THE LAND

by David Allan Barker

ISBN: 978-0-9869412-1-4

© David Allan Barker, 2011

The Land is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

That means you are free to quote from it, reproduce sections of it, incorporate it into some other work, create a mashup, zombify it, whatever your heart desires, so long as a) you give appropriate attribution, b) don’t use the resulting work for commercial purposes (even if you are a non-profit or registered charity), & c) redistribute the resulting work under the same licensing terms.

The reason I distribute this novel on such terms is that I despise unregulated capitalism. It cannibalizes all our cultural efforts and excretes them as commodities to be bought and sold pro forma in our global marketplace. I ask that you kindly accord The Land the respect it deserves as an extended and heartfelt conversation with you, my readers.

This is a work of fiction. All characters are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to real persons living or dead is coincidental.

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We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed ...

- 1 Cor. 15:51

PART I - GEORGE

I TRAMP THROUGH the field behind the house, a gentle slope to a spongy patch of ground where the water settles after a steady rain, then a long rise past the old maple to the barn. There's that sucking sound of my boots pulling out from the mud, like the earth is breathing, but with raspy emphysema lungs. Em watches me from the kitchen window. I can feel her gaze. It was her as prodded me to visit Beamsworth's. I gotta make the trip, I know, but I'd rather put it off 'til tomorrow, what with all the chores I have to do, getting ready for market on Saturday. Em says I should take a bin to Beamsworth's as a thank-you—a nice touch—not the sort of thing I'd think up all on my own. I haven't got a bin ready, so I'll have to make one up over at the barn. I been lugging two shopping bags full of turnips, butternut squashes and gourds which I'll dump into one of our thirty litre blue plastic bins. The squashes is heavy buggers and they sink me further into the mud than I'd like to go. My boots is damp enough already because they been sitting outside in the rain—not directly in the rain, mind—I got more sense’n that—but under the shelter of the side porch, outside nonetheless so's to attract the damp.

The barn's old, but I been through it beam by beam and know it's sound. It don't look it on the outside because all the boards is weathered to a bare bone grey, but on the inside things look different. Take the posts for example: big pillars the width of a man’s waist, cut from trees the likes of which they don't grow no more, and the wood as blond and as fresh as the day it was milled. Then there's the floor down below, where my dad used to keep pigs, poured concrete, a pristine lime, all of it sloping to the south end of the barn and a drain. We used to hose it down every day, and all the water and all the pig shit would slue its way to the south and, in the end I guess, go back into the land it come from. No money in pigs no more so I don't follow that routine nowadays, though out of habit I still like to hose down the floor from time to time. There's no cause for it to get dirty except as we sometimes kill a deer crossing the property and hang the carcass above the drain. I ain't a hunter but deer's a bloody nuisance trampling through the gardens, besides which a little venison don't hurt none in the diet.

When we got out of the pig business and into the organics, market gardening and such, I built myself a room on the south side of the barn where some of the sties used to be, a refrigeration unit the size of a bedroom, walls made of plywood and lots and lots of insulation. That way we can pick vegetables on a Monday and keep it fresh for market the next Saturday. I got it set up to manage the humidity, too, since there ain't much point keeping vegetables cool through the week if they're gonna turn soggy on you in the meantime. After I dump the squash and whatnot into a blue bin, I haul open the big door to the cooler and flick on the light. Not much left this late in the season, but I still manage to force some arugula in the greenhouse out back. Tubers do well. We still dig up hills of potatoes, and there's rows of beets, though the tops can turn to mush if there's a frost, and we grow all different colours of carrots—orange and purple and white and red. I throw in a bag of potatoes, a bunch of beets and a variety of carrots, and top off the bin with a plastic baggy of mixed greens. It's a good offering. I snap on the lid and haul the bin out to the truck parked in the lane beside the barn.

The truck's a Ford, a pickup truck. Seems inevitable we'd own a Ford. Our first-born came into this world in the cab of a Ford pick-up truck some thirteen years ago—a son, and healthy despite the ruckus at his arrival. We named him Ford so's no one, least of all him, would ever forget the circumstances of his coming into the world. What we didn't figure on was how that would lock us into a brand of truck. Can't very well name your boy Ford then go out two years later and buy a GM, now can you? And now that we've gone organic, things have only got worse. We feel the pressure to go all green and ditch the big trucks and gas-guzzling equipment. But it's hard. The farm's pretty remote from things and it's a rough land—hilly, and dirt roads that's none too kind to a suspension. So far, they ain't built the hybrid that could take the land around here. Which means, at least for now, we'll keep buying Ford pick-up trucks, and our oldest can rest easy knowing that we haven't abandoned his namesake. Or is he the truck's namesake? I can never keep that one straight.

Beamsworth's is on the edge of town, kitty-corner to the old stone church and the cemetery behind. Dad's buried there, and Mom soon enough. I guess it's a nice place to rest. We all used to go to the church there, parking on a Sunday morning in the gravel by the road running alongside, and we'd walk past all the headstones, me in my scuffed black shoes and dress pants that never stayed straightways on my hips more'n five minutes, and Mom and Dad in their good outfits. So I guess it's a familiar place. It's comfortable. I never visited Dad's gravesite all on my own. Only when Mom wanted me to take her there, wanted a strong arm to lean on, knowing one day she'd end up in that ground too. The soil in the cemetery ain't as good as the soil on my land. I got a blacker soil, richer. They say it was dumped there by glaciers in the last ice age. I wouldn't know. But in the cemetery it's a sandier soil, well-drained, which means it's drier. Better for cedar hedges and simple shrubberies. Mom always said she'd like some kind of evergreen near her headstone. I'm thinking maybe a juniper.

It's noon, too early in the day for anything to be going on at Beamsworth's. I lug the plastic bin up the front steps and past the sign that says Beamsworth's is now a proud member of the Winter Family. Since when did that sign go up? I'll have to ask Chester about it. All's quiet in the foyer and there ain’t no one in the office or the visiting room or the chapel. Chester must be downstairs in the embalming room. I take the elevator down. No one ever rides the elevator except to move bodies to or from the basement, but I don't feel like hauling a heavy bin of vegetables down the stairs.

When I poke my head into the embalming room, sure enough, there's Chester, decked out in his white coat. Even though Chester and I went to school together, he looks at least ten years older‘n me. Emily once joked that for a guy who embalms people, he's not very well-preserved. He has a full head of hair, but it went prematurely grey and now has the look of ash to it. While I spend most of my time doing physical kinds of work, Chester's life has turned out more sedentary-like, blessing him with a tidy gut that oozes over the top of his belt and with arms that waggle like an old woman's when he wears short-sleeved shirts. The only time he spends on his feet is times like now when he's down in the embalming room handling a corpse. There's some heavy lifting, too, like when he's transporting a body from the hospital or the coroner's office. Otherwise, his life as an undertaker is no different than any other pencil-pusher's. He has a business to run and so he has to do all those bean-counting kinds of things you'd expect of any business.

Brought you some fresh veggies, I says. I set the bin on the floor by the nearest embalming table.

You didn't have to trouble yourself with that.

Now, now, Em and I wanted to show our appreciation.

Well it sure is good of you.

Chester pulls open the stainless steel door to the cooler. It looks like the door to an oversized fridge, one of those European fridges with a modern design and dull reflective surface. When the door swings wide I'm relieved to see that the cooler is empty except for a six-pack of beer and Chester's lunchbox on the top shelf. He motions for me to hoist the bin onto the bottom shelf and he shuts the door. There's a thermometer on the wall beside the cooler says it's four degrees centigrade inside—a little too frosty for vegetables but perfect for a cold beer.

Chester and I don't have a whole lot to do with one another. We both go to the Rotary Club so we see each other there and sometimes at church, too, though I ain't so religious these days. Em says I should go more often, says it'll be a comfort, especially now that Mom's gone and I need to adjust to life being the oldest generation—no one before me and all that. She thinks one of these days I'm gonna come face to face with my own mortality, the way I come face to face with a coyote the other night, only with mortality, a little pop-gun of a .22 won't be any help; what I need is a clear shot of religion. That's what she says. Chester's like that too, maybe because he sees all sorts drifting through his establishment haven't got a notion which end is right-way up in this life of ours. People anchor themselves to other people, which is fine until those other people die, then what? But when people anchor themselves to religion, other people die but the ones left behind stay anchored. Chester's all about a personal relationship with Jesus. That's his anchor. The way he talks about Jesus, you'd swear they're next door neighbours. Hell, you'd swear they swap wives every other month. Except for the small detail about Chester's not having a wife. I just lost my mom yesterday and that don't upset my universe half as much as I know it would if I heard that Chester was getting married. That would be a tear in the cosmic order of everything. Mountains would crumble to the sea and volcanoes would spew the devil's bile. Poor Chester still lives with his mom and I think that's made him a bit soft. I think that goes a long way to explaining his personal relationship with Jesus. When he asks me what's my anchor if not Jesus, I tell him it's my work on the farm, the smell of the soil after a summer's rain, it's knowing I bring something good from the land. He scowls at me, but I don't recall him ever refusing any of the food I drop off on my way through town.

Well, Chester’n’ me, we may not see eye to eye on some things, but the two of us, we go back before memory, and that counts for something. He was the brother I never had. We played hockey together as kids and we camped out in the north wood lot and we went to 4H in our teens. Now there was a puzzle. Chester, the son of an undertaker, going to 4H. The kids didn't mind none because everybody knew him from school, but some of the parents raised an eyebrow when they heard how the Beamsworth boy was in 4H. That took some rationalizing, usually with the help of St. Paul, something about undertaking being a lot like farming. I guess putting people in the ground is supposed to be a lot like planting seeds. Personally, I think it's a lot more like fertilizing the seeds, but I'm not half as clever as St. Paul so what do I know? In any event, Jesus notwithstanding, and the lack of a wife and the presence of flab, I like Chester enough to find myself once a month or so in the basement of his establishment sharing a beer and shooting the shit.

Over the years, I got to know a thing or two about the undertaking business, or at least the part about embalming because it's in the embalming room where we spend all our time. It's a quiet, out-of-the-way place and perfect for a visit. Chester has two porcelain tables, each set with one end near a big sink like the laundry tub back home. Surgical tools sit on a counter, laid out in a row beside a machine that looks like it could have been assembled by a drunken technician who mixed up the parts of an old-style stereo, a slushie-maker, and a ham radio. This is the pump Chester uses to force embalming fluids into the carotid artery and to push all the blood out the jugular vein and through a hose into the sink. There's a poisonous antiseptic smell to everything and it don't matter what Chester do to sweeten things up in the room, that smell hangs over everything. In a matter-of-fact way, I come to accept it as the smell of death. The smell of death ain't rot and it ain't putrescence or decomp, it's this formaldehyde frog-in-a-bottle smell that gets pumped into the corpse's circulatory system and into its body cavity. I think Chester's got so used to it he don't notice the strangeness of it. Even now, he's standing there with his latex gloves and munching on a roast beef sandwich.

Chester hands me a beer and takes one for himself. I twist off the cap and throw it into a garbage can filled with reddish balls of cotton batting. One of the tables is occupied. A vaguely female form lies underneath a white cloth.

Wanna see how it's coming?

I wave him off, then check myself. It hadn't occurred to me until this instant that the form under the white cloth is my mom. I must seem acutely thick to Chester. Or is this normal? I feel like all my senses work, but maybe I'm missing great gobs of information. You'd think when there's a body in a room, that would be the first thing you notice when you go in, but here I am, stuffing a bin full of vegetables into a mortuary cooler, cracking open a beer, and only then noticing the shroud laid over the form on the embalming table.

That my mom?

Chester nods. I've finished the embalming. Sutured. Washed down. But there's still the cosmetic work to do. Maybe later's best.

No, no. I can look now.

You know, why don't we leave it 'til Marge has--

It's fine, Ches.

You sure now?

Sure.

We stand to either side of the table at about the level of Mom's shoulders. Chester reaches over the end of the table where the sheet hangs almost to the sink, and taking hold of the end, draws it up and over the head and down far enough that I can see the bare shoulders and clavicles and the very tops of the "Y" incision from the autopsy. Chester apologizes for revealing that bit, but I wave my hands. It's not like he's dealing with some pansy-assed fruitcake who's gonna turn all blubbery because his mom's laid out on a slab. It is what it is.

Here's what it is:

In front of me is an old woman, barely recognizable, skin almost translucent, like brittle paper, slender, no meat on her bones, not in life, not in death, grey hair gathered in a ball behind her head and held in place with a mess of net and pins, hawkish nose pointing down to a gaping mouth. Chester says sorry about the mouth. Hasn't had time to seal it shut. Says that was next on his list. I tell him not to worry about it. If I'm going to drop in unannounced like this, I can't very well expect him to apologize for not being finished, now can I? Then I get curious and ask how he plans to seal the mouth shut. Chester turns to the counter where he's lined up all his surgical instruments and searches out a tool that looks like a glue gun.

This here's an injector needle gun. He waves it in the air and smiles.

Show me.

What. Now? On your mom?

No, on you.

Chester don't get sarcasm, or can't think of nothing to do with it except scowl. He loads up the gun with ammo—needles and wire—and taking hold of mom's jaw, fires two rounds, one above, one below, leaving two tails of wire which he winds around each other like the ends of a twist-tie, tighter and tighter until the teeth almost come together. He pushes the wires inside the mouth and adjusts the lips so the mouth is closed.

Marge will get it right when she does the make up.

It looks like Mom is smiling in her sleep, but it's more a sly grin, as if she's been dreaming something lewd and it's come out in her look.

I've gotta put in the eye caps too. Chester sets what looks like two oversized contact lenses on the sheet. You know what? I'll do this later.

I'm the sort who wants to know how everything works, like when I was a kid and pulled apart Dad's gas-powered mower. And more’n that, if I'm gonna be the one paying the bill, then I think I'm entitled to know what Chester's doing to my mom. I'm starting to think maybe Chester's more squeamish than me about all this. What Chester don't want me to see is how Mom's eye sockets is stuffed with cotton so when we lay her out for viewing, her eyes don't have that sunken look to them. The eye caps have a sticky backing to keep the eyelids closed, otherwise they might pop open during the viewing and there’d be these two white cotton batting eyeballs staring at the guests. I guess Chester don't want those eyeballs staring at me either. Must think I'm sensitive or something. But it is what it is.

Closer to the centre of town is a florist named Alan Trueblood. He ain’t a Rotarian but I give him my business all the same, mostly because he's the only florist in town, though a good one. That's who Mom used when Dad passed, so I figure she'd like to have the same for herself. Stands to reason. When I step into the shop, the bell tinkles and the smell of roses and whatnot fills my sinuses and gets my eyes to watering. Alan is a little fruity, if you know what I mean, but a good soul, and he comes from behind the counter to offer his condolences, she was a good woman, no doubt I'll miss her dearly, gone to a better place, happens to us all someday, in God's hands, and surely she deserves the very best floral arrangement. He pulls out a catalogue of wreaths and fancy potted arrangements for me to look at, but my eyes is streaming and I can barely see the pictures. He figures I'm all broke up about things whereas it's his damn product what's doing this to my eyes. I point to a good arrangement of spring flowers and pussy willow branches and such and I plunk down enough money to cover the cost of shipping it direct to Beamsworth's and I high-tail it out of there before a sneezing fit starts. Alan chases me onto the sidewalk, waving a card I'm supposed to fill out with some kind of a message.

What am I supposed to say?

He smiles and shrugs: I don't know. Whatever you feel in your heart.

I stare through the blur of my tearing eyes. Well, what do other people say?

Oh, some say things like: we miss you mom. Or you could do like it's from your boys: we love you grandma. Something like that.

I tell him I like the grandma thing, like it's from the boys. It's important to make them feel included in all this.

Once I've settled all of that with Alan the florist, I drive out of town and back to the farm. I hate the town. It makes me feel claustrophobic. I like the fields and the lines of trees and the stone fences and barns.

Too bad I have to go back into town tonight. We all do. There's two hours of visitation upstairs at Beamsworth's when we'll all have to stand around the casket admiring Chester's handiwork, abusing our nostrils with the pollen and formaldehyde and plywood glue, smiling like idiots and sharing platitudes none of us believes but all of us says anyways because we don't got the wherewithal to come up with anything better to say.

When I pull into the drive, Ford is by the side door playing fetch with the dog but otherwise looking spiffied up for tonight. His hair's still wet from a bath and shampoo. He's getting to be a big kid now, not the sort who has a sudden growth spurt and turns overnight into a bean pole, more the sort who spends a couple years enlarging all the way around, not so's you'd notice from one day to the next, but so's you'd notice after a couple years how you had a man standing in front of you instead of a boy. He has thick tawny hair like his mom, and a lot of his mannerisms, from the way he talks to the way he throws the stick for Woofie to fetch, they borrow something from her too. He's precise and there's an orderliness to him. It comes out even in simple things, like the way his hair falls on his head, the neat line of his nose and of his jaw, the snap of his wrist when he lets fly the stick.

I call out to him and he waves. I ask how he's doing and he says fine. I ask if he wants to talk and he says no.

Em's inside with Justin. They've struck a deal. Justin don't want a bath, but he has to get cleaned up for the visitation. Em has agreed to read extra words to him from the dictionary and he's agreed in return to climb into the tub. Justin's odd that way. He gets preoccupied with words. He collects stones too, but only certain kinds. He has criteria for his stones, but we can't penetrate to whatever place in his brain the criteria live. We bring him stones as a way to connect, but it don't matter whether they're smooth or rough, round or jagged, grey or coloured, he rejects them all. Yet he has shoe boxes full of stones he's discovered in secret moments out in the drive or tramping through the fields, and somehow these hold for him a cosmic importance.

We home-school. There ain't no other way. Ford would be fine going on the bus and spending the day with kids his own age. But Justin?

Sometimes Em has the kids write for her. Justin's stories go like this:

Once upon a time there was an ancillary king. He used to be an adjunctive king but lost his crown. He used to be an adjudicative king before that, but kept going backwards until he abdicated.

At first you think it's clever. There's a kind of sense to it. I'm no whiz at grammar but I know enough to write a sentence with a subject and a whatever-it-is and action in between. Justin knows how to put all the parts of the sentence together and he can put the right parts in the right places. But he ain’t got so much as spit for an idea what they mean. It's like running a meat grinder. He knows what meat is and he knows how to turn the handle. But he don't have a clue what to do with all the stuff coming out the other end.

Justin knows I'm a dad. But he don't know I'm HIS dad. A dad is a label, a category. And that's what I am. As far as I can tell, I'm no more to him than a rock in his shoe box or a word in his dictionary. Em loves him desperately. God help me, I know I'm supposed to feel for him the way Em do, but I just can't bring myself to it. I guess Em and I are different. To be truthful, I'm a bit afraid of Justin. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if he has a soul. It's not that I think he's possessed by something that pushed him out and took his place, more that he was born hollow and some lesser creature took shelter inside. He's a coyote living a strange and feral logic. Or a bird of prey that floats in the updrafts of a world all his own. But I never tell Em these things.

I walk in all cheerful, or as cheerful as I can be when we're getting ready for a funeral, and give the boy a kiss on the top of his head. He's got darker hair, like mine, and slate-blue eyes that stare at you in a detached way that could just as easily be ageless wisdom as infantile slobbering. Justin has the dictionary open at the B's.

After an early supper, we stand in the reception room at Beamsworth's, door shut to keep out visitors until exactly seven o'clock, four of us gathered around the casket. Ford is moved but composed. You can tell by his face how he's struggling to be a man about things. Em puts an arm around his shoulder and draws him close.

It's okay honey, she says. It's okay to cry.

Ford says good-bye to his grandma. He touches her on the wrist folded across her torso, not on the skin, but on the sleeve. There's the hint of a tear in the corner of each eye, but he never squeezes them out fully formed.

Em takes Justin's hand and leads him closer to the casket.

Let's say good-bye to Grandma.

Justin pokes at her shoulder like he might poke at a dead dog with a stick, then, satisfied she's dead, he wanders to the window and fiddles with the venetian blind: open, closed, up, down.

Chester's got Mom done up in a violet dress with a high collar that hides the sutures. A good choice. Em found it when she was going through her things. Pearl earrings and matching necklace, something Dad gave her before I was born. What gets me is the smoothness of the skin on her cheeks. I was getting used to the wrinkles, and now, in death, they've disappeared and a kind of false youth has settled onto her face instead. The lips are a bit thinner than I would have liked, but all in all Chester's done a good job.

When Chester's sure we're ready, he throws open the doors to visitors. There ain't many people. It's a small town, and we home-school and keep to ourselves. There are some friends of Mom's from the home where she lived. A trickle from the church. A few from the Rotary Club who never knew Mom but come out of respect for me. It's the usual crap. Stuff about how she lived a good life, it was her time, now she can be with Walter, or God, or both of them, like she's flying off to a celestial three-way. The time comes for all of us. How'd she go? In her sleep? Ah, well, that's lovely. She went peaceful then. Much easier to think about it knowing things followed the natural order. She looks so lifelike lying there. Chalk up another good one for Ches. She would've been pleased.

After two hours of this shit, I'm exhausted. It don't seem like much, but there's quite a strain to talking up nonsense with people you don’t know no better’n the man on the receiving end of your tax return each April. This is my mom and, to be honest, except for Em and the boys, there's no one I care to be with when I mark her passing. I know I'm supposed to be sociable. I know all these others only want to pay their respects. But I don’t care to talk to them.

The only relief comes the next day at the funeral, a small affair in the room next to this. Ruth-Anne Hendershot brings her two and sits in the back. The older girl is Ford's age and grown-up enough to slip into the platitude bullshit like the rest of us, but the younger girl is seven or eight and talks in a big whisper through the whole service, question after question about why we're doing what we're doing and where's the old lady going. I expect some folks find the girl annoying, but it puts a smile on my face. Ruth-Anne is mortified and afterwards apologizes for her daughter but I thank her; it's the only natural thing about the whole service.

It's the minister from the church who conducts the service. He's a real porker who can barely fit into his vestments, and that's saying something given that vestments are supposed to be loose-fitting one-size-fits-all get-ups. We had to meet with him yesterday, supposedly for a dose of pastoral care is what they call it, and to help plan the service. But really what he did was get us reminiscing about Mom so's he'd have some personal tidbits to share in the service without having to admit he didn't know Mom from a hole in the ground. He was sneaky that way. There's readings about breathing life into dry bones and the resurrection of the body at the end of time and whatnot. There's hymns, too, old stand-bys that you ain't allowed to sing unless there's a thin-sounding wheezer of an organ somewheres in the background.

When it's all done, some of my recruits from the Rotary Club walk the casket to a side door and load it into the hearse and Chester drives it across the road. The cemetery's close enough that, except for a few of the biddies from Mom's residence, we don't bother to drive. There ain't enough at the funeral to hold up traffic in town. Then again, it ain't much of a town for traffic. You could walk through the streets blindfolded without much fear. At the graveside, Justin is fascinated by the motors that lower the casket into the ground. While the minister is trying to say his piece (or is it peace?), Justin gets louder and louder, explaining to Em how a motor is just a generator in reverse, electricity and magnets to produce motion instead of motion and magnets to produce electricity. The minister don't know what to make of Justin and gives Em the kind of look that might burn a hole through a brick wall. Em tries to shush the boy but he won't let up. She whispers to him how they're putting Grandma into the ground now, but he comes back in a big voice about how Grandma's somewhere else now and what they're putting in the ground is just a body and a box made of wood. The boy's right. I can tell by the looks circling the graveside that people think he's being insensitive. But it's Justin and he don't know from sensitive. Besides which he's right. Can't argue with right.

Funny what things grab your attention at a time like this. For me, it's Ford and the way he and that Hendershot girl—what's her name? Maggie? Marnie?—the way they make goo eyes at one another across the hole in the ground. Ruth-Anne home-schools too. Single-mom with insurance proceeds took a house in the centre of town where she could work half days at the library and spend the other half teaching her girls about the love of Jesus Christ and the Lord God Almighty. That's the difference between us and Ruth-Anne—we home-school for a real reason. Well, once a week, Em or Ruth-Anne or one of a handful of other home-schoolers in the county, they get together at somebody's home or go on a field trip so's the kids don't get lonesome with their book learning at the dining room table. Socialization's well and good until they get to that age when the hormones start acting up. Then, at least in my opinion, it would be better to lock them all up in fruit cellars and attics and such until the storm passes and they can move safely into adulthood. But until somebody heeds my advice, I've gotta watch Ford's face melt to mush every time I look up from the dirt at my feet to scan the handful of mourners at the graveside.

After Ches has lowered the box into the ground, and after I've dropped a clod onto the box with a dull wet thud, we drift towards the church and into the basement where the ladies have set out a table of cookies and squares and a coffee urn and pots of tea in silly crocheted cosies. The ladies is almost as many as us, so the conversation teeters towards church gossip, which seems to be the way things go when you find yourself stuck in a church basement. The minister comes around to make sure the family's okay and to quietly fish for his honorarium. Part of me wants to make him work for it, but the bigger part of me wants the conversation to be done with, so I reach to my inside pocket and pull out an envelope with the cheque already made out. Ford's off in a corner with that Marnie girl, making pretend grief to pull sympathy out of the poor girl the way he'd suck caramel out of a candy. Meanwhile Justin's found the furnace room and is clanking around the pipes trying to figure out how it all works. Intake and output, filters and vents, fans and motors. That's all he'll talk about on the drive home and for half the afternoon.

The fall goes like you'd expect. I can extend the growing season for some of the market produce thanks to the big greenhouse I built east of the barn. It ain't a glass greenhouse, but big sheets of plastic drawn over a ribbing of curved pipes so it looks like the see-through skin of a beached whale lolling upside down in a tidal pool. It's a good-sized whale, almost the length of a football field, eight metres wide and maybe two high in the centre. At three places along the way, I cut holes in the side and rigged big fans to keep the air circulating. That's not so important now that it's cooler, but if I don't keep the fans running in the summer, the whole setup is stifling and work inside it turns unbearable. With all the extra produce I squeeze out, I can extend my time at the farmer's market by at least four weeks. Then there's the maple syrup. We've got a wood lot—twenty-five acres of trees—I tap early each spring just as things are beginning to thaw. The beauty of maple syrup is that its shelf life is almost limitless. If the sugar crystalizes on the bottom of the bottle, all you do is reheat it on a stove and you're back in business. So this time of year I go Saturdays to the farmer's market with a display of syrup, butternut squash, pumpkins, potatoes, beets, carrots, gourds, stalks of maize for decoration, and I round it out with bags of mixed greens if I'm lucky.

Ford likes to help out at market. It earns him some pocket money, although I think he'd do it for nothing because he gets to see Marnie if he comes with me on Saturdays. Ruth-Anne makes some extra cash selling baked goods at the market—cookies and bread and pies and such. Ford takes a break at lunch and sits in the Hendershot booth where the two of them, Ford and Marnie, can make more goo eyes at one another while Ruth-Anne gets run off her feet during the busy lunchtime rush. I tell Ford to stop being a pest, but Ruth-Anne smiles and says it's okay; kids in home-schooling need every chance they can get for socialization. At least that's what she says, though I'm inclined to think she's got something more nefarious in mind, like turning Ford's heart to his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. In her eyes, I'm a heathen because I don't go in for all that religious hoo-hah. She figures it's her God-appointed duty to watch out for Ford's immortal soul. Personally, I find Ruth-Anne a bit dramatic, but she does make a fine apple pie, and at this time of year, there's nothing better on a Saturday afternoon than to come home with a tin full of cash and two or three of Ruth-Anne's fresh baked apple pies.

It's about this time I decide to introduce Ford to the .22 calibre rimfire. He's watched me pick off a rabbit or a groundhog making a mess in the lettuce and for nearly a year now he's been pestering me to try. I've been putting it off, but the other day I saw him walk down the long slope from the barn, tall now, almost my height, and it set me to thinking how I couldn't have been any older when Dad took out his Thompson/Center and showed me how to hold it and load it and aim it and fire it. There's no kick to the thing. He's big enough to handle it. Still, a boy with a rifle in his hands is any man's equal at least in his power to take a life, and that's not a fact I hold lightly. It may not even be Ford that's a concern for me. Ford I trust. It's Justin has me worried. Once I go down this path with Ford, letting out the line, treating him more and more like a grown-up, Justin will see it and expect the same lies in store for him. Only it don't. One day soon, Em and I are gonna come up against a wall: Justin ain't right. She knows it and I know it. The question is: does Justin know it?

Ford's a pretty good shot. I don't have a scope for the .22 so whatever he hits, he hits because of a keen eye. I have a middle-aged man's eye, so I see only half what he sees. I compensate for it with patience, of which Ford has only half. If you multiply eyesight by patience, Ford and I come out even, but as Ford likes to remind me, as I get older, my eyesight can only get worse while his patience can only get better. As he views the matter, this is my high water mark. Yeah, but there's the Winchester with its scope, and as long as I've got that at hand, I've got some good years ahead of me. The only problem with the Winchester is it makes a hell of bang when I fire it and if I'm shooting out of season, as I sometimes do, there's a chance I could get a fine. Here's the thing: there's sometimes I'll see a big buck hover a moment on the edge of the woods and I can't help myself. I take the opportunity the way Dad did when I was a kid. Dad used to say two things: first was that if a 12-pointer came onto his land, God was sending him food and he'd be a fool to refuse the gift; second was that no earthly power has the right to mess with what God ordains, so the fact you might be hunting out of season is neither here nor there. Mostly the Winchester keeps itself stowed in the locker just inside the mud room by the side door. All we ever need a rifle for is pests and that's rarely in the fall. Ford bagged himself a wild turkey, and not because of Thanksgiving but because they're pests and I gave him a standing order to shoot them on sight. I can't believe you have to get a permit to hunt one of those things. I've had wild turkeys trample through my late harvest vegetables like they was having a party. I've even had a wild turkey crash through the living room window because it was too stupid to know where it was going. And on top of everything else they're ugly.

The truth is: I haven't taken out the Winchester in years. I'll catch sight of a deer now and then, but a small doe and in the winter when I have no inclination to put on snow shoes and a heavy coat and go prancing through the woods after something that won't yield much meat for my trouble. I'm seeing them less and less as land round and about us gets sold checkerboard to developers so there's fewer corridors for them to move through. What I see more of these days is black bears. They can smell the garbage coming. In the spring they come for the berries. I keep a couple rows of raspberries but that's getting downright dangerous. This spring I come to the end of a row to drop another two pints in a flat I'd set in the shade, and there’s a black bear, not big but big enough, snuffling through the pints I'd already picked. I screamed blue murder at it and banged my basket and chased it into the next field, but it didn't run away. It lurked in the shade of a big maple, the big one Em loves so, and it watched for me to leave so's it could come back for more. There’s coyotes too. I don't see them so much, but I see their tracks running every which way and I hear them howling in the late evening.

It's odd that when a good chance finally comes along for me to open the locker and pull down the Winchester, things unfold in a way that keeps me from using it. It's a brilliant afternoon late in October when a big buck, a ten-pointer if it's two, comes nosing right up to the living room window where Em's sitting on the sofa reading with Justin. With the bright sunlight, it's hard to know if the buck can tell there's folks on the other side of the window. He looks in and they look back, startled into silence. I'm coming back from the bathroom, rambling on about something or other, when Em hssts me and motions to the window. He's a beauty. I pull on my jacket, drape the field glasses around my neck, and go to the locker. The rimfire is missing.

Where's Ford?

Out by the barn.

Done his lessons for the day?

Worked hard all day so I let him go early.

Did you see him take the .22?

No, but he said something about hunting groundhogs.

There ain't no groundhogs this time of year.

Oh.

Probably shooting at tin cans.

That's the problem with showing a boy something new like a gun. He needs to keep fiddling with it 'til the novelty leaves him be. Buy the boy a bike and he rides from sunup to sundown. Pour him a rink in the winter and he skates 'til his toes freeze to ice cubes and he screams when they thaw. We don't let the boys play video games, but I hear it's the same with them: play a game 'til you learn it backwards and forwards, then forget it for the rest of your life. Now, it's the rifle. Ford's looking for any excuse to take it out and shoot things.

