By Connor Wroe Southard
On our second night at the farm, my cousin and I kept watch on the road in case the men came back. We drank strawberry homebrew on the patio where, as boys, we’d been scolded by our grandmother for ‘talking ugly’ on our way to and from church. The black walnut tree—200 years old, just like the house—loomed over us and deepened the twilight gloom. A few scraggly dairy cows walked ragged circles in the pasture across the road. The evening smelled of grass clippings fermenting in the intensifying heat of late May. Every so often, a truck would pass between us and the pasture, bellowing diesel fumes on its way up the hill. None of the trucks carried the men from the previous night.
My cousin Jeffrey didn’t seem worried about whether the men would come back or what might happen if they did. Which spoke to why I wanted to be around Jeffrey in this season of my life. I needed someone to show me how it might be possible to simply do what you needed to do without becoming paralyzed by unbidden concern.
“If we can get the fence posts out tomorrow, we’ll be well on our way,” Jeffrey said.
“Our way to what?”
“You know. Making the farm like it used to be.”
“How did it used to be? Neither of us remember it being the way you mean.”
“That’s exactly my point. We make it like the stories. You know. The way it should be.”
I didn’t say, So the stories are how it should be? I’d used up my allotment of philosophical questions for the evening. If I were to ask any more questions, they’d need to be concrete, about a tool or a tree or an animal.
So I said, “Is this strawberry less sweet than usual? Seems better than it was last time I had it.”
“I actually think it’s even sweeter than before. You’re just finally becoming Southern.”
My cousin slapped me on the shoulder.
The homebrew was made by a friend of our uncle who would act cagey about whether he made liquor even as he poured it out of the jar for you. My cousin and I had bought several jars of it from this uncle-friend, who deserved his anonymity, for a pair of crisp hundred-dollar bills. We’d gotten a kick out of going down into the holler to meet the uncle-friend. He lived down a road back in the woods along which were scattered the carcasses of increasingly rusted and exotic vehicles. Several free-roaming dogs came out to inspect us as we passed and spun our tires in the ever-deepening mud. When we arrived at the uncle-friend’s house, he did us the great favor of coming out onto his porch brandishing a shotgun. That really made our day.
“Did you see that?”
My cousin pointed to the northern pasture, which was bluing with the fading of the light.
“The cows?”
“No. There was something running across, into the trees.”
“Deer?” “Wrong shape.”
A gray phantom rose from the trees along the riverbank where my cousin had been pointing. It swooped toward the house, and then banked off over the east pasture. A great blue heron.
“Was that it?”
“No. It was something else.”
We sat there in the satisfaction that there were too many animals around us, on our dead grandparents’ farm, for us to keep track of or even name. The men didn’t come back that night.
In the morning, after we had coffee in the kitchen where our grandmother had given us orders notarized on index cards, and where our grandfather had asked us whether we would take some responsibility for the ‘sorry’ state of the world, Jeffrey and I put on sleeveless shirts and cracked leather gloves and began digging up the rotten fence posts near the river. Neither of us had the slightest notion of what we were doing. Jeffrey had settled on using the tractor, which was older than either of us, as a sort of excavator. I’d loop a chain around the posts, and Jeffrey would lift the shovel at the front of the tractor, and the post would pop free of the ground. This worked well enough, except when it didn’t. A few posts snapped and their remains stayed on as mournful sentinels. The mold on the posts and the earth mortared into the tractor shovel were also probably older than either of us.
We did this until the day grew too hot for us to keep up our pretensions. We drank water and ate tomato sandwiches with mayo and black pepper, just like our grandmother used to make. Her sandwiches were better.
After eating, we finally allowed ourselves to look at our phones. We had a tacit agreement not to over-involve phones in our venture, as the farm was supposed to be somehow the opposite of a screen: Ancestral, endlessly tactile, not only able to be touched and smelled, but making such demands.
“Looks like there was another supposedly credible extraterrestrial sighting,” I said. “This one is vouched for by the governments of both China and India. They said it looked sort of like an anthropomorphic goat. In the high Himalayas.”
“Yeah,” Jeffrey said.
“That unexplained bioluminescence in San Francisco Bay changed colors,” I said.
“To what?”
“Purple. Wait, no. It was purple before. Now it’s like a turquoise.”
