are over 800 Waymos in the city.) Marigolds, for flowers, was a block from the apartment. One of the owners knew Maine, which is the same as love at first sight. For two weeks he didn’t do more in the kitchen than make coffee and warm left over burritos. Burritos: cheap, filling, and everywhere in the Mission, were not his favorite food before San Francisco. They're still not.

                                                                  **************
The first visits when he was confined to bed were hard. After all, here was a young fit, active guy, hiker, backpacker, bike rider, snowboarder - unable to walk. Visits were smiley and bright, but on leaving, out in the hall, the women, overwhelmed, burst into tears. Just how was walking again going to happen? One day at a time followed another. We walked back and forth between apartment and hospital. Early on two times a day. And then, as we breathed, a breeze stirred wounded embers into flame. We became witness to the miracle that is the human body. 

In a brain injury like this, the old connections don't simply reconnect, but physical therapy's simulations of original movement reminds the brain what it did before the accident, prompting it to make new connections. 

At first he stood from the bed with a walker, the foot braced, still numb. Then
tentative steps. Then the expanded horizon of the hallway, always accompanied by a nurse, with the sunshine room at the end, where windows looked over the city to the Golden Gate and beyond. The physical therapists were heroes,  every individual in the hospital, a savior. 

During their son’s recovery, mother and father live in the apartment. It’s been many years since the divorce, and some of the past is present and some not. They don’t talk about the things they’re not going to talk about. Their priorities are their son. The questions follow them everywhere.  Will he walk again, what kind of future are we looking at here? The doctors said a couple of weeks, but how do they know, although the face to face interactions with the healers reassure them. 

Western medicine is good. Everyone is thoughtful and kind. 

The staples traced a crazy crooked line on the top of his skull. The hospital haircut was utilitarian, a shaved swath just wide enough for the operation. His head looked like a drunk attempted a Mohawk and stopped half way. They found electric shears in a Walgreens, where everything was behind locked doors and they had to find someone with a key. But the shears worked. They used the low buzzcut attachment, and everyone in the hospital said how well he looked. 

Another sign of progress came when he suggested the parental visits might be spaced further apart. Like every other day would be OK. That was fine with me. Family conversations had been repeating themselves, and frankly, the novelty of Castro Street had worn thin. Mom and Dad started exploring alternate routes back to the apartment separately. I liked cutting across the green oasis of Dolores Park, the young people underdressed, as I saw them, and marijuana smoke. I did avoid the nude sun bathing area at the top of the hill. There were more interesting things to see in the city than naked men. 

Architecture, for one. Rich, varied, lots of over the top stuff in the eyes of this neo-Puritan New Englander. There was homelessness and poverty, but the general prosperity of the city made my circumstances quite clear. I didn’t come close to being able to afford living in San Francisco, unless it was camping under a bridge.  

                                                        House in San Francisco

Back at the apartment I degreased the kitchen stove and exhaust fan hood for something to do. Kept up with the dishes which were done by hand. The window over the sink looked down on the neighbor’s back deck where sometimes a woman in shorts sat out reading. On the other side of the house a window looked down on a deck occupied by potted plants, and often, a small dog inclined to bark at the world. I concurred with his opinions, but wished he had another way to express himself. 

At the back of the house a two story stairway, a little steep, descended to a bricked patio, (encroached on all sides by weeds) which conjoined other "back" areas, a general hodgepodge space of abutting fences and unmaintained foliage, a kind of communal but partitioned urban jungle. A dozen or more landings, not big enough to be called porches, hovered over the jungle, and wooden stairs of two and three stories angling this way and that sculpted the space Escher like, nothing kept or cared for, scruffy overall, and invisible from any street, perhaps sating the city dwellers' latent need for nature, if not wilderness. 

So much blood from the wound soaked his phone he was unable to use it to get help, so he yelled until the landlord on the first floor heard him and came up and called for an ambulance. Then the landlord graciously cleaned up the blood, and all that remained was a pinkish stain on the oriental rug. Soaking the rug with water raised a frothy pink foam I tried to sop up with paper towels, but when the rug’s dyes started bleeding I stopped and turned the rug end for end, pushing the pinkish part into the shadows of the hallway. 

                                                               *************

This remarkable recovery story is well known in the climbing world. In 2011 mountain climber Renan Ozturk was skiing in Jackson, Wyoming. He caught an edge, as skiers say, fell 1000 feet, and fractured his skull on rock ledge, severed vertebrae and blood vessels to his brain. Doctors doubted he would walk again. But within five months, with partners Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin, Renan was back out there climbing Meru, a 21,000 foot Himalayan peak. Despite Renan experiencing a mini-stroke on the mountain, the team finished a first ascent of Meru’s Shark Fin. Before the accident my son planned a climb on Mt. Shasta he had to cancel. On a white board in his bedroom I wrote “MERU” in green marker. 

He came home before the two weeks were up. Months more work lay ahead, mostly at home, with some check ins with physical therapists. We went out to eat of course, walking the few blocks to Flour and Water, a fine restaurant where for the moment money was no object. We toasted his recovery, and being thankful. The next morning I said good bye, with love, to that strange time in San Francisco, and went home. 

                                    "Books to Bird," Salvador Dali, circa 1931


Funny summer. 
Not a ha ha kind of funny, either.
The way time turned to quicksand. One day there was ground to stand on, next day poof. The history of life vaporized.

Each day the sun comes up over the Canal and sooner or later burns the mist away. The sun has been drifting south for a while now, the mists lingering longer. 

Time's nothing you can put your hands on. It might as well be tomorrow, or the next day. Things happen anyway. 

Like the derringer that fell out of her glovebox while rummaging for the park pass, or the saltpeter in the pantry. Neither happened, but looking up saltpeter, as if it did, which he did, made it no less strange. It didn’t matter what he thought about saltpeter, as what she, or the proverbial they, thought about saltpeter. Lack, a noun, describes relations between one individual and another, or one individual and everyone else, ie the they. 

It was funny that summer how time went silver like the belly of a sideways fish, then went dark, like the fish turned its back, or went deep.
All he was looking for was something to make meaning out of a regular day. 
Funny how annoying the world can be. New words appeared: misophonia; hyperacusis. Along came apophenia.

Summer can be like that. Too many people around with nothing to do. 

That’s when some folk catch a plane for Spain or Italy. They make reservations and wonder what they’ll pack. Research the weather where they’re going and calculate how many pairs of underwear they will need for two weeks. Note: Don’t forget a plastic bag for the dirty clothes. And just like that life has given them something to do. 

One pastime borrowed from Suburbia: vacuum and wash the car. As a younger man he might have ridiculed these sudsy Sunday occasions in the driveway, but with the new orientation to time, he came to appreciate a clean car. Free of longshadow dust, and turnover crumbs, coffee stains, the car could be a restful place. A temporary refuge for peace of mind. The car's odds for breakdown at this point are remote. Still, in a car the environment can change quickly. One day he might open the windows and feel the sea breeze on his skin, the next day close the windows and lock the doors, enmeshed in one of the periodic Armageddon events on the Interstate. 

For some time sex was the only thing to be relied on. The immediacy of sex was antidote to the otherwise disconcerting banishment of time. 

The nagging consciousness that one might drop dead any moment, or after a short illness, which the obituaries he read often alluded to was a splinter below the skin beyond the reach of tweezers. Or a corollary of dead, a percentage of half dead due to stroke. What was that numb finger? That odd visitation on the upper lip? 

Several consecutive purchases of broccoli turned yellow and got thrown out. Maybe he doesn’t like broccoli any more, after eating it every day for a year. It’s easier to eat handfuls of spinach right out of the bag than cook broccoli. Growing up his mother reminded him people were starving in Armenia. Is America the new Armenia? The two countries are spelled almost alike. But here people addict themselves to junk and processed foods, a sort of famine of the brain. Broccoli was supposed to resist that, but now it's gone. 

He went shrimping knowing it involved decapitating them. The spotted shrimp of Hood Canal is half head and internal organs inside a carapace, and half tail. To separate the tail, the edible part, you insert a naked thumb under the end of the carapace and pinch, splitting the creature in two. They are prickly and after several executions your hands feel rubbed in briars. He killed about 250 shrimp, experiencing a twinge of squeamishness each time the creature flapped in his fingers, but at the same time, growing colder and more heartless. Practicing, as it were. There are still 25 decapitated shrimp in the freezer. Eating them reminds him of pinching their heads off, but they are a delicacy still. 

Another funny thing was watching a hundred World Cup soccer games. Before this summer he’d never watched more than a few minutes of professional soccer. Messi and Ronaldo, two of the game’s superstars, translate, billionaires, he knew. At first it wasn’t the soccer game so much as the extravaganza of world communion that went off without a hitch, in spite of government missteps, and no matter how much they maligned FIFA. The people, the music, the flags, and games were beautiful, and for a few weeks an uplifting escape from our loathsome priorities of American life as promoted by the Republicans. Eventually the nuances of the game, the different styles of team play, the personalities of the teams caught up with him, and at the end, four years seemed a long time to wait for the next time. 