I leave the house from the side opposite the living room window and make a wide arc to the north where I can get a clear view of both the buck and, beyond that by four hundred metres, the barn. I'm downwind of the buck and obscured by a pile of granite boulders so I'm not about to scare it away. I take a look through the glasses. Yup. It's a ten pointer all right, though it must be stupid to be coming right up to a house like that. Turning to the barn, I scan for Ford. It's like I thought. He's picking off tin cans that he's set up on a fence rail. He lines up about ten of them on a stretch of weathered wooden fence, then he steps away about twenty paces and stands with his back towards the barn. From this distance you can't hear anything. Hell, even from fifty metres you probably can't hear anything. But every now and then a tin flies off the fence rail and into the tall grass behind.

On the south side of our farm, there’s two rises, the barn on one, the house on the other. Sloping away from each is a field, one sown with clover, the other fenced around as a paddock where the neighbour's horses sometimes graze. In the middle, where the two fields meet, is the lowest point of the whole farm, a stretch which forms a river of melt water in the spring but which dries up before the end of June. Even so, there's an aquifer running through the land and it flows north beneath the woods and comes out as a spring almost at the northern limit of the property. The buck has moved away from the house and is making for the low point between the two fields. Maybe it smells the water running below the soil. Maybe it knows that if it keeps going north along this dip in the land, soon enough it'll come to water.

I back away to the road that fronts the house and I set out along the gravel to the next field north, the one that abuts the wood lot. If I move in from the road, keeping behind the line of trees that divides this field from the house and the barn, then I can find cover downwind and wait for the buck on its path to the spring. I'm only assuming that's where the buck's headed, but it's a fair assumption. He ain't gonna find food to the south, and there's water to the north. What else is he gonna do? Dance the Charleston?

The way I think of our farm, it's four quadrants and a wood lot. The house and the barn stand each in a south quadrant. To the north, sandwiched between them and the wood lot, is two more fields. And running between these two fields and parallel to the concession road is a laneway lined with old maples bigger even than those in the wood lot. I've got myself tucked behind a stump and my legs hanging down into a dip beside the laneway. I've got the Winchester pressed against the stump and a bead on the low rise that marks the boundary between the south fields and the north fields. Off to one side is the big tree—Em's favourite—an ancient maple more than a metre thick, probably bigger around than two men could reach with their arms stretched wide. When the kids were young, we used to picnic there for a summer’s lunch if there was a lull in the work.

I stare at the tree while I wait. It's maybe seventy-five metres from my stump. The sun’s ducked below the tree line and it's getting cold. When I ran out of the house, I wasn't thinking what I'd need to track a buck from first sighting to kill. It would've been nice if I'd taken a pair of gloves with me. I haven't done this in years and I've forgotten how cold your fingers get in the fall while you're gripping a rifle. Setting the rifle at the base of the stump, I cup my hands together and blow, but it don't do a damn bit of good. The ditch is heaped with leaves and I burrow into them up to my waist, but they're damp and it's worse for me now than if I'd stripped and lain naked in the cold. I have to pee but I'm afraid to crawl out from this dip here because the swish of leaves is probably loud enough a deer would hear it. The leaves of the topmost branches have caught fire with the sinking sun and it seems cruel I should be lying underneath their fire but freezing my ass off. I pick up the rifle again and stare through the scope.

I wonder what Justin would think at a time like this. Though it beats the hell out of me how his mind works, I get this feeling that in Justin's universe, there ain't no such thing as waiting. I guess that means there ain't no such thing as boredom neither. If he was lying here on the cold ground with leaves around his legs and chunks of gravel biting into his rump and the cold numbing his fingers, how would he make the time disappear? Probably see the whole situation as a chance to feed whatever obsession has taken hold of his brain. Count blades of grass? Hunt for more stones? Study the shapes of clouds? Who knows. Maybe the more interesting question is why I'm asking the question in the first place. Why Justin? Why is it always Justin gets to me? Wouldn't it make more sense to wonder how the normal kid thinks at a time like this?

I see something in the scope, a shimmer above the bed of the laneway where it rises by the big tree. It pitches from side to side. I turn away from the scope and rub my eye. Looking again, I see the buck's antlers rising into view. The buck is walking along the laneway as if he owns it. To be fair, there ain't much to mark the difference between the laneway and the fields it runs through—parallel ruts in the dirt and, here and there, dips to the side that pass for a ditch. In effect, the buck is skulking along the edge of a field. It's coming at me head on so there ain't much of a shot yet except square in the head which I'd rather not take seeing as it might be worth mounting, not that I'm set on mounting it but I'd like the option. It pauses and turns by a quarter so I've got it broadside in my sights. That's more like it. I scan along the body from forequarters to rump.

Christ! What the hell's Ford doing? The sneaky so-and-so's been creeping along behind the buck. Ford must've seen him move away from the house and into the dip between the fields. But he's placed himself upwind. He don't know any better. That's why the buck's stopped and looked around. The minute Ford topped the rise in the laneway, the buck caught a whiff of him. I doubt the kid's had a bath in a week. To an animal, Ford's as high as a rotten carcass.

Stopping beside the big maple, Ford squares himself, raises the .22 to his shoulder, and peers down the sights. From my position, it looks for all the world like Ford is taking aim at me. Christ! If he misses the buck, he could hit me. I leap to my feet, shouting: Wait, Ford, Wait. But lying on the ground for so long, both my legs have fallen asleep and I tumble onto the ground. As I go down, I hear a light chuff, then Ford screaming Holy Fuck!

Whaddya know! You CAN hear the sound of a .22 firing from more’n fifty metres. I thought you couldn't. It isn't a loud report, not the kind of bang you'd hear from the road, but distinctive enough that I know Ford got off one round. I hear the sound of footsteps scuffing through the dirt towards me. I also hear the snapping of twigs and the hissing of leaves and grass as the buck bounds from the laneway and into the eastern field. When Ford makes it to the place where I'm sprawled on the ground, he finds me laughing.

Dad! You all right? The way his voice cracks, it sounds like his pants is too tight.

I raise my hands and signal for him to calm himself. I'm still laughing.

Get up, Dad. Why can't you get up?

I settle myself a bit and stare at the sky. I turn and stare some at Ford. He's a good kid. One of these days I'm gonna have to figure out how to tell him I love him. Meantime, I hold out a hand and ask him to help me up. My legs fell asleep, I says.

You mean I didn't hit you?

Hell no.

I thought I got you.

No. I put on a stern face. But you might've.

Shit, Dad. I thought I ...

No.

Then why were you laughing?

Son, it's the first time I've ever heard you say fuck. I don't know. It just sounded funny to me.

When I'm able to stand on my own, I take up my field glasses and follow the path of the buck to the edge of the wood lot. He's moving funny and I'm thinking maybe Ford's aim was true. Following a hunch, I hoist the Winchester over my shoulder and amble along the laneway towards the big maple.

You really think you were gonna bring down a ten-pointer with a pop gun like that?

Ford smiles. Thought I'd try.

Guess there's no law against being an optimist.

When we come to the place in the laneway where the buck paused, I scan the ground but don't see nothing. I follow the tracks where they run off the dirt and head towards the field. Tracing an imaginary line between the place where I saw the buck along the edge of the wood lot and the tracks here in the laneway, I clamber through the leaves and scrub and follow that imaginary line. It don't take me long to find what I'm looking for. There. In the tall grass where it leapt into the field. Crimson ribbons down the shafts and more scattered on the leaves.

Ford and I follow the laneway north, making our way through the wood lot and out the far side at the north concession road. He wants to know why we ain't following the buck directly but I hush him. We have to move like a whisper and approach downwind so's the buck can't tell we're coming. If we move quickly along the concession road, we may be able to cut him off before he comes out of the woods, but it's getting dark and we don't have much time left.

I also raise the minor detail of hunting without a permit. Because we're using the road to move fast, cars might see us walking with our guns. It's not a busy road. Two cars the whole time we're on it. Each time we hear the crunch of gravel, we slip down the embankment and lurk in the trees until the car has passed. Ford wants to know why I'm doing something illegal.

Ford, it's not a law; it's just a regulation. We can talk about it later, but right now we need to be quiet.

At the northeast corner of the property, I raise my hand and signal for Ford to stop. I point up through the trees on our side of the road and whisper to Ford that I expect the buck's gonna come down that slope to the edge of the road. We settle ourselves on the far side of the road and lie in wait. Every so often, Ford has a question or something to say, and each time, I signal for him to be quiet. His teeth chatter and he blows on his hands. The light is dim now and when I look into the trees through the scope, all of it seems a dark grey soup. From up the slope, we hear a crashing sound through the underbrush. If the buck had been healthy, I doubt we'd've heard it coming, but making such a ruckus now, it's clear the beast is struggling. At the foot of the slope, there's a sharp rise up the embankment to the road. The buck plants its forelegs on the edge of the road but slips on the gravel, loses its footing and tumbles back down the embankment. It tries again, and again it falls. We hear a wet rasping breath. Ford has given up even trying to be stealthy and begs me in a loud voice to shoot the thing. I guess the boy's right. If it was me all by my lonesome, I'd probably wear it down some before I took the final shot. Then again, if it was me all by my lonesome, the buck would be dead already and we wouldn't be chasing it through the woods in the almost night. I haul myself up the embankment and cross to the other side of the road and slide down that embankment onto my own property where the buck lies prostrate in the autumn leaves. It's given up. Again, I hear that wet breath and moving closer I realize what I'm really hearing is blood bubbling out its trachea through a hole in its neck. Ford's shot pierced the neck and gave the buck what amounts to a tracheotomy. I calls to Ford.

Without looking over the edge of the road, Ford says What?

Pass me your .22. No need to fire the Winchester.

Is it hurt bad?

Yeah.

So I killed it?

It's not dead yet.

But it'd die if you didn't do anything, right?

Yeah.

Then I killed it.

You wanna do this?

No. I can't even see down there.

Without looking at me or anything near me, Ford hands over the rifle. Since I can't see to take the shot I need—a mercy shot straight to the base of the skull—I feel my way to the shot; I step on the buck's neck so it can't rear it's head and skewer me with its antlers, and I press the barrel of the rifle to the buck's temple and squeeze the trigger. There's a twitch and then nothing. I'm not going to get my option after all; I've spoilt the head.

It's too dark down here to field dress the buck, but with all the scavengers that’ve moved into the area these last few years, I can't leave him here and expect to find more’n bones in the morning. I'll have to take him now and gut him in the barn. While Ford stands watch by the roadside, I hurry back to the house for the pickup truck. I tell Em we'll be late for supper but I'll make it up to her by bringing home enough meat for a week of suppers.

After we've hauled the buck to the barn, I hoist the beast over my shoulders while Ford holds open the doors. It's an awkward business, but I want to get the head through the doorframe without damaging the antlers. Once I've got it inside and laid it out on the concrete floor by the drain, I set about gutting the creature. I still have the knives that belonged to Dad. They're in the drawer of a broad wooden bench that stands by the doors. That's where Dad kept them when I was a kid and I see no reason to keep them anywhere else. Although they ain't had any use since Dad died, I kept them sharp for such a day as this. I ain't forgotten what to do. Once I’ve got a knife in my hand, it all rushes back into my head. I know what to do same way Em knows how to cook a meal—not from any recipe written out in a book, but from a knowing in the hands and a moving that don't need words.

I slice through the skin of the gut, low near the hind legs, but without piercing the sac that holds all the entrails, then I move up almost to the sternum, reaching in to cut it away from the diaphragm. Inside, the guts is warm, a nice feeling for my fingers which have turned sluggish and numb in the night air. Ford looks on, half dreading to watch, half unable to help himself. He's full of questions and I try my best to answer as I go. He's got questions about the mechanics of what I'm doing, but he's got other questions too, questions he started asking once before, questions about why it's okay for us to never mind about hunting permits. I tell him it's got to do with the idea of government. I tell him he'll understand more when he gets older. I tell him there's some things we want the government to do, helpful things, like building roads and defending our borders. But there's times when government takes on a life all its own and, instead of serving the people, which is what it's supposed to do, it serves itself, as if it comes before the people. You know that's happened when all your time is spent meeting nitpicking niggling regulations and none of it's spent just living your life, doing the things God meant you to do.

Once I've tied off the anus, I pull out the sac and cut it away from the body, spilling all the juices into the drain. I reach up into the chest cavity and find the esophagus, then work my other hand in with the knife and slice through it. That frees up the heart and lungs which I yank out in a single motion. Now it's time to skin the deer. I run a sturdy stick through the hind shanks and use that to string the buck from a beam, head down and swaying above the drain in the floor. Ford winces as I slice through the jugular vein but he don't look away. Together we watch the blood drain from the body and flow down the sloping concrete. I turn on the hose and help it along. Ford puts the offal in a wheelbarrow and carts it to the edge of the field, a gift for all the scavengers. It'll be gone by the morning. Hell, it'll be gone in an hour. While he's out trundling over the dirt, I set to skinning the animal, cutting all around the shanks and slitting the skin to the groin, then peeling it away, tugging it down until what's left is a fine carcass with some good cuts of meat.

When I'm done, I let the carcass down onto a tarp and drag it into the cooler. I won't bother about butchering it 'til morning. Right now I'm hungry and Em's had to wait long enough for us. Ordinarily I wouldn't store meat in the cooler where we keep all the vegetables for market, but it's the end of the season so the cooler's almost empty anyways.

Sitting at the dinner table, Ford's mouth motors on about all that's happened, which is fine enough 'til he gets to bragging about how he brought down a ten-point buck with a .22. That's where I break in and tell him I got half a mind to ground him for a month for doing something truly stupid. For one thing, he don't know a damn thing about how to shoot a deer and the fact he brought this one down was dumb luck. The idea's to bring it down in one shot, a clean kill, so's the beast don't suffer. And for another thing, I says, if you missed, you could've killed me.

Ford looks at me all puzzled. But you was laughing.

Were, honey. Em's a stickler for grammar.

You were laughing.

Yeah?

If it's so serious, why were you laughing?

Nerves.

Nerves?

I thought you hit me. Couldn't feel my legs.

Oh.

Plus you used a word.

Oh.

Once the snows come, things slow down for me. There's always a lull from mid-November to the end of January. After that, I start laying out fresh lines to tap the trees, and work starts to pick up again. But there's an in-between time that's always a struggle for me. I try to help Em with teaching the kids, but I weren't never any good at school, so I don't see as it's much use the kids learning from me. It gets crowded too with the four of us and the dog in a simple farm house. I got a workshop in the barn outfitted with a wood stove, and I use that sometimes to get away from all the commotion in the house, but if there's been a good storm and deep drifting across the fields, then I don't bother leaving the house.

It's sometime near the end of November when the dreams start. They're not dreams with a story. More images that fade in for a minute, then dissolve to black. There's one of my mom hovering over me when I'm a little kid sitting at the harvest table, the same table where my boys sit now while Em hovers over them. I'm colouring with crayons or something. Hard to know for sure. She's got her arm set on my shoulder and I feel the warmth of her behind me. When I finish whatever it is I'm working on, I hold it up from the table for Mom to look at and I twist around to look at her, wanting her approval I guess but finding instead a frail paper skin drawn tight across the cheek bones, thin lips smiling vacantly, and eye sockets stuffed with cotton balls. It's the eyes that get me. My habit is always to look into the eyes of a person when I want to know that person is really there for me, even in something as simple as buying a carton of nails in town at the hardware store. If the cashier don't look you in the eye when he's making change, well then, there's something wrong and the manager needs to hear about it. So when it's your mother who don't look you in the eye, except through sockets stuffed with white the colour of snow, you can see how that'd be even more unsettling than a cashier who don't fix you when you're buying nails.

I wake with a start—not a cold sweat kind of a start—more an "oh shit, I wasn't expecting that" kind of a start. It's dark outside and the ground is bare, colder and harsher than when there's a covering of snow on everything. There's a lamp on my night table and when I flick it on, Em moans and rolls around on her side of the bed. She sits up and asks what's wrong.

Nothing, I says.

Em's a soft touch. All she has to do is smile and lay a hand on me. That's enough as to say she knows when I'm full of shit. That's enough as to say she's there for me when I'm ready to talk. Em's got hair a dirty blond that turns dark in the winter. I love the feel of that hair over my face and I nestle into it now while she draws me close and kisses me on the temple.

I saw my mom.

Em squeezes my shoulder.

She had cotton balls for eyes.

Another night I see Mom sitting in her favourite chair, an old one where the covering's a piece of needlepoint she did years ago. She's dressed not too good, not too sloppy either, but somewheres in-between, as if she's going out to something casual. She's wearing a white blouse that's loose around the neck. Maybe I've come to visit her. I don't know. But I'm sitting across the room from her, across a low table, like I've come to have tea. Not that I've ever drunk tea with my mom, but it has that feel, uneasy, like there's rules we have to follow when we talk to each other. This time I don't remember looking into her eyes. In fact, I don't remember anything about her above the neck. Instead, I'm only looking at the area on her blouse above the clavicles. The blouse started out as a white cotton, the colour of clouds, but as I watch, something soaks through the cloth and it turns from white to pink to crimson. Mom looks down to one side of her chest and says: Oh, dear. She pulls away the collar of her blouse and shows up the skin underneath. There's a slit at the base of her neck, once sutured, now with threads that have frayed and blood that has dribbled down her chest and has soaked into her blouse.

I'm leaking, she says.

Again, I wake up with a start.

Another dream? Em asks.

Padding to the kitchen, Em boils a kettle of water on the stove and steeps a pot of chamomile tea. We sit across from each other at the kitchen table and wonder what these dreams could mean. Personally, I don't think it's worth wondering about the meaning of dreams. As I view it, dreams is a natural part of being human. I don't need to understand how my dreams work any more’n I need to understand how my digestion works. When I eat, my food gets absorbed whether I understand it or not. And when I sleep I get rested whether I make sense of my dreams or not. A dream is the head's version of a grumbling stomach. Em thinks I may be too strict in the way I compare things; it might do me good to give some heed to my dreams.

What? Like go to a therapist or something?

Well, why not?

Are you kidding?

A grief counselor then.

I don't need any of that stuff.

As far as I can tell, those touchy-feely people are crazier than the people who come to them for help. All the therapy I need I can find in an honest day's work. If I busy my head with whatever task is at hand, then I don't have to worry about my mind wandering off on its own to get into trouble. The brain is like a teenager: give it plenty of chores and it turns out just fine; but give it idle time and it works all sorts of mischief.

Maybe that's your problem, says Em. Come winter you've got too much spare time.

In that case, come February I'll be fine.

But when February comes, there's a new dream stirring me up. It starts like the last: me and my mom sitting in a room like we're about to share a pot of tea. This time there's no blood-stained blouse, and as far as I can tell, there's no cotton balls for eyes either. This time everything hinges on the mouth. We sit together in the room and there's something important about being there, as if Mom's called me over special. She's got something to tell me, something more important than she's ever told me before. She gives me this pleading look and I worry she might cry. I lean in close with my elbows on my thighs. What is it, Ma? I ask. She don't say and I get frustrated. This time my dream comes with a smell, an old-woman smell, like the smell that pervaded the residence where Mom spent the last two years of her life, a smell I never could get used to. What is it, Ma? I ask, but still she don't answer. Instead she raises her hand and presses her fingertips to her chin. Going further with her fingertips, she pulls down her lower lip and there's her lower teeth and discoloured gum. Going further still, she curls her fingers over her teeth and yanks her lower jaw downward so’s a twisted wire sticks out of her mouth. She waves her arm and moans something, but I can't make sense of what she's trying to tell me.

I share the dream with Em.

Maybe she wants you to release her jaw.

Midweek I drive into town for a breakfast of bacon, eggs and potato wedges at Mable's Nook, then I'm next door to Chester's with an extra cup of coffee. I pass the sign about how Beamsworth's is a proud member of the Winter Family. Still have no idea what that means. As usual, Chester is downstairs in the embalming room and today putting the finishing touches on old Mrs. Laird who once taught my dad English in high school, and at the grand old age of ninety-four met an inconsiderate patch of ice when she was crossing the street. Chester don't mind me walking in on him during his work so long as I rap on the door and stick my face in the window so's he can see it's me. There's regulations about how things get done in an embalming room and one of those regulations says you can't have regular folks in the room when there's a body on the table. Well, I have no care for any body on a table. Chester knows me well enough to know I'm not about to commit an indignity to a dead body or even snigger at the ridiculous look of a body that's laid out cold. So he bends the rules for me. What's the harm? Hell, Chester'd go squirrelly in the head if all he had to talk to was dead bodies while he worked. He likes having me drop in from time to time. When he sees the extra coffee in my hand, his eyes light up and he's straight to the door, dropping his hose and popping off his latex gloves.

We shoot the shit like we always do: whether things have slowed down in the funeral business, whether things are ever going to take off for organic farmers, his mom, my family, the good old days, the days yet to come. Like water around a drain, I circle around the thing uppermost in my mind, but when I'm just about finished my coffee, I get to the point:

Your work ever give you dreams?

Ches swirls the last dregs of his coffee. George, I've been in this business twenty years. If it still gave me dreams after all this time, I'd be in trouble.

Well, at first then?

Sure. Sure.

Gruesome?

Maybe a little. After all, I work with cadavers all day so it's inevitable some of that'll work its way into my dreams. But not wild stuff. Not zombies chasing me through the streets. Well, maybe once. But I had a fever then.

Huh.

Why do you ask?

I been dreaming about my mom.

Bad dreams?

Naw. Just her trying to tell me something. Only it's after she's been embalmed.

What's she say?

Well, that's the thing, see? She don't talk none because her jaw's wired shut.

Right, you were here when I did that.

Exactly.

Well, I wouldn't make too much of it. Probably you're still trying to say good-bye.

Only it's her trying to talk to me, not the other way around.

Huh.

I toss the empty coffee cup into the trash can underneath Mrs. Laird's table and I shiver. The embalming room is cold at the best of times, but at the beginning of February it's like an ice box. Chester dresses no different now than he does in July. I have no idea how he tolerates the chill.

Before I leave, I pause at the door: Tell me, Ches. When family comes to you about someone you're working on, do they ever ask for something different?

Different? Whaddya mean by different?

You know, something without embalming fluid and eye caps and jaws wired shut.

Oh sure. Now and again somebody says no embalming and we do it straight into the ground. Or somebody says embalming but no fixing up so we do a closed casket. But there are regulations we have to follow, you know.

Naturally. Government has to get its hands into everything.

A different dream starts up in March. By then, there's enough days above freezing—or enough days with bright sunlight to warm the trees—that sap is beginning to run. The whole wood lot is a circulatory system with capillaries and arteries and aortas. In truth, it looks more like a veinous system because all the tubes is made from a plastic that's blue. Everywhere you look through the forest, there's a network of blue spidering its way down to the pump house in the lowest corner of the wood lot. Trees feed the quarter inch tubes, one tap for a tree with a twelve inch trunk, and another tap for each six inches of diameter to the tree. Makes a nice math problem for the boys: a few of the trees have five taps; how wide are they? The quarter inch tubes feed the half inch, the half inch feed the one inch, down to two inch tubes at the pump house. And in the middle of all this, one afternoon, while I'm getting ready for the sap to flow, tramping around the woods on snow shoes, lugging coils of tubing and wire, I sit myself down on the pump house steps for a rest. That's when I have myself a dream. It's my mom as I've seen her before, eye sockets stuffed with cotton balls and jaws wired shut so she mumbles at me without making sense, only this time she's upside down, a rod through her shanks and hanging from a beam, gutted and skinned like a deer.

I start awake with an involuntary yelp, my heart pounding like a trip hammer. There's enough snow on the ground that it muffles my voice. All I hear is the drip of water from the icicles stuck to the pump house eaves. Normally, when I fall asleep in the afternoon, I wake up groggy and feel like a miserable sluggard until dinnertime, but today I'm up like a shot and the adrenaline rushing through my body has turned me hyper-alert. I snap the snow shoes onto my boots and tramp out to the road where I've left the truck. When I get back home, Em's finishing up with the boys and clearing books from the table. She sees how my eyes are wild and wide and she asks what's wrong. I tell her about falling asleep at the pump house and about the dream I had down there.

I say: I understand the dreams now.

I thought you said they didn't have to make sense.

They don't.

Then how can you understand them?

I don't.

You just said you do.

I pour myself a glass of milk and slump into a chair. This is more complicated than I thought. I had a notion of myself as a man who travels in straight lines, who adds two plus two and always gets four, who sows his seeds in the spring and reaps his harvest in the fall, who knows the moon passes through its proper phase even on a cloudy night. If I have a creed at all, it's a belief in explanations even if I don't understand them, and on the flipside, it's a complete denial of the boogie man, the devil, the ghost and the fiend. What's more (though, to be on the safe side, I don't share this with anyone save Em), I set Jesus on the same footing as these others. So my dreams come as a shock to the system. It's not the dreams themselves so much as how they keep at me, like tiny worms that burrow into my head and grow as they feed.

Maybe Mom's trying to tell me something. Whenever I see her now, it's not the eye sockets or frayed sutures that figure in the dream; it's the mouth with the pins in the jaws and the wires twisted together, round and round 'til the mouth is drawn shut. Always there's this motion to her mouth and a fiddling with the lips so the wires pop out. Maybe Mom's trying to tell me I shouldna done this to her, none of it, not the cotton balls, not the incisions, not the embalming fluid, but most of all, not the jaws clamped shut. The living should never try to silence the dead. I don't expect my mom has any dark secrets—no teenage axe murders weighing on her conscience, or half-wit siblings chained in the attic—but it's still her right to leave behind whatever wisdom she's picked up through her life. Who am I to wire her jaws shut and seal her in a box to stew in pickling juice?

It's late in the season—when all the snow's melted except in the shadiest parts of the wood, when day over day the temperature goes at least ten degrees above freezing so the trees get tapped out, when we boil all the sap down to a rich amber syrup and bottle up fifteen hundred litres of it, when the buds pop open on the trees and the asparagus sends its first shoots out of the ground—it's then that Woofie disappears. Now that I think about it, Woofie goes missing on Easter weekend. We don't do nothing special for Easter, not like some folks with big dinners and lots of family. Now that my folks is gone and Em's have been gone for years and neither of us has brothers or sisters, our dinners is just the four of us. Em still cooks a turkey so's we have something special to mark the occasion and she lays out the fancy dishes too. But when it comes time for us to sit down around the harvest table and bow our heads, Ford asks where's Woofie.

Now Woofie's part hound and it ain't uncommon for him to wander off for a whole day. He's got a good nose so we don't worry about him finding his way back. Like as not when he does come back we'll see him come trotting down the lane with a rabbit hanging from his jaws. We always keep a dish of food out for him, but most of the time he makes do with whatever game he catches in the fields. I suppose I'd hunt game too if it was just kibbles waiting for me at home. And, of course, the more rabbits he catches, the more lettuce and carrots I take to market and the more money I put in my pocket, so I'm content to have him wandering off for the whole day.

But when Ford asks where's Woofie, I know something's off. I can feel it in my bones. It's not as if there's anything different today than any other day when Woofie's wandered off for the whole day. But I get this feeling, like the whole world's been turned off it's axis by a quarter degree. It's not like I can point to something and say: There! That's how I know. It's something below the threshold of knowing that's true all the same. We finish the dinner and I help clear the dishes and put left-overs into plastic containers and wash up, but when everything in the house is set to rights, I find myself standing at the big living room window, staring out through the darkness towards the barn.

I spend the next day out in the barn, hosing down the big evaporator and the two ten thousand litre tanks we use to store the sap 'til it's time to boil it down. Now, I need to disinfect them, rinse them out and seal them up for another year. This year's been a good run and it's given us enough maple syrup to keep us stocked up at market right through to the fall. Afterwards, when I go back to the house, there's the usual chit-chat about how our days have gone, me with my cleaning up and Em with her lessons. Could be a day like any other. But we both feel ourselves circling around the one thing that sits there in the silence. At last, Em asks the question and I say: No. No sign of Woofie. Before I clean up and change my clothes, I pull the field glasses from the locker and have a last walk through the fields before the sun goes down. The ground's still mucky so I go mostly along the road and nip across the ditch from time to time, perching myself on a rock or a stump or sometimes clambering up a tree and surveying the whole of my land, going in broad arcs back and forth, drawing closer and closer to my own position with each sweep. I start from the south side of the property, looking as far as the line of trees that stands to the north of the house and moving eastward past the big maple that stands watch over everything, then I move on to the barn. Once I've looked over the two south fields, I go back to the road and walk on past the house to the north field and in to the laneway that runs up the middle of the land. I don't see anything. I continue north up the laneway and into the woods, calling out for Woofie and pausing to listen. Nothing but bird calls and sometimes the chatter of a squirrel overhead. Coming out to the stretch of road that runs north of the woods, I head back home for dinner.

The next day it's the same. We go about our work as if it's a day like any other, but always there's an absence lurking at the bottom of it. At the dinner table, Ford tells how he's heard of dogs gone for a week and come back like it's nothing. Justin says that's just wishful thinking; chances are Woofie's been hit by a car or coyotes got him in the night. Em is horrified. I've never seen her look at Justin like that before. It's like she's wondering how something so cold could have come from her. I have to admit, there's a surprising bluntness for an eleven year old. Even so, the boy's right and I can't argue with that. The difference between Justin and me is that I have enough sense to keep my mouth shut and let my thoughts steep in their silence.

It's a strange thing not knowing what happens, and an odd life-lesson to teach the boys. Usually, on a farm, the life lesson comes from something conclusive, like a dog killed by a passing car or a horse put down after it breaks a shank in a groundhog hole. It's a harder thing to teach a boy that endings are a kind of lie, that there's a flow to everything, a blurring of boundaries, a relentless seepage of one thing into another. I don't think either boy understands the lesson. Ford mopes and frets and keeps on about how one day the dog's gonna show up at the porch steps and set a new record for dogs wandering off into the wilds. Justin swings the other way, knowing full well the dog's already dead, but taking a strange relish in the mechanics of its death, going on about coyotes tearing its legs from their sockets and ants eating out its eyes and gasses bloating its belly 'til it bursts. When Ford's had enough of this talk, he slugs his brother in the stomach and Justin goes running off to Em. In this circumstance, I'm inclined to side with Ford, but as with most everything else, I keep that thought to myself.

By the time the snow's gone and the first of the forced arugula in the greenhouse is ready for market, the talk about Woofie has subsided as has the strangeness of his absence. A couple times, when I'm setting out after breakfast, I catch myself calling to him, expecting, without thinking, that he'll be right there on my heels. But soon enough I lose that expectation and life goes on without him.

My dreams take a twist. This time, I'm walking through the woods and tracking an animal, maybe a buck but I can't say for sure. I've got the Winchester slung over my shoulder. I stop to listen and my patience is rewarded by the shudder of underbrush swishing upright after it's been pushed aside. Looking through the scope, I see a dark form disappear into a thicket. There's no way I can follow into the thicket, so I circle wide and haunch myself against a tree on high ground where I'm sure to see when it comes out into the open. The hunt is all about waiting. It's midday and there's a hot sun overhead. I take a sip from my canteen and wipe the sweat from my brow. A horsefly buzzes around my head, but I don't want to swat at it in case I draw attention to myself. Every now and again I set my eye to the scope and scan around the perimeter of the thicket, peering into the shadows, looking for any irregular movement amongst the trilliums. The dark form leaps from the thicket and rushes up the slope, passing not ten metres from where I'm crouched. It's close enough the scope's only a hindrance, so I raise my head and squeeze off a round that enters broadside just behind the shoulder, right into the middle of its vitals. The animal's probably dead before it hits the ground, whumping against the hard dirt then scudding through the leaves. When I get close, I see by the black sheen of its coat that I've shot a big dog, part hound. Kneeling by its side, I brush the leaves from the head and find that it's a human head—my mom's.

This time I yell and it gets Em balled up in the sheets, scrambling out of the bed, stumbling through the clothes she left last night on the floor, convinced the ceiling's caving in or a plague of rats has invaded the house. When she finds out it's just another dream, she screws up her face. She's given up trying to be soft with me. This happens so often now, it's getting to be a nuisance and Em's more and more insistent I call up a shrink or a counselor or talk to the minister. She says even a witch doctor would do, she's losing so much sleep with my dreams. When I tell her about this dream, she laughs and asks if my mom barked at me. I tell her it's not funny, but she goes on laughing from the bathroom as she pours herself a glass of water.