“Ah.”
“That new movie about the Brooklyn writer and her dating life or whatever is supposed to be good. Maybe we should go into town to see it.”
“Sure.”
One reason I had joined forces with Jeffrey was his resolute inattention to such events. We were here to make things on the farm the way they were supposed to be, not to work ourselves into a hysteria about things we couldn’t control. Jeffrey had always been sensible.
“Also, Maisie is coming through on her way to the beach or wherever.”
“Saw that,” Jeffrey said.
We went back to the performance of work—ineptly filling holes on the gravel turnaround in front of the patio—so that our cousin Maisie wouldn’t catch us loafing. She arrived in her gleaming black German SUV and pulled up just short of where Jeffrey and I were poking at the gravel. Her daughter Mathilda sprang out of the car like a jackrabbit out of the sage back home in Wyoming.
“Well look at you boys,” Maisie said, in a perfect delivery of one of those non-statements that, coming from a woman, will always have great significance to a man.
“Drive down from DC was OK?” I said.
“As good as, well. There were checkpoints, of course. But fine,” she said.
Mathilda had already located the old gray barn cat that Jeffrey and I could never seem to find, and had persuaded it to bat at a little red ball she had.
“Do you actually take care of those cows?” Maisie pointed at the north pasture.
“Nah. That’s old man Kingery. He still has his dairy farm. He rents the land from us.”
“Is that right? His wife still making ice cream? I could take Mathilda up there.”
“His wife died. He’s gone a little weird. I probably wouldn’t take Mathilda up to the Kingery place.”
Maisie nodded, not needing further elaboration. Though no one ever exactly said so, there were always more and more places you shouldn’t go.
I didn’t tell her why she really shouldn’t go up to the Kingery place. It was disfavored by the men in the trucks, and we didn’t want that association.
We only knew about the dispute because the man at the hardware store told us about the disappearing church. There had always been this ruined stone church on the Kingery property. Just a simple cube of rough-hewn granite. Local lore had it that the church went back to colonial times, that it had been built by some now-extinct sect that had a Quaker-style yen for peace and honesty and other optimistic virtues. When old man Kingery opposed the doings of the men in the trucks—the bone of contention remained obscure—the old church had simply gone away. Dismantled and spirited away in the night, leaving only a muddy smear where there had been a church for three centuries. It wasn’t the costliest of penalties, but it was spooky.
Jeffrey and I didn’t want to disappear ourselves, of course. But we also wanted to make sure the farm didn’t up and disappear on us.
“You look good, Maisie,” I said.
We had reached the age at which we needed to hear that we looked good, but we weren’t so old that we wouldn’t believe it when we heard it.
“You’re sweet.”
“Ronnie doing OK?”
“Ronnie is the happiest man I know. Imagine that? Being married to the happiest person you know. He just keeps making more and more money. Sorry, that’s crude to say.”
“Not at all. Jeffrey and I have done fine, right? That’s why we can be here instead of doing real jobs.”
Maisie nodded.
“I suppose we’ve all done great, haven’t we?” she said. “Hard to imagine things being any better.”
Jeffrey was now passing an orange-and-purple foam football back and forth with Mathilda. They were having so much fun that even the cat seemed interested. It made me sad to reflect that neither Jeffrey nor myself would ever likely become a father. I don’t know that I would have been great at it, but Jeffrey would have been. He had that rugged grace that everyone wants in a father.
“So you’re here now? Permanently? No plans to head back to Wyoming?” Maisie said.
“I didn’t feel like I was making much of a difference there. This feels more important than, you know, the tech bullshit and the rest of it.”
“Farming?”
“Yeah. And all that farming represents, I guess.”
Maisie went into the house for a minute or two and emerged carrying an old bronze fox that our grandfather had used as a paperweight. It had been in the family a long time and served in my imagination as one of the regalia of the farm. I had always admired the fox, and considered saying something. But if Jeffrey and I were going to claim the whole farm, surely we could give Maisie her own little piece of the family legacy. No reason to run off a potential ally.
“You always made good choices, Alden,” Maise said, cradling the fox.
“Did I?”
“Well, I always envied your ability to figure out the right thing to do.”
My cousin wasn’t planning to stay long enough for me to ask her what she could possibly mean by this. As far as I knew, I hadn’t been any more right about things than anyone else. I was simply trying my best.
