The Farm Read online

  She decided to put a pot of water on just in case. Spaghetti only took fifteen minutes. She would be brave and not resort to the prepared sauces in the pantry. Instead, she would go for diced tomatoes and fresh mushrooms. Except, what did you spice a spaghetti sauce with? She ducked into the pantry and pulled out the Gregorio. She held the jar near her face and read the ingredients. Salt, oregano, basil, garlic. Okay, she could handle that. She didn't know the proper ratios but if she was conservative, then it might balance out. If worse came to worse, she could fry up some hamburger, greasy mad cow that would wipe out all the other flavors. Or goat. Goat would do the trick.

  Goatghetti. A traditional Appalachian-Italian dish.

  She tucked the jar back on the pantry shelf, then paused.

  The smell of lilac rose like a solid thing, brushed against Katy, embraced her. She shivered, though the pantry was dry and breeze-less.

  Footsteps sounded again, those hard heels leading from the pantry and across the kitchen.

  No.

  She doesn't exist.

  No matter what Katy had seen and heard and imagined these past few weeks, this kitchen belonged to her. This was her house now. Until death she and Gordon did part.

  Behind Katy, the Gregorio fell to the floor with a brittle shattering of glass.

  Chapter Two

  Lame, lame, lame.

  Jett tried to concentrate on her homework. World history, memorizing the long list of white Europeans, whom they killed, and when. The problem with history textbooks was they never got into the why of it all. Of course, the sixth grade spent a day each on India and Africa, and China, the world's most populous country, earned a shared chapter with Japan. Jett decided world history could be summed up in a single word, and she'd write it in on the next essay test: B-O-R-I-N-G.

  Make that two words. F-U-C-K-I-N-G boring.

  Her attention wandered from the book in front of her. If only she had an Xbox or a TV in her room. Too bad she'd gotten stuck with one of those weird moms, the kind who checked up on their daughters and paid attention to their moods. Why couldn't she have Bethany's mom, who had signed for birth control pills, given her daughter a cell phone with unlimited minutes, and turned her loose with a football stud? Now that was love. That was understanding. That was knowing what a daughter needed.

  Jett looked out the window. Anywhere but at her book. The hills crawled away toward the horizon, a few barns and houses scattered among the green hills. Solom, North Carolina. Whoopdie-shit.

  She'd taken to cussing in her mind. Rarely out loud, because Mom was one of those old-fashioned types who said cussing was the cheap tool of small minds, and Gordon was a bastard about blasphemy. Better to think up something clever and leave them baffled and off-balance, Mom always said. Of course, it was easy for Mom. She hadn't been twelve years old in a century or so. She'd forgotten what it was like.

  Solom. Population what? Three dozen, unless you counted the horses and goats and cows?

  Fucking Solom.

  Three churches, a post office, a general store, and five Rebel flags.

  Charlotte wasn't all that great, either. At Jett's last public school, a kid had gotten knifed at the bus stop over a dope deal. Dope was one of those things that horrified the teachers and parents, but most of the kids didn't pay attention. It was there if you wanted it, and if you could hang with that crowd. Jett didn't hang but she'd tried a joint and then she was lighting up every morning before school. That led to other things, some of which had erased their tracks through her brain. Like father, like daughter.

  Of course, Solom might not even have dope, as backwoods as it was. The big deal here was joining the 4-H Club, breeding prize-winning livestock, and growing cabbage. And going to church. No fewer than a half dozen girls had invited Jett to their churches in her first week at school, and every one of them attended a different one. Drip Creek Union Baptist, Cross Valley Living Water Fellowship, True Light Tabernacle, Solom Free Will Baptist, Solom Methodist Church of the Cross, Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church. Gordon could probably explain the differences, but if he even tried, Jett would fall asleep by the second sentence.

  Not that Gordon was completely bad. Mom had spent months and months telling Jett all about it. About how Gordon was nice to Mom, how he took care of the family, how he opened up his home and gave them a future. About how Gordon would be a good father, not her real father, of course, but he would be there if she ever needed him. Gordon was rock solid, reliable, ready to take on arrogant teachers and subscribe to Parent magazine, preview every PG-13 movie before Jett could watch it, and frown at every CD that had a black M stamped on the cover.