What makes this dream different ain't how there's a dog or hunting, but that when I brush the leaves aside and find my mother's head, the eyes are her eyes, clear and blue; and the mouth hangs open and the jaws would be able to move freely if it weren't that she's dead. The look on her face is a look I ain't seen in any of my other dreams. It's hard to be sure when you're remembering a dream, but I'm of the view she's lying there with a look of gratitude on her face. It's as if I done her a kindness, letting her die here on the forest floor amongst the wildflowers she so loved when she was alive. Though what the dog's body has to do with any of it beats the hell out of me.

In the last week of May, we hold a birthday party for Justin which doubles as the final get-together for the local home-schoolers. Justin don't care a rat's ass about the whole business. You could forget to bring out the cake. You could lose all the presents. You could forget the games and singing. He's so wrapped up in his own world, he'd never notice. The kids are outside playing soccer on a grassy patch of ground to the south side of the house while the parents sit on lawn chairs or at a picnic table we set up by a clump of shade trees. Em's made up a big jug of fresh-squeezed lemonade and laid out warm-from-the-oven squares. While everyone else is either kicking around a soccer ball or taking a snack in the shade, Justin is off by the road with his head pressed almost to the ground where he can study the life of an ant colony. The ants is as much friends to him as the kids. At least that's my estimation of how Justin sees matters.

Part way through the kids’ soccer game, the grown ups get onto the topic of insomnia and from there it's a short leap to dreams. Em takes the shift in conversation as her cue to share with everybody my nightmares and the turmoil they've wreaked on her sleep. Ruth-Anne Hendershot takes particular interest in my dreams and, in true Ruth-Anne manner, gives it a biblical gloss: as everybody knows from the story of Joseph, dreams are God's way of speaking to us, or speaking through us in cases where the dreams aren't meant for the dreamer but for someone close to the dreamer who's supposed to interpret the dreams and find God's message in the interpretation, just as the dreams of the butler and the baker weren't only for them but for Joseph too, and so it's my task—my calling really—to listen and to listen carefully and to take seriously these messages from God. The way Ruth-Anne goes on sometimes, it's a wonder she don't fall down blue and die on the spot for lack of air. She takes a special interest in me and my dreams and later, when Em and me talk about it that evening, we come to figuring she has me pegged for a minor prophet who's one of God's blessed. Whenever she and me bump into one another, whether at church or the drug store or Saturdays at market, she's after me for another installment of my dreaming. In her eyes, the biggest shame is how little heed I pay them. She thinks it's going against God's will the way I joke about my dreams and tease her about her interpretations. Em thinks it's craziness. Me? I think it's loneliness. The woman ain't had a man in five years. She's gone so long without, she don't know that's what she misses.

When school's done for the year, some of the moms indulge a tradition of a long-weekend holiday to a spa—kind of reward and a chance to get away from the kids. There's Em and Ruth-Anne and Thelma Ferguson and a couple of the others. That means I have to amuse the boys for four days and three nights. This would be easier during the school year when I could pull the excuse of school work out of my hat and force them inside for an hour or two. But now that it's summer, I don't have that excuse, besides which forcing them inside would be cruel. I let them have some unstructured time, but they're old enough now they should be contributing something to the farm. I give them enough for spending money. In return, they weed and pick strawberries and paste labels onto syrup bottles and coil up sap lines I ain't gonna use next year. The other thing is cutting grass. There's a fair lawn around the house needs cutting every week or so—too much for a push mower—so I hitch a mower to the back of the tractor and with that, I can do the two acres or so of lawn in no time at all. The tractor's nothing special, an old John Deere with a rebuilt engine. With a market gardening operation, there ain't much call for a tractor save working a few acres of land at the beginning and end of the season, that and hauling the portable sap tank from the pump house at the bottom of the wood lot and around to the other side of the farm where I've got the evaporator set up in the barn. But that's only a few trips in March.

When Ford sees me cutting the grass for the home-schooler's little garden party, he pesters me something fierce, so I promise that after school's done for the year, he can have a go at it. The boy's almost as tall as me so there's no question anymore of him reaching the pedals. On the morning when Em tears off to the spa, Ford and I walk through the fields to the drive shed which is on the south side of the barn. It's a newer building of corrugated steel and set on a smooth concrete pad. I pull the tractor onto the gravel in front of the shed and shut it off, then get Ford to climb up with me so's I can show him the throttle and the ignition, the clutch and the gear shift, accelerator and brake. It's not at all like Em's car with its automatic transmission. That's what Ford knows best. At first it seems confusing to him; he can't believe driving a tractor is so complicated, but I ease him into it by telling him to treat the whole business of driving like it's a game. There's a big enough space out there that he can ramble around without fear of hitting anything. He can practise starting and stopping, shifting into gear, slowing into turns, backing up with a hitch, popping wheelies. Maybe not popping wheelies but I add that to see if I can put a smile on his face. He's been sitting all this time with a grave look on his face like he's deciding the fate of nations. While Ford sits in his high chair reviewing everything in silence, I haul out the mower and hitch it to the tractor. Then I tell Ford to start her up.

It's painful to watch Ford jerk forward, then skid to a halt on the gravel. The uncertainty. The knowledge that I'm watching. The fear that I'm judging. There comes a time when I have to turn my back and give him the freedom to feel his own way, but I got no idea how to judge when that time has come. I guess turning my back is my gift to him. But knowing when to do it is my gift to me. Ford eases up on the clutch and the tractor lurches forward again. He smiles at me as his head snaps forward. I smile back, motioning for him to steer off the gravel and into the field. The tractor bumps and lurches and Ford sways from side to side, and when I see him, anxious at first but grinning broadly as he catches on, I discover for the first time in months that I'm happy. It ain’t that I was unhappy a couple months ago and only now have turned happy like a change in the weather. It's more a change of my inclination. The dreams have stopped. I'm feeling rested again. My mind is clear.

Leaving Ford to mow the lawn on the south side of the house, I walk to the garden on the north side to see how Justin's coming along with the weeding. Justin has taken off, which is typical of the boy. If he finds something that interests him, he'll get sucked for hours into an alternate universe, but if the task in front of him strikes him as dull, then there ain’t nothing on heaven nor earth that'll move him to finish it. I find him kneeling at the foot of the drive where the soil is sandier and ants have built a megalopolis. Justin's been reading stories about Japanese POW camps where they buried men up to the neck and doused their heads in honey. He's fascinated by the thought that such tiny things can carry out horrible destruction. Personally, I think it's morbid. To my surprise, Em encourages this kind of thinking. She figures you take advantage of whatever fascination presents itself and leverage that to get a kid engaged in his lessons. If stories about torture will get him reading, then torture it is. The problem is, we'll be in the middle of a meal, chewing on our meatloaf, when he gets himself wound up about Unit 731 and we'll have to listen to stories of flea bombs and people spun around 'til the G-force kills them.

Hi Justin, I call as I amble down the drive.

Justin says hi but don't look away from his ant hills.

I hear the tractor motor burring to my left and every couple minutes I see Ford swing into view as he does another pass over the lawn. He looks pleased like he owns half the planet.

Whatchya doin'?

Ants.

Ants?

Yeah, I'm watchin' ants.

Anything in particular about the ants?

Their mandibles.

Oh.

You think ants ate Woofie?

No.

I think ants stripped Woofie to the bone.

Why do you think that?

Cuz there's so many of them. We got so many of them, I bet they finished off Woofie before the coyotes even got a chance.

Oh. Well. I don't know about that.

If I die, the ants'll eat me too.

But you're not gonna die.

Yes I am.

No time soon.

But if ...

I wish I had a degree in psychology. If I had a degree in psychology, maybe I'd have a better notion how certain things work, like dreams, and Justin's mind. If I had a degree in psychology, maybe I'd have tricks up my sleeve I could pull out for moments like this, clever things I could say that would steer Justin away from his obsessions and into the world of regular eleven-year-olds. Instead, I stand in the drive feeling stupid, scratching an itch between my ribs.

If there's one thing to be said for Em's trip to the spa, it's that by the end of four days, I have a whole new appreciation for the home-schooling work she does with the boys, especially with Justin. That kid needs a lot of love and I'm not sure I'd have it in me to give him so much if it was just me to care for him. Seems he's gotten a lot more intense, even in this last bit through the spring. I'm wondering if maybe Woofie was a more important member of the family than I'd been given to believe. Even though Justin never let on he cared much for the dog, maybe there was more going on between them than we could see.

The next week, Ford drags Em and me across the fields to watch him drive the tractor out of the drive shed and hitch up the mower all on his own. It's the beginning of July and on its way to being one of those scorching summer days. Even though it's only eight-thirty, the dew's already gone—if it was there in the first place—and there's a warm wind funneling down the dip between the fields and sweeping up the rise to the back laneway and the big maple standing there. Em points to the maple and wonders aloud if this might be a good day for a picnic like the ones we used to take when the boys were little. Ford rolls his eyes and says that's so juvenile.

Lay out the right food and he'll come, I say.

Em looks beautiful today. Her hair's turned light in the sun and there's a shine on her cheeks. She wears a loose summer dress that flutters in the breeze. While I move like a farmer, still in my jeans and boots and clomping through the grass, Em moves more like a dancer, stepping on air and laughing. She takes hold of my hand and together we watch Ford hurry up the slope to the drive shed. When I'm sure the boy's not looking, I nuzzle in close to his mother and breathe her in—a sweet natural scent that fills me with a quiet desire. One day, when I knew we had time alone, I'd like to lay out a blanket beneath the shade of the trees and make love to her there while the sun shone bright and stoked the ground.

Know what I'd like to do right now?

She already knows and she ignores me.

There's a stray patch of raspberry canes and ripe berries on them too. Five years ago, I planted two rows of raspberries north of the house, and they started to bear in earnest two years ago. After that, the birds scattered them in plops all over the land. To bear fruit like this, these canes couldn't’ve come from seed scattered last year. They'd have to be older. I pull off a handful of berries and feed them to Em. I'll have to take up these canes and burn them if I don't want bears wandering across the land through the best part of the summer. The bears are single-minded enough about the berries they don't pose a danger, but they're a bloody nuisance. Maybe it's time to invest in an electric fence.

We come up the north side of the barn and walk the long way around to the drive shed so I can take a look at the greenhouse as we go. The greenhouse don't matter so much at the height of summer; where it's a boon is at the extremes of the growing season, either forcing seeds in the early spring or extending the growing season in late fall. I like to plant a few things in midsummer so they'll be ready for the late harvest. Brings me some extra cash in the fall market. There's a tear in the plastic low to the ground at the north end. I send Em on to the drive shed while I stay behind to patch the tear.

I don't know anything about driving the tractor, she says.

Don't really matter, I says. Ford knows what he's doing.

You sure?

I taught him last week. He just wants to show off to you.

I don't know how to use a clutch.

It's okay. Ford got the hang of it last week.

Em walks on alongside the greenhouse, lit in a haze from the low light passing through the plastic walls, hair blazing copper, flowers on her dress a brilliant mess of cobalt and crimson. I prop a sheet of plywood flush against the metal struts that frame the greenhouse, covering the section where the plastic is torn. Entering through the north end, I go to the makeshift worktable I got set up inside and rifle for my staple gun through a heap of junk. Kneeling by the tear, I staple the plastic to the plywood I set up on the outside. This is a temporary measure to keep rabbits and whatnot out; at the end of the season I'll do a proper fix. Even this early in the day it's hot inside and the sweat is dripping from my chin and gluing my shirt to my spine. I'm gonna need a drink.

I step outside and enjoy the feel of the breeze over my soaked shirt. Down beyond the far end of the greenhouse and hidden behind the barn, Ford starts up the tractor and lets it chug away in the drive shed for a bit. I enter the barn through the basement door. The compressor for our cooler is running full throttle and probably won't let up all through the day. I open up the tap and let it flow until the water's cool. We draw from a deep well, and once the stale water from the hose gets flushed out, I stick my face in the stream and drink the pure stuff straight from an ancient aquifer. There's nothing more refreshing.

When I close the tap and step outside, I hear the tractor's engine idling in the drive shed, but there's Ford tearing through the dirt towards me, screaming and waving his arms like a crazy man. I can't make out any of his words but I can tell by the wildness in his eyes that something's happened. He paws at my arms and takes hold of my shirt, tugging me back the way he came.

Dad, Dad. It's Mom. It's Mom. It's Mom. But that's as much as I get from him.

Ford takes off at a sprint and there's no way I can keep up. He beats me to the drive shed by a good thirty or forty metres. I follow him through the big open door and there I see the tractor, idling where it always stands when I park it. Ford's disappeared behind it, so I follow. Em's laid out on the floor, flush against the rear wall, back flat against the concrete, palms pressed down, eyes wide to the ceiling. I shout Em's name as I rush to her side. At first, I can't make any sense of it, her position on the concrete floor, the blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth, the red bubbles huffing from her nostrils. I should call for an ambulance, but the only phone we have is in the house on the other side of the property. We've never gone in for cell phones. Never seen the need.

I didn't mean to, Dad. Ford's in a panic and the tears stain his face. Everything he says comes out as a scream.

Mean to what?

Mean to—I screwed up. I didn't mean to. I got it wrong.

Got what wrong? Honey! I shout at Em, trying to get her attention, trying to get her to look at me. But her eyes is all wrong; they won't focus. She don't turn her head when I call to her, just stares up somewhere beyond the ceiling like she's trying to fathom something in the stars.

Why's there blood?

I didn't mean to.

Mean to what? I stand and shake the boy hard, maybe too hard. He stares and I wonder if what I'm seeing in his eyes is terror.

I put the stick in reverse. The boy crumples to his knees.

I should tell him to run to the house and call for help, but he's fallen apart. He don't answer when I yell his name. Just sits on his knees, tears mixed with snot, staring at his mom and saying over and over: I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry, Ma, I didn't mean to.

It's a strangeness to me, almost a wonder, that I can know a fact for a fact, yet at the same time deny it. That's how it is staring at Em. When the last bubbles eke from her nostrils and all of that stops, I know for a fact that whatever sorry Ford says to her, Em ain't hearing no more of it. I see it clear now: Ford threw the stick into reverse and he eased up on the clutch, thinking the tractor would chug out the shed and onto the bed of gravel. Instead, when he let up his foot, the tractor shot backwards while Em was walking around the rear. It caught her with its full force and pinned her to the wall right across the chest. Probably broke all her ribs and crushed her chest cavity. Squeezed the life out of her. Like I say: that's a fact I know, but I'm sure as hell not about to admit it into my life.

I take hold of Em's wrist and feel for a pulse. Her hand hangs limp in mine. I press two fingers to her carotid artery, but as with her wrist, I feel nothing. I lean in close to her, cocking my head sideways to listen for a breath, but I already know I ain't gonna feel a thing. I look for the point on her chest, just up from the sternum, thinking I can give her CPR, but when I touch there, the whole of her chest is mush. I can feel it with my fingers. Em is gone.

I stumble out onto the gravel. One cry to the sky, then I fall to the ground and sit there. I need to clear my head. I need to think what to do. What to do. I get onto my feet again and go around to the side of the tractor, and reaching up to the ignition, I shut the damn thing off. It's been making a hell of a racket this whole time.

I go to the barn and open the tap all the way. Spray myself full on the face and hope the cold blast clears away some of the fog. I stand at the fence and stare across the field towards the house. There's a mare chawing away at a clump of grass, and when she sees me leaning my elbows on the top rail of the fence, she pauses a moment as if debating whether or not to acknowledge me. As it turns out, my existence don't matter so much to her; she turns away, bends low and tears more grass from the ground. A hawk wheels high overhead, tracing a wide arc across the sky. Further along the fence, sparrows twitter like nothing's changed in the world. But I know better. The planet's cracked in two, and one half's gone wheeling off into the sun and turned to ash, and the other half's drifted into the deeps of space and frozen solid.

Em hasn't moved except her hand which Ford holds in his and rubs like a magic genie bottle. Maybe he thinks it'll grant an impossible wish. I want to set my arm across his shoulders and tell him something that smacks of decency, but I can't bring myself even to step under the same roof as him. At least not yet. What I know for a fact is Ford never meant to do such a thing; he's a boy and innocent in all this. But that fact don't keep me from feeling a rage deep in my bowels. I pace and mumble like a lunatic, trying to work things through, both what's happened and what I have to do now that what's happened can't be taken back.

I stand at the door and lean against the frame.

Stay here a minute with your Mom. I'm going to the house to get Justin. He needs to see what happened.

PART II - JUSTIN

I'M COUNTING ANTS. I wanna know how many ants is in the world. I know I can't count all the ants in the world. That'd take longer than my life. But I can count all the ants in a square metre. Once I know that, I can figure out how many square metres of land there is in the world, which is easy enough with Google, and multiply the number of ants by that number. It's simple math, like Mom's taught me how to do. Problem is, I could stare all day at the ground and never see but one percent of all the ants. Most are underground. I need to dig. I've got Dad's measuring tape from his leather belt thingy what holds all his screwdrivers and hammers and whatnot and I've measured out a square metre of dirt behind the house. Now I'm taking a straight hoe from the vegetable garden and cutting a line in the ground where I've measured.

I hear Dad hollering. He's always hollering about something. I'll stick to counting ants. Maybe he'll find me. Maybe he won't. Don't matter one way or the other. I hear the clomp of his boots on the gravel so I guess I've gotta mind whatever it is he's hollering about.

He says I've gotta come to the drive shed. He really means it cuz he's got hold of my arm and yanks me to my feet. I can barely keep up. It's like he's dragging me along behind. There's three horses in the field. Probably a billion ants underneath the grass in the horse paddock. Three horses. A billion ants. That's a ratio. Three horses weighing an average five hundred kilos. That's fifteen hundred kilos. Wonder if a billion ants weighs fifteen hundred kilos. I bet it's close. That's something to think about: there's as much ant in a field as there is horse. That's a ratio too.

Mass is different than weight. The difference is obvious to me but Ford always struggles over this one. Ford's dim about some things. Mass is absolute stuff. Weight is relative stuff. When we tramp into the drive shed, what I see is mass and weight. There's Mom dead. That's mass. And there's Ford all heaped over her. That's weight.

You can tell right away Mom's dead because of the eyes. I seen dead before with grandma, but that was different. That was after they'd had a chance to fix up the body. They drained it and cleaned it and closed the eyes. I goes up to Mom and move the eyelids over the eyes so's they don't spook Ford and give him bad dreams. Eyes have jelly in them. I read about eyes. I read that eyes have a lens in them too, a lot like a camera, and the lens takes the light and focuses it on back of the eyeball where the retina is. The retina isn't really a thing. It's an area. It's a collection of rods and cones that see different kinds of light. The rods and cones is mostly bundles of nerves wired to the optic nerve and then straight to the brain. The brain dies without oxygen. If a person don't breathe for a couple minutes, brain cells start to die, but it's nothing permanent. If a person don't breathe for five minutes, that's a different story. I read about it on the internet. Mom's even worse than that. Dad says she's been lying here for ten minutes now. If I don't close the eyes, ants will crawl into them and eat all the jelly.

There's a pool of pee around Mom's thighs. When a body dies, the sphincter thingy lets go. I read about that too. I wonder if the word sphincter is like the word sphinx. In olden days, a sphinx would stand guard at a gate and if you wanted to get past the gate, you had to answer a riddle. In olden days, a riddle wasn't a quickie with a punch line like "Why’d the chicken cross the road?" It was something more mysterious. If I was a sphinx and people wanted to get past my gate, here's what I'd ask: when a mom dies, how does its children learn any more stuff?

Dad's gone off to the barn and Ford ain't doing nothing but crying over the body, so I go around back of the drive shed to take a pee. I pee on an anthill. I talk to my sphincter. I ask it a riddle: Is my pee acidic enough to burn ants? Some things is acidic and some things is caustic. Then there's water which is right in the middle. If I held out my finger and poured pure sulphuric acid over it, the acid would burn my finger right to the bone, worse’n if I'd roasted it in a fire. The funny thing is: if I held out my finger and poured quick lime over it, which is caustic, the same thing would happen. Why is that? Why can two things so different from one another end up doing the same destruction? You'd think that if acid dissolves things, then the opposite of acid would make things whole. But that's not how it works. Or maybe it's just our notion of opposite don't work.

When I go back around to the front of the drive shed, Dad's laid out an orange tarp beside the body and he's easing the body onto the tarp a bit at a time, first the legs, then the torso, then shimmying the middle in the pee-soaked dress. Ford won't do a damn thing, so I have to help. Ford's still talking like Mom's right there in front of him and he's made some stupid mistake like spilling a carton of juice. Dad's trying to hush him now because he's got something important to say. It's kind of a set speech, the sort of speech grown-ups give when they're trying to explain something to you in a way that makes it sound reasonable even though you know and they know there's nothing reasonable to it at all.

Dad's going on about how grandma died last fall. That's when he lost his mom. Thing is: after she died, Dad went over to Beamsworth's and watched what they did to the body, gettin' her all ready for the funeral. He says: at first he didn't think anything of it, seein' as that's how it's always been done. That's how it was for his dad, which is my grandpa who died when I was too little to remember. And that's how it was for grandpa's dad. And so on as far back as anyone can remember. But just because a thing has been done a particular way since forever is no reason it should still be done going forward. He watched what Chester did: how he put two slits in grandma, one in an artery and one in a vein, and pumped embalming fluid through her body; how he put cotton balls in her eye sockets and covered them over with eye caps; how he stapled pins into her jaws, pins with wires attached to them, wires that he twisted round and round 'til grandma's mouth stayed shut. But afterwards, when they'd put grandma in a big wooden box and lowered her into the ground, pictures of her started to haunt Dad. He thinks maybe grandma is trying to tell him something. Maybe it's wrong to do all this stuff to a body after it's gone.

Dad sticks his arms under the tarp and picks up the body.

Ford says: What're you doing?

Dad says: We're gonna do right by your mom.

Dad carries her through the basement door of the barn and tells me to open the cooler door. When I swing it open, the room fills with the smell of thyme. Dad lays the body out on the floor, then shuts the door behind.

Ford says: What're you doing?

Dad says: We don't need no funeral home with cotton balls and eye caps. We don't need no government regulations telling us we gotta pump your Mom full of toxic chemicals that cost us ten thousand dollars. We're gonna give her a proper burial.

Dad leads us back to the house and up to their bedroom to go through Mom's things. He pulls out dresses one by one and holds them up and asks what we think, what would be a good dress to bury Mom in. Ford thinks this is crazy, but when I nod to a yellow dress with purple flowers, Ford nods too and it's settled. Dad pulls it off the hanger and stuffs it into an overnight bag he's laid out on the bed. Then he stuffs in underwear and shoes and a hair clip and earrings. Dad says we need a shroud. Ford don't know what Dad's talking about, but I know from reading about the shroud of Turin on this web site I like. We don't have anything that counts as a real shroud, but we have some pretty big table cloths in the linen closet, so Dad pulls out a big ivory cotton table cloth and stuffs it in with the clothes.

Downstairs, Dad's in a rush to get back to the barn, and Ford, well he's stumbling around in a daze, so he'll go wherever Dad tugs him, but me, well my stomach's grumbly cuz I didn't eat no breakfast this morning. I pull three peanut butter cookies from the cookie jar and stuff them in my pocket and I pour myself a glass of milk which I gulp on the spot. I munch on the cookies as we walk across the field and I wipe the last crumbs from my face as we're going into the barn.

Dad clears off the big bench and drags it scraping across the concrete and into the centre of the floor. This is the bench where we fill the maple syrup bottles and stick on all the labels when they've cooled. Dad carries the body from the cooler and lays it out on the bench. I see tears in his eyes as he unfurls the tarp. There it is, eyes still shut, but mouth open wide and lips turning blue. The fingers is curled around, a bit like claws, but not clutching at anything, more like when Mom sets her fingers on the piano keys before she decides what to play. One of the shoes is missing and Dad sends me off to fetch it. First I check in the cooler but it ain't there, so I run out to the drive shed and halfway there, in a clump of grass, I find the other shoe. It's a canvas slip-on runner with black and white checks. When I get back, Dad tells us to disappear for half an hour and come back at eleven-thirty; he needs time alone with Mom, wants some privacy to wash her down and dress her fresh before we say our good-byes and wrap her in the shroud.

We don't know what to do with ourselves. For a while, we pet the brown mare and smile when she lets go with a big platt. But the smile on Ford's face lasts only a second and he's back to his brooding. He says it's all his fault for moving the stick the wrong way when he was trying to pull out of the drive shed. Mom would be making them lunch right now if he hadn't been so stupid.

Don't seem real, he says. Bet if we go back to the house, Mom'll make us some lemonade.

I'm throwing stones at the fence post, seeing how many times I can hit it.

Dad'll never forgive me.

I don't know about forgiving people, so I keep my mouth shut while Ford goes on like that. After a time, we get bored of leaning on the fence and talking to the mare, so we wander through the greenhouse and out the other end, then on up the hill to the beginning of the back laneway and the big maple that stands there. We sit under its shade with our backs pressed to the trunk, Ford facing the house, me facing the barn. I stare up at the branch above my head and see if I can count all the leaves on it. If I knew how many leaves are on an average tree branch and if I knew how many branches are on an average maple tree, then I could figure out how many leaves are on an average maple tree. This ain't an average maple tree. It's a big tree. Bigger than any other maple tree on the whole farm. Maybe not big in the tall sense. But big in the big sense. It's all about volume. If you chopped up this tree, you'd get five trees worth of firewood, probably enough to do you half the winter. Every time the wind blows, I lose count. I'll have to wait for a calmer day.

I turn instead to catching crickets. I do that a lot because I have to feed the gecko I keep in my room. I don't keep the gecko in my room; I keep it in a terrarium and the terrarium happens to be in my room. Geckos don't eat dead food the way a dog will munch on kibbles if it's hungry. Judging by the way Woofie ate, I'd say dogs would rather eat live food too. Only difference is a dog won't starve itself to death if all it's got is dead kibble; a gecko will starve itself to death if all it's got is dead cricket. So every day I go outside and catch four or five crickets and drop them live into the terrarium and watch how the gecko stalks them, raises its tail, quivers before it lunges. I was supposed to name the gecko, but I never did. I call it gecko. It's a reptile. It has a brain the size of a fly's. If you give a fly a name, it's never gonna come when you call. Neither will a gecko. So why bother getting all cutesy, giving it a name and pretending it's a pet like a dog when everybody knows all it's good for is eating, sleeping and pooping? And dying.

I catch one cricket and hold it in my hand. It tries to poke its head out between my fingers, but I don't give it enough space. My hand is a cricket prison. My fingers is bars on a cell in the cricket prison.

Ford says the cricket's scared.

Most animals poop when they're scared. It's a survival thing. It makes them lighter and it grosses out whatever's chasing them.

Ford says the cricket's probably left cricket poop in my hand.

I stick the cricket into my pocket, a button-down shirt pocket, and wipe my hands on my shorts in case there's any cricket poop on them.

Let's go. It's almost eleven-thirty.

When we get back to the barn, Dad's almost done. He's got the body cleaned up nice and he's combing the hair. He's propped the head on a pillow and that helps to keep the mouth shut.

Ford steps close and stares bug-eyed at the body. It don't seem real, he says. He steps even closer and gets all blubbery on us, carrying on just like before in the drive shed, saying he's sorry, he didn't mean to, please forgive him, 'til even Dad looks to be getting impatient with him and pulls him back from the bench.

I'm gonna wrap her in the shroud now, so maybe you boys should say your good-byes.

Ford's crying a river now. He says: Bye, Ma. I didn't mean to. I'll always love you.

Dad nods to me and I step forward. I'm not sure what to say. I'm not crying like Ford, but maybe that's because my eyes don't work the way Ford's eyes work. Tears come from lacrymal glands. I read about it. Maybe Ford's lacrymal glands work more’n mine. When his voice started to change and he got his growth spurt, they said it was because his glands was shifting into high gear. Maybe it's like that for his tear glands too.

I don't know where you are anymore, I says. But wherever it is, I want you to know I'll always remember to brush my teeth.

Dad kisses the cheek, which has turned a weird-looking colour. While we were under the tree, Dad spread the shroud across the work bench and laid the body on top, so now all he needs to do is fold it down over the head and up over the feet and draw it from either side over the middle and tuck it underneath like he's wrapping a birthday present. He snips three lengths of twine from a ball at his feet and fishes them under the body and over the top, tying them off so's the shroud won't come unraveled.

We gotta work fast, he says. In this heat ...

Dad don't finish his thought, but I already know. It's like when you leave meat out in the summertime by accident. Don't take long before it smells and the flies start to buzz around it. We gotta get Mom into the ground before the same happens to her. Dad hands Ford a spade and me a rake, then he heaves the body from the work bench and carries it out into the sunshine. Every step, there's tears streaming down his cheeks, but he don't make a sound except for the odd grunt and some heavy breathing up the slope. We follow behind, like soldiers carrying pikes, and Dad leads the way up to the same tree where, only half an hour before, Ford and me was sitting counting leaves and catching crickets. When we get to the tree, Dad lays the body out on a bed of leaves in the shade, then stands up tall, straightening out his back and puffing a bit from the strain of carrying the body a good three hundred metres, maybe more. I counted out four hundred and seventy-two paces from the barn to the tree and figure my stride at sixty-five centimetres which makes just over three hundred metres.

Boys, Dad says, this is where we're gonna bury your mom.

We stare at him but can't think of a thing to say.

Your mom loved this tree. Hell, your mom loved this whole farm. And she loved you two more than her own eyes. Seems fitting, then, burying her here. Nothing else'd seem right.

After he rolls up his sleeves, Dad takes the rake from me and clears away all the leaves and twigs and scrub and whatnot from the south side of the tree, then he sets in to digging the grave. There's been a dry patch and it's turned the ground hard which means it's slow going, but Dad's not gonna skimp on a proper grave, and by the time he's done, his head's below the level of our feet. He clambers out of the grave and sits with his feet over the edge, shirt soaked through, dirt staining his face where he's run his forearm across his brow to keep the sweat from stinging his eyes. He holds out his arms like he's a bird about to fly and he lets the breeze cool his body.

Wish I'd brought a jug of water up here.

I volunteer to run down to the house and fill a cooler of water. Dad says that'd be nice and he promises not to bury Mom 'til I get back so's I can watch too. The shadows lean at an angle now, so I'm figuring it for about one o'clock. Halfway down to the house, I find a rock I've been looking for, a jagged piece of granite with enough of its innards showing that I can see flecks of quartz and mica and feldspar, which is proof there was once volcanoes here, but that was millions of years ago, even before the Jurassic period when there was big dinosaurs wandering over the land. I hop from spot to spot, pretending I have to watch out for bubbling pools of magma. If I miss my footing, I'll slip into the molten rock and get burnt to a crisp in a matter of seconds. There won't be nothing left, not even ash.

Back at the house, I open the tap full in the kitchen sink and let it run cold while I go upstairs to my room and dump the cricket from my pocket into the terrarium. At first, the gecko don't seem too interested in the cricket, but the cricket jitters around the terrarium, trying to figure out where it is, and passes in front of the gecko's field of vision. That's when the gecko gets interested. It steps its careful stealthy steps until it's got the cricket wedged into a corner, then it raises its tail and wiggles it back and forth. When it lunges at the cricket, it moves so quick, I can barely see what happens. All I know is when the gecko steps back, there's a couple legs and an antenna sticking out of its mouth.

Downstairs, I fill an insulated cooler jug with water. It holds four litres but that's too heavy for me to carry all the way back to the tree, so I don't fill it to the top. While I'm hunting through the kitchen cupboards for plastic cups, I hear the crunch of gravel outside. A car's rolled up the drive. It's Marnie and Janine's mom. I recognize her by the weird stack of hair bobbing above the steering wheel. Marnie and Janine is pretty, but they didn't get none of it from their mom, that's for sure. She's this roly-poly thing that wobbles from the car to the porch, and when she smiles at me, another chin pops out where her neck should be. She says she was out running errands, which is what she always says, and seeing as it was on her way, she thought she'd drop by and return the cookie tin she'd borrowed from before. She holds out a metal box and I take it from her. I don't know what before she's talking about; probably a before she made up. When she gets close, I smell the smell of mothballs on her.

Is your mom in? she asks.