He read how the billionaires Sir David Beckham and his wife Victoria’s estranged son feels his parents prioritize family life as a capitalist venture. He’s got a point. The Sir David Beckham advertisements aired over the course of the Cup grossed 26 million dollars. All those minutes of the velvety Brit accent /voice was worth it though. “Sorry Gary,” called Sir David, after his motorcycle scared the brown chicken. The audience got their money’s worth. Not sure about Home Depot. 

                                                                  *************

Robert Reich says forget about fighting climate change. It's too late. But he’d already concluded humanity is chronically manic and incapable of regulating itself in a sustainable fashion. Too much greed. From now on humanity’s non-strategy will be reactive adaptation. Imagine the Darwinian finch, but remember changing feathers will be easier for the rich. That’s why the rich don’t give a shite about the climate. They know they can buy their way out of any mess. The super rich can buy a vacant ICBM silo in Nevada and retrofit it for long term survivalism. Just like back home in the 1950’s when some of the wealthy families in Farmington built fallout shelters in their back yards and stocked them with canned foods and bottled water. He saw one some years after the fish flash of paranoia had passed. Someone left the door open at the Thompson’s shelter. The inside was just bare concrete.  

               "Sun, Earth, and Moon," Vincent Laurensz, van der Vinne II. 1714


Note:  If you've been reading the Farm sequence, it might seem like you've been here before when you start this installment, and you have. But it's been a while, and whereas at one time there was a good reason for repeating some of the story, by now I've forgotten what it was. It's not word for word repeated anyway, but edited, and improved I hope, so don't mind, please, and just read on and at some point everything will make sense. 



After the thunderstorm, Emily ran down the battery trying to start the car before discovering burned wires at the starter. She blamed the lightning. Which she blamed on the hole in the barn roof, claiming lighting never would have entered the barn had it been maintained in good repair. 

How do you know ? There was a burning smell in your car before the thunderstorm. 
How do you know? she said, with her hand draped over my shoulder, her breath close to my neck. 

One night I was in bed reading, and just turned off my headlamp when Emily came in and sat next to me. She wore a red bathrobe tied with frayed rope, and I saw the lacey collar of a nightgown under her hair. 

I can’t get that image out of my mind, Phil, that man Harnish blowing his head off. It keeps me awake and scared. Why would he come up your driveway and shoot himself outside your front door? It taints the place. 

In all honesty, I don't know why Harnish did what he did. 
Yes, well. She pulled at her robe, narrowing the vee at the neck, and went back to her room without saying anything more. 

 
One day the women left early in Caroline’s Datsun. They returned in the afternoon with the truck piled with furniture tied down with a half mile of rope. All lines taut and nothing shifted. Trucker’s knots, bowlines, a variation on a clove hitch. It was impressive. 
Caroline remembers all her knots from camp, said Emily.  I can hardly tie my shoes, which is why I wear boots. 

Where’s all this stuff going, I asked, right when a large flatbed truck turned in the driveway and chugged up the hill blowing smoky farts out the exhaust. I recognized it from town. Big Guy Gus, No Jobs Two Small or Two Big, was hand painted on the door. Apparently the women had driven around with Gus in tow stopping at garage sales and antique shops in Shortfall. I recognized some of the pieces. A bureau painted blue with a tilt mirror, a Boston rocker with broken spindles. Two items I’d given away year when I cleaned out the barn. 

Where’s all this stuff going, said Gus, whose agreement included loading and unloading. 

We’ll put it in the barn for now, said Emily, and sort it from there.

It would be better with that car out of the way. 
It's mine and it won't start.
Why not, said Gus, folding the cowling back. 
Wires, she said. 
He took a penlight out of his overalls and followed a red wire from the battery to the solenoid. He wiggled the connections on top of the distributor cap. 
This’ll just take a minute. 
Gus pulled a box from the passenger side of his truck, found screwdrivers, some wires, and a coffee can of parts he shook back and forth while peering in. 
He held the penlight in his teeth and leaned into the engine.

Emily stood by and lit a Chesterfield, and I asked her please no smoking in the barn. 
Phil, she said, this is starting to get old. But she stepped outside into the familiar crevice of air inside the dripline, except today it wasn’t raining. 

Gus got in the car and turned the key and it started. Sputtered some, but smoothed out.  He backed it out past his truck, then held the passenger door open for Emily, making a show of bowing at the waist. 
Why thank you Governor, she said, and settled in. I’ve never sat on this side of the car before. 


It’s been a while since Mom’s been on a date, said Caroline, especially in that car, which she doesn’t allow anyone else to drive. 

I asked her about the story of her mother running her car into someone on purpose. 
Yep. That was my father. He got a wood leg from it. 
Well?
What?
Why did she do it?
She was drunk. Mom’s got like six OUI’s.
Jesus. How can she still have a license?
She doesn’t have a license. 
Ah. 
She scraped her shoe back and forth in the dust.

I’m glad we have this moment Phil. I’ve been meaning to bring up the outhouse. It’s filled with shit. It’s an existential threat, living so close to all that shit. History is rife with cholera epidemics, e-coli contaminations, Gastroenteritis, hepatitis. This farm could be the epicenter of a national health crisis.

Spoken like a true city person. But I didn't say that. 
It’s a three holer, C. There’s still lots of space down there. 
I think you're missing my point Phil. 

We worked our way around Gus’ truck untying knots. 
Did you see this haul on garden tools, Phil, they’re old but so well made and in great shape. There’s nothing like working with a good hoe. 
That’s what he said. 
Ha ha Phil. Sometimes you’re funnier than I think you are. Or maybe not. 

I knew what she meant, and was wondering how she knew about hoes when a motorcycle turned in the driveway and coughed up the hill and stopped by the truck. 

A mud caked dirt bike of indeterminate make and vintage. A black clad rider wearing leather aviation goggles and a Nazi helmet. 

Phil Mott? 
That’s me.
And there I was looking into the hollow end of a revolver. A .357 snub nose I guessed. 
A dog barked.
Shut up, Curly. 
Curly barked again. 
This is your fault, Mott. This is from my father. 
That was when I recognized Harnish Holcomb, Jr. 

I don’t remember my thoughts. Other than they were going to be my last. Except, Caroline swung her hoe down on the gun with perfect timing, for me, and the bullet went into his leg. 

Bike and rider went down. Stunned, we watched blood pump out the hole in his leg. 

Harnish raised the gun at my head again, and I ran to the back of the truck. The shot clanked into the truck, reminding me how he used to throw stones through the school windows. Later on his visits up the river, for armed robbery, kidnapping, and rape. 

He shot again and hit the radiator. Steam gushed out the grill. 

The grass  was brown and laying down. It was just spring, and already the land looked like it was waiting for fire. The swallows flitted about in front of the barn grabbing insects out of the air.  Cotton clouds hung stock still in the sky. Probably another thunderstorm later. I thought the barn looked sacrificial.

Caroline's head bobbed in and out of the kitchen window. There was no sound or movement from Harnish. 
She cranked open a window and leaned out.
I think he’s dead Phil.

I picked up a couple of stones and threw them at the motorcycle. My throw pinged off the gas tank. The next stone was another bullseye. I scraped a handful of gravel off the road and sprayed it over the bike. Nothing. 

Emboldened, I walked around to the front of the truck. Harnish was slumped against his bike, the ground black with blood. 
He bled out fast, said Caroline, beside me. 
Major artery there, major. 
At least he shot himself, that’s good. 
What’s good about that? Fuck. That’s two men shot on this farm in a matter of days. Almost feels like I shot this guy myself. This looks bad. We need to get rid of him. 
What do you mean? 
Make the body disappear. 
Phil, she said, holding a finger in the air like a lightbulb had turned on. 
What? I braced for an appeal to reason. 
I got an idea. 
What's that? 

Bury him under the outhouse. 
I looked at her. 
You’ve heard about things hidden in plain sight. 
That’s not exactly plain sight. 

We looked at each other and laughed. We laughed too long and cried. 
It was remarkable how easy we became partners. Like a brotherhood, but brother and sister. 
There's a panel in the back for cleaning it out. I’ve never seen it used. 
Most of the stuff’s got to be compost now anyway, she said. This is not a crime Phil. We’re offering natural burial services, and eliminating a lot of red tape. She repeated red tape several times in the next few minutes. 

The panel came off easy, held on by a couple of carved wood latches. Good thing Harnish was small. Five feet four?  Wiry little guy, maybe a bit of the Napoleon DNA in him. I admit it was unpleasant work. Caroline wasn’t much help. She got sick at the start, went inside and brushed her teeth, came back out and got sick again. 

Sorry Phil. 
I tried to change the subject. Have I told you an uncle of mine died in this outhouse. Ruptured abdominal aorta. Same thing happened to one of the English kings. 

Was there red tape then? For your uncle I mean. Probably not enough fiber in his diet, she said. I’m going to write a chapter on fiber for my book. 

We worked side by side for half an hour, excavating, getting Harnish situated. 
She almost got sick again, but took a moment and walked it off. We were almost done when Caroline giggled. 

Now what? 
Our eyes met and we both laughed until we cried. Must have been nerves. 
Phil, what are we doing? This is the most crazy fucking thing I've ever done. 
I thought the same, but tried to change the subject again.

I wonder where your mother and Gus are. I would have thought they’d be back by now. 
I can guess where they are. 
Where’s that? 
For Mom a drive in the MG means tavern stop. She spent an afternoon in the Cloud Nine before running into my father. I don’t know about Gus. 
Oh, I do. Augustus sleeps it off regular in the Shortfall jail. 