  Sure, Gordon was all right. His eyes were dull and kind behind those thick lenses. He read a lot, and must be pretty smart, judging by all those degrees and certificates on the wall of his downstairs office. If world history started to mess with her, Gordon would probably have all the answers. But there was one major problem with Gordon.

  He wasn't fucking goddamned her dad.

  He was Gordon. Mark was Dad. Dad wasn't even Mark, just Dad. He didn't need a name. If she had a working cell phone like everybody else in the world she'd give Dad a call right now and tell him about this hick shit hole called Solom.

  The wind blew the curtains apart, giving Jett a full view of the barn and its dark windows. She imagined ancient creatures flitting and fluttering around in me eaves.

  Inside the hayloft, a light flashed. Must be a lantern, because it flickered and bobbed instead of cutting a solid arc the way a flashlight would.

  Jett was no hick, but even she knew better than to carry a lantern in a barn. With all that straw and stuff, a dry barn was like a whatchamacallit on a galleon, the kind of ship the English sank in the Spanish Armada in 1588. A powder keg. Where one spark meant ka-blooey.

  She went to the window. The sun was low in the sky but not yet touching the horizon, so it was probably a little before seven. Why did some lamebrain need a lantern in the barn when it wasn't even dark yet?

  The light came again, flashed once, then twice. Like a signal. One if by goat, two if by cow. Jett pressed her face against the glass and peered up the slope that faced the barn's opening. Under the dark canopy of trees came a flurry of movement, as if something or someone had been beckoned by the light.

  Holy shit. This was like Nancy Drew or something. A real mystery.

  Jett thought about telling Mom, because Mom kept saying they were in this together and would "get through it together." But Mom had enough to worry about, what with a smelly kitchen and dirty dishes and a new husband and nothing to do all day but clean house. Actually, Mom would enjoy a good mystery, but if things got the slightest bit squirrelly, Jett would be sent to her room until matters calmed down. Who wanted calm? Certainly not a girl who was now a woman, almost, at least in the ways that counted.

  She glanced at the textbook on her desk. The F-word was getting lame and she should come up with a better alternative. But for now, it would have to do.

  "Fuck off, Archduke Ferdinand."

  She left the room, pausing at the head of the stairs to make sure Mom wasn't lurking. A pot clattered to the floor in the kitchen downstairs. "Shooty-booty," Mom yelled, not aware she had an audience.

  Mom was busy making the perfect meal, all four food groups represented, as colorful as anything in Women's World Weekly, the calories toted up, the serving dishes neatly spaced on the dining room table. When Mom was in housewife mode, Jett could get away with murder. She slipped down the stairs and out the back door. The barn was thirty yards away, weathered and gray, the sun bouncing off its dull tin roof.

  Gordon's barn was weird. The boards on the top story slanted upward in the angle of a V, and the loft opening was a black, upside-down triangle. The barn leaned slightly to the side in a wobbly geometry. The other barns in Solom had the same appearance, like something M.C. Escher would draw while stoned. Jett's secret obsession with art might come in handy if she ever needed to sketch a picture of
her pathetic life.

  The barn was separated from the house by a brown stretch of garden. The vegetables were mostly played out for the year, the tomato plants hanging like crucified black witches from their stakes. The only green was from the rows of fat cabbage heads, thick bottom leaves curled and yellowed, evoking an image of blondes buried to their necks in the dirt. That would be sweet. Jett despised blondes, resented their vacant faces and blue eyes and the amount of silliness that the boys expected from them. Plus, Bethany was blond.

  The frost had come two nights before, sending the garden to seed. Jett had been delighted by the sight of it, waking up to see the billion silver sparkles across the landscape. Then she'd had to wait for the bus at the end of the road and decided that cold was for the Eskimos, she'd take a sunburn in Charlotte any day. She dreaded the coming winter. Snow was a rarity in the Piedmont, but these mountains on the Tennessee border received four or five feet of snow per year. Probably glaciers, too, cutting through the valley and scooping up goats, cows, donkeys, and enough rednecks to fill the stands at a tractor pull.