We're burying her out in the field.

She squints and points up to the maple, but from here, all you can see is three tiny forms, one standing, one sitting, and one laid out on the ground.

Way over by that tree there? she asks.

Yeah.

Oh, you Barneses, and she laughs a roly-poly laugh that makes her stomach jiggle up and down. You always dream up such creative ways to spend an afternoon. She dabs her forehead with a white kerchief. Well, I'm not about to walk all the way over there. Say hi to Emily for me, will you?

I will.

When I get back to the tree, Dad asks who it was pulled into the drive. I set three cups on the ground and we fill each of them. While we're gulping our water, I tell how Marnie and Janine's mom came by to drop off a cookie tin. Dad looks at me all concerned.

Was she her usual nosey self? he asks.

I guess. I dunno.

How'd she seem when she left?

Fine I guess. She said to say hi to mom.

So you didn't tell her?

Tell her what?

That mom's gone.

I told her we was burying her.

Dad goes berserk on me. He almost launches me into orbit. He almost tears the tree out by its roots and uses it like a bat to knock me into the next county. He huffs and he puffs and he almost blows the house down on top of me. That's how angry he is. As he struts around ranting like a crazy man, I keep asking: What'd I do? What'd I do? It's Ford comes between us and explains that what we're doing is against the law and if anybody finds out, they'll come and arrest Dad and they'll take us away and put us in foster care or something.

Well, I wouldn't go that far, says Dad.

What about all them funeral home regulations? says Ford.

Exactly. They're regulations. Breaking regulations ain't wrong. Not in any moral sense. I just don't want the government poking around where its nose don't belong is all.

I guess Dad's worried that if Marnie’s and Janine's mom gets to yakking in town about what we're doing, pretty soon word'll get around to the police and they'll be out to the farm, and reporters too, and government people. Pretty soon after that, regular people will come out just to stare at us, and then we'll get no peace.

By the time Dad's settled himself again, the sun's gone a piece further across the sky and the shade of the tree's swung around to put the body half in the light. By the head, the shroud's warm to the touch. The odd fly buzzes circles above the shroud, but Ford shoos whatever comes near.

Boys, we've gotta talk more about this. But first thing is getting your mom into the ground.

Dad sets the body by the edge of the grave, then slides himself in. Ford and me kneel to either end of the hole and help ease the body over the edge and into Dad's arms. We watch from above while Dad lays the body across the bottom where it's cold and wet. After he's pulled himself out of the grave, he tells us both to pick up a clod from the mound and toss it into the hole. We listen to the thunk of dirt on the body and stare at the way it lies there, stiff and lifeless. What gets me most is the quiet. I guess that's how I know for sure mom's dead, cuz if she weren't, there'd be a mess of chatter coming up from the hole. She'd be after us about one thing or another, like the dirt on Dad's face and pants and the state of Ford's hair and the pile of clothes in my room, or she'd be thinking aloud about whatever was passing through her head at that moment, never anything hidden, always yakking about the world around her, and since the world around her is mostly us, that's mostly her yakking too: an endless list of the comings and goings of Ford and me and Dad. Almost endless.

Any last words? Dad asks.

Ford's more together now than he was when Dad laid the body out on the work bench. This time he makes sense. He goes on for longer and says more than how he's sorry. When it comes my turn, I promise to be good and to do all my homework and to do my share of the chores. When I'm done talking, Dad says it's okay if we don't say everything we'd hoped to say, it's okay if we come up with something later we wished we'd said now, because mom will always be here. Somehow, though he don't know how—not in any scientific way—but somehow, Mom will always be here. So whenever we need to, we can come up here to the maple tree and talk with Mom, tell her our troubles, tell her how we're feeling, keep her up-to-date with what's happening in our lives, keep secrets with her if we like. Dad takes a shovelful of dirt from the mound and tilts it into the grave and tells Em he loves her and he'll do his level best to care for the boys—that's us—so she'll be proud. One day she'll look down from wherever she's sitting, and she'll see two fine young men, and she'll know they came from her.

Dad starts shoveling in more dirt, and faster too, but Ford stops him, says we're not done yet, says there's one more thing to do, says it ain't a proper funeral 'til we've sung something. Dad pitches the shovel into the dirt and asks what we should sing. It's no good asking me cuz the only song I know right the way through is Happy Birthday and that don't really fit the occasion. Ford's not much use neither, even though it's his suggestion. He thinks it'd be a good idea to sing "Nearer my God to Thee," only he don't know the words. He tries his best and ends up singing the words "nearer my God to thee" four times over and not in tune neither. Dad tries singing Amazing Grace. He gets all of verse one out, which is more’n Ford ever managed, but he gives up halfway through verse two. Fact is, we never go to church all that often, at least not enough to learn the words to no hymns. After a couple minutes of silence, Dad shrugs his shoulders and gets back to shoveling dirt into the hole. Filling a hole is a lot easier than digging it in the first place and the work goes quick. When Dad's done, there's a mound over the grave like you see on a woman that’s having a baby. Dad says how, with rain, the mound'll sink. Dad says it's important the grave be inconspicuous. We can't do anything that'd tip off people where mom is buried. For instance, if we visit for a chat with mom, we can't leave flowers behind.

Dad says we're gonna need a story. Once school starts again in the fall and we have to go once a week to mix it up with all the other home-schoolers, the parents are gonna wonder what's happened to Em. We don't want them to know the truth, otherwise the police, they'll come and investigate and dig her up and do all the things to her body that we was trying to keep them from doing. So we need to agree on a story. We need to practise it. We need to make sure there's no holes in it.

We never had no lunch and now we're all famished, so we go back to the house and Dad cooks us up hamburgers on the barbeque, and while we chaw on our hamburgers, we think up the story we're gonna tell people. In the end, it ain't much of a story, but maybe that's the best kind of story. If it's simple, it's harder for us to screw it up. We just say Mom up and left. It's a case of abandonment. She got tired of home-schooling. Too much of a burden. She'd always dreamt of being an artist so she took off to a place in New Mexico, what they call a colony. We heard from her once when she got there, but nothing since. She met somebody else. We have no idea how to get in touch with her anymore. That's it. That's all we ever have to say.

Mom didn't really abandon us, did she?

No, Dad says, Mom loved you boys beyond the sun and moon.

Then our story's a lie.

Only technically, he says.

But I thought lying is wrong.

Well, he says, sometimes you have to tell a small lie for the sake of a bigger truth.

I have no idea what Dad means. He must see that on my face, cuz he adds: Justin, think of it as a game we're gonna play with the world.

Okay, I says.

As long as I know the rules, I'm good at playing games.

That night I wake up with a dream of Mom. Only it ain't my dream; it's Dad's. He wakes up with a yelp and that starts me out of my bed. I pad down the hall and, looking over the railing, I see Dad downstairs, sitting in the dark and bawling his eyes out. He ain't wailing out loud. It's more a choked kind of bawling, as if he'd love to wail but feels he shouldn't, so he does everything in his power to push it all back inside. Mom says this is why men get ulcers. It's fascinating to watch Dad cry. What he's doing is called lacrymation. I read it in the dictionary. The only time I ever cry is when I get hurt, like when Ford punches me or I fall off my bike and scrape my skin. The way Dad cries, it's like he's hurt too. Only I know he's not hurt; Mom's the one who's hurt.

In the morning, everything's quiet. I peek through the slit in the doorway and see Dad sprawled on top of his sheets, eyes covered by the crook of his elbow, snoring so the floor rumbles. There's a bottle on the night table. Pushing through the doorway, I step around to Dad's side of the bed and look at the bottle. The label says the bottle belongs to Johnny Walker, though God only knows who Johnny Walker is. Whoever he is, he's 40% alcohol by volume. Most normal people are 70% water by volume. Next to Johnny Walker's bottle is a smaller bottle with pills in it. The bottle is sitting open with the lid on the floor along with some of the pills. They're little round pink pills that feel powdery to the touch. There's a label on the bottle says the pills is Rivotril 1.0 mg, take two a day one in the morning and one at night and Emily Barnes printed beside the instructions. I think it's odd that Dad would be taking Mom's pills, though grown-ups do odd things all the time. I pick up all the pills from the floor and drop them into my pocket, the button-down pocket on my shirt.

Downstairs, I pour myself cereal for breakfast. We're running out of milk, so I write a note on the pad stuck to the fridge. That way Dad will know we're in a milk crisis and he'll run into town for more. I like Kap'n Krunch even though Ford says they put chemicals in it to make me weak-minded so I'll believe whatever they say in their advertising. Ford says it's a good thing we drink well water because the government adds chemicals to water in the city and it turns city folks into zombies. It makes them passive so they'll sit for hours in smoggy traffic jams without raising a fuss. Ford knows all about these things.

I go outside with my jar and hunt for crickets. There's still dew on the grass behind the house. Crickets don't make noise so much in the morning, but I know where they likes to hide so I always catch a few. Crickets jump like grasshoppers, but not so far, which means I can catch them in my hand and plop them into the jar. After I've caught four, I go upstairs to the terrarium and put a couple of them in for Gecko.

The phone rings. Dad's not moving. Neither is Ford. The phone rings five more times before I find it between the cushions in the couch downstairs. It's Marnie Hendershot. Ford's got it sweet for Marnie. Ford says Marnie's starting to develop, which I don't really understand because Mom hasn't taught me about that stuff yet, but I think it has something to do with the bumps that've sprouted on her chest. They're funny-looking now, but Ford says someday they'll get big like Mom's. I take the phone upstairs and at first Ford don't say nothing because he's too groggy even to take the sheets off his head, but I keep poking and pushing at him and pulling at the sheets so he has no choice but to pay attention to me and take the phone. Yeah, he says, twisting around in his underwear and setting his feet on the bare wooden floor. When he hears Marnie's voice, he waves me out of his room, and I pretend to obey him, only I clomp my feet so it sounds like I'm walking down the hall even though I'm not, then I tuck in close around the other side of the doorway and listen to Ford and Marnie talking. Usually, they talk about stupid stuff, like shows on TV, not that any of us is allowed to watch much shows on TV, and Ford says what an idiot I am and then it gets quiet which means Marnie's taking a turn saying what an idiot Janine is, and Ford says how Marnie's really pretty and then it gets quiet which means Marnie's taking a turn telling Ford he looks like a movie star or something. Only that's not how it goes this time. Ford takes the phone and says yeah. His voice is dull, like he's talking into a plastic bowl, and he don't seem interested in talking to Marnie. It's quiet for a while and I don't even think Marnie's talking then. It's just quiet. Usually the two of them goes on and on and you can't shut them up. It's so weird the way Ford acts. He just drops the phone on the bed and stands up. Don't even hang up on Marnie. You'd expect when he walks past me eavesdropping on him like I'm a spy that he'd punch me in the arm or something. Only he don't even let on he seen me. Just walks on by in his bare feet and underwear and his hair going in a thousand different directions, kind of a far away look in his eyes like he's sleep walking. I grab the phone off the bed and follow Ford along the hall, past my room, past Mom's and Dad's room, and down the stairs and into the kitchen.

You didn't even finish talking to her. I stand in the doorway holding the phone over my head. Don't you wanna finish talking to Marnie?

Ford's got the fridge door open and he's staring into it like he's a zombie from outer space. He closes the door without taking any food or nothing. That's the weirdest thing I ever seen. Normally Ford takes out more’n he can hold in both his arms. This time, he goes empty-handed into the living room and stares out the window that overlooks the fields. He stands there a while then moans and sighs and flops himself down on the couch, looking up but not really focused on the ceiling.

I'm bored of Ford's staring at nothing at all, so I stuff my pockets full of cookies and head outside across the field to the big maple tree where Mom's body is buried underneath all that dirt. After I've et all the cookies, I see how some of the crumbs have fallen on top of the loose dirt that Dad piled on top of the hole, then I see how ants have found each of the crumbs and is carrying them off to wherever it is they live.

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-three is a prime number. There's twenty-three ants between my two feet. Two is a prime number too. Just like three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen and nineteen. A prime number is what you got if the only numbers you can divide it by is itself and one, unless you're talking about one, in which case you don't got a prime number. You've just got one. Zero ain't a prime number either, because if you divide zero by itself, you can't find an answer. That's math's way of saying some questions don't have answers. Or maybe it's math's way of saying that the answer don't matter because sometimes the problem is in the question, not the answer.

Dad's left the rake and the shovel leaning against the far side of the tree. I set them on my shoulder and hold them with my arm stretched out like I'm holding a rifle and I march down to the greenhouse where they belong, four-hundred and forty-two steps, less steps than going up, probably because going down you can take longer strides is why. Four hundred and forty-two ain't a prime number because it's even which means it can be divided by two so it's got more factors than just itself and one.

It's cool in the basement of the barn. There's flies buzzing in the window, six panes all orange-tinted with dirt that's grimed over in the lower corners of each pane. Dad's hung a couple fly-strips from the beam running north to south through the middle of the barn, and fly-bodies is stuck to them in clumps, top to bottom. The strips is twisted in coils, sometimes fluttering in the breeze. I try to shove the work bench back against the wall beneath the window, since that's where it's supposed to go, but it's too heavy so I leave it be. I put the twine away that's sitting by the leg of the bench and I stick the knife back in the drawer where I saw Dad pull it out yesterday. Inside the cooler, everything's fine, though there's an awful heap of produce waiting for market and I wonder if maybe today's Saturday. I can never keep my days straight. If this is Saturday and it don't go to market, it'll all have to go into the compost heap instead where it'll rot and bugs and stuff will churn it into fertilizer for next year's crops. It smells nice in the cooler. The air's thick with herbs like sage and thyme, and I smell carrot tops and arugula and onions. The floor is clear where Dad laid the body. I turn out the light to the cooler and seal the door.

There's a stack of wood left over from boiling sap in the evaporator, and Dad's left the old clothes by the wood. That gives me an idea. I open the big metal door to the evaporator. It's like the metal door on the old wood-burning stove, only bigger. Dad's got the insides cleaned out so you could eat off it. I tear an old paper bag into strips and set the strips inside the evaporator along with twigs and scraps of wood for kindling, then arrange some bigger sticks around the kindling, like it's a log cabin. Everything's so dry, it lights up like drums of gasoline at a fireworks display. That's one of Dad's sayings. Once I'm sure the fire's took, I throw on a couple big logs and shut the door tight. After a couple more minutes, I throw on three more big logs and then stand around waiting for it all to burn down almost to the embers. Meanwhile I pick at the dirt under my fingernails. Your not supposed to bite your nails, especially when there's lots of dirt under them, cuz if you do, you might get tapeworm which is a parasite that'll grow inside your stomach and flutter around until you poop it out, and even when you do poop it out, if the head don't come out too, it'll just grow it's body all over again and you'll be right back where you started.

When there's mostly just embers left, I open the door to the stove again and pick up Mom's clothes, the ones Dad took off her while Ford and me sat up under the big tree counting leaves and stuff. First is the underpants, which I really shouldn't be touching, but I haven't got no choice, so quick, I throw them onto the fire. It's so hot in there, they go up in a whoosh and before you know it there ain't nothing left. Next to go is the socks and the bra thingy. The shoes don't go so fast, maybe cuz the soles is made of rubber which takes longer to burn and stinks besides. Last of all is the dress she was wearing, which don't take so much time to burn because it's made of this light flouncy cloth that ain't hardly anything at all. I slam the door shut, thinking I'm done, then looking around, I see the tarp lying there in the middle of the floor by the drain, and even in this low light I can see there's spatters of blood on it. There's more to the tarp than all the clothes combined. I do my best to roll the tarp into a tight ball, then use the poker to stuff it into the stove. It's gone in no time, like burning dried leaves in the fall.

It sure does get hot standing in front of an open wood-burning stove when the temperature outside is close to a gazillion degrees. I'm feeling grimy and sweaty all over. Pulling off my clothes and throwing them on the work bench, I stand naked over the drain and take the hose to myself. At first, it feels fine, but the longer I leave the hose going, the colder the water gets 'til I'm hooching and hollering and spluttering and my eyeballs is practically popping out of my head with the cold. But that gives me another idea. I should be hosing down the floor to the drive shed. Mom was bleeding and stuff on the floor and it's probably not so good leaving it all in a mess. It don't take long for me to dry myself off standing naked in the noonday sun with a warm breeze blowing in from the west. Once I've got my clothes on again, I haul the hose out through the barn door and unroll it all the way into the drive shed. There's a shelf in the corner with all kinds of stuff like motor oil and cans of gasoline, and there's jugs of cleaner for unclogging drains and such. The label says it's made of calcium and lime which is caustic so you shouldn't get it on your hands. I know all about this stuff. I put on a pair of Dad's old rubber boots. They're too big and they come halfway up my thighs, which makes me look kind of silly in my shorts, but it don't matter how I look for what I'm doing just as long as it keeps the caustic juice off my feet. I go around back of the tractor and dump a whole jug of the stuff all over where Mom's body was laid out on the concrete. There's patches of blood and pee, but once I go over it back and forth with the wiry bristles of an old broom, pretty soon it's all gone. A good squirt of water washes it all away, out the back and down to where the fence keeps in the three horses. There's a couple metres of gravel, then a strip of dirt, then the fence, then the horses. That's where the water soaks into the ground and disappears. After I wind up the hose into the barn and take off the rubber boots and find my shoes, the concrete floor in the drive shed has pretty much dried off. You can see a shimmer of water vapour rising off the hot surface, but that's it. With the garage doors raised all the way and letting the light fall into the space, the floor looks perfect.

The shadow by the open door to the drive shed is straight up and down which means it's noon—lunch time—and my stomach's muttering so much I wonder if maybe there's a tapeworm inside and fluttering its tail around. I check the fire in the evaporator, like Dad does with the Franklin stove in the living room, just to be sure everything's all right with it. There's still some embers, but it's pretty much burnt itself out.

In the field, I watch the dragonflies. Can you eat dragonflies? One time when Mom took me to Sunday school, they taught about these guys in olden times who lived in the desert and ate nothing but locusts. They said a locust is a big grasshopper. But how big? As big as a dragonfly? Or somewheres in between. I bet if I had a net, I could catch dragonflies and I bet eating them wouldn't be no different than eating locusts. Gecko eats crickets and crickets is just small grasshoppers. If gecko can eat crickets, then there's nothing says I can't eat dragonflies. I've tried eating ants, but ants is so small, you don't get much from ants. You'd have to eat a hundred ants to make up a single dragonfly. Seems hardly worth the work to grub around on the ground hunting for ants when you could swish a net through the air and catch all kinds of dragonflies on a hot day like today.

Dad's out of bed now, but not doing much more'n when he was in bed. He's lolling around on the couch in the living room, clicking his way through the channels on TV, but never stopping to watch anything for more’n two or three seconds before he moves on. I say hi but he just grunts and clicks to another channel. There's bananas in a bowl, but they’ve turned leopard-coloured in the heat and they're mushy to touch. There's apples in the cold cellar. I don't mind going down there except for the potato bugs and the spider webs which I hate to get in my mouth. I bring up a couple apples and leave one on the end table by the couch in case Dad decides he's hungry. It don't look like he's eaten anything so far today and his face is all stubbly. After the apple, I look inside the microwave oven for a frozen pizza, only frozen pizzas don't magically appear in your microwave oven the way they do on TV, so I'll have to find something else. There's jello made up in a bowl, and even though it's three days old and the top layer has turned all rubbery, I don't mind the way it feels on my tongue so I finish the whole bowl. That'll do me for now. Maybe by mid-afternoon, Dad'll've made something we all can eat.

Ford's upstairs in his room. When I go in, he tells me to get the hell out of his room. There's wet spots on his pillow where he's pressed his face—three spots—two for the eyes and one big one where stuff from his mouth and nose have run together. I don't get the hell out of his room and I guess he don't really want me to leave cuz he starts talking.

You suppose Mom's watching us right now?

No. She's over there. I point out through the wall. You can't see the big maple from Ford's room, but we both know which way it is.

I know her body's over there, he says. I'm talking about her soul. You know. The part of her that never dies.

You think it's watching us?

That's what I'm asking, he says. I just wanna know if you think she's watching over us.

How should I know? I say.

Ford gets all angry and says there's no friggin' point talking to me. I don't know what he expects me to say. I'm only eleven. Some things I've learned, like prime numbers and ratios. And some things I haven't had time to learn, like bumps on Marnie's chest and what happens to people when they die. All I know of what happens to people when they die is what I seen with my grandma last fall and my mom yesterday. When I saw my grandma, there weren't nothing but a body left, and not much of one neither. Once they closed the lid on the box and put her into the ground, I never saw nothing of her again. If there was a soul, I never saw it, which don't mean there weren’t no soul; only that I never saw it. With Mom, all I ever saw was a body laid out on the concrete. Maybe it's too soon. Maybe souls need time to ripen—like fruit. Maybe the body has to be good and gone before the soul gets to fly off wherever. With grandma, they filled her up with juice like the juice Dad keeps all those funny-coloured eggs in. Maybe that's why I haven't seen anything of her since she went into the ground; her body's still stewing around down there. With Mom, maybe things'll move along faster cuz she's only wrapped in a table cloth.

Back in my own room, I pull down the dictionary and flip it open to whatever word it feels like giving me, in this case, vociferous, which means loud. The way the word looks, it must be related to the word voice. I guess vociferous is when you're loud with your voice. Words are like that—related to one another. Kind of like people. Ford and me, we're related to one another cuz we come from the same Mom and Dad even though we're sort of different. Ford's more like his Mom than Dad. Me? Well, nobody ever says I'm more like one than the other. Mostly, they say I'm unique. They laugh and say they broke the mold when they made me, then Mom calls me sweetie and gives me a hug. Mold is an interesting word. It's two words really, but they sound the same and they're spelt the same. The one is a shape, like the mold for making candles or jello. The other is the fuzz that grows on fruit that's gone bad. The first time Mom said they broke the mold when they made me, I thought she was talking about the fuzz, and the picture it made inside my head was so weird, I thought Mom was crazy.

On the page before vociferous, the last word is vociferate, which is a like lacrimate. Some words is a lot alike, not because of where they come from or what they mean, but because of what they do. People are like that too. Dad and Mr. Ferguson don't look anything alike. Dad is tall and lean and has these wiry, sinewy muscles in his arms and neck. Mr. Ferguson is thicker through the middle and his arms and neck is beefy. Dad's quiet and keeps to himself most of the time whereas Mr. Ferguson laughs a lot and his stomach shakes when he gets going. But even though they're different in lots of ways, they're both farmers who grow things out of their land and those things make food for other people.

By the time I've got to the top of the page and vituperate, the sun's moved around so it comes bright through my window and splashes its light across the bed where I'm sitting with my dictionary. I stand on the bed to pull the blinds across the window, and looking out across the lawn below, I can see a car easing off the concession road and up our drive. It's the Hendershot car, which I recognize from yesterday, and Marnie's in the passenger seat and Janine's in the seat behind her. Dad'll be none too happy about a visit from Mrs. Hendershot. He says she talks too much and she's a nosey so-and-so. Whenever he says that, Mom shushes him and says he's not to be so judgmental: She must have some fair qualities otherwise she wouldn't've raised such lovely girls. Dad says: They ain't finished yet; she's still got plenty of time to ruin them.

The window is open with a breeze blowing through, cool on my face. Even from this far, I can hear the car doors slamming shut and Mrs. Hendershot saying something to Marnie and Janine in a scolding tone, like pull up your socks or fix your hair. They trail behind her, around the house to the screen door at the side. She fills the house with her call: Halloooo. Halloooo. Like an owl with a speech problem. The screen door slides open, which means Mrs. Hendershot has let herself into the house and pulled the girls in behind her. Mom don't mind, or at least don't let on even if she do mind, but it drives Dad bonkers how anyone would just let themselves into someone else's house without first being invited. One thing I know for sure is Mrs. Hendershot ain't no vampire cuz vampires can't cross a threshold without being invited. Even though they suck your blood, at least they got good manners.

The Hendershots stand three in a row, biggest to smallest, like those Russian dolls Mom sets out at Christmas, just inside the entranceway where the house opens up into the kitchen/dining/living room area with the big vaulted ceiling. I stand behind the railing at the top of the stairs and look over everything. From where I'm perched, I can see Dad laid out on the couch with an arm over his face and the afghan wrapped around his feet, but the back of the couch faces the entrance, so the Hendershots can't see Dad and he can't see them. Dad smacks his lips and mumbles something nobody can hear for more than a low moan. Then Mrs. Hendershot sees me leaning over the railing and she steps into the room.

Hello there, dear, she says. Is your mom or dad around?

I don't answer because I'm busy in my head trying to remember the story we're supposed to tell.

I missed your Dad at market today and thought I'd check in to make sure everything's okay.

Ford comes up behind me and points down to the couch. Marnie's eyes light up and she steps into the room too. Dad's head rises up so you can see his eyes over the back of the couch, like he's a frog lurking in pond water. He yawns and runs a hand through his mussed hair.

We missed you George.

Dad nods and rubs an eye.

Can't remember the last time you missed market.

Dad swings around and scrambles to his feet. The lowest two buttons of his shirt is undone so his belly button shows.

The whole family's a bit discombobulated, he says.

Oh? You okay?

Em's left us.

That's the first time I've ever heard Dad tell a lie—at least that I know of. I guess, technically, what he says is true: Em's left us. Except the way he means it and the way it is are so far apart you can't help but call it a lie. Dad raises his head to Ford and me, and he fixes us steady-like, as if to say: now we're in this all together and don't neither one of you boys dare flinch while we play out this story. Ford and me looks right back at him, just as steady, and it's like we've shook hands on a deal—a spit shake that you can’t never break.

Once Dad's words sink in, Mrs. Hendershot acts all astonished, and she clucks and fusses like an old hen. She says: Oh, now, I'm sure it's just a temporary thing. Just a disagreement. She'll be back soon enough. You'll see.

We don't say nothing back to her. Ford and me, we walk down the stairs, and after standing in front of the girls, shifting weight from one leg to the other, looking just about anywheres except into their eyes, Ford asks Marnie if she wants to go outside for a walk. I ask Janine if she wants to see my gecko eat some crickets, which she does, or says she does, so I lead her upstairs to my room.

There's two crickets left in the jar from this morning, so I open up the terrarium and dump them inside. We watch while the gecko lunges, then sits with a cricket in its mouth, staring out through the glass at us, keeping its jaws clamped shut 'til the bits still sticking out of its mouth stop moving. I spray a mist into the terrarium and pour some water into its dish. Janine talks to the gecko as if it understands what she's saying and will give an answer after it sits awhile thinking what to say. She can't understand why I don't give it a proper name. I can't understand why she cares.

The problem with Janine is she's three years younger’n me, which makes her interesting for only so long and then I've gotta find something new to do with her, or better yet, play hide and seek and run away while she's counting to a hundred with her eyes shut. I tell her we need to go downstairs now, but we stop at the top of the stairs to watch all the commotion down below. Janine's mom is in the kitchen whirling around like a tornado, boiling a pot of water on one burner and heating a skillet on another, beating eggs with a whisk, dicing onions and green peppers, and talking and talking like the off switch don't work. Dad's pulled himself together a bit since I last seen him, with his hair combed proper and his shirt tucked in, and he's circling around the far side of the kitchen counter saying this ain't really necessary.

Nonsense, it's no trouble at all.

I really wish you wouldn't.

You and the boys need a proper meal.

I'm perfectly capable of making us a meal.

But at a time like this—

Janine's mom sees us watching from the stairs and waves us down, saying we're gonna have a bit to eat in five minutes, so she wants me to go outside and find Ford and Marnie. Looks like they've wandered off towards the barn.

Once I'm out the side door, I set off at a run and Janine never catches me up after that, but I don't care. I get to the barn as Ford and Marnie are going in the downstairs door, so I follow them inside. As I go through the doorway, I turn and see Janine stumbling through the field, still a long way off.

Ford, Marnie's mom cooked some—

Where's the stuff? Ford's voice is harsh and squawky.

What stuff?

You know. The stuff.

Ford and I stare at each other in the dim light while Marnie stands to one side, not knowing what to make of the anger that crackles between us. Sweat's running down my face and I'm still huffing air from running flat out across the field. Ford's half a head taller'n me but I ain't afraid of him. He gets hisself all worked up into a heat and lashes out, but when he does that, he forgets his brain. I know if he lashes out at me now, with Marnie watching and him all goo-eyed, he'll forget his brain even worse, and it'll be that much easier for me to keep out of his way.

There was a tarp laid out.

It's gone.

Where?

Why'd you bring Marnie here?

None of your business.

You shouldna brung Marnie here.

There was shoes, too.

Shut up.

Where'd they go?

Can't say.

You say or I'll knock your teeth out.

I'll tell Dad you brung Marnie here.

I'll tell Dad you hid the stuff.

I didn't. I burnt it.

You what?

Which is when I tear out the door, past Janine who's wheezing up the slope, and all the way back to the house. Ford's on my heels the whole time, but I've got a head start, plus Ford takes a tumble over a clump of grass. I clatter through the house and up the stairs where I lock myself into the washroom and I fill the sink with cold water that I splash on my face to get rid of the sweat and the grime. It feels good to run like that. I hope Ford thanks me for getting him to run like that too. If he hadn't chased me, pretty much his whole day would've been taken up moping around and barely moving his limbs. When Ford comes into the house, he clomps up the stairs after me, but Dad stops him before he gets to the top and chews him out for making such a racket and calls him back downstairs to wash himself up in the mud room by the side door and chews him out some more for leaving the girls to walk back through the field by themselves. I can almost hear the way Ford's shoulder's sag as he turns on the stairs and thunk, thunk, thunks down again.

It's too early for supper, but all six of us sit around the harvest table and have our supper anyways, plates heaped with a bland goop, and as we work to get this goop down our gullets, we have to listen to Mrs. Hendershot compliment herself for being able to make meals from scratch without a recipe book. Ford sits across from me, glaring like a demon and mouthing things at me like "I'm gonna kill you later" and "You're doomed." I wish Woofie was still around, then I'd have a way to get rid of Mrs. Hendershot's kindness. As it is, the three of us—Dad, Ford and me—we push our plates away from the edge of the table even though there's still plenty of goop on them. That's the second time I hear Dad tell a lie. He says thank you to Mrs. Hendershot. It's been a lovely meal, but with all that's gone on these last couple days, it's left him without an appetite.

Mrs. Hendershot looks at me with sad puppy dog eyes. She treats me like I'm one of those scrunched up cabbage dolls she can squeeze and pinch and oooh and awwww then leave in its chair and ignore for the rest of the evening. Once everything's cleared away and the food's in plastic containers, which Dad dumps into the garbage when the Hendershot's have gone, we all gather in the driveway for a final visit. Mrs. Hendershot goes on about how sorry she is that Em's left. The sun's shining down at an angle now and it's got a string of clouds lit with a golden tinge, the same colour as marshmallows if you hold them over hot embers without letting them catch fire. A fly lands on Mrs. Hendershot's hair band. I want her to shoo it away, but she don't notice and goes on yakking instead. Dad says thanks for dropping by and lending some support. It's a difficult time, but we'll manage. We're three sturdy men. We know how to take care of ourselves.

After they've driven away, I find a cricket on the shade side of the house, and because gecko has already had his fill for the day, I eat it myself.

The argument explodes once we step inside. Ford tells on me. I tell on Ford. Dad wants to know what was going through my head that I'd light a fire and burn mom's clothes and the tarp besides. I tell him there was blood on everything, figured it would be best to get rid of the evidence. Dad says "evidence" is a strange word for me to use. It came from one of those police shows I saw on TV once when I was over at Marnie's and Janine's and it pops out of my mouth without me thinking. But it is evidence, isn't it? Not evidence of any horrible crime. But evidence that we broke the regulations. If we don't want no government finding out and messing with our business, then we need to get rid of that stuff.

You should've asked, Justin.

If I hadna done it, Marnie would've seen.

Dad turns on Ford and that gets the attention away from me. Dad thinks maybe the girls is making Ford turn soft in the head. He had no business taking her over there and on and on. In the end, Ford and I both catch a little heck, but it's me Dad comes after most, especially after I tell him about how I threw cleaner on the floor in the drive shed and hosed it down.

Show me, he says.