And there you have it. It’s just as well they’re not here, considering. 
And there you have it, I said, latching the panel in place, for the next few decades I presumed. 

Where’s the dog? 
I don’t know. Curly? 
Is that his name? 
I don't know.
Curleee? Here boy. 

            "The Tilled Field," Joan Miro, 1923, 1924. Guggenheim Museum, New York. 


The chicks came in the mail two days after Harnish shot himself. Fifty Rhode Island Reds, and fifty Plymouth Rock Hens, chosen for their compatibility with cold temperatures, and Emily’s preference for brown eggs. 

I didn’t realize it would be so many, she said, about the 100 chicks cheeping around the kitchen floor. Where will we keep them? 
That was my question before you ordered them, I said. 
It’s OK Mom, they can stay in my room until the coop gets built. 

I didn’t know how long Caroline planned to stay. Her circumstances were unclear, but apparently under discussion between them, because I’d see them huddled, heads leaning into fervent conversation, until I got too close. Then they’d laugh and throw their heads in similar semicircles, making their hair appear as in a slipstream, then walk away in separate directions. 

Did I miss something? A discussion, or agreement. Perhaps a misunderstanding, how two women I didn’t know came to live in my house. Maybe I’d been hit by lightning. I’d heard of lightning strikes causing amnesia, if it didn’t kill you. 

Caroline had a PhD in American History. Her dissertation looked at the role of the family farm in popular American culture. Since finishing her degree she’d done some waitressing, and as she put it, filling in at an escort service down in Burlington. 
It’s not what you think, Phil, she said. 

I didn’t know what to think, never entirely convinced someone working as an escort wasn’t something other than an escort. She’d been looking at opportunities, she said, but wasn’t it interesting how she found herself living on a farm. Like maybe this was her life’s work. 

Several days after the chicks arrived and still no one was working on a coop. They got bigger, and needed more space. The water tray spilled and they kicked food all over the floor which resembled cement when mixed with their poop. Caroline moved out of the chicken room and onto the living room couch, turned to face the wall for privacy. 

Why don’t we just make them a door to the outside, and call it good, she said. 
This reminded me of old lady McNutt, a former neighbor, who was dead now, but lived with chickens, goats, crows, and a donkey in her home for years. She outlived two horses who died inside the house. She said the animals provided extra heat in the winter, and were good company.

 “If you knew anything, Phil, you’d know that in medieval times, not that long ago, animals and people lived together in the same spaces. Look at the baby Jesus, born in a stable.”

Caroline spent more time reading about chickens than tending to them. One time I walked by and she had a page open to goats. She made lists on legal pads, with goats making one column, and pigs another. Under pigs she wrote, fence, food, mud. Under goats, she wrote vines and tin cans. She talked to herself, mentioned Farm to Table several times a day, and said she was reading about farm bed and breakfasts where the guests did the farm chores. 

Phil, Mom. There’s so much potential here. All this time, Phil, you’ve barely scratched the surface. 
There were other lists. Like the Chores list. Clean outhouse, Repair barn roof. Fencing for goats, prepare garden beds. Those items had a P after them. Furnish farmhouse. That was Emily and Caroline. 


The MG wouldn’t start after the thunderstorm. 
Did you see, Phil, how that golden aura made the car seem like it came from heaven? And I’m not a religious person. 
But then trying to start the car she ran down the battery, and discovered burned wires near the starter. She blamed the lightning. Which she blamed on the hole in the barn roof, claiming lighting never would have entered the barn and lit up the MG if all had been maintained in good repair. In other words, her car problems were my fault. She hinted I should cover the new wiring. 

Emily, I smelled something burning in your car before the thunder storm. How do you know?
How do you, she said, with her hand draped over my shoulder, her breath close to my neck. 

Since Emily’s arrival life on the farm seemed to have a mind of its own. I mean in the way one day followed another more or less satisfactorily with no forethought. I’d no idea where things were going, but made a bargain with myself not to overthink it. 

One night I was in bed reading, and just turned off my headlamp when Emily came in and sat next to me. She wore a red bathrobe tied at the waist, and I saw the lacey collar of a nightgown under her hair. 

I can’t get that image out of my mind, Phil, that man Harnish blowing his head off. It keeps me awake and scared. Why would he come up your driveway, and shoot himself.  It taints the place. There are stories in town of you two having a feud over land. 

Those are stories. 
What about them? 
I sold land his grandfather sold to my grandfather a hundred years ago. Harnish didn’t like it. 
He wasn’t even alive then. Why would that affect him?
I don’t know. He was depressed. 
In all honesty, I didn’t know why Harnish did what he did. 

She changed the subject to chickens. She said the chicken coop was my responsibility, me being the legal owner of the farm. She was a tenant farmer with no rights, and Caroline was here to do research and maybe write a book. That was the first night she slept in my room. There was no discussion or anything, it was just two farmers sharing a bed. And that was the arrangement from then on until she died, just two short years later. 

 
One day the women left early in Caroline’s Datsun. They returned in the afternoon with the truck piled with furniture tied down with a half mile of rope. All lines taut and nothing shifted. I was impressed. Trucker’s knots, bowlines, a variation on a clove hitch. 
Caroline took knots in camp, said Emily. I can hardly tie my shoes, she said, that’s why I wear boots. 

Well, where’s this stuff going, I asked.
Phil, it’s time the place was furnished. There’s another truck coming too. 

There was an oak bureau, side tables, a coffee table, a roll top desk, which I had to admit, was a design I’d always admired and thought I might get one someday. 
And we got the rolltop for you Phil, said Caroline. With all those cubbies, you can keep the farm accounts organized. 

A large flatbed truck turned in the driveway and chugged up the hill smoking and backfiring. I recognized it from town. Big Guy Gus, No Jobs Two Small or Two Big, was hand painted on the door. Apparently the women had driven around with Gus in tow stopping at garage sales and the antique shops in Shortfall. I recognized some of the pieces. A bureau painted blue with a tilt mirror, a Boston rocker with broken spindles. Two items I’d given away the year before when I cleaned out the barn. 

Where’s all this going, said Gus, whose agreement included loading and unloading. 
We’ll put it in the barn for now, said Emily, and we’ll sort from there. 
Nice car, said Gus, after he’d backed up as far as he could. His eyes swept around the inside of the barn. He looked up at the hole in the roof and shook his head. Damn shame, he said, shaking his head. 

It would be better with the car out of the way. 
That’s mine, said Emily, but it won’t start. 
Why not, said Gus, as he walked over and folded the engine cowl back. I’ve always wanted one of these. Look at those leather seats. 
Wires, she said. 
Oh really. He took a penlight out of his overalls pocket and pointed it at the battery, then followed a red wire to the solenoid. He wiggled the connections on top of the distributor cap. Give me a minute, will ya?

Gus pulled a box from the passenger side of his truck, found a screwdriver, some wires, and a glass jar of eclectic connectors. 
Are you experienced with MG’s, asked Emily. 
Lady! He exclaimed, but that’s all he said, head in the engine with the penlight in his mouth. 

Emily stood by and lit a Chesterfield, and I asked her to please not to smoke in the barn. 
Phil, she said, this is starting to get old. But she stepped outside into the familiar crevice of air inside the dripline, except today it wasn’t raining. 

Caroline rolled her eyes. Told you Mom, we should have had it towed. 
Ha ha, chuckled Gus. Do you know who drives the tow truck? 
He got in the car and turned the key and it started right up. Smoked some, but after sputtering for a few seconds smoothed right out. 
Smooth as a …… well, said Gus. He backed it out past his truck, then held the passenger door open for Emily, making a show of bowing at the waist. 
Why thank you Governor, she said, and settled demurely into her car, I’ve never sat on this side of the car before. 
We’ll be back to unload in a little bit, said Gus, double clutching and jamming the walnut knobbed stick shift into first. The MG raised a dust storm in the dooryard, as Gus shifted into second, then third, then down to second, before drifting neatly around the corner in the fine gravel. 

It’s been a while since Mom’s been on a date, said Caroline, especially in that car, which she doesn’t allow anyone else to drive. 

So, I said, do you know the story about her running her car into someone on purpose. 
Of course. She ran into my father. He’s got a wood leg from it. 

Well?

What?

Why did she do it?
They’ve been married a long time. It’s a long story. 
Tell me some of it. 
I don’t know what happened before I was born. I think things happen incrementally, don’t you Phil? 

I’m not sure anymore. 

Anyway. She found out Dad had another family with two wives and five kids. It was secret polygamy for a while, until Dad told Mom and suggested they combine everyone into one household. That’s when she lost it. Her license I mean. 

When she drove into him. 
She’d had a few drinks. That was her defense, and the polygamy. If you see what I mean. 
I guess so. Hmm.

How’s the job search going, I asked. I was growing fond of Caroline, and was quite sincere. 
Fine Phil. I’m enjoying it, but I wish the work here on the farm paid better. Maybe when the chickens start laying. 
And when will that be? 

We heard the motorcycle before we saw it. One of those attitude machines, broadcasting the self esteem of the rider. It came over the hill, out of the forest and slowed down. 
Who’s that?
I’ve no idea, but I think we’re going to find out. 
Even I could tell the bike was an old Harley with the muffler sawed off. Predictably, the rider wore black leather, and the sound was ungodly.