  Now, Jett, she could hear her mother say. Mom had a way of doing that, popping into her head with a voice of common sense when all Jett wanted to do was make fun of people and turn her back on the fucked-up world that never seemed to heed her wishes. She was an artist and an outsider, and that gave her a hammer. She could knock down anything that stood in her way.

  Including the goat that stood between the edge of the garden and the barn.

  Gordon's pet goat.

  It was mostly white, with a few tan splotches on its belly. Two worn stubs of horns grew out of the skull like the thumbs of dirty gloves. The eyes were the color of a storm ditch, and the black pupils were horizontal slits against them. The goat raised its head and stared at Jett. A long tuft of hair trailed from its gut to the ground matted with the animal's own urine. Somewhere in there was its mysterious penis, but she didn't look too closely.

  Abraham, the goat was called. One of Gordon's religious jokes, the kind he let loose out of one side of his mouth, sitting in his overstuffed chair while reading a book, not caring if anyone heard him or not. Gordon had a lot of inside jokes. He would chuckle to himself, the sound rolling up from his ample belly and squirting out beneath his mustache. Poor Mom tried her best to keep up, to ask him to explain, but lately she'd taken to answering with a halfhearted laugh, a nod and a stare off into the corner of the room.

  "Howdy, Abraham," Jett said. "Good kitty."

  Abraham dipped his head swiveled his neck to look at the worn patch of meadow behind him, then swicked his short tail to scare up some flies.

  "Nice kitty, kitty, kitty."

  Jett approached the hog wire fence, getting a foothold in one of the wire squares along a locust post. The fence was topped with a single strand of barbed wire, but that would be no trouble for an athletic twelve-year-old. All it would take was a hop and skip, then a jump and roll like an Olympic gymnast finishing up a spastic routine. Abraham twisted his jaws, bits of green dribbling from the pale lips.

  Halfway over the fence, her legs splayed on each side, Jett glanced up at the barn loft. The light flashed again, penetrating the center of the black triangle. Jett's hand hit the top wire and one of the rusted metal barbs pierced her palm.

  "Shit fuck damn ass-wipe me, Jesus," she said, depleting her entire repertoire of bad words. She put the wound to her mouth and sucked, hoping to draw out the tetanus and West Nile virus and herpes and whatever else you caught from farm animals. Abraham lifted his head, ears perking. His nose wriggled as he sniffed the air. He took three steps toward Jett.

  "Nothing to see here, folks," Jett said. "Just move on along."

  The only moving Abraham was doing was closer.

  "Seriously," she said, her voice cracking just a little. "No harm, no foul."

  Abraham snorted and his head doddered, the filthy white beard waving in the breeze. Jett looked back at the house. Mom was busy in the kitchen. Not that Jett would call for help, even if her life depended on it.

  What's the f-ing deal? Scared of a doofy goat. No wonder the kids at school make fun of you. You ain't country, you ain't mountain, you ain't from round here. You 're freaky. You like to draw and read Vonnegut and Palahniuk. You have purple bootlaces, a black leather bracelet, and a button of Robert Smith in silhouette on your backpack. A Gothling in the land of Levi's and plaid cotton. A confused pilgrim in the Promised Land. No wonder you look like billy-goat bait from Abraham's point of view.

  Easy meat.

  "I'm not scared," she said to Abraham. "I'm the human here. I'm the one who can toss your ass on the altar or serve you up as stir-fry."

  Abraham was unimpressed. He eased closer, his musky stench assailing her. Jett dangled from the top of the fence, her crotch dangerously close to the barbed wire. She couldn't flip herself to either side without risking some sort of unimaginable disaster, the kind that no amount of feminine products could stanch.

  Maybe Mom would hear her if she yelled. But she pictured the scene that would greet Mom, her daughter straddling the fence, held at bay by a goat. Christ, she wasn't a four-year-old anymore. This wasn't a Charlotte playground where the crack kids would mug you for a nickel. This was her new home, the place where she would grow to womanhood, where she would crawl through her defining moments. High school, soccer team, first boyfriend, junior prom, and with any luck, the place where she would lose her virginity. All those things were much scarier than a fucking goat.

  She clenched her jaw and launched herself toward the meadow. Abraham, startled, stepped back. Jett landed on the balls of her feet, raised herself into a jujitsu stance, and said, "Bring it on, crap sack."