We walk together across the field. I'm relieved Dad ain't so mopey anymore. The way he was lolling around on the couch this morning, I was worried maybe he'd et too many of Mom's pills and he'd never be right again. Now he's alert and walking with big strides that's hard for me to keep up with. Even Ford's having trouble keeping up with him. Once we're in the barn, I open the evaporator door and Dad looks inside. He uses the poker to sift through the ashes for any remnants of the tarp or the shoes or the dress, but there ain't nothing in there. It's all burnt to a clean white ash. We walk over to the drive shed and around the tractor to the rear wall where Mom died. Ford stands outside by the fence while I show Dad what I used to clean up and how I hosed it all down. Dad musses my hair and calls me a damn practical kid. Even though he uses the word "damn," I can tell by the sound of his voice that he means it in a good way when he calls me a damn practical kid. Things are gonna be all right between us. As we walk back to the house, the sun disappears over the hills, shooting ribbons of light into the sky.

The next afternoon, dark clouds pile on one another where the sky was lit up the evening before. They're stacked so high you'd think they scrape the top of the sky, and they're so thick and solid-looking you'd think they're rocks in a cliff face you could climb with ropes and picks. They roll in towards us like an avalanche a hundred miles wide, and all along that hundred miles of billowing rock is flashes of lightning and a rumbling deep underfoot. It should be bright outside with the sun blazing down on my head, but even as I watch, the sky turns a sickly greenish black and the air turns a damp cool the way it feels in the basement. The wind picks up, so I run through the house closing all the windows and doors while Ford takes down the umbrella that's out on the lawn and drags all the chairs into the garage. We don't know if we've thought of everything. Dad should be telling us what to do, only we don't know where he's gone.

Once we're sure there's nothing left that we can do, we stand on the porch and look out at the storm coming towards us. The way the clouds billow out in front, it's like the storm is swallowing up the land. Down in the paddock, the brown mare is hiding under a tree while the other two is prancing around in skittish circles and making desperate high-pitched noises. Ford says Mr. Ferguson should be getting his horses out of the paddock and across the road into his own barn. I don't see how Mr. Ferguson can move all three horses at once. If the storm breaks while he’s crossing the road with them, one or two of them might bolt and he won't be able to chase them down 'til after the storm has passed.

I'm going down there, Ford says.

You're an idiot, I says.

They're scared, Ford says.

So what? I says.

Ford steps off the porch as big raindrops splat here and there on the gravel drive and the leaves in the trees and the grass around Ford's feet. These ain't ordinary raindrops. Each one is a cup of water dumped on our heads from a thousand feet. Lightning strikes so close I figure it must've been somewhere on Ferguson's farm just across the road and the thunderclap's so loud it rattles my brain around so's I can't think straight. I yell at Ford to get back under the porch or the next lightning strike will be right on his head and turn him into a smoking crispy critter. The wind is more than blowing. There's a howl to it now, especially under the soffits, so's it sounds like a choir of screeching ghosts. Ford struggles back to the porch and does what I do: he clings to one of the posts. Already he's soaked to the bone and the storm's barely got going.

Wish Dad was here.

Where is he anyways?

Don't know.

We watch the horses scamper around some more, then they huddle under a tree with the brown mare. Why do horses do that? Why do horses go to the place they're most likely to be struck by lightning? You'd think after thousands of years of evolution, all the horses that run under trees during electrical storms would've been killed by now and the tree-shelter gene would've disappeared.

Ford taps my arm and points away from the paddock and on up the slope towards the big maple tree where Mom's buried. The rain's coming down heavier now and it's gotten dark almost like night, so it's hard to see what Ford's pointing to. The wind whips the leaves around. A shingle goes flapping overhead like a giant bat and lands all the way down in the dip between the two fields. I squint again through the blur of rain and wind.

Is that Dad?

It looks like the form of a man standing under the tree by the grave, arms stretched out to either side like a scarecrow's, turning his face straight into the wind and the rain, hollering something we can't hear from this distance, but hollering it all the same, not at us but to the sky turned black and crackling over his head.

Maybe he's gone crazy.

He's gonna get fried standing there.

At its worst, we can't see Dad across the field, nor the tree, nor the grave, nor the field for that matter. The rain comes down in billowing sheets of water. I figure it's like we're in a septic tank and God just flushed the toilet. Standing under the porch makes no difference; sometimes the wind blows so hard the rain falls sideways. Whenever I stand in weather like this—which ain't too often—it gets me to wondering if maybe the world's busting at the seams, maybe the world's too much even for itself, so it shatters down the middle and flies apart into little bits and then, when the little bits have rested for a time, gathers them all together again and goes on being the world.

When the rain slows to a steady downpour, Ford and I go into the mud room and find our rubber boots and rain coats, then run through the fields to the maple. It's slow going cuz all the ground's turned to a soggy muddy mess, and down in the dip it's flowing a stream of water that's run off the Ferguson's property and made a nice sized pond further on towards the north fields. Ford and me splash through the stream up almost to the tops of our boots. We fall in the mud and get it all over our knees and hands. At the top of the rise to the tree, there's Dad in his overalls and white T-shirt, face down in the mud of the grave, soaked through to the skin. When he hears our boots squidging towards him, he looks up, face streaked with mud, even around his lips so it looks as if he was trying to eat the dirt. He sits up on his knees.

I miss your Mom.

You could've been killed up here.

I wasn't thinking about that.

Well. You could've.

I guess.

Ford walks Dad back to the house to get him cleaned up and into dry cloths. I stay behind to fix up the grave. The downpour has done funny things to the dirt in the grave. Some of the dirt's still heaped up in a mound, but one corner's sunk way down and another part's washed down the slope. I cup my hands and move the dirt around to even things out. The mud's pliable, like plasticine. I take my time, patting the dirt down, smoothing it out so the grave looks seamless with the ground all around it. Once everything dries up, it'll look a lot more like it was before we dug it up.

The next day I'm out in the drive doing my regular ant count, seeing if the storm made any difference, when a car I don't recognize pulls past me and stops close to the house. It's an official looking car with a logo on the side door, but not a logo I recognize, not like the police or the home-schooling people. A woman gets out of the car but she ain't in any uniform. She's dressed more like a farmer, with boots and jeans and a checked shirt. The only thing not farmery about her is the fancy metal brief case she carries. She smiles from behind reflective sunglasses and talks to me as if I'm about five years old. I hate when grown-ups do that.

Your Dad around?

I guess.

I get up and lead her into the house, but Dad ain't there. The one problem with not believing in cell phones is you have to walk all over the property before you can find somebody. Dad says he'll be damned if he ever gets a cell phone because if you use a cell phone they can listen in on your conversations and you have no way of knowing. I take the woman across the fields to the barn. The ground's still mucky from yesterday and when we get to the dip between the fields, I lose one of my boots in the mud. It's like glue down there, but the woman helps me pull out my boot without me plopping barefoot in the mud. As we walk up the slope to the barn, the woman explains that she's an inspector for the organic certification people; she's here to make sure my dad can keep on saying he's an organic farmer when he sells stuff at the market and wherever else he sends his vegetables.

Is my dad in trouble? I ask.

In trouble? Why would he be in trouble?

I shrug. I dunno.

We find Dad in the greenhouse, patching some flapping bits of plastic yesterday's storm blew loose. Dad stands on the inside, sweating and wrestling with bits of plywood, while the woman and me stand on the outside and she introduces herself. When Dad steps outside, I can tell he's rattled. He stumbles over his words and tries to gain a few seconds to think by wiping the sweat from his brow with his shirt sleeve and going on about how hot it is. He confesses he's forgot all about the inspection. Things have been a bit chaotic around the farm—family stuff, he says—and it completely slipped his mind.

Dad ain't had more’n two hours sleep straight through without waking up in a cold sweat, yelling or crying or both, pacing downstairs, or slamming the side door because he's gone outside to walk up and down the drive even though it's dark and there's coyotes howling in the distance. He's got these dark half moons under his eyes and stubble on his face the colour of gunpowder, and he ain't changed his clothes in ages, not even after the storm, just sat the rest of the evening in his wet overalls 'til they dried stuck to his skin and crackled when he got up again. There's big yellow stains under the armpits on his T-shirt, stained some more from all the work he's done this morning. He's starting to smell a bit too, especially his baseball cap which hasn't left his head in days and is getting that old man smell we once whiffed when we all went to the city and rode in a subway car where a homeless man had stretched himself out on the seat across from us. Dad hasn't et a proper meal neither, not since Mom left, and I get the feeling from the way he's talking now that his empty stomach's made him light-headed.

The inspector says she wants to do the usual walk-through of the farm, then she'll take a look at the paperwork. Dad slaps himself on the forehead and says Shit! I don't hear Dad say "Shit!" much so I giggle and the woman smiles at me. Dad shakes his head and says he forgot to lay out all the paperwork. Completely slipped his mind.

They start with the greenhouse, walking down the middle from one end to the other, me tagging behind while the woman asks a lot of questions and Dad does his best to answer without seeming too dopey. Halfway through the greenhouse, the woman kneels in the dirt and flicks open the clasps on her metal brief case. She pulls out a plastic baggy and what looks like a mini shovel, and pushing the shovel into the ground maybe the length of a screwdriver, she scoops up some dirt and seals it in a baggy. After she's written some stuff on a label, she peels it off, sticks it on the baggy, and plops the baggy into the metal brief case. From there, Dad shows her the cooler where he stores the produce before he takes it to market. It's still full of the stuff he was supposed to take to market on Saturday and pretty soon he's gonna have to dump it on the compost heap. He shows her the evaporator too. It's a shiny metal container the size of a small bus and takes up most of the north end of the basement. The inspector says she don't really need to see it for the inspection, but she's still interested in how we make the maple syrup. All she cares about is how we manage the trees. We climb up the ladder through the floor in the barn to the main part of the building where the tanks for the sap sit on big wooden blocks. In the summer, they sit empty. Dad cleans them out at the end of April and seals them up until the next year.

After the barn, the inspector says she wants to visit each of the fields and take soil samples just like she did underneath the plastic of the greenhouse. I follow Dad and the inspector in a big circle around all the land, first in the horse paddock, then around past the house and the vegetable garden. The raspberries are out in full now and all the bushes buzz with the bees. I like standing in the middle of the raspberry bushes because the bees are too focused on what they're doing to mind what I'm doing. They crawl all over my arms like I'm a branch or a rock.

We keep walking north through the clover field, on into the sugar bush, and down the hill to the pump house. Walking a big U through the woods, we come out into the field sown with hay. We follow the back laneway south to the big maple where the inspector stops so she can survey the whole of the land. She goes on about what a view it is and how we're so lucky, not just because of the farm, but because of the land. Such a beautiful peaceful place, perfect for raising a family.

What's this?

The inspector's standing only a couple metres from the place where Mom's buried. She scuffs her foot along the line of dirt that marks the edge of the grave. It's the line I smoothed over when yesterday's storm was done. The dirt's still dark with the wet and it's soft when the woman presses her foot into it. Dad gives me a sideways look, then pulls off his cap and runs the band around between his fingers.

That's uh—we buried our dog there—got hit by a car a few days ago. Dad waves his cap towards the road.

Must've been a big dog. The inspector's eyeing the grave from top to bottom.

Yeah. She was part hound, part something else. We don't know what, but whatever it was, had to be big. She was at least ninety pounds. Maybe a hundred. And could she eat. Man! You wouldn't believe the food we went through in a week.

I glare at Dad but he don't see me. He's worse'n Ford for yammering on when he should be shut up. I'm thinking maybe I should bash the inspector over the head with something and bury her somewheres in the ground—not right here of course cuz this is Mom's special place—somewheres off towards the woods. But looking around I don't see any decent head-bashing rocks and I took the shovel back to the greenhouse yesterday, so I leave the idea go. If the woman starts to suspect, then Dad'll have to take care of things himself. Maybe he could strangle her or something; I'm not big enough yet for that kind of work.

The woman ambles down the slope a piece and, kneeling on the ground, clears away some of the scrub so's she can get at the dirt. She pulls out her mini shovel again and digs into the ground for another sample of dirt to go in her plastic baggies. I sneak up behind her and ask what she does with all those plastic baggies she's stuffing into her brief case.

Well, honey, she says, we send these off to a lab for analysis to make sure you've got healthy soil. Sometimes it doesn't matter how hard you try, unwanted chemicals get into the ground and you have no control over it. We just check to make sure everything's clean.

Now that I take a good look at this woman, I see she's real pretty. She kneels with her fancy brief case open in front of her, baggies full of dirt all lined up in a row, and I look down at her slender neck thinking that if I looked at her neck through an X-ray machine all I'd see was a little twig of a vertebrae, a little twig that would snap clean in two with a single stroke of an axe. The pretty woman stands and says it's time for paperwork.

They walk towards the house and I walk a good piece behind, staring at the house and wondering how many bricks it took to build, remembering how there's a stack of leftover bricks in the garage, thinking it would've been convenient if one of those bricks had been hid behind the big maple tree, so just at the right moment, while the inspector woman's admiring the view, I could duck behind the tree and come out with the brick in my hands, bringing it down on top of her head 'til her brains is smushed. While they're inside fussing over paperwork, I go around to the garage and get me a brick, and another one for good measure, and carry them back across the fields and up to the big maple tree. Bricks is heavy, which is good for smushing brains, but not so good for carrying cuz it makes your arms ache even before you're halfway across the field. The way the tree's roots is all gnarled and dirt has got eroded from around its base, there's a good nook where I can stash the bricks. When I'm done, I stretch out my arms cuz the biceps ache. I sit for a while with my back against the tree, staring out past the grave, out over the fields and past the house and past the Ferguson's, out over the land and past the town and past the city, out over the country and past the world and past the solar system. Sometimes I like to dream of space. I like to count the stars. I like to think how there's billions of stars in every direction, and that's just in our galaxy. There's billions more stars in billions more galaxies in every direction. And there's quarks and quasars and muons and neutrinos and neutron stars and dark matter and gamma ray bubbles fifty thousand light years across, and when I think of all these things, it don't feel so bad cuz I know that no matter how big my troubles may seem with an inspector almost finding out about Mom's grave and Marnie almost finding out about Mom's clothes and Mrs. Hendershot feeding us puke for supper, all my troubles rolled up together ain't no bigger than a puff of air when I look at them from the same place a quasar looks at them.

I'm thirsty so I go to the barn for a squirt from the hose.

When I gets back to the house, the inspector's gone with her fancy brief case and her baggies of dirt. Dad's pacing through the house and he's got himself wound into such a knot I'm worried he'll never untie himself. He's going on about government regulations and bureaucratic bloat and how he wishes they'd keep their noses out of other people's business. After he's got himself settled a bit, he sets me down across the table from him and says he's gonna explain the facts of life to me, only I don't think he's talking about the bumps on Marnie's chest; he's talking about the way the world works.

My Dad says government isn't there for us. Not anymore. Maybe once government was there for us, back in the days when we were the ones that gave government its power. But now government is just a tool for other people—not elected people, but people who get their power from money or weapons—to lord it over honest working people. People like farmers and construction workers and truck drivers and auto mechanics.

What about teachers? I ask.

Not even teachers, Dad says.

There might've been a time when teachers was okay, but teachers work for the government, and even the teachers that don't work for the government have to teach stuff the government tells them to teach. Dad says that's why him and Mom took Ford and me out of school: so they could make sure we never got our heads stuffed full of propaganda. Then Dad says something I ain't ever heard before. He says: Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.

What's that?

It's from the Bible.

But I thought you said all that stuff is hoo-hah.

Only the religious parts.

Dad takes a blank piece of paper from all the papers scattered across the table, and he takes a pen too, and he writes out the thing from the Bible he just said to me, then he hands me the slip of paper and tells me to memorize those words. He wants me to carry those words with me always; they're the most important words in the Bible, the only words that matter. He wants me to write those words on my heart. That way, if I lose the slip of paper, I'm still carrying the words with me wherever I go.

Are these words you and Mom said together?

Dad's real quiet for a bit. Naw, he says. Those words, and a lot more like them, those were words your grandma made me write on my heart when I was even younger than you.

What about Mom?

Your Mom didn't go in for that stuff. And for a while I didn't either. But as it turns out, she's the one who's dead and I'm the one who's living. Can't help but wonder if maybe that had something to do with it.

Dad steps to the living room window and stares out across the land. He stares over the fields to the big maple tree. Then he turns back to me.

Son, he says, you write it on your heart and it'll protect you like a shield.

It's still only summer and the thought of school is a million miles away, but I treat what Dad says like it's a homework assignment. I go upstairs and I shut myself into my room and I pull out the slip of paper and I read it to myself over and over again ‘til I can say it back without even thinking.

PART III - FORD

I MISS MOM.

The world's been thrown off-kilter since we put her into the ground. It's my fault, of course, seeing as I'm the one who killed her. I did something wrong and I believe that sooner or later all wrong things call their punishment to them. It's like a natural law. The world seeks a balance. We were four, which is a nice even number, but now we're three and life for us has fallen out of balance. What's happening to Dad and to Justin, maybe that's my punishment. I think, in some way we can't understand, what's happening to them will push us all back into balance, but until that happens, we're going to be miserable.

Dad can't sleep. When he dozes off, it isn't really sleep he's fallen into, just a fitful twilight where dreams haunt him. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I hear him cry out, and when I come to him, I find he's kicked back the sheets and there's tears smearing his face. It used to be that he'd be up at first light and getting himself ready for another day of work, but now he mopes around on the couch until past noon, and when he does get on his feet, he mutters to himself and he twitches one of his hands while he runs the other through his hair. He hasn't eaten a proper meal in weeks. His pants hang loose off his hips so he has to pull his belt a notch tighter. He's taken to wearing his overalls everywhere he goes so he doesn't have to worry about a belt. There's a fuzz covering his face that looks like the fuzz you find on bread after it's sat untouched for three weeks, and there's a stink coming from him now that's bound to attract scavengers hunting for carrion if he goes out after dark. The weirdest change, though, is how he's taken to quoting the prophet Isaiah. While Mom was here, I never knew him to be a religious man—closer to an atheist, in fact—but now that she's gone, it's like religion has flooded into his heart to fill the emptiness.

Justin's the opposite of Dad, sleeping his happy dreamless sleeps like he hasn't a care in the world, passing his days in whatever universe he thinks this is, counting things, cataloging things, mapping the land and organizing the sky. Every day he's up and charging out on whatever mission fills his brain with its obsession. The rest of the world could fall into the sea or vanish in a haze of smoke and he wouldn't notice until he'd done whatever he set out to do. Unlike Dad, there's still plenty of meat on Justin's bones. What he can't find in the freezer, he finds in the fruit cellar or, better yet, out in the shade behind the house, chirping and hopping around in the grass. His taste for crickets began as a convenience, a way to get rid of the gecko's leftovers, but as time rolls on, it's gotten to be more of a staple for him. What Justin shares with his dad is the habit of talking to himself, only with Dad it's just a way of working things out, whereas with Justin it's beginning to look like there's other people talking back to him. I don't think Dad's noticed. I wish Mom were here; she'd know what to do.

The fridge is empty and the cupboards are bare, the weeds are growing tall, the dirty laundry is piling up, it's almost more than I can manage. There's nothing I can do about the fridge and the cupboards since I'm too young to drive to the shops in town. But this is a farm and there's plenty of food growing all around us. All we have to do is pick it and figure out interesting ways to make meals out of it. Every day, I fill a blue plastic bin with vegetables and carry the bin to the house, spreading the vegetables across the kitchen counter. There's no excuse for anyone to go hungry. I've emptied the cooler room in the barn and thrown all the old produce out to compost. And I've planted all the seedlings that Dad started in the greenhouse so we don't miss out on the late harvest. The weeds don't stop growing to make allowance for us, so every day I spend a couple hours in the vegetable garden pulling up weeds and watering when it seems a good idea. The work is good. I like the feeling I get at the end of the day when my muscles ache and I flop down tired on my bed and close my eyes and fall right asleep. If I didn't work like this, all kinds of things would race through my head, like guilt and anger. I'd be telling myself nasty things about myself and there'd be no peace for me. So I work through the day until I'm ready to drop, and the work helps to give some order both to this place and to my head. If I keep it up, maybe there will be balance in my head someday too.

Midway through the summer, the lady from the organic inspection agency shows up on our doorstep again. Dad isn't expecting her and he's all flustered and complains about how she shouldn't be arriving unannounced. She has this look of disbelief and says she called yesterday. Dad scratches his head and gives this scowl as if to say: No, you didn't. Between the two of them, I'm more inclined to believe the lady from the organic inspection agency. The lady knows she's right, but Dad has turned mulish, so I stick myself between the immovable rock and the irresistible force by going to the lady with my hand extended and saying: Hi, my name is Ford.

Hello, Ford. I guess it was your brother I saw the last time I was here.

Yeah, I guess so. I'm the older one.

The inspector lady is carrying a big metal brief case which she sets on the floor before she shakes my hand. She's got solid hands with strong bones and veins crawling over the knuckles. She's got the sort of hands that don't mind doing a good day's work. Dad isn't so quick to take the woman's hands. He's lurking somewhere behind me and it's just as well given that he hasn't cleaned himself up in days.

The inspector lady says she's here to take more soil samples. Results from the last batch came back ambiguous.

Ambiguous? Whaddya mean by ambiguous? It almost seems Dad wants to pick a fight.

Oh, I don't think it's anything much. Just that the levels of a couple chemicals were higher than we like to see.

Dad grunts, then scratches himself under an armpit.

Probably nothing, she says. Sometimes levels are elevated for isolated reasons. One-time events. Was there anything unusual happened on the land just before I took the samples last time?

Hell no. Dad's real quick to answer. He's defensive, almost aggressive. Despite all the fuzz on his face, a sweat has come up on his cheeks, and he moves around the hallway with these exaggerated swings of his arms, like his body's gotten itself possessed by the spirit of a rabid chimpanzee.

Again, I have to stick myself between the immovable force and the irresistible object, holding up my hands and saying to Dad that what I think the lady is talking about is things like weird weather or trucks spilling stuff on the road as they drive by.

Oh. Oh. Dad backs off and scratches his chin. Well, there was this one thing.

When I hear this, I get real worried. Dad is discombobulated enough he might just give it away.

The day before you took samples, there was this storm. A real doozy. Flooded the Ferguson's place across the road. Now, normally the culverts can handle all the run-off, but this time the water come up and over the road and down into our fields.

So you had a flood?

A proper deluge.

Maybe that's it. Probably got some run-off water with chemical fertilizer in it.

The inspector lady says she'll have to take more soil samples all the same. It may be the farm gets decertified for a season while the chemicals filter down through the soil and get washed away. She says it's like when the body ingests a drug or gets poisoned: the body gets sick for a time, but it's got all kinds of tricks to get the chemicals out of its system and after a while, it cleanses itself.

I walk the inspector lady around the farm, first taking her down into the dip between the two south fields where the water pooled after the big storm. The soggy patch near the bottom has dried up, and when you're standing down there, turning yourself around in a circle, you can see the high water mark, in some places etched in the dirt, in other places drawn out in the way the grass lies across the ground. While she's kneeling in the dirt and setting herself up to take her sample, she gets all chatty with me:

Your dad looks a mess. He okay?

We been through a lot lately.

I'm sorry.

Our mom left us.

I'm really sorry.

She plops a scoop of dirt into a plastic baggie and writes a note on a label that she sticks to the baggie.

You got any kids of your own?

She smiles. Twins. A boy and a girl. How old are you?

I'm going on fourteen in the fall.

Then they're almost your age.

The inspection lady is pretty, and I decide I wouldn't mind someone like her for my mom—that is, if I ever needed a mom, which I don't seeing as my mom is looking down the slope at me from the big maple, but if I did, she'd do nicely. She has this dusty blond hair, and she walks around with blue jeans tucked inside cowboy boots like she just hopped off a horse, and she has an easy manner that comes out when she smiles, like the way she's smiling at me right now.

You married?

Yes. And she laughs.

The inspection lady knows her way around the farm from taking samples the last time she was here, so she goes wherever she needs to go and I walk alongside her. Once we get into the woods, she pulls out something that looks like a cell phone, only it's got a screen on it that displays a map and our location on the map. She calls it a GPS device and she uses it so she never gets lost; otherwise she'd be hopeless. I find it a funny thing to be afraid of getting lost. All it takes to figure out where you are is to walk over the land. Wherever you find yourself on the land, that's where you are. The only way you can feel lost is if you wish you were somewhere else and don't know how to get there.

The inspection lady takes her last sample by the big maple near mom's grave. The dirt over the grave used to be a mound, but with the weather settling it and with Justin's coaxing, the ground has smoothed out. A little bit of grass and weeds and nobody will ever know there's a body buried there. The lady scuffs her foot along the edge of the grave. I look half at her and half at the barn where Justin has come around the side and started up the slope towards us.

Sorry about your dog, she says.

My what? I says.

Your dog.

What about my dog?

Your dog that died.

My dog ran away.

Your dad said it died.

Why'd he say a thing like that?

He said he buried it here.

Oh. Oh, that dog.

Justin is about halfway up the slope now, but slowing because he gets wheezy when he runs flat out. He looks silly wearing his shorts and Dad's big rubber boots that flop around the tops of his thighs. I laugh at him, but he's still too far away to hear me making fun of him. The sight of Justin trying to run is a good distraction from the conversation with the inspection lady.

You have more than one dog?

Yeah, I thought you were talking about Woofie. Hey Justin, could you look any dorkier?

When he gets closer, he tells me to shut up.

Hi there. The inspection lady smiles and, in this sunlight, her face shines.

You here for more dirt? Justin asks.

Yeah, she says. Last time, there was something weird in the soil so I've come back to figure out what it was.

The inspection lady returns to our conversation about Woofie, the dog who ran away, and about another dog, whose name I don't know, who is supposed to be buried beneath our feet. She tells me what a shame it is that we boys have to go through so much, first a dog that gets hit by a car, then a mom who leaves us, and now (she learns) another dog that runs away. While she's tearing up and her voice is turning all shaky on me, I see Justin duck behind the maple. He scrabbles for a minute in the roots at the base of the tree, then emerges with all the stealth of a hunter stalking his prey. While the inspection lady goes on about how it's no wonder our dad's such a mess and how we boys are doing so well all things considered, Justin raises his arms above his head and I see that he's gripping either end of a big red brick.

Justin, I say, you building that shrine?

Justin stops and gives me a What-the-frig-are-you-talking-about? look, with his eyes bulging at me and his face twisted to one side. The inspection lady turns around and sees him standing there with the brick over his head.

Justin wanted to make something to mark the spot.

Justin grins.

After the inspection lady leaves, Justin and I have the first man-to-man talk of our lives, not that we're men yet, but we've got something important to talk about. Not riding your bike through a platt of horse shit is what kids talk about; not bashing a nice lady over the head with a brick is what men talk about. We say good-bye to the inspection lady, standing beside her car on the gravel drive, then we go out to the barn where we know Dad won't overhear us. Justin sits on the work bench with his legs dangling over the edge. The rubber boots are too big, so they fall off and plop onto the concrete floor. I sit across from him on a big stump of a log that hasn't been split yet for firewood.

You were gonna bash her head in with a brick, weren't you?

Yeah, so?

You were really gonna do it.

Justin looks at me with his inscrutable blue eyes, and when I look back into them I can't tell whether I see innocence or evil. Watching Justin, I'm beginning to think there's only a fine line between the two. It's like thinking about angels and devils. We think angels are these nice beings of light who give us comfort and watch over us. I'd like to think Mom is an angel now, and that she watches over me. But then there's the angel of death—not the sort of angel you'd want to give you comfort or to watch over you. Come to think of it, maybe I'm the angel of death, and maybe Justin's a devil, my mirror, watching me from the far side of the river that flows between us.

You were really gonna do it.

Dad told me to.

No he didn't.

Sure he did.

You mean to tell me that while I'm walking over our land with that nice lady, Dad pulls you to one side and says: "Son, as soon as you get a chance, bash her over the head with a brick"? Is that what he said?

No. Dad said something different.

Well what did he tell you?

Justin sits himself up straight on the bench and recites something by heart, something I've never heard before, and when it comes out of his mouth, it has a hollow tinny sound, like he's a robot with a metal head. This is what he says: "Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish."

Dad teach you that?

He said to write it on my heart.

Well how the hell do you get from whatever it is you just said to "Bash the nice lady over the head with a brick"?

Justin stares at me, unblinking. A fly buzzes in the window behind him. There are flypapers swinging from either end of the beam overhead, but they've lost their stickiness which means all the fly bodies on them are old and dried out. The cooler door hangs open. Last week, I shut off the compressor as there's no point using energy when we're not storing anything for market on Saturdays. It looks like Dad has given up on the market for the time being.

I saw that lady, Justin says. I was down here and I saw that lady talking to you, up there by the tree, by where Mom's buried. I had a good look at that lady and I says to myself: "That lady's striving with Ford."

What the hell is that supposed to mean?

She was striving with you.

What do you mean, striving?

Striving. Wrestling. Struggling. Don't you ever read a dictionary?

No she wasn't.

And she was winning too.

No she wasn't.

She was gonna get it out of you how Mom's buried under that tree. She was gonna trick you into telling. If they strive with you, they have to perish. That's how it works.

Justin, how did you get so fucked in the head?

You shouldn't swear.

You're full of crazy talk.

Dad says I'm a damn practical kid.

As practical as Dad thinks Justin may be, it's me who ends up doing something practical for us all. Sometime towards the end of July, I'm out early in the morning, weeding the garden, putting vegetables into a blue plastic bin and thinking of what to make with them for lunch, when I stand up straight to work a kink out of my back, and looking across the horse paddock, I see a form passing through the light that falls between the drive shed and the barn. It's not big enough to be one of the horses, so it's probably a deer. Moving slowly to the house, I slip into the mud room and open the locker where Dad keeps the .22 and the Winchester. I stuff a couple rounds into my pocket, string the field glasses around my neck, sling the Winchester over my shoulder, and then do what Dad forgot to do the last time: pack the knives so I can field dress the deer once I've killed it instead of having to get Dad to lug it onto the truck bed and drive it back to the barn. I want to do this without Dad's help. Besides. Dad's worse than ever. He's thin as a beanpole and paces back and forth in his room, muttering to himself about one thing and another, quoting scripture or making things up. He doesn't sleep or eat, doesn't shave, doesn't keep himself clean. Hell, I don't think he even wipes himself after he takes a shit. Lately, when I pass the door to his room, I catch a whiff of stink that's a mix of sweat and shit and rotten food that he hasn't bothered to take back to the kitchen. If I could kill this deer, I'd be able to get some decent food into him and maybe help to keep him from deteriorating like this. In a way, I feel responsible. After all, if it weren't for me, he would never have fallen into this state in the first place.

When I step outside, I find Justin grubbing in the grass and popping a cricket into his mouth. He sees the rifle slung over my shoulder and, after he swallows, asks what makes me think I can go hunting and leave him behind. There's nothing says he can't go hunting with me, only there won't be any hunting at all if he yammers on in a loud voice and clomps around in boots five sizes too big for his feet. Justin slips inside and finds a proper pair of shoes, and when he comes back out, I drape the field glasses around his neck so he has something to do instead of being a pest. We stand together, him with his field glasses, me with my scope, and we sweep from south to north, up from the south concession road to the drive shed, past the gap, along the weathered barn boards, until we reach a tall clump of grass on the north side of the barn, half in the shade, half out. The grass shimmers around a doe. Hard to say from this distance how big it is. I'm hoping it's big enough to yield some meat.

The doe doesn't know it's being watched. It saunters further north, but instead of climbing the slope to the big maple and the start of the back laneway, it moves east around the knoll and out of sight. It's probably headed across the northeast field and into the woods on the far side. In a way, this is a good thing, because we can hurry up to the maple tree and shorten the distance between us and the doe without alerting her to our presence—assuming Justin can keep his mouth shut. At the top of the hill, we drop onto our bellies right over Mom's grave and we crawl to the crest.

You had breakfast yet? I whisper.

Of what? There ain't anything to eat no more.