You know a lot of folks, Phil. Caroline walked up beside me when she said that, close enough our arms touched. 

A Nazi style helmet sat on the seat behind him. He looked familiar but I didn’t know why. Up close we could see his get up was expensive. Rich leather everything, from the riding gloves to the saddlebags. He coasted to a stop and turned off the machine. 

Phil Mott, he said. A small dog poked its head out of a saddlebag. 
That’s me.
Been a long time. You don’t remember me, do you? Harnish Holcomb, Jr.

                            "The Farm," Joan Miro. 1921,1922. National Gallery of Art

She inhaled Chesterfields.
I inhaled old leather and rotting rubber, damp rust and oil on a warm engine, and the rest, in some percentage, was Emily. 

What's that sound? She leaned her left ear out the window. 
Thunder.  The storms slide east along the edge of the hills, this time of year. 
I had a friend hit by lightning. She never spoke again. 
Shorted her wiring. 
Something like that, but it wasn't funny. 
I didn't say it was.
Maybe not, but you inferred it. 
I took a deep breath of her second hand smoke. We didn't speak for a while, listened to the thunder coming closer. 

Do you see the front fender on your side?
Yeah, it’s dented. 
That was my husband. 
He drove into something?
No, I ran into him. 
She chuckled, but I saw she was serious.

On purpose? 
Definitely on purpose. I’m a great driver. 
I thought some explanation would follow. It didn't though, and we sat there looking at the hole in the roof. I looked at the dented fender, then up to the hole in the roof, then back to the fender. My clothes were clammy from the rain and I felt a chill so I asked if she could turn on some heat. 
The heater doesn’t work, she said. 

“We could go into the house if you want.” This was her, suggesting we go into my house. “You could start a fire.” 
Yeah, maybe heat up some leftovers. Hungry? 

I got out and looked at the fender. She stood beside me and said that for a while after she ran into her husband, blue thread stayed stuck in the crimped metal edge for six months, from his favorite pair of jeans. 

Why’d you run into him? 
We were married a long time. So, long story. 
Did you kill him?
Oh no, but he’s got a wooden leg, like Ahab. You’ve read Moby Dick, right? 
Sure, I’ve read Moby Dick a couple of times. Maybe two and a half times. 
Well, think of me as the white whale. 

The whale lit another Chesterfield, bathing her head in a sea of smoke. 

I wish you wouldn’t smoke in the barn. If you know what I mean. 
Ok fine. She snapped the Zippo shut and stepped outside the doorway, and hunched her shoulders in the crevice of air between the barn and  the drip line. Both of us looked up at the eaves, a gambrel high above.

It’s hard to get a gambrel right, she said. This one's not bad. But these days they mostly blow it.
It takes an artist to draw a good gambrel roof, I said.
Are we going inside or what, before I burn down this barn. 

My feet are soaked, she said, when we reached the porch. 
I told you that would happen, wearing those city boots. 
I don't remember you saying anything about my boots. 

I’ll get the fire started, you can dry your stuff. I brought in an armload of super dry kindling to get the fire going quickly. Emily went out on the porch and brought in our coffee cups and washed them and hung them on their hooks under the china shelf, everything in its place like she lived there. 

She opened the fridge and stared inside. I liked to open and shut the fridge door fast to keep the cold in but Emily was of a different school of refrigeration. 

I’m not seeing much, she said. 

There’s some wild rice in one of those containers. 

I hate Tupperware, she spat. 

Actually not Tupperware. This stuff is cheaper than Tupperware.  

We soon felt the warmth from the cast iron. She took off her boots and put them on a chair with the soles turned toward the stove. I got her a dry pair of socks and she draped her wet ones over the chair back. 

Just so you know, I’m not planning on taking any more off than my socks.
It never occurred to me that you would, I said. 
I should hope not, she said. Unless we go for a walk in the rain. 
Ha ha. 
You think that’s funny?
Yeah, sort of. 
Sorry, what did you say your name was? 
Ha ha. Now that is funny. Phil.
My husband’s name was Phil. 
Of course it was. I knew that when you drove in here. There’s Emily, I said, who was married to Phil. That’s what I said to myself when your gray MG drove up here in the rain and I hid in the closet. 
Now you’re funny. 

How about a can of Annie’s Chili. To go with the rice. And I’ve got a loaf of sourdough I baked yesterday. I sliced four pieces with my amazing Cutco breadknife, and threw them on the stove. A minute later Emily singed her fingers flipping them barehanded. 

Reminds me of the time my hair caught on fire, she mumbled, sucking her fingers. I hate the smell of burning hair.
I’d be curious to hear more about that, I said. 
Long story, she said, 

She finished everything, smacking her lips which gave her an unusual look,  until she smiled, when they became comely.  

Thank you, Phil. I needed that. 
How far was your drive yesterday? 
Far far. 
I'm still curious about this accident with your husband? 
Nothing accidental about it Phil. I ran him down on purpose. 
I guess you did say that. 
I did. Now, I’m going to order some chickens. This farm needs some things and I’m going to start with chickens. What address should I use for delivery?
There really isn’t a good place for chickens here, Emily. They need a proper chicken house. 

I was going to tell her I saw a weasel kill ten chickens in thirty seconds once, but 
just then Harnish Holcomb drove into the dooryard in his Eldorado. Poorest excuse for a truck, but what the hell was he doing. He hadn't been to my place in twenty years. But with Emily here, and her socks and boots drying beside the wood stove, and the ambiance for the moment cozy, you might say heartwarming, relatively, I felt more generous toward Harnish, forgetting his childish pranks, and thought I’d go out and say hello, maybe ask him in even. Let bygones be bygones. 

Then the shotgun went off. Scared the hell out of both of us. We yelled, and jumped off the floor. Out the window, through the webs and dwindling drizzle I saw Harnish’s face exploded among the flying diamonds of the safety glass.

My god, he's shot himself. 
I give her credit, she already had her phone out calling. 
But right away it was obvious he was beyond help. His head lay half out the door. The rain washed his blood in rivulets on the outside of the door and made a pink puddle below. 

Jesus, said Emily, her hands covering her face, but eyes peeking through. What the hell happened. 
This is Harnish getting the last word in. 
Last word on what? 
Long story I said. 

Shouldn’t we check for a pulse or something? 
Half his head’s gone. 
I shivered with shock, and felt sick to my stomach. I put a hand on her shoulder. One of those moments makes you think, stroke, finally! Emily turned away from me lurching with dry heaves. 

There’s the siren. You know how the sounds of sirens put the rest of the world on pause. The Emergency Medical Services are highly evolved in this country.
The rain was stopping, one pause. 
Harnish Holcomb was on permanent pause. 
But no pause in thunder and lightning. A yellow bolt flashed over the barn. Another seemed to go through the hole in the roof, and light up the inside. We saw the MG glow with an angelic aura. The sirens were closer. 


 A small pickup came up the driveway first though. A dusty white Datsun of indeterminate age with a young woman at the wheel stopped behind the Eldorado. 
Emily waved. 

Who's that? I said. 
Oh, Caroline’s here, what bad timing! Caroline waved, and Emily ran to meet her. She made a horse blinker with her left hand as she ran past the Eldorado. A twelve gauge shotgun sure makes a mess of things.
Who’s Caroline? I called. 
My daughter, she said over her shoulder. I was about to tell you when Harnish drove up. 

 

                            "The Farm", Joan Miro. 1921, 1922.  National Gallery of Art

The barn roof has been leaking for a long, long time. In the northeast corner where the shingles blew off in that gale everyone around here remembers because the 90 mph winds broke all kinds of stuff. Including Harold Stedman’s sugar maple, which fell on Harold. So he don’t remember it.
 
Why didn’t I get up there and repair my roof?  Now the rot’s spread to about ten feet square and from inside you see more sky all the time. In fact, on a clear night, seeing stars through the barn roof feels completely natural, except the floor in that corner of the barn is soft and I’ve fenced it off with some hay bales so no one walks there, and maybe falls through. 

This is how things go with barns. It starts with a roof leak, and spreads. The top few feet of the corner post, along with the plate, and the end rafter never dry out, and the plate where it’s over the post is starting to compress under the weight of the roof. This is the early stage of an old barn eventually falling down.

The barn’s just a hollow old thing with an upside down horseshoe over the door. So the luck don’t spill out, he said every goddamned time he walked under it. There hasn’t been an animal, outside of rats and barn swallows, live in the barn for decades. Maybe some corn snakes. The cows grandfather sold in 1970, the day before he hung himself in the hayloft. Grammy brought him out his coffee and slice of buttered bread like she always did, and there he was, in two pieces unfortunately, having jumped from higher up than necessary. 

Dad had nothin to do with the place and took off south for a factory job. Nice and clean, at least not manure, and never came back while they were alive for reasons not entirely clear. To me anyway. So Grandmother skipped her son and left the place to me. What was I gonna do with a farm? ‘Course I been living here ever since. 

I did like how the ground got green in the spring after lying under all the goddamned snow all winter. But then everything got so thickly deeply green I didn’t know what to do. I stayed in doors a lot because outside everything was out of control. Stuff grew and grew and didn’t stop. Spiders enclosed the porch with their webs, and the webs caught insects and then the view up the fields was fuzzy with this charcoally gauze made from thousands of mosquitos and flies stuck in the webs. 