“Oh wow!” Jeffrey said.
Mathilda had decided to give him the red ball as a gift.
“You can throw it back and forth with Alden.”
“Catch,” Jeffrey said, and chucked the ball at me.
I failed to catch it.
All I got from Mathilda before she and Maisie departed was a high-five. Mathilda was young enough to make you feel like a superhero just for being bigger than her. Big enough to protect her, or so she believed.
Somehow it was almost time for dinner. Or maybe it was just time to drink. We had damson plum wine this time, also from the uncle-friend. It tasted like cough syrup and was nonetheless delicious. The evening was even finer than the last perhaps because of the honeysuckle scent of all that was beginning to bloom.
“Tomorrow we should pull out those old rail ties,” Jeffrey said.
“You mean the ones that used to bound grandpa’s garden?”
“Yeah. They’re too rotted to be of any use to anyone now.”
“What do you want to do with them?”
“I don’t know. Burn them? We can get a bonfire going down by the river once we have enough shit piled up.”
Jeffrey and I turned and regarded the bend in the river where we would have our fire. There had been fires down there when our grandparents were alive. Great roaring conflagrations made of the scrap of a dismantled barn or felled paradise trees. Despite the buoyant flames, drinking was meant to be kept to a minimum. There was a right way and a wrong way to do these things on the farm.
While we were looking at the old fire spot, the men returned. Two truckloads, making the tricky, steep turn into our drive with calculated precision that made me believe they’d been on the property more than once before. Had they been tramping on our land when no one was here to keep watch? What would we do if they had been?
“Here they are again,” I said.
Jeffrey said nothing.
I began to walk down the drive to meet the men. I thought Jeffrey was behind me, but he must have peeled off, because when I arrived at the lead truck, which was red and lifted, he had disappeared.
“Howdy,” I said, not bold enough to say something like, Can I help you boys?
“We just come by to say hi,” said the driver of the red truck. He was sunburned, fitfully bearded, ballcapped. All the men in both trucks looked about the same. They all shifted and coughed and peered with the same primate cadence.
“That’s kind of you.”
“Come to see if everything was going alright for you and your brother.”
“He’s my cousin.”
“Cousin.”
The way the driver said these two syllables suggested he might not believe me. Perhaps he suspected Jeffrey and I to be lovers. Was that another perception for us to fear? If only we could say to this man, We pose no danger, and leave it at that. It never works that way, of course. Nothing has to be proved more stringently than the absence of a threat.
“Anything we can do for you?” I said. “Glass of water? Maybe some homebrew? We’ve got some damson and some strawberry. Might also be some blackberry. I could check.”
“No, we’re OK. We just hoped to talk about—”
We both turned our heads toward the slope leading away into the woods. There had been a splintering sound followed by a thud. Jeffrey was up there, splitting wood atop an old stump. He hefted the axe and brought it down with a clatter. It was as if none of us were down here; not me, not the men. Jeffrey looked for all the world as if splitting wood was the only thing he had ever done or would ever do.
He split two more logs before slinging the axe over his shoulder and coming down to join us.
“Evenin’,” he said.
“Evenin’,’ the driver of the red truck said.
“Help you boys?”
Jeffrey was breathing exactly rapidly enough to let us know he had been working hard, but not so rapidly that it might appear he was unequal to his task. The axe was old-fashioned, a scarred red blade atop a curved wooden handle. Jeffrey kept the axe slung over one shoulder. The bulge of his arm against his rolled sleeve struck me. I hadn’t understood how strong my cousin was.
“We were just coming by to see if y’all needed any help,” the driver said.
“Oh, that’s mighty kind of you. But I think we’re all set.”
Jeffrey swung the axe down so that its head was nearly on the ground, dangling from his right hand.
“Hard work, running a farm.”
“Sure is. But Alden and I are making do. Say, you’re not related to Augur McKinstry, are you? You look a bit like him, if you don’t mind me saying. He used to come by a lot when our grandparents were alive.”
It was as if Jeffrey had said some magical incantation. Eight men across two trucks unclenched and began to shed their menace.
“Pap Augur was my granddad, yep,” the driver said. “I didn’t realize you knew him.”