  Apparently the crap sack was awed by her display, because Abraham backed away, the horizontal pupils fixed on his sudden adversary. Jett waved her hands in a shooing motion and headed toward the barn. The center of her palm threw off bright sparks of pain, but she focused her attention on the loft. Whoever was in the loft must have seen her. The space beyond the triangle was dark and still.

  Jett hurried to the open mouth of the barn, expecting Abraham to charge at any moment. She'd prowled the barn before. That was one of the first things that caught her eye when Gordon had brought his new family to the mountain farm. Gordon had flashed a pleased grin at Jett's interest, but in truth, Jett had been desperate to get away from him. A two-hour car ride up from Charlotte had been about as much of the Gordon experience as she could handle for one day. So the barn had been both an adventure and an escape, and she'd explored it a couple of times since, imagining a roll in the hay with a boy, though she couldn't picture the boy's face or exactly what they were supposed to be doing, only that it was something that would make grown-ups mad.

  The bottom floor of the barn was nothing to get excited about. Strands of hay and dried waste laid a mottled carpet, and a few stalls at the back were empty. Apparently Gordon's ancestors had killed cattle and pigs here, but Gordon said it wasn't right to slaughter the innocent. Only the guilty. Not that Gord was a vegetarian; he just let other people do his killing for him.

  A set of crooked stairs led to the loft. Black squares in the floor above allowed hay to be thrown down to the animals. Jett listened, expecting footsteps. The mystery person upstairs must have seen her enter the barn. A delicious shiver ran up her spine. She twisted the leather bracelet for courage.

  Maybe she wouldn't die of boredom in Solom. Not with all the delightful conspiracy theories she could spin. The person upstairs could be a terrorist, Al-fucking-Qaeda, Osama's long-lost twin gone country bumpkin. Or a militant white supremacist. She'd never seen as many Confederate Stars and Bars as she had on the two-mile stretch from the main road to Gordon's house. The cluster of them around the tabernacle gave the feeling of an armed compound as if the natives would disappear into their bunkers at the first sign of a government license plate.

  Sure, it was a weirdo, a freakazoid child rapist. In that case, what in the F was she doing standi
ng there? Entering its lair, its zone?

  Probably it was Odus Hampton, the stubble-faced guy in overalls who sometimes did farm chores around the place. Odus didn't talk much, worked hard, and kept to himself. To Jett, Odus was the typical redneck, with big, rough hands and crooked teeth. As crooked as hers would be, if Gordon hadn't been wealthy enough to pay for braces.

  Jett peeked through the gap between two siding boards. If the person upstairs was signaling someone, then maybe she could decipher the message. Turn the tables on him, get the goods and pull a little blackmail game. Accuse him of trespassing, maybe score some points with Gordon, for what that was worth. The stand of hardwoods where she'd seen the answering light was unwaveringly dark, the evening shadows creating a thick morass beneath the tops of the trees.

  She leaned against the wall, held her breath, and listened. She peeked through the boards once more, and a rheumy green eye looked back at her. She yelped and fell on her rump, crab-crawling away from the eye. Then Abraham gave his moist snort, and Jett sighed, dust filling her nostrils.

  Scared out of her wits by a fucking goat.

  Some Nancy Drew she was. More like a lame Olsen twin.

  Jett stood and brushed herself off, determined not to be girly. Someone was upstairs, in Gordon's barn, without permission. In her barn. After all, she was family now, whether she liked it or not. She was part of this fucked-up stretch of uneven ground, it was her turf, home territory, the farm. Besides, if worse came to worse, she could yell for Mom and have an ally. Mom was always on her side, no matter the battle.

  Some old bits of hardware hung from pegs on the wall: a length of chain, stinky brown rope, a hackamore, rusty branch clippers, and a backpack spray tank that looked like a leftover prop from a fifties big-bug sci-fi movie. Jett pictured herself slipping on the backpack, finding some goggles, then clambering up the stairs and scaring the living bejesus out of the intruder. No time. Besides, that was a little over the top. Just being a Goth Lite was edgy enough. Maybe the tiny bit of black eyeliner that Mom allowed would be enough to frighten her adversary.