I sold off three hundred acres on the other side of the ridge. It’s land I never see and with that deal I was all set. I don’t go over there and haven’t seen to look what they’re doing. The developers' plans called for a layout of farmettes, that’s all I know. 

My neighbor Harnish Holcomb whose family got his land from the king after an ancestor was a hero fighting the French somewhere doesn’t like I sold the land over the ridge and harasses me by putting for sale signs on my place, out on the road. Everything on his farm is perfect. He never stops working, never. He finished reshingling his cedar shake roof last month. He sawed all the cedar shakes himself, after hauling the trees out of The Great Swamp. That’s what he calls it. 

Thanks to Harnish I got people driving up here and getting out of their car and nosing around. They say it doesn’t look like anyone’s living here. Like that’s an excuse for trespassing. When I see them coming I duck into the closet under the stairs. Sometimes they come on the porch and try the lock on the door. I might take the broom and bang the handle on the walls and listen to them run off. Other times I sit on the porch and wait for them to notice me, just sitting there behind the cobwebs nothing they would expect, a man sitting there. Most it creeps them out when they notice me and they just keep driving around the circle and on out. How many times I throw that for sale sign away and Harnish puts up another.

I don’t have hard feelings on Harnish though because his for sale sign is how I met my wife. Which understand was nothing I was looking for, and would never have found in a million years but for his damn signs. Which he put because of the land on the other side of the ridge I sold. 


So Emily drove up in this old rattle trap MG painted with gray primer. The top was down and her hair was all out in back like in a movie, but it started raining right when she got out so she pulled the top up and fastened it shut pretty efficiently I thought. She grabbed a red leather purse out of the back and ran to the porch and sat right down in my rocking chair like she owned it. Not just the chair, the whole damn place. 

The rain wasn’t much. The day was warm and the rain was soft and nice to look at. It had that lilting quality and I could tell she liked it the way she lit a cigarette and let her head lean on the other hand with the arm propped on the chair arm, like the rain and the view out those green hills relaxed her. I mean, all this going on like she owned the place, no thought someone else might be at home, someone who owned the property and might expect some respect, some appreciation for the rights of privacy and private property. Nothing like that, nada. 

She was sad I thought, and nice to look at in her own way. And I could see how she fit in those hills because the hills, they’re sad too, how she sat on my porch with her legs crossed and smoking and the line of drip coming off the porch eaves like a curtain, splashing not far from her boots, which I can see one has a sole worn through a layer of leather, the kind of boots that would be waterproof about three seconds in this kind of weather. 

She pulled her phone out and wiped the screen one way and another and saw there’s no reception out here in these hills so gave up and put it back in her pocket, trading for a Snickers bar which she unwrapped and took small bites out of at the same time lighting another cigarette. I got the idea she had things on her mind that were worrisome. This made me inclined to be hospitable. I put two cups on the counter and spooned in coffee hoping she liked it black because there was nothing to whiten it with, no sugar, and started to get a little excited, you might imagine, anticipating her reaction when I opened the door and carried two cups of coffee out on the porch where the rain was coming down pretty good, more than before, and louder, and obscuring the hills more so that beyond the dripline of the porch eave the world was pretty much a blur.

I had the cups in hand and was on my way outside when suddenly I see her face pressed against the window looking into the kitchen and after a double take, comprehending a person is inside, recoils in fear and embarrassment, appropriately, though I’m sure I smiled, and gestured with the coffee cups I was on my way outside to meet her. 

She retreated so my rocking chair was between us. 
I’m so sorry, she said, I didn’t think anyone lived here. 
Others have thought the same thing. 
Maybe, but I’m here now and am truly embarrassed for intruding. 

Never mind that, I said, I hope you like it black. 
Oh, I like it all ways, she smiled.
She glanced around the porch, through the rain into the dark maw of the open barn. The doors on the barn were long gone. 
So, you live here full time?
Yup. This was my grandfather’s place. And my grandmother’s. He died first actually. 
Oh, when was that?
Like the early 60’s I guess. 
And you took up farming then, she said, taking another look around, as if looking for evidence. A tilled field. A tractor, or a hoe even. Callused hands and a tight stomach.  
She ended up gazing at me, waiting for something. 
Not exactly. 
Oh. 
I sold a bunch of the farm, I said, so I wouldn’t have to farm, or anything else, for that matter. In fact, that’s why you’re up here, I imagine, because my neighbor Harnish didn’t like I sold the land and puts for sale signs down on the road to annoy me. 
So am I annoying you? 
No ma’am. You are not. 
So it isn’t for sale?
No ma’am. 
Too bad, because I’ve been looking for a place like this, something I could move into right away. 
Well, for one thing, this place only has an outhouse. 
Oh I don’t care about that. 
You don’t? 
I don’t know about you but I hate cleaning toilet bowls. And then the brush turns brown, if they even use it. And guess who cleans the goddamn brush. Fuck that. 
I see.  

I pulled the other rocker up alongside hers, or mine, the one she was sitting in anyway. Not too close, something respectful, to the best of my ability. Our coffee cups shared the same table, which seemed OK. We rocked and watched the rain. It felt like the outhouse topic dampened our conversation, and after a couple minutes her rocking slowed, then stopped, and I looked over and saw her head at an angle and her eyes closed. Must have had a long drive. 

I continued to rock and gave some thought to my future. Our future? I wasn’t getting any younger. I was using cliches more often. The natural world is nice, but not everything. You can’t sleep with the rain, for example, and the barn is nice to look at and has lots of stories to tell but those are mostly about animals. Emily’s asleep now, but she’s a human being with a voice and bad habits and probably some screwy ideas I haven’t heard yet. Which maybe I'll hear when she wakes up. 

Was that her snoring? Hard to tell with all the sounds from the rain. Rain on the roof, rain sluicing off the eaves, rain splashing in the gravel trench eroded parallel to the porch edge. Rain pattering on the maple leaves. The sounds of rain.

So I tip toe away and fix up one of the extra rooms for her to stay in. Made the bed and ran a damp cloth over the dresser to remove the dust. I checked the chamber pots were clean, and filled a pitcher with water and put out a clean towel, the cleanest one I could find. 

When I returned to the porch expecting we might enjoy a second cup of coffee after her little nap her rocker was empty. I saw movement inside her car, that crossing motion of clicking in the seatbelt and then she leaned forward to turn the key. I jumped through the wall of water and ran out there, soaked in an instant, and knocked on her window.  She opened the window about an inch and I put my mouth up close to the opening to be sure she’d hear. That’s when I noticed her eyes were the green clarity of high up mountain streams, where water hasn’t been polluted yet, at least not much. 

I fixed up a bed for you, I said. You said you wanted a place you could move into right away. 
Ha ha, that’s nice of you, but that’s not exactly what I meant. 
No?
No.
What did you mean?
Why don’t you get in, you’re getting soaked. 
She picked up her red leather purse as I opened the passenger door, which dropped when it unlatched, and closing it I had to lift it with both hands to make it close. The inside was leathery and smoky and Emily. The roof dripped in two places between the seats. 

I’m in the middle of a restoration, she said. Been working on it for two years. 
The rain was a thousand fingers thrumming the roof. Once again the conversation changed. 

Just what is it you do here on the farm, ah, what was your name? 
Phil. 
Sorry. 
That’s OK, I don’t think I said my name before. 
You didn’t that I remember. So what do you do here, Phil, if not farming. 

Well, I, ah, hold things together. 
Hmmm. 
Why don’t you drive into the barn and get out of the rain and these drips will stop. 
Good idea. 

She drove in front first of course, and though it was pretty dark inside there was light in the back corner where the shingles blew off years ago and started the roof rotting, which let in more and more rain and daylight all the time. We could see the rain streaking down inside the barn, lines of rain really, bright streaks for a few seconds in front of the dark barn boards. It was quite a thing to watch, and we were both mesmerized.

What’s going on there, she asked? 
Leak. 
I see that. Why don’t you fix it? 
She looked at me and bent her head like a dog. She took a cigarette out of her red purse and put it between her red lips and lit it and blew the smoke out her window, which she’d cranked down. She’d look at me, drag on her smoke, then turn and exhale out the window. Time and again. Smoking in the barn made me nervous, I have to say. 

The drips from the MG’s roof slowed down, then stopped. Her question about fixing the barn roof hung between us, waiting for the conversation to change. 

                 "The Scream," Edvard Munch, 1893. National Gallery of Norway.



For Sale:  New England farmhouse, built 1845, story and a half under a twelve gable, one story kitchen ell off the east end. A long shed makes off perpendicular to the ell, includes 10 cord woodshed, three hole outhouse, two open bays for tractors and equipment, and two more rooms used as bunkrooms, food storage, and during the Civil War, a hospital and mortuary. The farm was a stop on the underground railway. 

The abandoned buildings drift in a sea of purple loosestrife. 

Angel paid cash. Counted two hundred thousand dollar Dicks from the shoeboxes stacked in the back seat. She moved in the same day. She didn’t have much. Sleeping bag, duffle of clothes, an ornate pair of alligator boots from New Orleans, her Griswold skillets, and assorted Goodwill dishware. 