“Oh just one among many of our grandparents’ friends we met over the years. I remember Augur had that straw hat bleached as white as what was left of his hair.”
A mellow chuckle spread through the truck.
“That’s right. Damn, I had forgotten that hat. Well, listen, you can find me up at what used to be Augur’s place if you need anything.”
In spite of my dislike of these men, I had to admit the charm of refusing to do everything by phone. They were trying to conjure up a world that they, like us, were too young to remember. We were all trying to construct our fantasies.
“That’s yet again kind of you,” Jeffrey said. “Thanks for stopping by.”
With tips of cap brims and nods, the trucks circled our turnaround and departed. Jeffrey and I stood in the dissipating fumes of the trucks and contemplated the gloaming. We had received permission to stay on our land. Our hand was strengthened. We would work now with the purpose of surety.
“Do you think what did it was you telling a story about that old boy that convinced them?” I said.
“I don’t know. I do think guys like that are usually pretty easy to handle.”
“Yeah? They seemed like trouble to me.”
“They can be. They just want to know you see things the way they do.”
“And which way is that, do you think?”
“Hey, do you see that?”
Jeffrey pointed across the road. There was a light gray shape loping across the pasture. The cows were gathering together and edging away and watching.
“That’s a damn coyote,” Jeffrey said.
He trotted to the side-by-side we kept in a carport and began to rip down the drive toward the pasture. I was a little hurt that he didn’t even ask if I wanted to ride along. When Jeffrey reached the pasture, the coyote was almost all the way across, already disappearing into the trees. He pulled a pistol from the tool case in back of the side-by-side and pointed it toward the vanishing gray blur. It was a miracle of good taste that he didn’t shoot just for the hell of it.
When Jeffrey came back, there was nothing left to do except finish the jar of damson. We didn’t talk about the coyote. I wanted to, but I had already solved one problem that day. You have to know when you’re asking too much.
We spent another day in fumbling labor and opened another jar of hooch when evening came. This time it was peach. The sweetest of all. I admired the growing calluses on my hands. I pointed out a red-tailed hawk on the powerline. Jeffrey seemed to approve; the hawk would keep down the rodents, especially the rabbits, who had grown too bold as the barn cat aged. We agreed that we should get a younger cat. I let myself believe we were settling into a gratifying evening routine.
Jeffrey and I had been alike, in our previous lives, at least on the surface. We were both tech guys who made too much money and had too little to do with it. Since we were bad at making meaning, and since our fortunes had been good, albeit wife-less and childless, we gravitated back toward the one place where significance had already been spelled out for us: The farm. In almost every other way, we weren’t all that alike. I read books from time to time, whereas Jeffrey hadn’t read a book cover to cover since high school. I once cared about politics, and Jeffrey never had. But we had been brought together by the search for certainty. The farm felt certain, especially after we had earned the approval of the men in the trucks.
Right as the sun dipped below the venerable oaks on the other side of the road, the red truck curled into our drive. I was heartened that no one was in it except for the driver. He was the one we had talked to. The descendant of old Augur McKinstry.
This time, the red truck rolled to a stop right in front of the porch, between us and the black walnut. Jeffrey was on his feet and gladhanding before I could even parse whether it would be necessary to invite the driver in. The driver got out and revealed that his name was Pierce. He was taller than either of us. He and Jeffrey exchanged the witless witticisms of men who earn their places in this world through something other than intellect. My contribution was to jiggle the jar of peach and offer him a swig, which he declined.
“I just come by because I figured you could use this,” Pierce said.
Pierce hunched over the bed of the truck and undid some latches, swung some hinges. When he straightened up, he was holding an axe.
“Well now,” Jeffrey said.
"This here was handmade by my brother,” Pierce said. “Won’t find one sharper or better-balanced.”
The head of the axe was sooty except for the gleam near the edge. The handle was a handsomely polished light wood. Even at a glance, you could tell it was a damn fine axe.
“I’ll be,” Jeffrey said.
“I know you like to chop wood. This will chop it better than anything else you’ll find.”
“I believe that.”
Jeffrey accepted the axe with two hands, regarding it like the totem of a favored deity.
“Well, much obliged,” he said. “Thank you. That’s a very kind gift. I’ll have to—”
“Don’t mention it,” Pierce said.