We raise our heads over the crest and there, below us by fifty metres, is an adult doe, big brown eyes staring out across the field, bending down to tear a clump of clover from the ground, then upright again to chew for a bit. The Winchester isn't loaded. I didn't think we'd come up to the doe this soon. Now I have to poke around in my pants pocket for a bullet. I stick the bullet into the breech, but I don't know what I'm doing, and when I fiddle with the bolt, it makes a metal clicking noise. The doe freezes then pivots its head towards us. I press a hand to Justin's shoulder to keep him still. I ease the rifle onto a thick tree root and slither on my stomach until I've got my eye pressed to the scope. The doe has turned away from us but isn't moving. I get the butt of the rifle wedged against my upper arm and curl my finger around the trigger.

Why don't you shoot it? Justin whispers.

Shh. You can't kill a doe shooting it in the ass.

Oh.

We wait. This is why I wish Justin hadn't tagged along. He doesn't know how to wait. It's not that he doesn't have patience. When it's something that serves one of his obsessions, he can sit for hours at a stretch without moving. But when it comes to sitting while others are doing something, he starts to fidget and gets a head full of stupid questions. The field glasses help, but there's only so much of a doe's twitching tail he can stare at before he wants to see something fresh—like a doe's twitching tail drenched in blood. I distract him for a few more minutes by telling him to count all the ants in the grass in front of him, but when he starts putting them into his mouth, I make him stop.

The doe keeps looking away from us towards the line of trees that marks the eastern boundary of our property. Is there something it sees over there? I use the scope to scan the line of trees but don't see a thing, in part because the sun is still low and shining bright into my eyes. Now would be a good time for a baseball cap so I could pull the visor down over my eyes. If I wanted to, I suppose I could take a head shot—get it right in the back of the head—only I've never fired this gun and have no idea whether, at fifty metres, I'd hit where the cross-hairs say I'd hit. There isn't any breeze, so that isn't a factor. Just gravity, distance and the resistance of a bullet passing through the air. I don't know how to figure it. I've never been any good at math problems, not like Justin who takes to it naturally. He's two and half years younger than me and already a year ahead of me in math. Then again, there are other ways he's five years behind me—like when it comes to reading a story. I'll read a story—The Cask of Amontillado, for instance—and I can tell you all about it, but Justin will read the same story and he gets stuck on one detail. Maybe it'll be the bricks. He'll want to know why the one guy goes to all that trouble bricking the other guy into a room in the basement when he could just as easily have picked up one of those bricks and brained him with it. Because he can't get past that point, he gets stuck and can't read to the end. I guess that's just the way his head works—great at figuring out patterns in stars and numbers and such, but useless when it comes to figuring out patterns in words.

The doe steps sideways so I've got a clear shot broadside. I squeeze the trigger and holy crap! I wasn't expecting the kick it gives me. I wasn't expecting the kind of bang it makes either. Justin has his hands over his ears and he's yelling at me for not telling him beforehand that I was going to fire the gun. He goes on talking at me with his voice too loud because he can't hear a thing for the ringing in his ears. Even so, the doe is tipped over onto its front knees or whatever you call the joint in its front legs. I could see through the scope how the bullet struck it full in the chest. I keep watching through the scope. There's a look of distress in the doe's eyes. It's like I'm God deciding this doe's had enough of life here on this earth, and the doe's all indignant, thinking it's got more time to do doe things like make baby deer and eat clover and stuff.

Justin is on his feet and running down the slope to get a closer look at the dying doe. I yell at him not to get too close because the doe could still kick him with its hind legs, but Justin can't hear me and walks right up almost so he can touch the creature. The doe is still standing lop-sided, hind legs extended straight and tipping it over onto its front knees so its head is almost pressed to the grass. Then it teeters a bit and falls sideways, whumping onto the ground. There's blood dribbling out of its mouth. Its chest heaves. It makes a sound, almost like a sigh, and then it lies still and doesn't move again.

It's dead, says Justin.

Yup, says me.

You killed it.

Yup.

Now what?

We field dress it.

What the hell is that?

We take out all the guts and stuff and leave them in the field for the coyotes and turkey vultures.

Cool.

I've got the knives clipped to my belt in an old leather sheath. From watching Dad, I know pretty much what I need to do. I may not be as quick as him when it comes to cutting open a deer, seeing as I haven't got a feel for it yet, but I'm patient and I know what to expect. The most important thing is: all the guts come in a sac full of fluid and you don't want to bust that sac before you've pulled it out of the doe, otherwise you've got a big mess on your hands. I start by cutting a slit sideways down in the groin, but not deep, only deep enough to pull the skin away. From there I do another slit and take that all the way up to the sternum, pulling the skin away to either side of the doe like a cape that comes widest down by the groin. I work my way under a layer of fatty tissue and muscle and stringy bits of doe innards 'til I've got the jiggly sac of deer guts exposed to the morning sun.

Justin says it looks like jello gone bad and asks if he can touch it.

Sure, says me.

I tell Justin to run down to the barn and fetch the wheelbarrow seeing as we'll need a way to move the carcass, but he won't go; he wants to watch me pull out all the guts and stuff.

Fine, says me. But soon enough we'll need that wheelbarrow. And probably an axe or a saw so we can cut off its head before we move it.

To make it lighter?

Exactly. We don't need the head for anything.

As I cut the sac of guts away from the bottom of the diaphragm, I get to asking myself a question. I don't like mucking around inside a deer. While I do it, I hold my nose back a bit, whereas Justin sticks his face into everything with a lip-licking enthusiasm. It's like in one of those corny black and white movies where the robot comes to life when it touches the blood. So the question I'm asking myself is whether this counts as violence if we're doing it for food. Or does it still count as violence if, even though we're doing it for food, we come to it from the wrong direction? Maybe we like the killing because we think it's fun and use the story about doing it for food as our excuse. That seems to me like coming at the killing from the wrong direction.

Justin helps me to tip the deer onto its side so I can dump the guts out onto the grass. Once I tie off the anus, I cut the sac free and that gives Justin a whole new cause for fascination. He takes the other knife and pokes away at the liver and the gall bladder and the pancreas and the kidneys and the intestines and he goes yakking on about what they're for and what they feel like when the knife slides into them.

It's the same in us, isn't it?

Pretty much, says me.

Cuz we're all mammals, aren't we?

Yup, says me.

Justin untucks his T-shirt and presses his hands into his own gut.

I've got a liver and kidneys too, don't I?

We all do, says me.

After I've cut through the esophagus and pulled out the heart and the lungs, I say it's time we got that wheelbarrow from the barn. Justin asks if he can stay with the carcass while I'm gone, so I say fine and walk around the sunny side of the knoll. I find the wheelbarrow by the door to the greenhouse and the axe leaning against the wood crib beside the evaporator. On the way back, I see Justin lying in the dirt by the big maple, eyeing me through the scope on the Winchester. Good thing all the bullets are in my pocket. That boy's crazy enough he might just shoot me to see what my guts look like. Standing beside the deer, I see trickles of blood on either side of its face.

She was starin' at me, says Justin, so I poked out her eyes.

Oh.

Justin asks if he can chop the head off. I can't think of any reason why not, seeing as I've done all the good stuff so far and it's only fair he get a chance to do some good stuff too. Still, I've got my doubts. For Justin, none of this is about food on the table; it's about hacking up a body for the fun of it. But I haven't the will to be arguing with him, so I hand him the axe and he hoists it onto his shoulder.

You know, says he, the doe's neck reminds me of something.

What's it remind you of?

The first time the inspection lady come around. She took a sample of dirt right over there. Knelt on the ground. Bent her head down. There was just something about the look of her neck.

Pretty?

Yeah. But more'n that, it made me wanna chop it with an axe.

The axe is too big for Justin to get a proper stroke, so it takes him three or four tries before he cuts clean through the vertebrae. Even after that, when he goes to pick up the head, it's stuck to the body with bits of skin and sinew. He has to saw it with his knife before the head comes clean. He holds it high in the air and drops of blood plop onto his hair and dribble down his cheeks. He whirls like a shot-putter and lets it fly maybe ten metres so it lands in the dirt and rolls over two or three times, coming to rest with its poked-out eyes staring back at us. Justin lets out a whoop and smears blood and snot from his face onto the sleeve of his T-shirt.

I load the carcass into the wheelbarrow and trundle it down to the barn while Justin walks alongside me with the axe over one shoulder, the Winchester rifle over the other shoulder, and the field glasses dangling in between. When we get to the barn, I make slits through the shanks and force a rod between the bones the way I saw Dad do it, then I hang the rod from a hook in the beam, and the carcass swings back and forth above the drain. Although we left most of the blood soaking into the ground where we brought down the deer, there's still some that leaks out through the neck and pools on the concrete around the drain. I run my hands along the tawny hide, and Justin follows after me like this is a game of Simon Says. Or maybe it's more like I'm a minister and he's a convert learning all the new rituals. Only I'm the sort of minister who understands it's all hoo-hah, but Justin, being the convert, feels he has to try harder than anyone else.

The next thing we have to do is skin the doe. I set about it the way I remember Dad doing it, starting with a circle around each shank and slitting the skin up the leg to the groin. I cut it a little bit at a time until I've got enough for both hands, then I yank at it, pulling down and down towards the floor, towards the doe's shoulders. I remember Dad saying something about the cape.

You mean like Batman? says Justin.

I guess, says me.

When I'm done, Justin drapes it, still wet and slimy, over his shoulders, and he runs circles around the evaporator singing the Batman song. While he's doing that, I pull down the carcass and lay it out on the work bench so I can butcher it the way Dad did with the buck we killed. The only problem is: after we'd skinned the buck, we put it in the cooler for the night and Dad came out alone the next morning to finish the job, so I never saw how he did it. All I know is that when I went out to the barn after breakfast, Dad was walking back to the house carrying a picnic cooler full of neatly stacked slabs of meat that he had wrapped in double layers of newspaper. I never saw how he made the cuts. I'll have to make it up as I go along.

I hack and wrap, hack and wrap, until I've got a picnic cooler full of meat too. Maybe not as full as last time, because then it was a buck Dad was butchering and this is only a doe, but there's still enough here for a few good meals. While Justin is buzzing around and flapping his arms like a bat, I pile the leftover legs and hooves and whatnot into the wheelbarrow and roll them out past the greenhouse to the eastern limit of the field and dump them under a tree for the scavengers. Justin and I carry the picnic cooler back to the house and load half the meat into the fridge and the other half into the freezer. Once we've cleaned up the knives and returned the Winchester to the locker, I force Justin into the shower for a proper cleaning. He doesn't like it, but he comes out looking not half bad and I tell him so. I take a turn too, lathering myself up and shampooing my hair, and washing all the blood and dirt down the drain. We both put on fresh clothes and I wash the old ones and hang them on the line to flap in the sunshine, and while the sun is drying the clothes, I plan our first supper with meat in nearly a month.

Towards the end of August I get itchy for school again. I realize we don't go to a real school in a building, but at least we get together with other kids one day of every week. I miss them all, especially Marnie. She and I used to talk on the phone all the time, but Dad stopped paying the phone bill and so the phone company shut off our line, which Dad says is just as well because they were listening in on all our calls anyways. I don't know what we'd say on a phone that's so important they'd want to listen in on our calls, but that's Dad for you. Through August we still had the computer to chat with, but Dad stopped paying our internet bill and so the internet company shut off our connection, which means I haven't chatted with Marnie for nearly a week now. I'd really like to go in to town to see her. The only trouble is my shoes are coming apart. One has a big hole through the sole and the other one flaps around so I feel like a clown when I walk.

On a Wednesday morning, when Dad's still chawing on some bacon from a pig he had slaughtered over at the Ferguson's, I step in front of him with my shoes on and show him the hole in the one and how the bottom of the other flaps when I walk.

I need new shoes.

He chaws some more on his bacon and scratches his head. His beard has grown long now, so when he tilts his head down, the beard touches his chest. He hasn't trimmed it all summer which means his face looks prickly, like a mutant burdock you'd find growing around a nuclear power plant. After he swallows the last of his bacon, he has me take off my shoes so he can get a closer look. There's an intensity on his face, as if the study of my shoes will somehow unlock the secrets of the universe.

I can fix these, says he.

I need new ones, says me.

Dad won't be swayed. He says that shoes are part of the plot. Shoes are the foundation of everything. Start with a man's feet and work your way up. Before you know it, you've enslaved his mind.

I bet you want Nikes, says he.

That would be cool, says me.

You see? They've got you already.

Dad never gives back the shoes. Instead, he puts on his own, tucks mine under an arm, and tears off across the fields to the barn. I look for something else to put on my feet and settle for last year's pair of rubber boots which, by this year, are too small and squeeze my toes together. By the time I make it to the barn, I can feel blisters coming up all over my feet. It would be more comfortable to go barefoot. While I sit on a log by the wood crib tugging at my boots, Dad goes foraging through the barn for whatever strips of leather he can find: old bridles, a belt, a pair of work gloves. He settles for the hide of the buck we killed last year which he'd kept stretched on a rack upstairs. He drops it through the trap door and scrambles down the ladder, then lays it out on the work bench so he can trace the shape of my shoes into it.

You're joking.

This'll work. You'll see.

Even if it did—

What? It's no good unless it's got your favourite logo? Is that it?

Using a pair of tin snips, Dad cuts the shape of my shoes from the hide, then taking up a ball-peen hammer, he fastens the hide to the bottom of my shoes by tapping a fistful of tacks into them, and, since the repair doesn't really work, he adds some elastic bands for good measure. He hands back the shoes and tells me to try them on. By running my fingers along the insides of them, I can already tell there's no way I should be putting on these shoes unless I want to turn my feet into pin cushions. I fling the shoes at the far wall and stomp barefoot through the door while from behind me comes the accusation that I'm an ungrateful so-and-so and that my mother would be appalled at my disrespect.

I run from that place. I cut my feet on stones and tear the skin on blades of quack grass, but I run from that place. I sprint up the slope to the big maple, past Mom's grave to the back laneway, and all the way to the wood lot where I work my way down to the pump house and sit myself down for a rest on the steps. I cry too. All this time, Dad's never once blamed me or judged me for my hand in Mom's death. In a way, it surprises me. I expected him to be angrier. I expected him to yell. Instead, for the last two months, it's lurked there behind everything we do, unnamed, and maybe more terrible for being unnamed, like a swamp monster we've allowed to grow instead of chasing it into the light where it can shrivel and die. Yes, I killed my mom. Yes, it was my fault. But I didn't mean to. Isn't the hole in my heart punishment enough? It's the hole torn open by the ache of her absence tugging one way and the guilt tugging the other way.

I sleep for a time on the steps to the pump house, waking to a light that hazes through the trees, descending the slope from the back laneway and hovering towards me. Although it's hard to say, I'm pretty sure it's my mom's spirit risen up from the grave and coming to me for a talk. The light settles on the leaves not far from where I lie, and while no voice speaks from out of the light the way a human might speak, even so I sense something—a silent kind of talk. Above all, what comes from the light is a feeling of forgiveness. Mom wants me to know that even though I backed a tractor into her and smushed her chest, she still loves me and will always love me no matter what. But the other thing I sense is that she doesn't have a lot of time for the pleasantries. She really needs to get down to business. It's kind of like she's calling me on a cell phone, but there's only a few minutes on her plan so she has to use them sparingly. There's this problem of Dad losing touch with reality and what to do when a nutty idea takes hold, like when he tries to use buckskin to repair the soles of my shoes. She tells me that, at times like this, it's okay to ignore him. He gets stupid like that sometimes, but he always comes around.

I may have been dreaming, but who can ever be sure about moments like this? The important thing is to act. I need shoes and I'm not going to get them by sitting in the woods talking to a ball of light. Walking back to the house, I sneak up to my room and hunt for the envelope I keep in my desk, the one where I stash all the spending money I earn for helping Dad at market. It's not like I've been to market lately, but it's not like I've been to town spending my money either. There's thirty-five dollars in the envelope. I stuff the bills into my pants pocket and sneak downstairs to the garage where I wheel out my bicycle and ride down the drive to the concession road.

It takes me an hour to ride to town. Normally, it'd take me forty minutes, but this time it takes me a full hour because my feet are cut on the bottoms and the bicycle pedals are metal without any soft parts to them. The concession roads are made of dirt and have lots of pot holes in them, but once I make it to town, things go smoothly because all the roads are paved a nice black asphalt, which is fine until I have to stop, at which point the asphalt burns the soles of my feet. What I want to do more than anything is to see Marnie, but I can't do that without a proper pair of shoes on my feet, so I go first to the shoe store: Bert's Shoes and Work Boots. I prop my bicycle against a tree outside the store and stare through the display window. Even though Bert's sells steel-toed Kodiak Grebs and hip waders, it looks like a good enough place to buy running shoes.

When I step inside the store, a man who looks like he could be Bert asks: Can I help you with anything?

Even if I weren't standing there in my bare feet, I'd still think that's a dumb question to ask somebody who steps into a shoe store. I want something for my feet—obviously.

I want some Nikes, says me.

The man stares at my bare feet with their cuts and their dirt, then he stares at my ripped pants, and at my dirty hair, then back to my bare feet. If you wanna try on your shoes before you buy them, then you'll need to be wearing socks.

I don't have any socks.

I can sell you some socks.

How much?

I can sell you a pair of tube socks for two dollars, two pairs for three-fifty.

I only need one.

One sock?

One pair.

That's good, because we don't sell singles.

Bert hands me a pair of tube socks from a pile beside the cash register, and while I hop on one foot and then the other, putting on my new tube socks, Bert points out the different styles of Nikes he's got on display. I'm not real fussy as long as they're Nikes. He's got all different colours, fancy racing stripes for marathons, reflective surfaces for running at night, special technology to reduce impact, air pockets for high arches, Velcro for people who hate laces, special materials that breathe so you never get foot odour, anti-fungal inserts. It's as if, since the last time my mom took me out to get shoes, they've turned from things you stick on your feet into technological wonders. The next time I come shopping for shoes, they'll probably come equipped with nuclear powered jet packs. I point to a shoe with a red stripe and ask how much.

Two hundred and sixty-five dollars.

Got anything cheaper?

Bert points to a shoe with a reflective patch on the back and says it's a hundred and thirty-five dollars.

What's the cheapest shoe you got?

Bert scans his shelves and pulls down a grey shoe with molded rubber sole and cloth mesh. This baby's seventy-five, he says.

I finger the seven five-dollar bills in my pocket and do my best to hide the mix of panic and embarrassment I feel. If I walk out now, I could ride over to Marnie's and hide with her for a bit—only I can't go there without shoes. I point to the shoe with the reflective patch on the back and ask if I can try on a pair in size nine.

Bert steps into the back and comes out a minute later with a lidless box, plopping it on the floor beside me and kneeling to lace each of the shoes. As he eases them onto my feet and ties the laces, I stare down at his balding glistening head, and at his wheezing flabby chest, and at his big gut rolling over the top of his belt, and at the thighs almost bursting through his corduroy pants, and I wonder how many years it will be until, one day, while he's serving a customer like me, he rolls his eyes back up into his head, flops backwards onto the floor, and dies there of a massive heart attack.

Ever have a moment of clarity? I'm having one right now. I don't know why it should happen now. Maybe it has to do with pedaling for the last hour and how lots of exercise somehow squirts endorphins into your brain. To be honest, I don't know anything about endorphins, but Justin was going on about them the other day. Or maybe it has to do with not getting enough sleep. None of us has been getting enough sleep since Mom died and it's doing funny things to the way we see the world. Or maybe it's a sudden burst of gamma rays from a sunspot that's done it to me. Whatever the reason, I have this moment of clarity which isn't so much a fresh way of thinking as it is a fresh way of feeling. I sit in this man's chair with the skin on the bottom of my thighs stuck to the vinyl, staring up at the 1:30 clock behind the counter where he piles his tube socks, and listening to the air conditioner blow cool air into the back room and listening to the florescent lights buzzing overhead and listening to this man wheezing his asthma wheeze, and I'm filled with a feeling. I look at this man kneeling in front of me and I know that as big as he might seem, he has a nothing life compared to the life I've got stretched out in front of me. I deserve these shoes whether or not I can pay for them.

Bert presses his thumb into the end of the right shoe: These feel just about right. Why don't you take a walk around?

I step back and forth in front of the window but: I dunno. Maybe I should try an eight and a half just to compare.

I think an eight and a half'll be small, but if you want, I'll see if I've got any.

When Bert disappears behind the curtain to the back room, I tear out the front door and jump on my bicycle. There's a bell jangling on the door, so Bert knows I've left. He comes lumbering out onto the sidewalk, moving at a surprising speed for a man shaped like a whale, and he yells and swears and calls me a punk and tells me that if he ever gets his hands on me he's gonna pulverize me proper. He sure has a foul set of lungs on him, which probably explains why he slows to a trot after passing only a few shop windows. To his credit, he doesn't give up, but he's no match for me on my ten-speed bicycle. The problem for me isn't Bert, but the other people on the sidewalk who catch on to what's happening and come to his aid, including a big burly guy with a handlebar mustache. He's standing with his arms crossed and blocking my way on the sidewalk. Getting around him is no problem: I veer left of a concrete planter full of dried-up petunias and onto the road. The problem is that the guy with the handlebar mustache is more nimble than Bert the whale man and he can get himself to warp speed in no time. I pump away at the pedals until my thighs burn and, just as I think Mr. Handlebar is going to reach out his claws and pull me off my seat, the bicycle shoots ahead. Looking down, I realize my escape would’ve been a lot easier if I hadn't left my bicycle in tenth gear before I went into the shoe store.

I veer right, down a side street, and right again to be safe, but now I'm all turned around and not sure which way to go if I want to get out of town and back to the farm. If I'd come into town more often, I might know my way around better, not that it's a big town, but it's big enough to have a main street with old two-story brick buildings, shops on the main floor, apartments upstairs, and side streets cutting across the main street like stitches across a gash, and back allies with garbage bins, and a greasy spoon with red-and-white checked table cloths, and a movie theatre that shows a zombie double-feature on Saturday nights. It's big enough that Bert, the shoe salesman, and Mr. Handlebar don't know who I am. When I get to the edge of town, I decide I'm at the wrong edge and need to stay out of sight for a while before I try to go back through the middle of town and out past the other edge.

I ditch my bicycle behind a stately old building, then go around the front, past a sign that says "Proud member of the Winter Family", and through the front door. Inside, I recognize the place: it's the funeral home where they had grandma laid out in the big wooden casket. A sign stands on a brass easel by the entrance to the main room, and it says there's visitation for the late Mrs. MacPherson—nobody I know. Looking through the open doorway, I see a casket with the lid open and an old lady propped up on a pillow. She could be my grandma. With the skin drawn smooth over her cheekbones and her grey hair pulled back in a bun, there's not much about this woman that makes her different from my grandma—or any other dead old lady for that matter. There's a smattering of people around the casket, and a couple of the more bored-looking mourners stare at me staring at them.

I'm not going to find a place to hide in a visitation room, so I go downstairs to the basement. Upstairs, it's all wood paneling and nice carpets and lamps and paintings and fake antique tables, but downstairs, it's bare tiled floors and florescent lights and fire extinguishers and red exit lights. The basement feels dank and there's a smell to the place like medicine only worse. I try a door knob, thinking I can stash myself in a broom closet for a while. When I push open the door, I realize too late that I've made a mistake. I'm not in a closet at all, but in a different kind of room, a kind of room I've never seen before. It's more the kind of room you see on TV when they show a scene with doctors in a hospital performing an operation: two tables, each backing up to a sink with hoses and whatnot, a counter with knives and scissors laid out on a fresh white cloth, and a metal container like a fridge, only bigger, that goes almost to the ceiling and with a door as wide as two men standing shoulder to shoulder. Between the two tables is a man in a white coat, wearing latex gloves and holding a clipboard, who looks up at me over a pair of narrow granny glasses. He's a pudgy man, though not big like Bert, and he has grey hair around the temples, but less of it on top. He'd look about my dad's age if it weren't for the spidery veins crawling over his big red nose and the stiff way he moves when he steps around from behind the tables.

Hello, he says. And taking a closer look at me: Why, you're George's boy, the older one.

Yeah, says me.

I haven't seen George in—oh—two or three months, which is unusual. How's he been?

Not so good.

Oh?

Our mom left.

I'm sorry.

Now I recognize the man. His name is Beamsworth and he's the one who got grandma ready for burying in the ground. He's the one who owns this place.

What's this room? I ask.

This? He chuckles as he wipes his reading glasses on his white coat. This is the embalming room. This is where we get the bodies ready for viewing upstairs.

Is there ... I nod to the big refrigerator.

A body inside? Just one right now, a lady from Sunny Acres. We get a lot of business from them.

Can I have a drink of water? I'm thirsty.

The Beamsworth man pulls off his gloves and runs the water cold. While he's got one hand under the tap, he pulls open a cupboard door with his other hand. Inside the cupboard are rows of bottles full of a clear red fluid and tucked in between a couple of the bottles is a stack of plastic cups. After the man pulls a cup from the stack, he fills it with water and hands it to me.

Your Dad's not in town with you, is he?

Naw, I biked into town.

No wonder you're thirsty.

I hand back the cup and say thank-you. This Beamsworth guy is giving me a weird look, first eyeing my face which I'll admit is dirty, almost as dirty as my stringy hair, then eyeing my T-shirt with the big hole under the right armpit and the jean shorts with the frayed denim so you can see bits of my underwear, then settling his eyes on my brand new shiny Nike running shoes.

You know, son, he says, there‘s regulations in this business that require us to keep the embalming room as dirt-free and antiseptic as we possibly can.

The man holds open the door and motions for me to step out into the hall.

Why don't we go upstairs to my office and you can tell me why you biked into town. I'm guessing you didn't plan on visiting an embalming room.

I came to buy new shoes.

At the top of the stairs, the floor switches from vinyl tile to carpet, and my shoes switch from squeaks to whispers. I kick up a foot so Mr. Beamsworth can see my brand new shoes with the reflective stripes and the bright red swooshes. He raises an eyebrow and pretends to be interested. His office is just inside the entrance to the building and the name plate beside the door says his first name is Chester, which I seem to remember from supper table conversation leading up to grandma's funeral. The funny thing about this office is that the door and the inside walls are all made of glass that goes from floor to ceiling. What if the guy wanted some privacy while he was working at his desk? What if he had to scratch his nose because there was a booger hanging from it? The office sits right across the hall from the visitation room so all the mourners looking out through the doorway would be able to see him with a finger stuck up his big nose.

After we've both settled into his fancy leather chairs, Chester starts in about how him and Dad were best friends back when they were kids, practically brothers for all the time they spent together. He still regards Dad as one of his best friends. Most every month Dad pops around for a chat and they share a beer if it's later in the afternoon or have breakfast down the way at Mable's Nook if it's earlier in the day. He's missed seeing Dad this past while—the whole summer, come to think of it—and hopes things get back to normal for us. He smiles and shakes his head, and I can tell he's got memories stirring around inside his skull, like when you rattle a snow globe back and forth and watch all the white flecks whirl in circles until they settle on the bottom again.

Chester is all set to bore me with one of those memories when the front door bursts open and in walk two men. I'm seated facing away, so I hear them before I see them, and I recognize the agitated high-pitched voice of the one man, but I'm not so sure about the other. Sneaking a glance, I see it's Bert, the shoe salesman, and he's with Jack Naismith, probably the only police officer to work continuously in this town for twenty years. He's always had a partner too, but that's been a revolving door. Word's been going around that the problem is Jack's body odour. His partners can't last more than a year or two riding with him in the confined space of a police cruiser before they stumble out gasping and apply for a transfer. He's likable enough—another of these guys who grew up not so far away and went to the same school as Dad and Chester. I think he has three kids, but they go to regular school so I don't know them.

When they walk through the front door, Bert is babbling about the bicycle they found out back. Jack taps him on the arm and points to the sign about visitation for the late Mrs. MacPherson and tells him to shush, but when Bert sees me staring at him over the back of Chester's chair, his voice goes back to the level it was when he first came in. He's mad as hell. He's gonna teach me a lesson. He's gonna show me to respect other people's property. While Jack does his best to pull Bert back down to the floor, Chester steps out of the office and pushes shut the fine wooden doors to the visitation room. He turns to the other men and, even though I can't hear everything he says, I can tell by his manner that it involves a lecture on decorum and respect for the dead. When he's finished, he leaves the two of them arguing in the foyer and comes back into the office.

It's Ford, isn't it?

Uh huh.

Well, Ford, Bert there says you stole those shoes. Chester points to my feet. That true? he asks.

A feeling of panic takes hold of my throat and cuts off all my words, kind of like there's a knife working at my esophagus the same way I worked at the esophagus of that doe I brought down. It's not that I'm afraid of saying sorry. I could care less about that. I haven't the faintest inclination to say sorry to Bert the shoe salesman. He's no better than a fat pig the way he squeals out there in the foyer, not giving a damn that there's people in the next room missing their grandma. It's more that I'm afraid of word getting out and spreading like a plague through the town until Marnie hears about it, or worse, her mom, which would be the end of me seeing Marnie ever again.

Well, son, is that true?

I cough out an uh huh.

I see, and he rubs his chin, then realizing he's still in his white embalming room coat, he pulls it off and jams it into a drawer. I'm in a bit of a quandary here, says he. On the one hand, your dad and me, we're best friends, so naturally I want to do right by him when I deal with you. But Bert, there, well, him and me, we serve together on the board for the local chamber of commerce, so I want to do right by him, too.

We sit together in silence for a bit, him in his quandary and me in my vague and formless fear. I have a feeling this isn't what my mom had in mind when she visited me in a ball of light and told me to ride into town for some shoes. For a minute, I imagine what it would be like, pinned to the ground beneath Bert's fat butt, forced to scream "Uncle, Uncle" before he gets off me; or tied to a post in the middle of town, wearing a sign that says "Thief" while people pelt me with rotten vegetables. When I come back to the present, what I notice most isn't the man frothing at the mouth on the other side of the glass wall, or the policeman next to him carrying a sidearm and wearing polished leather shoes. What I notice most are Chester's fingernails, eight smiling crescents lined up along the edge of his desk, clean, precise, buffed to a high sheen. They're nothing like Dad's fingernails. At any given time, Dad's missing at least one of his fingernails, either ripped off from an accident, or else banged off thanks to a poorly aimed hammer. As for the rest of his nails, they're either bitten jagged or full of dirt packed underneath the cuticles. Hell, most of the time, he's carrying half the farm around in his fingernails. He could grow a pumpkin patch under each one of them.

How much were those shoes?

Hundred and thirty-five plus tax, says me.

Give me a sec'. And Chester goes back out into the foyer.

I can see the three men chatting. Chester reaches into his left pocket and pulls out a fat billfold. Licking his thumb, he flicks off eight twenties and offers them to Bert. Before Bert takes the money, he says something about the boy needing to understand how this kind of behaviour has consequences. The three men stare at one another as if they're in a Mexican stand-off. Bert moves first. He snatches the bills from Chester's hand. And why not? In the end, it's just another sale, and business is business.

After Bert has waddled out of the building, Jack Naismith comes into the office and introduces himself even though I've known him all my life and he knows it. He goes on about how he and my dad have always been good friends, just like with Chester, all three boys growing up together, all three belonging to the Rotary Club, all three hunting together back in the day. Blah, blah, blah. Jack Naismith tells me I'm lucky my dad's so well liked. It means someone like Chester'll step up for me when I'm in a tight spot. Chester's covered the cost of the shoes and it'll be for him to settle that account with my dad. And it'll be for my dad to settle a different account with me. Jack Naismith winks at Chester when he says this and I get the feeling he thinks I'm in for a proper hiding when I get home. If they had seen my dad lately, they'd know Dad won't give a damn; he may not even let on he's heard when they tell him what happened. Jack Naismith says he's gonna give me a ride home in the police car, then he's gonna talk to my dad and make sure we all understand one another.

I ride in the back seat of Jack Naismith's boxy looking police cruiser with my bicycle hanging half out of the trunk. All the way through town I slump low in the seat and hope the cruiser doesn't stop at any lights where people might peer through the window. From time to time, Jack Naismith leans back with his arms stretched out straight to the steering wheel and talks to me through the grill that separates the front seat from the back seat. He tells me this is no big deal; Bert just gets himself wound into knots; that's the way he is; gonna kill himself with fussing someday, but that's the way he is. He tells me he's sorry my mom left; he's known the both of my parents, Emily and George, for as long as he can remember; no two finer people; so if she left, he's reasonably certain it wasn't because one or the other of them was doing anything bad; probably more a matter of not getting along.