I know the loosestrife is invasive, she told the realtor, but I love that purple in the spring. 

The first man showed up a few days later. Dick was barechested, drove an older Chevy pickup from Wisconsin with expired tags. He got right to work pulling clapboards and sheathing off the north wall, exposing the sills that fell apart when the boards came off. He worked eight hours a day, then sat in the yard with a book and smoked a cigar accompanied with a few fingers of Jim Beam. Sometimes Angel sat on an arm of the chair with her arm around his neck and a breast pressing his cheek, pretending to follow along in the book. 

A week later a ‘66 green F150 with a wood butcher camper pulled in. This was Pitch. He got the tiller going and brought back the old garden patch, still outlined by the change in weeds. They remarked on the smell of the earth, how people forgot about stuff like that. She talked about the farm stand she wanted to build. 

Dick and Pitch started on a front porch. The place never had a porch, and she wanted one. They hand dug for footings and mixed the concrete in a wheelbarrow. She primed the lumber before they put it up. A swinging love seat, hung from the ceiling with chains, appeared next, and several Adirondack chairs, all with minor variations in detail. 

The sun came in there in the afternoon, slanting under the branches of the three hundred year old sugar maple. She sat with a tall lemonade, the men with their Jim Beam.  

The house stood in its good bones, and they made it handsome with their work, and they sat on the front porch and looked down the long sloping fields to the river and at the evening the fog rose from the low places and ran into the shadows spreading out from the woodlot trees. She stretched her long bare legs over the ottoman. The men watched her toes flex and wondered what hue of red she painted her nails. 


One day a black sedan pulled in the driveway, parked, and a man in a bulging dark blue suit climbed out. He wore a brown fedora with a red feather in the band, and black shoes, long and pointy. His hands were big, attached to gangly arms, and he led with an uncommonly large dark jaw. 

He touched his fedora at the bottom of the stairs, stepped up to the porch and picked Dick up out of his chair and slammed his meaty fist into his gut with everything he had. The wind whistled out, and he fell on the floor gasping. Then the man in the suit kicked Dick in the side of the head soccer style, and he lay still.

What the hell, said Pitch, who’d jumped up when Dick was punched. 
Never mind, said the man in the blue suit, and he stepped toward Pitch and socked him hard in the guts, and Pitch went down gasping and choking. Then the man skipped nimbly, and kicked Pitch in the head, soccer style, winding his leg back like a penalty kick. Pitch rolled over moaning, and the man in the suit kicked him again in the back of the neck and Pitch shivered for a few seconds with seizures, and was still. 

He tugged his jacket sides to straighten things out, and asked Angel if that’s what she wanted. 
Did you have to be so violent? 
He scowled. You widows. You’re all the same. 
It’s business, Harry. She had a sheaf of loosestrife in a bucket by her chair. 
Now get them into the barn and get out of here. She held her hand suspended in the middle of the purple flowers. 
Let’s see the money before they disappear. 
She went inside and brought out an envelope and handed it to him. 
He thumbed the bills without taking them out. 
You wouldn’t short me?
Finish the job Harry. 

The trap door in the barn floor was covered with old straw. One wheel of an ancient farm cart sat in the middle of the trap door. The man in the suit swept the straw aside and rolled the cart to the porch and loaded the bodies. He moved them around to balance the cart. It only had two wheels like a rickshaw. He picked up the handles and ran down to the barn and threw the men down the hatch. He switched on his headlamp and climbed down the ladder and pulled Dick and Pitch one at a time down the tunnel as far as he could.

All that was left of the others was bones and rags, and the air was thick. He didn’t linger, but kept his head down on the way out to the ladder. What the hell? The light above was gone. The trap door was shut. He went up the ladder and pushed on the door, put his shoulder into it but it didn’t budge. He knew by the sound the latch was drawn. Bitch! 

He backed down the ladder, sat down, and turned off his headlamp. 

He had a thousand dollars in an envelope. His gun was in the car. He imagined Angel driving his car to the quarry. He imagined the darkness with the batteries run down. He imagined hunger and thirst. He imagined soiling himself. He imagined going blind in the darkness, and his skin turning alabaster. Albinism they called it. He thought of a couple more things. The lawn he once had and the way the sprinkler turned on by itself at 5:00 p.m. That nice waitress who brought him his last cheeseburger the night before. 

                        Bulk Carriers at Anchor, Columbia River, Astoria, Washington

On June 2 a family reunion started on Bainbridge Island, Washington. After two nights  we drove to Waldport, Oregon, via Astoria, to join another sibling for three nights. Then back to Brinnon, and Seattle, for three more nights. It's more complicated than this, but that's all I want to say at this time. 

                         In line for Fish and Chips at the Bowpicker,  Astoria, Oregon
                        

                                         Sealions , Newport Harbor, Oregon

                           Slice of Sequoia, Newport, Oregon. From 550 BC to 1950

       Life in Boats : Circa 1958, Manomet, Massachusetts. That's me standing.
               
                   In Waldport, Oregon, a box of family photographs emerged. 

                      Life in Boats. Circa 1978, Blue Hill Bay, Maine.  That's me standing

                                          Introduction to Literature, est. 1958

                                        The Sands of Time, Oregon Coast

                                                 The Oregon Coast, June 2026
It's said there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on all the world's beaches ! 

                 Generations, My Father's Side. Petersham, Massachusetts circa 1958

             Generations, including a Local Duck, Bainbridge Island, June, 2026

                   In Pleasant Harbor, Brinnon, Washington. June, 2026. That's still me. 

                                  No. 1 1950 (Lavender Mist) , Jackson Pollock


In summer the porch got sun early but by midmorning the eave cut it off and the porch stayed in the shade for the rest of the day, except for a few days either side of the solstice, when a polygon of the sun’s light appeared in the west end for a short time before the maple blocked it. 

They liked the sun early because even in July and August cool air sank overnight from the glacial heights of Tahoma, and skidded down the old mudflow’s gentle slopes until it wrapped around their place. The night air refreshed them, but then they liked to bask in the morning warmth when it rose over the treeline and the first beams fell into the porch. 

It takes 8 minutes 20 seconds for the sun’s rays to reach earth, she said. 
You’ve mentioned that. 
How many times, would you say, I’ve mentioned the sun’s rays take 8 minutes 20 seconds to get here. 
Maybe once a week for 50 years so fifty times fifty two would be 2600. 
It takes 8 minutes 20 seconds for the sun’s rays to reach earth, she repeated. 
2601. Funny.
Those would be photons. Mass less photons. 
You’ve said that. How can something have no mass?
I don’t know.  

Remember Jack is coming for lunch. 
Grilled cheese again?
I was thinking we’d have grilled cheese. 

Why didn’t she know when she married her husband she was marrying the brother of her first husband. Maybe because all the eight siblings in her husbands’ family were estranged, and they couldn’t say why, just that it had always been that way. That Jack was coming for lunch was very unusual, in fact it might be a first, that is, after she married his brother. Of course, as her husband they’d eaten many sandwiches together. Jack made a pretty good sandwich himself, at least he did before he got cancer. He’d had cancer for a long time. Lost part of his colon, and his stomach. She couldn’t imagine the hodgepodge of his gastrointestinal system at this point. 

Jack’s brother, her present husband, had health issues of his own. He’d had balloons planted in his heart, like there’s a party in there, or something, he’d said to a visitor once while swallowing his pills with a sip of water. Just then she remembered grilled cheese wasn’t the best option for a man with circulatory issues. 

Perhaps avocado toast, she said. We have a fresh loaf of sourdough.

What happened to the grilled cheese, that sounded pretty good.

I don’t know why I said that. It’s not healthy. Really, there are too many things you’re supposed to know these days.

He lifted the revolver off his lap and placed it on the table. He brushed the croissant crumbs off his pants onto the floor. 

I wish you wouldn’t do that. It attracts ants. 

Her first husband Jack had a large gun collection, something like fifty guns. No automatic weapons though, mostly historic guns interesting to collectors. Like the sawed off shotgun Doc Holliday used at the OK Corral. Well, then the Gatling gun, still stored in her barn. Early in their marriage he spent a year and several thousand  restoring it. 
We might have gone on a nice vacation with the money you spent on that stupid gun.
That stupid gun was at Gettysburg. 

Jack met his next wife at a Civil War reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh. He was in the infantry and got shot, pretend, and she was a nurse and stopped to care for his wounds, pretend. After the battle was over they moved into an empty tent. They didn’t stay married that long. They did a genealogy search together and found her ancestors were all Confederates, and slaveholders at that, and his were northerners with some abolitionists in the mix. From there things went downhill. 

Her present husband only had the one revolver, but it was always with him. He didn’t go anywhere without it, not even to bed. Supposedly he slept with the revolver under his pillow, but how many times had she woken up and felt the steel on her arm, or thigh. Creepy.

It goes back to Boy Scouts, he said, it’s all about preparedness. Besides, when it’s in bed with us, it’s not cocked. 

She sort of understood what that meant. But whenever he said that she thought about a cocked gun, and that other cock in the bed, supposedly, and this set off a merrygoroundish thing in her mind, in which the two meanings ran together for a moment, but pulled apart, leaving her confused and anxious. 

