Scott Nicholson - The Farm

Katy was afraid Gordon would find the vibrator, but Gordon hadn't exactly set the marital bed on fire, either. In fact, he'd not even struck a match.

Maybe professors of religion had to take a vow of celibacy. Though Katy had no moral qualms on the issue, she wondered if premarital sex should perhaps become a legal requirement. After all, you might say "I do" even when the person standing with you before the priest might be thinking "I never will." Mark had been a real believer in premarital sex, to the tune of two or three rounds per day. He called it the "Protestant sex ethic," though Mark had been about as Protestant as a pope. His ardor hadn't dampened once they had tied the knot and the beautiful miracle named Jett had slid down her vaginal canal. Still, the years had left a growing gap between them, and late-night whispered secrets had given way to accusations and aloofness.

But that's not why you divorced him.

Katy walked away from the fireplace. She had more pressing matters at hand than a good wallow in the swamp of regret. Like the butternut squash in the oven.

She found herself thinking of it as the "fucking butternut." Katy made a conscious effort to quit cursing when Jett was a toddler, after the first time she'd heard Jett burp, sit propped up on her wadded diaper, and say, "Fuck." With a toothless grin that melted matronly hearts all the way back to Mesopotamia, Jett had declared her intelligence and the simultaneous importance of surroundings on her upbringing. But Jett was on her way home from school, either by bus or with the trustworthy Mrs. Stansberry up the road.

So Katy felt comfortable saying it aloud, but not too loudly. "Fucking butternut," she said, as she grabbed her pot holder and reached for the oven door.

The whisper that skirled from the pantry was probably nothing more than the September breeze bouncing off the curtains and playing around the room, carrying the autumnal scent of Queen Anne's lace, goldenrod, and pumpkin. But it sounded like a word. Or a name.

"Kaaaay."

Katy grabbed a spatula between the thumb and mitt of the pot holder and spun like a ballet dancer after three shots of whiskey. "Who said that?"

She was annoyed both at herself and at whatever trick of physics had made her panic.

Her heart fluttered, and an uneven rhythm pounded in her ears, like when the natives were asking King Kong to step up to the altar and accept their drugged sacrifice. Fay Wray in the original, Jessica Lange in the De Laurentiis version, and Naomi Watts as the hot blonde du jour in the Peter Jackson remake.

"Kaaaaaaaaay"

"Go away." Katy held up the spatula like a hatchet, hoping to ward off the invisible thing in the corner of the kitchen. Gordon's first wife didn't belong here anymore. She was dead. Rebecca didn't exist.

This was Katy's house now.

And Solom was her home.

Something stirred in the attic. Damned mice. She'd have to speak to Gordon about them.

Later. First, she had a meal to prepare.

Rush Branch Primitive Baptist Church was a one-room wooden building that sat on a crooked row of concrete blocks. The white paint had curled away in places, and the thickness of the chips showed the age of the church. The grounds were well tended, and the waterway that gave the church its name ran barely twenty feet from the front door. A deep pool at the base of a short waterfall made for convenient dipping when baptisms were performed.

David Tester ran a Weed Eater around the wooden steps. Like most rural mountain preachers, he had a real job during the week. David owned a landscaping business, which never would have made it had it not been for the seasonal home owners who had neither the time nor the inclination to do their own yard work. David saw it as a sign from the Lord that outsiders belonged in Solom. Since the Primitives believed in predestination, David didn't have to worry about converting anyone. Their names were either listed in the Big Book or they weren't, simple as that.

Gordon Smith, the college professor, had asked him why his denomination still held services when there seemed to be no ultimate goal. To David, the goal was to live right and to get along, and regular church services couldn't hurt. Besides, this was a community church, and though families could now pile up in a car and drive to one of the fancy churches in Windshake or Titusville, most of the locals preferred to go to the church where they had been raised. The congregation was aging, but that was true of all the old Baptist subdenominations. Seemed the kids didn't take to the Bible the way they used to, and David could hardly blame them.

The Weed Eater's thick fishing line plowed through the ragweed and saw briars that sprouted along the building's foundation. The buzz of the gas-powered engine echoed over the hillside and a veil of blue smoke lifted into the cloudless sky. The rotating line hit gravel and a rock spun free, bouncing off the plank siding of the church. Shredded vegetation stuck to the shins of David's jeans.

David was about to trim around the old cemetery stones when he noticed a small dark hole in the ground by the first grave. He killed the engine and his ears rang in the sudden silence. He knelt by the hole. The grave was that of Harmon Smith, a horseback preacher from the 1800s. Horseback preachers traveled from community to community in all kinds of weather, staying with a host family for a week or two at a time. David admired the sacrifice of such men of God, though Smith had been a little scattershot in his beliefs. He preached to all denominations and according to legend had managed to fit his message to each without ever slipping up by trying to save a Primitive or letting a woman wash a man's feet during the annual Old Regular Baptist foot-washing ceremonies. Then he'd gotten what the old folks called "a mite touched" and had become devoted to the idea of sacrifice, even breeding his own life-stock to serve as Old Testament-style offerings.

The grave hole was probably made by a mouse. David looked around for a rock so he could plug it. A mouse's den probably had a back door, but David didn't think it was proper for a creature to be crawling all around in the preacher's bones. Harmon Smith had earned his rest.

David went to the parking lot and found a fist-sized chunk of granite. He tossed it up, enjoying its weight. David had been a pitcher on the Titusville High School nine and still liked to play church league softball. He was approaching the grave again when he saw the twitch of a dark tail as it disappeared down the hole. Too big to be a mouse. And it was scaly.

Sort of like a David told himself that no snake would burrow into the ground on such a sunny day. It would be on a rock somewhere, absorbing the heat. David ran across snakes all the time in his landscaping work. They were mostly harmless, though copperheads and rattlers lived in these mountains and water moccasins could be found along the rivers and streams. David held the rock by his ear as he approached, ready to hurl it if a serpent's head poked out of the hole.

A truck passed on the highway, slowed, and honked. David lifted his left hand in greeting without taking his gaze from the hole. The truck pulled into the parking lot. David knew how silly he looked, standing in the little cemetery with its worn gray stones, holding a rock like some kid who was afraid of ghosts.

He tossed the rock toward the creek. The truck door opened and James Greene, one of the church elders, climbed down from the seat. He wore denim overalls and a plaid shirt, his sleeves rolled up to reveal thin forearms with silver, wiry hairs. Greene pushed his Atlanta Braves baseball cap off his balding head, wiped at the sweat, then returned the cap to its usual skewed resting place.

"Hi, Elder David," James said.