“Would you take a few jars of hooch in exchange,” I said, smiling and jiggling the jar again.
Pierce regarded the jar of peach as if it were a lesser axe.
“No, thank you,” he said. “I’m OK.”
It belatedly occurred to me that these men, or at least Pierce, might be tee-totallers. I put down the jar.
“Well, I can’t wait to use this, thank you so much,” Jeffrey said. “I have half a mind to go chop some wood right now.”
“Have at it,” Pierce said, with as close to joviality as I expect he ever came. “I won’t keep troubling you.”
“Not at all. Any time.”
Jeffrey clapped Pierce on the shoulder with a naturalness that made it seem inevitable, as if his hand had forever been fated to arrive there. There were further words of parting that were barely words. Pierce’s truck rumbled away.
“That’s a damn good sign,” Jeffrey said, examining the axe.
“How do you mean?”
“We could get in good with those boys.”
Jeffrey seemed to talk more and more as if he already was one of ‘those boys.’ Which made sense. Why else would we be here, if not to meet expectations? And he was right. I had a strong sense that none of our buildings would disappear, our animals would go unpoisoned, our trees would go unburned. We would be allowed to persist and even thrive. To be permitted to exist was the victory we sought, and we had won it. “Can I see the axe?”
“Sure can.”
I had a hope that the axe might be more inferior than Pierce had said. That it would reveal some failing in Pierce and his boys. But it was a perfect axe. Even without swinging it, you could tell the balance was exceptional, the handle lovingly sanded and curved to channel every ounce of force in your stroke. The blade itself looked so sharp that I didn’t dare test it with my thumb.
“I don’t know that I’m worthy of an axe like this, cousin,” I said.
“Oh, sure you are.” Jeffrey slapped my shoulder with the same ease as he had shown with Pierce. “Go try it out.”
I had been drinking, and wasn’t of a mind to chop wood, but there was still some light left. I lifted the axe and set out for the wood pile.
“Son of a goddamned bitch. Look!”
Jeffery was trotting behind me. He pointed at the pasture. There was the coyote. An unmistakable figment of gray against the darkening grass.
“I’m going to get him this time,” Jeffrey said.
“Could we maybe just try to have a whole evening without trying to kill something?”
These words belonged to the old me. Jeffrey was taken aback by my sharpness. He stared at me for a beat or two with the blankness of a man unable to comprehend an unexpected challenge to his authority. I half expected him to wrench the axe out of my hands.
“We need to shoot that coyote.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s what good neighbors do. If we have a coyote on our land, it might kill someone else’s cat or goat. If we don’t take care of our problems, they become everybody else’s problems. Is that the kind of world you want to live in, Alden?”
“So that’s the world you and I live in? Neighbors helping neighbors.”
“Yeah.”
Jeffrey was done talking. He swept past me and almost checked me with his shoulder. I backpedaled to give him space. Maybe I should have tried to stop him. But having the axe in my hands would in fact have made it that much harder. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I was trying to help us remember the way we used to see things, way back when. Like the damn fool I am.
“Jeffrey.”
“It’s the right thing to do.”
“The coyote has done nothing to us. We can just let it be.”
“You can’t let a predator just run wild, Alden. You oughta understand that.”
My cousin backed the side-by-side out of its shelter and gunned down the drive. He crossed the road too blithely. It could have gone badly for him if anyone came down the road. But it was as if he already understood this place so well that traffic would have to halt if he were on the hunt.
The coyote stared across the road, regarding both me and my onrushing cousin. It stood in the middle of the pasture. The coyote presented itself to us and to whoever else wanted to see it.
“Jeffrey!” I yelled, hoping to spook the coyote.
The coyote kept on staring. Did it understand, and accept the way things were? Or did it simply not care?
Jeffrey was stepping out of the side-by-side and taking aim, this time with a proper rifle. He was a good shot.
The coyote stared him down.
I considered yelling again, but couldn’t make myself believe it would make a difference. I regarded the axe. A tool or a weapon, depending on how you held it. I understood that I wouldn’t even chop wood this evening. The truth was that I would do nothing. I would only bear witness. Was that any better than simply turning away?
Connor Wroe Southard is a writer living in Laramie, Wyoming. He writes the newsletter A Lonely Impulse of Delight.