Erin Hart - The Book of Killowen

She still couldn’t believe that there were seven other people now living at Killowen. How on earth had that happened? In some ways, she had been better off alone, those first years. There were days she missed it dreadfully, the silence, the weeks and months of soul-scouring solitude. Asking two human beings to live in close quarters without coming to blows was hard enough—but eight ? And all eccentrics, to boot—everyone at Killowen was an oddball in some way, there was no denying it. She must have been out of her mind. Look at her, retreating to this private bolt-hole every day, thinking she might avoid dealing with the whole situation by coming out here and getting stoned—again. Pathetic, that’s what it was, really and truly. If she had any sense, she’d have left long ago, before the place had turned into something… unmanageable. But when was that point, exactly?

When she arrived here, the first imperative had been putting distance between herself and what had happened. That was the way she thought about it now. On that fateful day so long ago, she had just started walking away from the blood and the chaos, the sound of the sirens. And she had kept walking, thumbing a lift when she could, until by sheer chance she had arrived here. For the most part, she had succeeded in walling off her past. There was no reason to return. Claire took another drag and held the smoke inside her lungs. That familiar, comforting buzz was becoming a little harder to achieve, a bit more difficult to sustain every day. Claire leaned back, letting the weight of her body slump into the oak tree’s gnarled roots, remembering. She watched the smoke curling around her head, suddenly back again in the warmth of a pub’s wooden snug, the lofty words and ideas wafting as dense as the curling cigarette smoke in the air. The conversation, fueled by whiskey and porter, was no more than youthful railing against the status quo. Nothing was ever resolved—did anyone really expect resolution? Once in a great while, she allowed herself to miss the innocence and arrogance of those days, when action was still only hypothetical, and idle words had no consequence. Raising one hand in front of her, she studied the worn palm, the stretched skin and enlarged knuckles. Who’d have thought, after everything, that she’d end up as a farmer?

The place had been an absolute tip when she arrived, abandoned for years. The eighteenth-century granary, now the main house, had been a complete ruin, just four walls and gaping windows. The cottage roof was stoved in and the windows were broken, the frames peeling paint; every wall seemed invaded by damp and mold. There was no electricity, no plumbing to speak of. The sad death and even sadder life of the last bachelor-farmer occupant was evident in the mismatched jumble of crockery still on the table, the remains of a final dinner left to molder on the range. She had slept poorly that night, on the old farmer’s rough straw mattress. The following morning, she had staked her claim. Picking up a rusty sledge from the shed, she’d gutted the whole cottage in a single day, right down to bare stone. In the days and weeks after, she had cleared away cartloads of mildewed junk and found scraps of sheet metal that would do for temporary roofing. When at last the cottage was marginally livable, she had dug in beds for herbs and vegetables, built a chicken run out of scrap lumber and odd bits of fencing, started trading eggs for paint and lamp oil. It had taken her more than a year to make the place habitable, but after months of hard labor, the cottage walls were finished and fairly glowed with several coats of fresh whitewash. She often thought back to the texture of those early days, the bone-weariness that allowed her nights without dreams. Occasionally her precarious standing as a squatter had triggered a sleepless night, but eventually even that fear had worn away. What might happen was kept at bay by the here and now. And the combination of work and solitude had suited her then. There were times when she’d spoken to no one for weeks on end.

But the need for companionship must have been much more deep-seated than she realized and reared its head quite unexpectedly. She remembered the day in great detail. She’d been taking advantage of rare good weather, staking out beans in the garden, when a middle-aged couple on a walking tour stopped to ask where they might find lodging.

“We’ve no guesthouse nearby,” she’d told them, “but you’d be welcome to stay here. I won’t say the accommodation’s deluxe, but it is free—that is, if you’d be willing to lend a hand for a day or two.”

Her own words had taken her by surprise. But the offer, once made, could not be withdrawn. That couple—Martin and Tessa Gwynne—planned to stay on only a few days at Killowen. Eighteen years later, they were still here. She couldn’t imagine how she’d ever got on without them. Martin, tall and slender, with elegant long hands, was an artist with the quill, something she found out only after he’d been at Killowen for more than two years. Tessa was nearly as tall as her husband, with a cascade of dark hair long since turned to white, and hands strong and sinewy from playing the harp. They were both like characters from the ancient sagas, out of place in the present. Martin, in particular, had made himself indispensable, with his esoteric understanding of compost toilets, wattle-and-daub construction, and drystone walls, all subjects about which Claire herself knew next to nothing. Even after all this time, she still knew precious little about Martin and Tessa, except that they were roughly fifteen years older than she was and had lived and traveled the world—London, Switzerland, Paris, North Africa. Claire knew virtually nothing about what had led them to those places, but if she had been forced to speculate, she might have guessed that they were on some sort of spiritual quest. That was quite all right—as long as they didn’t try to tell her about it. She had a low tolerance for that sort of thing.

For years, it had been just the three of them. Then, nearly a decade ago, Martin had proposed converting the ruined granary into an artists’ retreat, and everything else had progressed from there. It had never been Claire’s aim to create anything; to her way of thinking, Killowen had just happened as she was trying to survive. But they had built something here, bit by bit, as the years piled up, the tilling and planting, the circle of seasons, round and round.

Over time, a whole rootless menagerie of misfits had arrived on her doorstep like strays, all looking for something. Some never found what they were seeking and moved on; some stayed, perhaps content just to work in a garden after being chewed up and spat out by the world. At Killowen, they were fairly well insulated from all that. It wasn’t that they were purposely egalitarian, it just worked out that way. They all pitched in with the farmwork, according to their interests and abilities, shared cooking duties in turn, and had time to pursue their own creative inclinations. A French couple had come to stay last year, through a scheme that matched volunteers with small organic farms. Lucien and Sylvie had launched a cheese-making operation and now supplied local co-ops and farmers’ markets. Claire didn’t really understand what had drawn them to Killowen, but she needed the extra hands—and, she had to admit, the overall quality of the communal meals had vastly improved since the Francophone contingent had arrived.

She had purposely avoided asking questions of the residents, knowing all too well that any idle curiosity might be turned back upon her. No one at Killowen knew of her former life either. It was almost as if the past didn’t exist, as if in coming here everyone had acquired a fresh start.

None was more enigmatic than one of their latest arrivals. Eighteen months ago, Martin had discovered a stranger, apparently ill and wandering the bog on foot—with no identification and no sign of where he’d come from. It being the depths of winter, Martin really had no choice but to bring him back to Killowen before he froze to death. Claire closed her eyes, remembering her first glimpse of the man at the door of her cottage—wet and wild-eyed, ill clothed, chilled to the bone.