When we pull up the drive, Jack Naismith takes my bicycle out of the trunk and leans it against the side of the garage. He sets his state-trooper hat on his head and adjusts his sunglasses to make himself look as impersonal as possible, like he's a law enforcement robot. He wears taupe pants and a matching shirt, but you can hardly see the shirt for the Kevlar vest which makes his chest look puffed out the way you'd see on a body builder. Only, in our town you don't see anybody who looks like a body builder; you don't even see anybody who looks like they exercise. The closest you come is somebody like Jack Naismith who takes advantage of starch in his shirts, a man-girdle and a bulletproof vest that forces his spine into an unnatural shape. Most people hereabouts don't carry their weight as muscle. They enjoy a starchy diet, which stands to reason given all the corn and tubers grown in these parts, and they enjoy pies, not ordinary pies, but pies baked in deep dishes and slathered in whipped cream.

My dad is an exception to this rule. When Dad steps onto the side porch and down from there to the gravel drive, Jack Naismith doesn't recognize him. There isn't a gram of fat on him now. If he died in the field today, the vultures would be done with him inside half an hour. They'd get some sinew, some stringy muscle, some bits of liver and kidney, but that's it. The rest of him has already rotted away. There are bare patches on his head where hair comes out by the fistful. Spots have come up on his face around the cheekbones where the beard doesn't cover them.

Hi Jack, says Dad.

Jack Naismith doesn't say anything, but stares in amazement. He shakes Dad's hand. Watching him shake Dad's hand is like watching a gorilla pump a twig up and down.

Dad looks at me, then at the police car, then at me again. He turns to Jack and: My boy in trouble?

Not so much, George.

There's a great pause between the men, and it yawns so wide I'm afraid I'll fall into it.

He was tired out from riding his bike, so I asked if he needed a lift.

That's mighty nice of you, Jack.

Oh, it's nothing, George.

Jack turns to me and: You okay, kid?

I nod. I guess if I was in Jack's shoes, I'd ask me if I'm okay too. We Barneses must be a sight.

Jack returns to Dad and: Your boy tells me Em left.

Dad looks at him with no expression in his eyes. The whites aren't white anymore, but yellow. I can tell Jack is fishing for an acknowledgement, the slightest puff of an emotion, but he gets nothing.

I'm sorry, George.

Jack gives Dad a pat on the back. He turns to leave, but pauses and comes back to the place where we're standing. Looking at me: You have another brother, don't you?

I nod.

I'd like to see him if I could. It's been so long since I seen you boys. When I go home tonight, I'd like to tell Maddie I saw the both of you.

Sure, says me. I run off to look for Justin and leave Jack standing there, like a doctor, staring Dad up and down and doing his best to diagnose all the evils that now afflict the man. Justin isn't far off: around the other side of the garage hunting for crickets. When I find him, he's crunching into a mature cricket with lots of meat in it, and when he's done chewing, he washes it down with a mouthful of water from the garden hose. I lead him around the garage to meet the police officer.

Hi there. Jack eases back onto the hood of the car, one foot resting on the bumper, and he pulls off his sunglasses. I'm a friend of your dad's. My name is Jack.

I know who you are.

So what've you been doing with yourself all summer?

Justin gazes up at him with those hard cold eyes of his. They aren't even human anymore. It's like, while he was sleeping, an alien pod sucked out his soul and hatched something new and fierce to put in its place. I wonder if he looks at the policeman the way he looked at the doe.

Justin shrugs. I play I guess.

With your brother?

No.

Friends then?

I guess not.

Well who do you play with?

I dunno. My crickets.

You play with your crickets?

Mostly I eat my crickets.

Jack smiles at Justin and pats him on the head. After his shift, he'll go home to his wife, a square-hipped fatty with hairs sprouting from a wart on her chin, and he'll tell her how he saw the Barnes kids today, how the older one seemed a little troubled—went into town today and tried to steal shoes, but that younger one, cute as could be, not spoiled yet by all that crap on TV they feed teenagers nowadays.

When the police car disappears down the concession road, Dad rips into me, stunned that I would be fool enough to bring a police officer snooping around the property when I know damn well the government has no business setting foot on our land. Police is government. Police is the enforcement arm of government. Police is government's muscle. By the time Dad is done, his voice has crescendoed until he's yelling at me in a terrible fury. Even when he pauses, his voice rings across the land as an echo from the wide bare face of the barn. The good thing about Dad starving himself is that his rage doesn't last long; he hasn't got the strength to keep it up. When he's done, he slumps onto the porch steps and I take a turn. I yell at him about how I didn't have a choice in the matter. How did he expect me to say no to the cop when that would only raise the man's suspicions? Besides, that was nothing compared to the suspicions Dad was raising.

Just look at yourself, I scream. You don't eat. You don't sleep. You don't shave, or wash yourself. You don't even wipe yourself after you shit. You're pathetic.

Dad struggles from the porch, and if he had got himself all the way up, I expect he would have hit me. Only he gets light-headed and stumbles over the steps. By the time he gets himself back on his feet, I've grabbed Justin by the hand and we've run off to the woods.

Justin and I decide we're going to sleep in the woods. We could sleep in the pump house, but it's full of spiders and I'm not prepared to spend a whole night listening to Justin describe all the reasons why I should be eating bugs while he lies next to me munching away and licking his fingers. What we need is a tent, so we sneak into the garage and hunt for an old three-man tent we sometimes set up in the yard for fun. After we've found the tent, we step back around the house and see Dad lying under the big maple, flat on his back with an arm over his eyes. An hour later, after we've laid out the ground sheet on a level patch, and after we've set up the tent, we come back for sleeping bags and food and a cooler jug full of water and flashlights. Dad hasn't moved. Once we shut all our gear in the tent, we creep the back way to the big maple, up out of the woods and along the back laneway so our approach is hidden by the tree. We lie in amongst the roots where Justin has stashed his bricks. One of the bricks is still stowed under a root; the other brick sits in the open at the head of Mom's grave. Now, the ground is mostly overgrown with weeds. Dad lies across the middle of the grave, exposing himself to the full sunlight and a steady wind that blows from the west and whips up grit that works against the skin like sandpaper. Peering around the tree, we can see that Dad's lips are dried and cracked. He's talking to Mom.

From where we crouch, we can't hear everything Dad says, and even if we were right beside him, it would be hard to hear him because he mumbles and all his words are slurred. He's been at it for two hours now. He doesn't have two hours of stuff to say. He could be done in five minutes, but he's got all his words on a loop that remixes itself every time it goes around, so it sounds like there's more to say than there really is.

He misses Mom. He wishes he could do better by the boys, but he can barely find it in himself to get out of bed in the morning. For a while there, he was feeling horrible pangs in his stomach, but that's gone away. Maybe he's getting better now. He lost a tooth this morning. He felt something in his mouth, thought maybe there was a raspberry seed stuck between his teeth, but when he tried to jam a fingernail between two teeth, one of them came away from the gum. Spat it into the kitchen sink and that was that. Not even much blood. Hasn't been to market all summer and the money's almost gone. But that's okay. They're getting almost everything they need from the land. Ford got himself into a spot of trouble in town early in the day but he took care of it. Everything smoothed over. He and Jack go way back so the whole business has been forgotten. Building a bunker. Digging a hole to the lea side of the house, then gonna line it with cinder blocks, put in a drain, vent it. Dad says something big is coming. He can feel it in his bones. He can feel it deeper than in his bones. When he lies down like this and presses an ear to the ground, he can feel it as a low rumble, like when you press your ear to the rail and feel a locomotive coming even though it's ten kilometres away. He wonders if Mom can feel it even more keenly than him seeing as she's deeper into the ground, closer to the centre of things.

Justin and I back away from the tree and return to the woods where we sit on logs in front of the tent and debate whether or not to light a fire. We decide against it. There's a layer of dry and crinkly leaves on the ground and it's been a scorching summer. If we lit a bonfire tonight, there's a chance other stuff might catch and then we'd be in a real mess. We have a dinner of carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, peas and watermelon. Anything we don't eat, we string from a tree branch so bears and raccoons can't get it. Raw peas always give Justin a stomach ache and each time, he says he'll never eat them again, and each time, he does eat them again and ends up holding his gut. Justin can't hold it in any longer, so we sneak back to the house in the dark and he goes to the bathroom there. When he's done, we sneak back into the woods and settle in for the night.

When you sleep in the woods, you don't really sleep. There's all kinds of noises to keep you up through the night. You may fall asleep for a short while, but you start awake at the sound of footsteps skittering through the leaves or coyotes howling in the distance or an owl hooting overhead. There's times when I fall asleep despite the noises, but Justin shakes me awake and asks what was that. I ask what was what and he shushes me to listen. We sit up together by the entrance to the tent and listen. There's never anything close, so I start to wonder if maybe this is just a game Justin plays to get attention. A more troubling thought is that maybe Justin really hears the night noises even though they aren't there. By first light, we're both exhausted and sleep in 'til ten in the morning.

As we're carrying some of our gear back to the house, we notice through the line of trees separating the north and south fields that a car is parked in the drive. In between the trees is a broken down stone wall where we nestle ourselves to study the situation. It's a police car, and Jack, the policeman who gave me a lift home yesterday, he’s standing in the drive, hat in one hand and sunglasses in the other. This time, there's a woman with him, a smart-looking woman in a grey suit and wearing shoes that don't work on the gravel drive. She wobbles to one side and has to steady herself against the police car. Jack is yelling to the house and Dad's starved form lurks dark behind the big window by the side door. Justin surveys the scene through the field glasses.

Wonder who that lady is, says he.

Lemme see, says me.

The woman is older than Dad, with a bulldog face and close-cropped hair like she's a marine or something. At the same time, she wears a frilly blouse underneath her suit jacket. It's as if she can't make up her mind who she is. Part of her wants to punch people in the face at bars, and part of her wants to be soft and motherly. Turning to Jack, I see that something has changed in his attitude since yesterday. Then, he was all friendly and "oh, your dad and me, we go way back" and today he looks more like he means business. By the way he moves his arms around and the way he points at Dad, you can tell he's there as a policeman more than as a friend. Something's wrong and it looks like Dad could be in trouble.

Let's get closer.

I want to hear what they're saying. If we back east along the line of trees and away from the house, we can slip into the vegetable garden at the far end, hiding behind the raspberry canes. The canes have grown as tall as a man and have filled out so you can't see between them. If we creep west between the two rows of raspberries, we can put ourselves within earshot of the house without being seen. The trick, as always, is to keep Justin's voice to a whisper.

They're talking about us. They're not talking; they're yelling. The boys this and the boys that. The boys need this and the boys need that. Proper clothes. Proper food. Proper education. The woman butts in every now and again about the state's duties. Each time the woman talks, Dad's voice booms from the shadows about how that government lady needs to shut the fuck up. Justin watches through the field glasses and tells me the lady has turned the colour of a beet: She's so angry her head's gonna explode.

While we're watching the lady with the explosive head, we hear the tire-crunch of gravel and see another car pull in behind the police cruiser. Although we can't see the driver's face, we know who it is by the big ball of hair heaped on top of her head. Mrs. Hendershot is out of the car and running into the middle of everything.

Jack, Jack, now Jack, you listen to me. What those boys need is a proper Christian home.

Mrs. Hendershot has one of those shrill-sounding voices that carries high in the morning air. Maybe if this was late in the day, her voice would disappear with the humidity, but right now it sounds like a bell.

The raspberries are done now, but there's a few late blossoms scattered through the bushes, and so there's still the hum of bees all around us and it fills our heads with a soothing sound to offset the screeching that comes from the drive. Jack has his hand raised, palms open and facing Dad. He comes in peace. Maybe he's an alien.

Jack says: Look, George, this is a simple formality. We just want to have a chat with the boys is all.

Dad comes back with: Then why come in a police car.

I already explained: Mrs. Jenkins' car broke down and I'm giving her a lift.

Bullshit.

The boys haven't been to church in months.

Jack turns to Mrs. Hendershot and tells her she has no business being here.

Justin and me, we grin every time Mrs. Hendershot opens her mouth. She's annoying in a way that makes us want her to keep on being annoying. Some people make it fun to be annoyed at them. If she weren't annoying, she'd be nothing. It's hard to believe Marnie came from this woman.

The sun is high enough now that it bathes all the fields in light. Even since we crawled between the rows of raspberries, the temperature seems to have risen by two or three degrees. It could be all the anger passing back and forth in front of our faces. Justin says he's trying to think the lady's head into an explosion; he glares at it through the field glasses and says he's emitting a death ray that will boil her brains.

Things turn quiet. Dad has disappeared from the window by the side door. Jack takes advantage of Dad's absence to turn around and lecture Mrs. Hendershot. I hear a gasp from the lady in the grey suit. The porch door slams shut with a crack. The spring on that door needs to be adjusted; it's always pulling the door close too fast. Dad's standing on the porch with the Winchester braced against his shoulder, barrel aimed straight into the middle of Jack's chest. We've been so used to him moping around the farm, dragging his heels and slouching, that it takes us by surprise to see him standing tall, back straight and arms held firm. He stands with his feet set shoulder width apart.

Get off my land, he bellows.

I see no sign of the meek and wasting man who has sat all his summer on the living room couch fading from the earth. This father is a different man altogether. Jack has his hands up again, like he's a mime trying to pat the face of an invisible wall. He backs away, telling Dad everything's gonna be fine, telling the lady in the grey suit to back up slow and get in the car, telling Mrs. Hendershot to get into her car and back it onto the road. For the first time since her arrival, Mrs. Hendershot is quiet, saying Uh-huh and whimpering a bit as she feels her way alongside the police cruiser and then back around her own car to the driver's side. The lady in the grey suit stumbles on the gravel and Dad reacts to the sudden movement by shifting his aim so he's pointing his rifle straight into the top of the woman's head.

You all are doing what I tell you to do, says Dad.

He yells at Mrs. Hendershot to drop her purse onto the ground, then get in her car, back it out onto the road, and wait there because she's gonna give the other two a lift back into town. As much as I know Dad's in the wrong, and as much as my heart pounds at the shock of what he's doing, there's a tiny part of me that cheers when he yells his orders at Mrs. Hendershot. She wears this look on her face like she's the most downtrodden creature who's ever walked the earth. It's impossible for me to tell from my place on the ground, but it wouldn't surprise me one bit if she's peed herself. She does like Dad tells her and backs down the drive, though wobbly from nerves so she nearly runs her car into the ditch. Once she gets the car onto the concession road, she sits it there idling.

Dad turns to the other two, telling the lady in grey to drop her purse on the ground just like Mrs. Hendershot did, then to walk down to the road where she can get into the car. The lady has a difficult time on the gravel and stops to ask if it's okay for her to walk on the grass beside the drive.

Whatever. Just get the fuck off my land.

The woman scurries over the grass and trips by the culvert. She was probably one of those awkward kids when she was my age and in school. After she gets herself into the back seat of Mrs. Hendershot's car with the door shut behind her, Dad aims the Winchester at Jack's chest.

Take off your pants.

What?

Take off your fucking pants. But slow. Any move for your gun and your guts will be on the grill of your car. Understand me?

But George. It's me. Jack. I'm your friend. We go way back.

I don't care if you're Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead. You work for the government and you're on my land.

Justin and me, we snicker when we see Jack standing in his polka-dotted boxer shorts, probably something his wife gave him on Valentine's Day. The pants don't drop right away; first, Jack has to unclip the radio speaker from his shoulder. Once he does that, the whole kit comes down with the pants: radio, pistol, bullets, mace, all of it in a heap around his feet. Jack steps away from the heap, but Dad doesn't let him leave until he's put his hat, his sunglasses, and his badge on the hood of his car. By the time Jack reaches the road, he's running at a good clip and motioning for Mrs. Hendershot to move over so he can slide in behind the steering wheel and speed back into town.

Even when the car is well down the road and the plume of dust is settling where the wheels spun, Dad stands in position on the porch with his Winchester rifle aimed at the road. He relaxes and shifts the rifle around so it's slung over his shoulder. Raising his hands to his mouth, he hollers louder than I've ever heard him holler.

Boys!

It's not a call and it's not a question, like: Boys, where are you? It's a command. We pop out from the end of the raspberry rows, running like privates to a drill sergeant.

Dad says we haven't got much time. When Jack gets into town and gets himself a fresh pair of pants, he'll put out a call through all the county and they'll have the place surrounded.

This is the day we've been waitin' for, boys.

It is? I ask.

It surely is.

Dad says we're gonna hole up in the barn. He tells me to turn on the compressor for the cooler and gather up vegetables from the greenhouse to store there. He tells Justin to go to the drive shed and move all the cans of gasoline into the barn. He hands Justin the .22 and a box of bullets and shoos him on his way, then he fishes Jack's gun and bullets from the heap on the ground and hands them to me.

We set out at a run, turning around when we reach the dip between the fields. Dad has gathered up the purses and the pants and the mace and hat and sunglasses and badge and stowed them in the back seat of the cruiser and rolled it backwards to the entrance of the drive, parking it cross-wise so it blocks the way in. When we're almost to the barn, we hear an explosion. Dad has blown up the cruiser. The hood wheels through the air, caught on a draught that carries it almost to the vegetable garden where we had been hiding only minutes before. A black smoke plumes through the trees that stand to either side of the entrance, and once the first mushroom of smoke has cleared, we see the flames. Dad watches from the porch for a minute, then ducks into the house to gather up supplies.

When we've gathered ourselves in the basement of the barn, we do a stock-taking of our supplies. This is what we have:

Food

Carrots - 1 20 kg bag

Onions - 1 20 kg bag

Potatoes - 2 20 kg bags

Beets - 1 20 lb. bag

Leaf Lettuce - 5 bags unwashed

Tomatoes - 1 30 litre bin

Venison - 15 kg

Pork loin - 10 kg

Flour - 10 kg

Salt - one 500 mg box

Baking powder - one can

Utensils

Skillet

Pot

Bowl

Spatula

Flipper

Swiss army knife

Matches (2 boxes wooden)

Butane BBQ lighter

Weapons

Dad's old .22 from when he was a kid plus box of 50 rounds

Winchester rifle with scope plus two mostly full boxes of bullets - 78 rounds

Jack's Ruger 5-shot .38 plus 15 rounds

3 20 litre cans of gasoline plus 72 empty one litre maple syrup bottles ideal for making Molotov cocktails

Knives (2) for field dressing deer

Miscellaneous

Flashlights (2)

Toilet Paper - two rolls

Deck of playing cards

Books (2) - Bible (King James Version) and Oryx and Crake which Dad had torn in two, using half to prop one leg of the work bench (Dad says we can use the other half if we run out of toilet paper)

Field Glasses

Dad fills five maple syrup bottles with gasoline and caps them. There are round bales of hay at both ends of the greenhouse, sitting there for more than a month through the heat of a dry summer. Using a knife, Dad cuts out the core of five bales, each within a sightline to the barn, and sticks a bottle of gasoline inside, covering the holes with hay and scattering the rest of the hay across the ground. Dad says these are a little surprise for the police. While Dad goes about his business outside, he has us filling another twenty bottles with gasoline and tearing strips from an old bed sheet so we have wicks when the time comes.

When Dad is satisfied at the preparations he's made, we gather for a huddle beside the evaporator, heads bowed, arms across each other's shoulders. Everything about Dad has changed, so he's been twisted around, first into a starved shell wrung of all the stuff that makes a man, then twisted again. Now he's a giant snake shedding a dried-out skin and stunning us with fresh new scales and a clever tongue, a tongue which quotes the prophets and tells stories of how simple men much like ourselves stood up to power armed with nothing more than the truth. Justin nods at every word and adds a few of his own: how they'll be ashamed and confounded, how they'll perish if they strive with us. The way they talk, it's almost like prayer.

I'm not so comfortable with the words we share at our huddle. I have to admit: when I first saw Dad standing on the side porch with his rifle raised and aimed at the policeman, and when I heard his clear, strong voice, I felt an electricity flash through my body. Hell, anybody'd rather have a dad who takes a stand than loafs on a couch. But after that first moment, after the shock of seeing a man changed, after the flash through the body, it came to me that a stand isn't much of a stand if it's patterned on the lives of men who lived three thousand years ago when men were barely out of the stone age and shat behind trees and found their way by looking at the stars. The thing is: if Dad isn't prepared to give a little bit, the police will kill him. They'll figure they're rescuing us boys from a half-crazed anti-government religious fanatic who's gone and killed his wife and buried her under a tree. They'll never guess the truth—not that I want them to know the truth—but I don't see why we have to defend our right to be left alone by holing ourselves up in the basement of a barn. Couldn't we stand up to power by sending emails or something?

When the police show up, we don't notice at first because they're way across the other side of the property by the smoking wreck of Jack's cruiser. There are four cars in all. They look stymied—not that police cruisers parked on a road can look one way or another. One of the cruisers tries to get around Jack's car by cutting through the ditch between two trees, but as the car goes down the incline, it lurches sideways and crunches the passenger door into a tree. That's the one sound we can hear, and that's the sound which alerts us to the arrival of police. Their lights are going and they've blocked the concession road. Looking to the southwest corner of the property, we see two more cruisers parked, lights flashing, blocking the intersection where the north/south road meets the east/west road that runs along the south side of the property. Two more cruisers pull up a hundred metres immediately to the south of us. Three police get out of the two cars and pull big rifles from the trunks, but even before they've got themselves settled into the roadside ditch, Dad's steadied himself against the doorframe and shot out the engine blocks of both cars. Dad says he's sending them a message to back off a bit. He don't want to do them any harm, but a hundred metres is too close.

The police have commandeered one of the Ferguson's tractors, the one rigged with the front end loader, and they use it to shove Jack's cruiser out of the way. Pretty soon the driveway's full of police pointing and yakking and trying to decide what to do about the situation. Looks like they may use the house for a command post. A police van pulls into the drive and a man dressed all in black with a Kevlar vest and baseball cap rolls open the side door and lets out two dogs—excited German shepherds that tug on the ends of their leads and let out deep-chested barks that cut clear across the property. A woman steps out too, but not in uniform. The police suit her up in a Kevlar vest. I try to get a closer look with the field glasses, but it's hard because my hands shake. Not until I press the lenses against the window frame do I get a clear view of the woman and the dogs and the new police van. It's the organic inspection lady, still in jeans and cowboy boots, but top-heavy now that she's wearing the Kevlar vest. She points off to the maple tree, then to the line of trees that separates the north and south fields. She leads the police to the far side of the trees and up the low rise to the back laneway where they approach in the protection of the big maple. As the dogs appear from behind the tree, tugging the police officer over the crest of the knoll, they begin to bark and do a frenzied dance over Mom's grave.

Christ, says Dad. Know what they're probably thinking? They're probably thinking I'm a murderer. I've killed my wife and buried her body. And now I've got my boys as hostages. That's what they're thinking.

There's tears squeezing out the corners of Dad's eyes and losing themselves in his beard.

Now they're gonna dig her up.

He smashes out one pane of the north-facing window with the ball-peen hammer he used to fix my shoes, and he clears away the jagged bits of glass with the handle.

Can't let that happen.

He sets the barrel of the rifle on the bare frame of the window and steadies himself for a shot. It's three hundred metres. There's no way he can make any kind of a shot at this distance. That's not to say a Winchester rifle can't shoot a bullet three hundred metres; it's just to say the bullet won't end up where Dad wants it to go. Then again, maybe Dad isn't too particular about where he wants his bullets to go just as long as they go somewhere. The first shot lands south of the grave. Watching through the field glasses, I see a puff of dirt hop off the ground and drift east on a light breeze. The bang has filled the air all around and probably up to the clouds. The police officer freezes and looks in our direction. But Dad isn't watching him. He's withdrawn the rifle from its place in the window and already has another shell in the breech. With his next shot, he compensates for the distance and one of the dogs goes down without even a yelp.

That'll keep them away for a while.

The policeman is yelling and waving his arms at people behind the maple tree. He lets go the one lead and vanishes down the back laneway, leaving the dog dead by Mom's grave. Nothing happens for a time. The waiting is hard, but Dad seems fine with the waiting. I guess this kind of waiting is better than the kind of waiting he was doing when he moped all day on the couch. His eyes are wide and clear now, and there's a kind of nervous energy that's taken hold of his limbs. He walks circuits around the outside wall of the barn, peering out each of the windows as he passes and telling us to stay keen. He hands the ball-peen hammer to Justin and tells him to knock out a pane in each window, just like he's done on the north side. Meanwhile he's got me climbing the ladder into the barn as a lookout to make sure nobody's approaching. He says the upstairs is our weakness: if they can get into the upstairs, then they can smoke us out. The barn is elevated, so it's hard to approach without being seen, but the west side which faces the house has a ramp up from the horse paddock. At some point, the police might want to break a stand-off by driving the Ferguson's tractor up the ramp and through the big barn door, with police storming up behind and dropping canisters of tear gas into the basement. Dad's been thinking about this one for a while, and when an idea strikes at last, he calls up for me to come back to the basement.

They've got me figured for a murderer, so if I step into the open, who knows what they'll do. Maybe they'll shoot me in cold blood and be done with it. But you boys—they figure they're here to rescue you. Which means if you step into the open ...

Dad looks at me, half pleading, half commanding.

What?

Dad wants to make the ramp useless. We can't burn the ramp because we'd light the barn on fire and kill ourselves. But we can coat the ramp in oil and grease and fat and shit so it's too slippery to climb. My job is to run to the drive shed and bring back as many cans of motor oil and transmission fluid as I can carry. He empties his knapsack and tells me to pack everything in there.

The hardest part of the task isn't what I expected. Walking to the drive shed is easy; the police are so far away, they don't notice me until I'm coming back. And finding all the cans of motor oil and transmission fluid is easy too; it's all set out on a shelf in neat rows, like in a grocery store. The hard part is just being in the drive shed. I haven't thought about it at all until I step through the door and come face-to-face with the tractor. The tractor stands lower than I remember because the tires have gone soft from a summer of disuse. And there's the corrugated metal wall, bowed where I backed into it. And the concrete floor where Mom lay flat on her back and the light went out of her eyes. I pause for a minute the way I'd pause in an empty church or in the fading glow of a sunset. Apart from Justin on his quest for cans of gasoline, nobody's been in here all summer. The spiders have taken over. There's a bird's nest in the peak of the roof, but it's empty now.

Back in the barn, Dad has me climb up the ladder and empty the knapsack behind the door by the ramp. He tells me to pour all the smaller cans into two big buckets. That way, when the need arises, we can pick up the buckets and soak the ramp with oil. I've never known Dad to plan ahead for anything except his crops.

We watch and note the small changes that take place around the property—more cruisers along the edge, police all in black and creeping on their bellies up the east side, news trucks with their satellite dishes set up beyond each of the south corners of the lot, two more vans in the drive, lights on inside the house. Dad wonders aloud whether he could make a shot from here into the living room and would he be justified seeing as they're trespassing on his land. I tell him he'd be crazy to take out a cop. He scowls at me, but there's a grin from the corner of his mouth. I don't know how to read that grin. The Ferguson's tractor starts across the field and up the rise to the maple tree where it parks itself in front of Mom's grave. Two men, each with a spade over his shoulder, march along the line of trees, then dash to a position behind the tractor.

Christ, they're gonna dig up your Mom.

The three of us watch through the north window as two heaps of dirt mount to either end of the tractor, light and dry at first, but turning a deep wet brown the further they dig. A black van from the county coroner's office sits in the drive with its rear door hanging wide. A man in a black suit carries a big black bag up to the tree and waits somewhere out of sight. Sometimes we can hear the crackle of radios bursting through the air with that clinical sounding banter that seems to pass between police who sit at a desk and police who work in the field, with its code words and its numbers and its good-buddy hoo-hah that turns ordinary lawmen into true believers.

Justin taps me on the shoulder and points towards the house where a lone man has broken away from the group of police milling in the drive and has set out towards the barn from across the field. Through my field glasses I see it's Jack walking at a steady pace, come to talk to us. I tap Dad on the shoulder and he takes a look through his scope.

Well I'll be damned, says Dad. One humiliation ain't enough for him I guess.

Jack doesn't have a hat or a badge or sunglasses, and if he got himself a new pistol when Mrs. Hendershot drove him into town, he isn't wearing it now. Except for the ugly brown of his clothes, he could be any civilian come out to shoot the shit with us. He's got his hands stuck up in the air, and when he gets to the dip between the two fields, he calls Dad's name in a big voice, saying he isn't armed but just wants to talk, wants to make things right so this whole business can be resolved and nobody get hurt. When he gets closer, he asks Dad to acknowledge him in some way, maybe wave a hat or something, since he doesn't want to go on talking only to get his ass shot off for no better reason than that Dad can't hear him.

Dad throws a potato out the window and yells: There you go, Jack. There's my great potato of acknowledgement.

Thank you, George. Now I need to see the boys. I need to know they're all right.

Gonna hafta take my word for that one, Jack.

I need to see them, George.

While you're getting all cozy with me, I need my boys to watch my back.

George, I'm not tryna pull anything over on you. Show me the boys and I promise you: no one's gonna sneak up on your tail.

You stop digging up Em, then you get to see the boys.

Jack wipes his brow on his sleeve. Without his hat, the exposed parts of his head have turned the colour of a raspberry. He doesn't look like the kind who tolerates the sun, not like Dad whose skin turns a leathery brown by the end of summer—or at least most summers.

You know I can't promise you that, George. We need to know how Emily died.

You'll pull her from the ground, cut her up with knives.

We'll perform an autopsy. A standard procedure.

Then you'll pump her full of chemicals and stuff her eye sockets with cotton and staple her jaw shut.

It's called embalming. A standard procedure.

It's an indignity to a corpse.

Look, George, putting her straight into the ground is an indignity to a corpse.

It's the way God intended, Jack. The Lord God Almighty. And you don't go against Him. Know why? Know why, Jack?

Jack shakes his head.

Because the Lord will judge you. And He will be angry. And when He visits His anger upon you, it will be swift and terrible. That's why you don't go against God.

Oh great. Just fucking great. And I suppose God is using you as the instrument of his wrath. You're like a—a—whaddyacallit—a conduit. Is that what you are? You're on some fucking mission from God?

Careful how you talk, Jack. You might make God angry.

George, why don't we leave God in the church where He belongs? And why don't you and me talk like men in the real world?

Fair enough. Know how much my mom's funeral cost, Jack?

Huh?

My mom's funeral. Know how much I had to pay Chester for cotton in the eye sockets and a jaw stapled shut?

No idea.

Nearly ten thousand dollars. And that don't include the headstone. It's a fucking corporate conspiracy. And you talk to me about dignity. The government makes laws that force working stiffs like you and me to bend over and take it up the ass from these people. Where's the dignity in that? You should be in here with me.

Christ, George, I always knew you was a little kooky, but you're worse'n I thought.

Then I guess we're done talking.

Jack backs away, a step here, a step there, hands still raised to shoulder height. You know, George, says Jack, I always liked you. Until today, I always thought you were a decent fella. But before you go any further down this path, ask yourself this: how much dignity do you think there'll be in a police take-down?

Dad has to raise his voice because Jack has backed a little ways down the slope towards the house. See the window in that tractor cab?

Yeah?

I just want you to know that the reason you're still alive has nothing to do with me being a bad shot.

Dad squeezes the trigger and blows out all the windows in the tractor parked in front of Mom's grave. The two men with shovels have dug down far enough they can duck out of sight, and the coroner with the black bag scoots behind the maple tree. Jack is yelling something at Dad, but we don't listen anymore because Justin has seen movement southeast of us. Two men in body armor, and carrying assault rifles, have crept up from the south concession road and are hiding behind a round bale of hay by the south end of the greenhouse. We look where Justin points, and every now and again, one of them takes a peek around the side of the bale in a motion that looks for all the world like a chicken bobbing its head as it struts in the yard.

One of them raises a canister and it looks to me like he means to lob it through the window. Dad answers with a shot into the centre of the bale. The bullet shatters the bottle of gasoline which explodes in flames that spurt out either end of the bale. The explosion isn't big enough to rip apart the bale, but it's big enough to start a roaring fire. One of the police shouts Officer down! while he drags his partner away from the burning bale. At first, we see an arm flailing, but it soon disappears in a haze of smoke and tear gas. We hear a coughing splutter and see a helmet rolling across the dirt.