Do we have avocados? 
We always have avocados since that new study came out about how good they are for you. 

He’ll be here any minute. You might want to get started. And he reached for the revolver and slid it back into his lap, cocking the hammer on the way.
There it was again, that double ratcheting sound.
What’s that for, she said. 
Preparedness, once again, he said.

She stood and walked toward the screen door unaware his .45 was aimed at the small of her back. He did that sometimes, just fooling around, seeing what it felt like to aim a gun at a person instead of a paper target. For her part she kept rat poison in the pantry, and sometimes sprinkled a few kernels into his steelcut oats at breakfast. She’d researched the topic, and was aware it took a lot more than a few kernels to kill someone, but that the effects were cumulative, so that repeated small doses over time would eventually be fatal, and a victim might not realize anything was amiss until it was too late. 

She started her rat poison experiments when she was married to Jack, her husband’s brother, who was on his way to their house for lunch for the first time since she married his brother, many years ago. Jack never found out about the poison, and never fell ill, so far as she knew, which gave her some confidence about dosages. Sometimes she confused her two husbands. The way they were brothers, and the way both bored her with similar stupid questions about the solar system, her speciality, and so correspondingly, similar to cock and cocking, so did the rat poison dosages over time get mixed up and unremembered in her mind. 

So they had a light lunch of avocado spread, with a twist of lemon, on slices of toasted rye. She put out some salted almonds, and Kosher pickles and a pitcher of honey sweetened ice tea. Jack complimented her Scottish shortbread tea biscuits, into which she’d introduced a teaspoon of poison, but otherwise no one remembered what was said during lunch. Maybe nothing was said. All three thought of things to say, but never said them. All three experienced that breezy condition of irregular empty space in their heads that precluded discourse, although nothing seemed particularly out of sorts during the meal. Finally, Jack stood and said he was going to the barn to check his Gatling gun, which he was thinking about taking home with him. 

It’s about time, said her husband. 

Jack picked up his backpack and disappeared into the barn’s dark interior. 
That wasn’t so bad, she said, biting into a pickle. 
You mean the avocado, instead of grilled cheese, he said.

They watched Jack drag the Gatling gun out of the barn into the sunlight. It was very heavy, they could tell, by the angle his body made with the ground. Out in the open he swung the gun around in a one eighty, so they were looking straight into the business end of the cannon. The sun’s photons bounced along the cobwebs streaming off the barrel, having been torn from their connections to the horse stall.  

Look at all that light, she said, and there’s nothing to it.

That’s quite a weapon, said Jack’s brother, .50 caliber if I remember. 

Jack bent over the back of the gun fussing with various levers and such. Then he waved, and started cranking the handle. 

Over the years they’d read many times how the Plate of Juan de Fuca was subducting under the coast: that they lived on an ocean of rock superheated by the friction of the plate moving against the bottom of the crust, fifty miles down: that Rainier was a vent that let off some of that pressure, aka volcano. 

They knew about Vesuvius, and the fate of Pompeii in 79 A.D. They knew about the Electron Mudflow circa 1500. They’d read the 2015 article in The New Yorker about the inevitable Cascadia Earthquake, guaranteed to devastate, decimate, destroy the region’s infrastructure, flood the coast, kill thousands. A catastrophe of unprecedented scale forthcoming god knows when.

They knew all this, but it wasn’t on their minds, when they sat drinking coffee at 5 a.m. on June 21, 2028. Well, yes it was somewhere on their minds, because volcanoes do not erupt out of the clear blue sky they live in. Well, yes they do, or can, literally erupt in the sky, but not without warning, because they’ve wired the mountain with hundreds of sensors recording its vibrations, so that some day, they will predict, where and when, it will blow. 

Still, nothing imminent, so far. Second cup of coffee. Working a crossword, he. She, musing on a book of women poets. His rocker making one porch board squeak, hers running over an uneven spot and making a regular ka-tunk-ah, ka-tunk-ah. Now and again groups of geese fly down the river heading south. Five geese, seven geese, and the odd numbers got their attention, because geese, of course, mate for life.
Wonder what happened, she said, referring to the groups of geese. Because they’d observed geese for decades, and were in the habit of mentioning the odd numbered groups. 

Maybe the two groups are meant to be one, he said. That would solve it. 

Hmm. 

Seven letter word for fate? He looked at her with eyebrows raised. 

“I drink coffee next to you, she said, but one day I know it will be otherwise”, Jane Kenyon. 


Overnight several fumaroles high on the flanks of Tahoma started smoking. Not a lot. Thin tendrils like someone up there was smoking a cigar. They didn’t notice at first, and they watched the mountain every day it was out. They’d watched the Tahoma Glacier shrinking as long as they could remember. She pointed to the smoke at some point, and he followed her finger. 

I might go in for a checkup, he said. I imagine the cataracts are getting worse. 
Pretty much a given, passing time, she said. But it might be otherwise. 

The purple martins chittered over the fence poles and she looked up from her book, which nested in a sheaf of loose pages on her lap. The book would flop down, she’d rustle the dog eared pages and pull one out and write on it. Sometimes crossout first, then write. 

Eight letters for, “prepare for bed,” he said. 
She hated crosswords and never responded to his requests. Why he bothered asking was beyond her. 

I’ll stay with you till death do us part, but it might be otherwise. 

Jane Kenyon would not say that. 

No, I said it. 

A crow flew low and scattered the martins. 

The early Rhododendrons are already fading, yet here we are, still upright on our perch. 

Porch. 

Perch.

Porch. 

Oh god, here comes Ulbright. Don’t look, maybe he’ll just go by.
Fat chance. 


Hey Comrades. You  hear?  
What? 
Percy. 
What about Percy? 
Dead.
He’d just had a conversation with Percy outside the post office, day before yesterday. He was fine, making plans for his annual salmon fishing trip to Alaska. 
How’d it happen? 
Well, Ulbright looked up at Tahoma and rubbed his chin. She thought he did that because of the dimple, which was deep, and off center. People made jokes about it, but they were hardly ever funny. 
It happened unusually.

They continued rocking, waiting for Ulbright. He could be such a .. something, Ulbright, with his square head and huge hands crooked with arthritis. She had a hard time looking at him, which made her uncomfortable because she knew it shouldn’t be that way. At least he wasn’t talking with his hands now. That was the worst. 

Impaled on elk antlers, said Ulbright. One of the Roosevelt elk went off, charged him. It’s exceedingly rare, of course. 
Never heard of that. But I saw a pissed off elk puncture the tire of an asshole tourist at Yellowstone. PSSSSSSssss, went the tire. 
Ha ha. 

Peritonitis. I guess he went quick, Percy. 
Yeah, I guess so. 
I wonder what Velvet will do now?
Says she’s going to hit the road in the rv.
She’s never liked it here. 
Velvet’s never liked anything. 
She’s free now. Got all Percy’s money, apparently. Free and clear and a rich bitch 
with an itch. Well, you two enjoy the morning. It’s a lovely one. 

Ok Ulbright, thanks for the news. Sad news, though. 
Sorry about that. Don’t shoot the messenger. 

They waited until he was clear of earshot. Continued to rock, but slower. 

Don’t you sometimes just wanna shoot the messenger.
He’s not such a bad guy. 
I didn’t mean him, necessarily. Messengers in general. 
Um, nine letter word for upheaval. Third letter r. 
Look at the smoke up there now. 

He turned toward the fumaroles high on the flank of Tahoma. That’s steam, not smoke. 

The temperature of basaltic magma underlying the mountain averages around 2000 F. The five mile high pile of rock looks pretty solid, but it’s all honeycombed with cracks and fissures, rotten clayey rock degraded by sulfurous gasses.  In fact the whole shootin’ match is a slippery slope, and could let go any time.

Oh my god look. 
A huge elk stood unperturbed on a gentle rise at the edge of the field. 
It’s The Hartford’s stag. What a magnificent specimen of an animal. 

I’ll say, magnificent, and look, his antlers are bloody. And that shred of cloth. 
You don’t suppose……
My god. 
I hope our policy premiums are up to date.
Dear, we’re not with The Hartford. 
I know, but……oh, what are we?
Geico. Been with Geico for over thirty years now. 
You make it sound like it’s some kind of accomplishment, when it’s just a fucking ripoff.
We get the good driver discount, in spite of your accident…. 
Still, it might be a good idea to check. That we’re current I mean.

Miles beneath the porch magma boiled, and tweaked the needles on a thousand seismographs. The Stag turned and took a few steps toward them, his stunning rack of a thousand tines holding up the sky. 

                                            Olympic Mountains from Mt. Walker

The road to the top ruins the mountain for wilderness. Up the grade the SUV's drag plumes of dust. Sometimes the locals desecrate the woods with their old refrigerators, bleakly white against the duff. My lazy thoughts drift in a sluggish slough, but then something reminds me of mountain lions, and I stop walking and look around. I pick up rocks in both hands.

I remembered reading about a lion attack in the North Cascades where the animal knocked one rider off his bike and dragged him to his cave. The other rider went for help, and they tracked the lion and shot him. Other recollections were vague, but still deadly, except for one incident when the tables turned, and a man strangled a lion after being attacked. I've still got a decent arm, and at one point I fire a rock at a mound of moss standing in for a mountain lion, and miss by a mile. 

It's not wilderness, but stands 2000' high over low country, with views north to the San Juan Islands, Mt. Baker, (a volcano) and Vancouver Island. In the West the Olympic Mountains loom, still snow covered at this time of year. Inside the fringe of perimeter mountains glaciers survive in a sort of polar fastness, but they are predicted to be gone not that long after I am. 

From the south viewpoint on Mt. Walker you can see buildings of Seattle, some of Hood Canal, and fragments of South Puget Sound all the way to Olympia. Thousands and thousands of miles of Douglas Fir forest spread around the mountain, with few signs of human activity, which is deceptive, but encouraging.  

There's parking for cars on top, and pit toilets. A few years ago a woman  dropped her phone in the pit. Then, trying to retrieve it, she went in too, and couldn't get out, but  made a call and the fire department arrived and hauled her up, and sprayed her off. It was a big story in the news.  

                                                         Trillium on the Trail

On the way up the trail I heard the call of a partridge, or maybe a spruce grouse, that warbly flutter in the throat when they're looking for a partner. My own heart was pounding and made me wonder about a heart attack. I was pushing pretty hard, and stopped a few times to  let the heart calm down, A woman passed me on the way up, and again on her way down. You're almost there, she said, smiling. 

So this time, no lions, and no gods either, which are sometimes associated with the tops of mountains. I didn't expect the latter, and don't know why god was on my mind since the idea irritates me. It's gotten harder being atheist in the land of evangelical christians these days. Everything is fragments.  

Like this one, rising inexplicably among the lions, to the surface of the slough, the memory of reading how the Germans executed 5000 Polish Army officers in groups of fifty, shot in the back of the head. The killings took place in a forest similar to this one, except flat, without refrigerators. 

On the way down the mountain the lions and the lack of god recede, the snarl of a chainsaw ascends from the valley. In the hours since I passed, the first rhododendrons have opened to the world for their brief and stunning stay. 

"Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" Paul Gauguin. 1897



Early morning haze. Too much suspended crap to call it fog. 
The water windless, calm as a cucumber, befitting moroseness, considering the breakup, this one in midlife, or an age commonly regarded midlife, depending how long you live, i.e. the question on everyone’s mind. 

Nothing is an island. Everything depends. ( The moral of this story. ) If stories have morals. Good story? Bad story? Corrupt story? Lying story? A sweet young story, kneeling in a church pew. There, child. Everything might be all right, or might not. 

This relationship had serious dreams attached, though to be clear, she often referenced the dreams to him. Does that matter one wonders. 

Two abandoned wheelchairs on a dock in the early morning haze. One coated with barnacles, which will start smelling when the sun hits. Early morning haze because she’s an early riser and likes to get outside before the sun, on this morning surprised by wheelchairs, of all possible runes. Who wouldn’t be? Could be someone’s in the water. With the absence of struggle, splashing, and calls for help, and the ubiquitous, for the time being, calm, cucumber water, odds are the chairs’ occupants are drowned and dead. If they’re nearby. 

There’s nothing to indicate they are or aren’t, nearby, alive, or dead, or anything else. No baseball cap. No wooden nickels in the water, or lipstick smears. No blood on the dock, no floating corpses, no nothing. There might be a letter in the mail somewhere. A suicide note scrawled on a postcard of Yosemite, or Joshua Tree. Or at an honest to goodness theme park, postmarked here. Say Leavenworth, the pretend town on the other side of the Cascades, also the name of a prison back east, Or maybe there’s an email in an inbox, a voicemail on a phone. Or nothing. Zilcho. Which is about the worst thing in situations like this. Missing persons situations I mean. If that’s what it is. 

Sorting out the past is tough. That’s why the movies are filled with detectives. Alcoholic, divorced, did something bad in one of our wars and now it affects their behavior. These folks are good at figuring stuff out, apparently. Take your pick of problems and wars. We have lots of them. We wage wars so we can make movies about them after. It’s more realistic that way. People can relate, unsure they’re watching a movie or a war. 

You notice, in public spaces, unexplainable things happen all the time, mostly at night. At home when you wake up and find an inch of water, or wine, or Coca Cola, in a glass, you assume your partner left it there, reasonably assume. When you find a glass on a bench beside a path, early in the morning haze, you have no idea where it came from and whose lips have been in creepy contact with the rim of the glass. 

Miracles tempt us, but there are no miracles. Short cuts tempt us. God is a short cut, and we allow these temptations to control us. Still, death is on the other side of the door. 

Then a friend you see almost every day disappears. Her disappearance screws with time, because she’s missing from the present. She’s somewhere, but not where she used to be. Her absence makes the present incomplete. The story wanders and you wonder if there’s a story at all, if the whole thing hasn’t gone to hell, and you’re never going to understand it. Never.

Take the barnacled wheelchair for example. We know there are 1400 varieties of barnacles. They reproduce without partners, that is, they’re hermaphroditic.They colonize a new underwater surface in a couple days.  Barnacles attach to everything in the water: rocks, tires, wheelchairs, whales, whatever’s in the water, unless the object, a boat perhaps, has a coat of antifouling paint, essentially copper, which is a poison and repels life. 

The couple have been on a decades long journey, and it’s been ok for the most part. Right now they’re on a pleasant dirt road with a grass strip in the middle, that slopes out of forested hills onto the coast plain, skirts the sea cliffs for a time, then drops to a beach or landing place, where they pass an old boat, then a fish house, but then up they go again, sometimes precariously, and arc back into the woods where the sun dimples and flecks the warm floor of rusty needles. The road does this several times. In and out, up and down. 

She squinted over her shoulder. And a minute later again. 
What, he said.
Someone’s following us. 
They’re just on the road, like us. 
No, I can feel it, they’re following us. 
They? 
There are two.
They both looked up into the huge fir trees straddling the road. Up ahead was light, and they emerged from the forest engulfed in the salt air of the sea. 

They held hands and talked about where they might spend the night. 
Not too close to the edge, he said. Remember, sleepwalking. 
Ha ha, wouldn't that be something. Wake up and find yourself in mid air. 

After a few minutes she looked back again. 
This time he picked up on something. He was used to her body as alarm system for aberrations. 
What is it ?
It’s death, she said. Two of them, and they’re following us.
Why would they do that? 
Why do you think? 
Is it that obvious? 
She said nothing. She balked at acknowledging stupid questions. 
He remembered she even said once, I’m not going to waste my breath. 
Ha ha, he’d replied, by way of pointing out the irony she just had. 

What do we do? 
I suggest we go up to that little knoll there, where we’ll be out of sight, and make love until they go past, and then resume on the road. 
I like that idea. 

That’s what they did and they took their time doing it. Might as well give death a good lead, they even talked it over. They peeked through the grass and saw the two deaths pass by. Turns out they were on horseback after all. 

We can’t outrun them. 
Of course not.
What do we do?
Go back to the road and continue on. What else is there to do?
I don’t like it. Look at them. Bad company. 
Get used to it. 

She got dressed. 
He sat on a smooth slab of warm granite and watched, reminded of earlier times when they used to do this on the islands before the boy was born. Forty years ago they were in different bodies, that was for sure, watching the disintegration of her upper arms. Not dissimilar from the two on horseback. The boy coming changed everything, and then everything changed again. 

What, she said.
Just thinking. Here we are. 
She threw him one of her looks. An acknowledgement he didn’t mind in the least. In fact, these days he’d take what he could get. 
I’m ready, she said. What about you? 
I might go on from here with no clothes. 
Yeah right. 
Wait up, will you? But she was off down the hill to rejoin the road. 

He caught up with her after walking alone for some time. It made him nervous, something might have happened, or something might now. But there she was sitting on a rock looking out at the sea, which was about as flat as it gets, the air barely moving. Isn’t air something?. Still like this one minute, then next a maelstrom frothing the sea into a monster’s fury.  

They’re up ahead, she said, pointing across the cove. Waiting. 
Shit. Well, we can wait too. 
We’ve been waiting most of our lives, and how has that gone?  
That’s different, he said.
I’m not sure. How many times I have felt already dead. 
We’ve been over it, and over it, and over it. 
But not over it. 

Company, she said, tilting her head back the way they’d come. 
A young woman led a small boy who carried a stick and whacked it around on the road, spitting up little tufts of dust. They could tell she was speaking to him, perhaps asking him to stop, but his behavior didn’t change until they got up where they were sitting. 

They looked at the boy with curiosity, while exchanging words with the woman. 
Watch out ahead, they told her. They’re waiting for us, just there. Both pointed toward a group of boulders where the deaths sat their horses. 
I don’t see anything, said the woman. 
There, just right there, said the man and woman together. 
The boy restarted his whacking. He’d picked a great stick for whacking because it curved near the end in a way that its long length really smarted the dust when he struck.
And still they watched him with more curiosity than he was due.
You’re joking, right?, said the young woman. 
What’s so funny, said the boy. 
Because my vision is 20/20. There’s nothing over there. 

The lovers’ eyebrows went up. Like, what is with her?
Come, said the young woman, motioning to the boy. 

But he’d spied a garter snake at the edge of the road and whacked it straightaway with his stick.The snake writhed chaotically, and the boy whacked again, and again, until the pieces stopped moving, and he stood there with blank eyes, looking what he’d done.