Dad says there ain't nothing more entertaining than watching a cop go up in flames, but there's things more important to worry about right now, such as the likelihood that they'll take advantage of the show on the east to sneak up on us from the west. He sends me up the ladder again to keep watch between the barn boards. There's a good view from here across the horse paddock and the lawn to the house and to the big living room windows where Dad has lain most of the summer, gazing out across the land and nursing whatever grief his thoughts have spun. Now, instead of Dad sprawled across the couch, there's police hunkered over a table. It looks to me like they've got a map spread out, because they're all staring down at the table, taking turns pointing to things on it, rubbing their chins and drinking their coffees. It looks like they're planning something.

It's past noon now, and bright everywhere except in the barn. In spite of the shade, the air in here is no good. It's hot and dry and dusty with old hay. I walk to the north side of the barn and gaze up the slope to the knoll where the Ferguson's big tractor blocks our view of Mom's grave. I'm standing right above Dad, maybe three metres higher than him, and from here, I can see the heads of the grave-digging cops. Do I tell Dad he can get a clear shot from up here? Would he really kill a cop if he had the chance? Does he even mean to come out of this alive? I feel the weight of Jack's .38 in my pants pocket and wonder what would happen if I saw somebody coming up the ramp to the big barn door. If he slid open the door and stepped inside, and if I was waiting for him behind a post with the .38 drawn and pointed at his chest, would I have it in me to squeeze the trigger? If it was Justin pointing the gun, there's no question: the cop would be laid out in a pool of blood. But I'm not sure I could do it. This is Dad's cause, not mine. I'd rather walk away safe from it all. The only reason I'm here is because Dad wants me to be here. I don't think this is going to get Mom to forgive me.

I hear thunder beneath my feet, and staring north through a knothole in the barn boards, I watch the nearest of the tractor's big rear tires crumple beneath it. The tractor totters sideways, leaning with the slope of the knoll, falling over with a great metal clank and exposing the two policemen standing waist high in the grave and poised with their spades. For good measure, Dad shoots the spade out of one cop's hands, though it's difficult to know whether, from this distance, he wasn't aiming at the cop's chest and missed. The cops are rattled enough by Dad's aim that, instead of leaping out of the hole and racing down the back laneway, they crouch in the hole. That's where they stay for the next hour.

While the police at the command post worry their way through a strategy to get the cops out of Mom's grave and out of the crazy man's line of fire, the crazy man isn't even watching. Instead, Dad's left his gun in the window and has walked to the cooler where he's dropping a bunch of vegetables into a pot. He scrubs them under the hose. He chops them at the work bench. He lights a fire in the old Franklin stove. And when it gets hot enough, he grills the vegetables on the skillet, using bacon fat to keep the vegetables from sticking. It's the first proper meal he's cooked on his own since Mom died. As he's turning the vegetables to brown them on both sides, he hums some of the old songs he and Mom used to sing to us when we were little. If I didn't know better, I'd say he's smiling. I'm sure that while we sit here salivating at the prospect of a proper lunch, all the cops are over in our living room, watching the smoke rise from the aluminum chimney that runs up the outside of the barn's south wall, and asking one another what the hell we're planning. Dad rustles up some tin plates we use in the wintertime when we hold our annual maple syrup festival and cook flapjacks for all our visitors—or used to until two years ago when the local health department shut us down because we didn't have a permit we never knew we needed. Dad doles the vegetables onto two plates and eats his own straight from the skillet. We don't have any forks, so we use our fingers to stuff the food into our mouths.

After eating, we change positions so we don't get tired of the same post. Justin climbs the ladder with the .22 slung over his shoulder and takes my place in the barn watching the approach to the ramp. Dad takes Justin's place by the east-facing window and keeps a watch south to the road. And I sit in the window that looks north to Mom's grave. I savour the last of the lunch. Seeing Dad lively after so many weeks of swirling around like swill in a bucket gives me hope that things could get better for him—if it weren't for this mess. Too bad we can't turn back the clock by even a few hours. The way it looks now, even the best-case scenario involves Dad spending time in jail. He pointed a gun at a policeman and he blew up a cruiser. So far (that I remember) he's shot seven times at the police. That includes burning a police man, though not much. Plus they'll probably say he kidnapped Justin and me. Plus, judging by the talk he had with Jack, they'll say he committed an indignity to a dead body. That's a lot to get charged with, especially when it involves the police. And then what's gonna happen to Justin and me? We saw that lady in the grey suit who's from the child protection people, but Justin and me, we don't need protection. Maybe we need a bit of money so we can buy shoes and food. But otherwise, we can look after ourselves just fine.

Some time after three—I can't be sure because I forgot my watch—Jack saunters across the field again. I say he saunters because the way he walks is exaggerated, which I take to mean that, even though on the outside he's acting all casual, on the inside he's so nervous he's on the brink of shitting himself. With the sun to his back right shoulder, Jack doesn't have to shade his eyes like he did this morning, but he still keeps his hands up where I can see them. Dad has taken the .38 and left me with the Winchester. It isn't until Jack is standing twenty metres from the window that he notices it's me and not Dad.

Hey Ford, says him, you okay?

Course I'm okay, says me.

Your brother okay?

Course he's okay.

If you wanted to leave the barn, you wouldn't be in any trouble with us.

Even if I shot you between the eyes first?

That shuts him up. He pauses and I notice a series of looks pass over his face. I don't understand the looks until I see an earpiece and a coiled wire running down the back of his neck.

That thing have a mic? I ask.

By now I've got the rifle aimed at his chest the same way I saw Dad aiming it this morning, feet wide apart and butt to the shoulder.

What thing?

The thing in your ear.

What about it?

Does it have a mic?

Yeah. No. Aw, shit.

Take it off.

Jack looks at me like I'm from Mars. The way I figure it, this situation is as unreal to him as it is to me. There he stands, taking orders from a boy thirteen who's got a hunting rifle trained on his gut.

I said: Take off the gear.

I can't do that, son.

If you wanna talk to us, you're gonna have to take it off.

Or what? You gonna shoot me? Your mom wouldn't want you to do that.

The bit about my mom makes me angry. How the hell does he know what my mom would want me to do? The way I figure it, he's just twisting the memory of my mom so I'll agree with him whichever way he pleases. The way I figure it, that's as much an indignity to a corpse as anything Dad's supposed to have done.

Hey mister.

It's Justin's squeaky high-pitched voice calling down from above. Looking up through cracks in the floor, I see how he's pushed out a loose barn board and has the .22 aimed at Jack.

Hey mister.

Jack gazes up at the barrel of the .22

Now, son, says him, that's not a toy and you need to stop pointing it at me.

Hey mister.

Did you hear what I said, son?

Hey mister.

Stop saying "Hey mister" and answer me.

Hey mister. My brother, Ford, may not have the guts to shoot you, but I'd sure like to try.

Now, son, that's not a great idea.

With Justin, there's no hesitation. There's no fear. Justin is Justin, a boy unto himself and no one I'll ever understand. There's a logic in his brain, that much I'll grant, and it unfolds with its own mathematical purity, but the laws it obeys come from another galaxy. I don't know much about astronomy, but I do know that Andromeda's the name of another galaxy. Maybe that's where Justin's thoughts come from. When I hear the chuff from above my head, I know he's fired the rifle, and I know there's nothing any of us can do about it. Jack lets out a yelp and grips the side of his left knee.

Justin calls down and says he was aiming for the kneecap but missed. He asks Jack if it's okay for him to have another try. Jack looks up from the blood oozing between his fingers and stares—a bit pained and a bit bewildered—at the cold blue eyes staring back at him.

What?

I just grazed you. Mind if I have another try?

No. Yes. I do mind.

Jack holds up both hands, which strikes me as a useless thing to do seeing as, from a bullet's point of view, fingers are no different than butter. He stumbles backwards onto his ass and crawls crabwise a few paces until he can get back onto his feet. Everywhere, there are people watching us through high-powered binoculars. The pair in the grave have given up their digging and are using it as a foxhole. Every minute or two, one of them pops up like a gopher and takes a peek through his binoculars. There's a policeman in full body armor who's done a lousy job of hiding himself at the north end of the greenhouse. If he stays there much longer, I'll have to introduce him to another of our fire-bales. Then there's the two along the line of trees north of the vegetable patch. All the watchers can see my face through the window downstairs, but they can't see anything of Justin except a hand's length of his gun muzzle.

I expected, the next time Justin pulled the trigger, I'd be more scared than I am. Instead, when I hear the chuff of the .22, there's a part of me that cheers for Justin even as another part of me wants to throw up because of the dark nerves that twist my stomach into knots. I know we shouldn't be shooting bullets at people. Then again, I know we aren't completely bad people for doing it. And I know Jack isn't completely good for the fact that he wears a badge and rolls around on the grass, gripping his other knee and crying out that we're crazy, we're all fucking crazy. I think he's being judgmental. I don't think we're crazy. We only seem crazy because Jack is so boring. If we had something better for comparison, like an artist or one of those gymnastic girls who can fold herself in half, we'd come off looking a whole lot better.

Jack screams at us to get our Dad. He wants to ask him face-to-face: what kind of a man lets his sons grow up to be monsters? I don't think this is fair, and for two reasons. First of all, Dad never had much to do with how we grew up; it was mostly Mom; and given that she's gone, it's only natural to suppose we'd turn a little wonky. And second of all, Jack shouldn't be lumping Justin and me together. The two of us are nothing alike. With Justin, it's as if a switch tripped in his brain when he hit a certain age—ten maybe—and everything's been off ever since. But with me, things are okay. Nobody talks to me who isn't there. Numbers don't have special cosmic meanings. People can't read my mind. Whatever I'm doing right now, it's because I'm stressed.

George, yells Jack, you get to the fucking window.

Dad knows the barn is surrounded by policemen with high-powered binoculars and long guns, so he hangs back in the shadows. Even so, he's close enough to the window that Jack knows he's there. There's a good mess of blood on the ground outside and Dad mutters that it's surprising Jack hasn't gone into shock yet.

George, how could you let them—

When Justin lets off a round into the left shoulder, Jack starts to sob and says things like Oh God and Please help me.

I can't watch anymore. While I have no great love for this policeman, it disturbs me the way my younger brother tortures him by picking him apart piece by piece. If all this began with Dad's dreams about an indignity to a corpse, what kind of dreams am I going to have? I bang on the wood above my head and call Justin down the ladder.

I stare out the north window, one pane broken, five others intact. A couple more days until the beginning of September. Looking up the slope to Mom's grave, I see that some of the leaves on the big maple are beginning to turn. By the end of September, the maple will be a glorious blaze of red. It lasts only a week and then she drops her leaves. By the end of October, her limbs are bare and they look like claws that scratch at the sky. Nothing stays the same. Some things come back in the spring, but other things don't.

When Justin climbs down the ladder, he says in a big voice that he's hungry and wants a snack. I take him into the cooler and we pick out a few carrots, good firm tubers with dirt still stuck to the skin. We stand over the drain and scrub the carrots clean under the hose, watching the dirt run away across the concrete floor. Fresh pulled this morning, the carrots have a taste you can't get from store bought. It's the taste of the land. It's the raw taste that disappears little by little as the carrots roll by the millions along conveyor belts, cleaned and cut and factory processed, dye-injected orange when they could just as easily be dye-injected pink with purple polka dots, shrink-wrapped in a plastic that gives women breast cancer and men nodules on their ball-sacs, shipped across the continent in smog-spewing trucks, laid out by the pallet in mega stores where happy smiling ladies put them in carts and trundle them out to minivans and back home to countertops of polished granite where they get sliced and diced and stuffed into more plastic for school lunches. Dad's told us before how things work when we lose sight of the land. Dad says that in the city people don't live in houses on the ground; they buy their houses in tall buildings and live like bees in a hive and never have to touch the ground, not even when they sleep.

Boys, you should come see this.

The three of us gather by the north-facing window. While we've been washing vegetables and munching on our snack and talking about how people live in cities, the police have been busy with their shovels. It looks like they've dug all the way down. The man who had arrived with the big black bag walks around the grave taking pictures with a fancy camera. When he's done, he hops into the grave and someone else passes the big black bag to his outstretched hands. Dad clenches his jaw and he tightens his hold on the rifle. I tell him no. They're working in the open now because they're not afraid of Dad anymore. They're in position so they can pick him off with a single shot. The only thing keeping Dad alive is Justin and me with our heads stuck close to his in the window. Dad lets go the rifle and backs away from the window, crumpling onto the floor by the wood crib. Justin and me, we keep watching what they're doing at Mom's grave. The black bag is full now and laid out beside the grave, and the man in black is climbing out of the hole. Two other men come from behind the maple and take hold of the bag, one at the foot and one at the head, and doing their best to keep the bag from dragging on the ground, they disappear with it over the crest of the knoll and down the back laneway.

They took Mom away, says me.

Because Dad's sitting away from all the windows, it's hard to tell, but I'd wager there's a tear glistening in the corner of his eye.

Well, I guess that's it, boys.

What's it? asks me.

They pulled up the body. They got what they wanted. We lost.

Every now and again, there's a moaning and a groaning that breaks our peace. Jack's outside on the ground, pawing away at the grass and calling for help in a feeble voice. He isn't about to die, but he isn't comfortable either.

Dad rises from his place by the crib and steps to the drain where he turns on the hose and scrubs his hands clean. He soaks a hand towel, then wrings it and drapes it cool around his neck.

Boys, says him, I'm sorry I got you into this mess. I think it's time I do right by your Mom and give myself up.

Give yourself up? Justin can't believe what he's hearing. Giving up doesn't belong to the logic.

Shouldn't you have a white flag or something? says me.

I'll be all right. And he sets an arm on my shoulder. You done good, says him. You both done good.

Dad rolls down his shirt sleeves and buttons himself up proper. He splashes water on his hair and slicks it back so he looks somewhat respectable despite the mess he's made of himself. He squares his shoulders and turns to us: You boys'll be fine. Pulling the door inward, he ducks his head to step below the lintel.

A spray of blood hits Justin and me full in the face. A bang like a cannon booms from the east and rattles all the windows. That's the order: blood, then a bang. I would have thought it was the other way around: I'd hear a bang and then blood would spatter across my face. But the gun that fired the bullet must have been a long way off, maybe in the trees along the eastern boundary of the property. Bullets travel faster than sound. The blood is like lightning, and the boom is like the thunder that comes afterwards, rumbling across the land with the sound of a thousand horses. Dad staggers and falls on his back near the drain, a hole in his chest, not big, maybe the size of my index finger, but probably a lot bigger out the back given the amount of blood pooling around his shoulders and his head and working its way down to the drain. I call out to him, but he's already gone. I can tell by the eyes. I've seen eyes like this once before, open and unfocused, gazing vaguely upwards to the ceiling, or somewhere beyond the ceiling, like they're trying to find the stars through all the mess we've built to block them out. I kneel beside Dad and try to prop him up, try to lay his head on my lap. The hair and shirt are soaked in blood, and soon I've got blood everywhere: it's soaked through my pants and I've wiped it on my shirt and on my cheeks and I've even dragged it through my hair.

Justin stands over Dad, staring first at the hole in his chest, then at the blood on my face. Justin has turned cold and distant. I can feel it in the way he moves. His limbs carry themselves with precision, like the bolt action in the Winchester—click, slide, click. Justin says they'll storm the barn if we don't move fast. I can't move at all. Justin pokes me in the shoulder, but I'm tired. I want this to be over. Ever since Mom died and we buried her by the tree, we've been living as if it's us against the world. I'm too small to live that way. Or the world's too big. Maybe both.

Justin walks away in disgust. Without getting close to the windows, Justin shoulders the rifle and fires, once, twice, three times until he hits the centre of the hay bale on the north side of the greenhouse. There's one prepared bale left on the south side and Justin has that one burning after two shots. In short order, he's got two good plumes of smoke rising on the east side of the barn. He stuffs his pockets with bullets and climbs up the ladder into the barn where he dumps all the oil down the ramp. Through cracks between the boards, he takes pot shots at the house and puts one through the living room window, or at least that's what he brags when he climbs back down the ladder. He says we need to send a message: we may not be fierce like a wolf anymore, but we still have to be reckoned with; we're a porcupine now, and we have to be reckoned with.

Things have turned hazy. It could have been the wind changing direction and blowing smoke into the barn, or it could have been a canister of tear gas lobbed through the door, but it isn't either of those that accounts for the haze. It's something in my head. The haze softens all the hard edges, makes it easier for me to look at the world, makes the bright red of Dad's blood and the deep black of Mom's body bag seem more like pastels. There's a breeze through the open doorway that buffets the haze, and every time it blows, it pushes me up and away from the scene. After a few minutes, the breeze has blown me far enough away that I must be higher than the barn, higher than the tallest tree, looking down on our land with the same view that a red-tailed hawk has when it soars above the fields. I don't have limbs anymore. My legs have detached themselves and walked away all on their own. My arms have flapped and flapped and taken flight. Come to think of it, I don't have a body anymore either; it's turned to a dry dust and blown away. I'm a head—that's all—bobbing along like a balloon.

Justin haunches beside me and drinks from his canteen.

I put a bullet through the living room window. Took three tries but I did it.

I don't care anymore, but I keep it to myself.

I figure I can hold ‘em off long enough to take care of Dad, says Justin.

Dad's dead, says me.

I know that, says him. You think I don't know that?

No, I'm just saying he's dead.

Justin fishes something from his shirt pocket, I can't see what. The tears in my eyes blur everything. Justin hands me the canteen and tells me to drink. It's only then that I realize how thirsty I am. I haven't had anything to drink since we holed up in the barn this morning and now it must be four or five in the afternoon—six or seven hours without a drop. After I empty the canteen, I hand it back to Justin. I stare down into Dad's face and notice how the eyes have gone cloudy. Or is it my eyes? Things are darker than they were. My body feels heavy. I have to lie back onto the floor, otherwise I'll fall over and hit my head. The concrete is cool. I close my eyes and wonder where this will take me.

PART IV - JACK

I'M SHIVERING ON the ground, when the older boy, the one called Ford, comes crawling out the east door all in a daze and first thing he does is puke. Oh my goodness, but there's an awful puddle of it by the time he's finished emptying his guts, and when he's done with the puking, all that's left is the dry heaves. I've got Josh McDuffie in my earpiece giving a detailed description of what I can see for myself. Josh is hunkered on the east side of the property, behind the remains of an old stone wall that runs north/south between the Barnes's and the Galsworthy's who are Presbyterian but that's neither here nor there. Josh is with Blaire or Blaine or whatever the hell his name is, and the two of them are playing babysitter to the fella from the tactical squad, the one that took out George. Oh, but what an awful business that is, and there'll be hell to pay for it too. A tough call, but when word gets out that George was shot right in front of the boys like that, the shit will go up from the Sarge to the Captain to the police chief, like a backed-up toilet 'til some politician smears it all around.

George was in a bad way, no question, but not bad enough he deserved a kill-shot, not like that. Thing is, I could've prevented this business if it weren't for getting laid out with a slug through my kneecap and another through my shoulder. The graze on my other knee is nothing. Neither's the shoulder for that matter. It's the right knee that's the problem, hurts almost as bad as when I had it bent sideways playing football in high school. After that, I was lucky to get on with the police. I'm gonna need surgery, no two ways, and who knows how bad it is. Kneecap's shattered, that's for sure, but there don't seem to be an exit wound, not like my shoulder with its neat hole coming out the back. When I fell, it must've done something to the mic because they couldn't hear a thing after that, kept yelling for me to wave my hand to signal I was okay, show one finger for no, two for yes, and me listening to all the chatter buzzing around the farm without a way for me to say: now wait a goddam minute here. If I'd had a hand signal to say that, or if the fellas at the command post had bothered to ask me more particular questions, I might've got them to back down.

The way they're calling it, George murdered his wife and forced the kids to take a stand with him in the barn. They're going on about Stockholm Syndrome and all that, and I'm thinking: that's why it's crazy to put these college educated types in charge. They just complicate things when a touch of common sense would go twice as far as any two college degrees. The fact is: they shouldn't be using their theories to go convicting George of murder when they ain't even done an autopsy yet. But they don't wanna wait for an autopsy. They wannna go home in time for dinner. Just blast the hell out of whatever stands in the way of dinner by saying George was a murderer who's turned his boys into Jonestown nut cases ready to drink the Kool-Aid on his say-so.

Only I don't see it that way. I don't know what I see. But it ain't that way. First thing I seen was Ford in town yesterday. He didn't strike me as a wild-eyed fanatic. Mostly he was pathetic, a kid wanting a pair of shoes who come to town filthy and hungry. You're not supposed to see shit like that except in the third world where they let kids get that way. I talked to Chester afterwards and he agreed. Him and me, we grew up with George. We all went together through school and our folks knew one another even before that, so we have a fair idea how George works, which is to say George don't work. Or didn't. He was the one of us who had a head full of ideas, but not so much gumption or we would've seen more evidence of those ideas when he took over his dad's farm. He was always speculating about the nature of this and that, or wondering what if, but that ain't much good any more than those college boys and their theories. I guess what saved George from a life of daydreaming was his marriage to Emily. Small wonder then that he come undone when she died. The college boys all think he was a complete whacko, but I think he was lost. That's it.

When I took Ford home yesterday, and then George and me had our chat in the drive, George didn't strike me as a man who'd lost his grip on reality; he struck me more as a man in grief who'd lost his wife. I didn't know then how he'd lost his wife, whether she'd run off alone or run off with another man or what, but I could see plain enough that it'd left him rattling around lost in his own house. When I come back this morning with Nadine Jenkins from Children's Aid, it weren't that I wanted to tear the kids away from him too. All I wanted was to make sure they was properly cared for while George got his head back together. Too bad George went and pulled a gun on me. Even that, I could've smoothed over with him. Even me standing in my boxer shorts, even that I could've forgiven. But when he went and took the Ruger, well then, it was out of my hands. I have to account for my sidearm and no amount of good old days, and AOTS, and beer at the legion hall, and small town courtesy will make that go away.

That's when I decided it was time to ask a few more questions. Between the story of Emily leaving and George getting all defensive on me, well, something felt off. I had no evidence of foul play, but my horse sense told me that George pulling a gun on me was the least part in all this. The first person I questioned was Ruth-Anne Hendershot. Well that was useless. Me sitting beside her in my underpants and speeding into town while she’s going on about the need for a proper Christian home. All I could use her for was to help pinpoint the date of Emily's disappearance which I pegged at sometime in the last week of June. After that I asked at the Ferguson's whether they'd seen anything strange and they mentioned a car in the drive the day before. Turns out Thelma Ferguson spends a lot of time in her front room watching comings and goings while she knits for the fall bazaar. The car she saw, well it come from the organic inspection people which put me on to their agent, which is Maggie Renfrew down on the eighth concession does this part time freelance. She don't know anything, but I push her a little and a light goes off in her eyes. There was a grave. They said it was for a dog but it was big enough it could've been for the mother. So we get her to come along and show us the spot. Well, once George starts taking pot shots at us, it's pretty clear this ain't no grave for a pet dog.

Aw Christ this hurts. It ain't a sharp pain like at first when the bullet went into my kneecap. More a dull throb so the pain comes in waves. I ain't gone shocky. Sure, there's a mess of blood, but it ain't buckets. No worse'n if I went to a blood donor clinic. Some juice would be good seein' as I'm a bit light-headed. A shot of whiskey would be better.

Problem is: those college boys figure George for everything that's gone down today. It's all George. It's George, the cold-blooded killer. It's George, the hostage-taker. It's George, the gun-crazed cop shooter. There they go, buzzing in my ear about how George shot me three times. All they seen of it was the muzzle of a rifle sticking out from behind the barn boards. They can't imagine it'd be one of the boys. But what a shocker it was for me to stare up into the muzzle of a gun and see a child's eyes starin' back at me—and not with normal eyes neither, but cold and dead, like the glass eyes of a stuffed bird. It was the younger one. What's his name? Justin? Starin' down at me like I was no more'n a groundhog or a rabbit. I'm not sure the college boys would know what I'm talkin' about if I tried to explain it to them. There's no evidence in it. No forensics. No science. All I got is a feeling and that don't count for squat in police work no more. But looking into that boy's eyes, a feeling's all I have to go on, because feeling is what's missing. There weren't a drop of feeling in those eyes.

If I was in charge of the investigation, which I ain't, I'd put my money on the younger boy for killing the mother. I bet anything he did it, and deliberately too. Maybe shot her with a .22 just like he shot me. And probably for nothing more'n that she told him it was past his bedtime. The rest—burying her in the ground and telling a story about how she left—that was probably George protecting his son. That'd explain why George acted so torn apart. How do you mourn your dead wife and protect the son that killed her all at the same time? When I look at it that way, it's a wonder we didn't find him hanging from the rafters.

And now Ford's come stumbling out the east door of the barn, falling onto his hands and knees, and puking 'til there's nothing left. I hear college boys buzzing in my earpiece. Most are all for rushing in to grab Ford, then into the barn for Justin. But the captain's got reservations. Maybe Justin's been warped by his father, thinks it's his duty to take a stand.

You okay, Jack? Give us a wave.

I wave the way the queen waves, with my hand pivoting from side to side.

Very cute, Jack. We'll have you out of there in no time.

What I want him to say is something more along the lines of: wave if you think the kid in the barn is a psycho killer who wouldn't hesitate to shoot a cop between the eyes. But they don't seem interested in my opinion. If that kid put the muzzle between the barn boards again and took a bead on me, I don't know what I'd do. Guess he's found something else to keep himself busy though.

Ford's still hunkered over on the ground, with a dribble of something hanging from the bottom lip and flapping like a spiderweb on a breeze. He stares for a minute at the great puddle of puke he's made, with a look on his face like he can't believe it all come from him. Josh and Blaine have come around the south end of the greenhouse, hovering on the far side of the burnt bale and a couple others that didn't catch fire, wondering what to do. They're saying things like looks okay and everything's clear and the captain's saying things like hold up a minute, boys and where's that other kid. While they're doing their hemming and hawing, a body comes up from behind and runs out in front of them. It's that Hendershot lady, the one who drove me into town yesterday and don't know how to shut up about her Christian this and her Jesus that.

I never noticed before how much a fat woman jiggles when she runs, and not in a good way neither. She must've been watching for the last hour or so from the south of the property, though they should've moved her away to the east so she'd be out of range of the barn. I know if I'd been George I might've taken shots at her. She must've bullied her way closer to the barn, saying she was a friend of the family, or telling an out-and-out lie like she was the sister. However she done it, she got herself close enough she could see Ford tottering out the doorway and onto the ground. At that point, I guess her sense of Christian charity kicked in and she tore up from the ditch and ran the hundred yards or so like a hippo with its ass on fire. When she passes Josh and Blaine, she calls them a pair of gutless do-nothings and goes on to the place where Ford is on his hands and knees. She’s already on the ground beside him, or as close beside him as her sense of smell will let her go, when Josh and Blaine look at one another and decide they'd better help out.

That Hendershot has one hand on the boy's shoulder and is coaxing him to his feet, folding him into her freakishly huge tits and patting him on the back, when Josh and Blaine call it in that they're at the east entrance to the barn. The captain cusses them out, but they figure they have no choice now that Hendershot has gone once again and poked her nose where it don't belong. She's got a reputation that way. They've got themselves positioned between Hendershot and the entrance. That way, if the kid aims a gun through the doorway, he'll hit a cop before he hits a civilian. Josh and Blaine get to either side of the doorway. Josh pokes his head inside, quick like. He lowers his sidearm and puts it back into the holster, then he steps inside. It ain't more'n five seconds before I hear a shout, not a shout of panic or distress, but of something else I've never heard before, or at least never at this volume. It's a shout of disgust, not the kind of disgust you hear when someone see's a kid puking his guts out, but disgust more on a cosmic scale.

Josh comes stumbling out of the barn, just the way Ford did, and crumples onto the patch of dirt worn smooth from people going in and out, then he unleashes a torrent of puke all his own. He's shouting Oh God, Oh God. Behind the shouting, I hear the sound of water. There's a tap running inside the barn and water splashing on the floor, and above this is a voice singing sweet and high-pitched like you'd hear in a cathedral choir. Justin is inside the barn, singing away like an angel and squirting water from a garden hose, while outside, Josh is screaming and wiping puke onto his shirt sleeve.

Now Blaine takes a turn. He lowers his sidearm and slides it back into his holster, then he ducks his head through the door. He turns all the way around and stands square on the threshold, scanning the basement of the barn from north to south. When he's done, he turns around again, pressing his back flat against the outside wall and gulping breaths. Blaine pushes off from the wall and steps behind Ford and Hendershot, spreading his arms wide and forcing them to move away from the door. Hendershot squirms around to look over Blaine's shoulder and pushes against his chest and says: Lemme see. I need to see. But he don't let her near the door. Keeps inching her out towards the greenhouse and south towards the road. Says: We need to get this boy to the paramedics.

Josh goes back inside the barn and while he's gone, I roll myself over and come up on my left knee which, apart from the gash, is in fine shape. It's a balancing game for me, because I can't topple to the right or I'll come down on my right knee and that would just about destroy me. At the same time, I can't use my right arm for support because that would be too painful, what with the hole in my shoulder. Maddie would call me an idiot and a damned fool for tryna get onto my feet, but she calls me that all the time anyways, so I've come to hear it more as her way of saying she loves me and, well, if she loves me, then who am I to disappoint her? I give a great heave and a swing of my left arm and hop up onto my left foot, swaying a bit, but steadying myself by gripping the handle of a wheelbarrow that sits nearby. The right knee smarts 'til my eyes water and my hands tremble. I hop three times 'til I'm against the barn and can prop myself upright without fear of falling over. There's a buzz in my ear as people from every quarter give me proper hell, telling me to slide back onto my butt and wait for the paramedics to carry me out on a stretcher. That would be the sensible thing to do. But who the hell ever said I was a sensible guy—or that this is a sensible job?

Josh comes outside again, carrying two rifles in one hand and my Ruger in the other. He lays them out on the grass beside the door, and when he straightens out, our eyes meet. His expression is grim. He shakes his head.

Jack, don't be a fool. There's paramedics coming.

I gotta see for myself.

You don't wanna see this.

I have to.

Don't do it.

What is it about someone saying don't that turns it automatically into a do? You'd think, as an officer of the peace, I'd have an interest in following other people's rules. But that only makes things worse. Us cops, we turn don'ts into dos, not because we're closet rebels, but because we honestly believe we stand outside the rules. The way I see it, we're like the referees in a hockey game. Because we don't play the game, we don't ever worry about landing in the penalty box.

Josh calls me a stubborn fool and ducks back into the barn while I work my way towards the door. The next time he comes out into the light, he's pushing the boy in front of him, his hand tight around the boy's left tricep and handling him pretty rough if you ask me, or rough for an eleven-year-old. The kid's soaked from head to toe, with stringy hair that falls across his eyes and hangs around his bare shoulders. He was wearing a T-shirt, but that's been ripped away and the remnants hang over the back of his blue jeans. To be truthful, his blue jeans ain't blue no more; they're closer to purple, what with all the blood. And all around the cuffs is soaked in it. When the kid comes out into the light, he's beaming and humming away. Even after Josh gives him a shove, he goes on humming. It's like he's on his way to a fucking picnic. When Hendershot gets a sight of him, she yells and waves, and that sets her giant tits waggling back and forth, and she says Oh, you poor dear and other nonsense like that. I wanna yell out that her poor dear just shot me three times, but the words get stuck in my throat; I'm as parched as a skeleton in Death Valley. Once I get into the barn, I'm gonna have a drink from that hose.

I take the last hop to the door, wincing at the pain in my knee and bracing myself in the door frame. It's dark inside. After laying out in the sun for a couple hours, my pupils have contracted to the size of pinpricks. I squint into the darkness and hop down the step onto the concrete floor. The first thing I see is the evaporator looming to the north side of the building. It blocks the north window, so the only light I see is narrow shafts radiating from the edges of the evaporator. The damp cool is a relief after lying on the hot ground. I hear the drip and gurgle of water down the drain and a creaking overhead. Hopping another step inside, I steady myself against a work bench where a couple red-tinged knives lie at odd angles.

I turn to the creaking sound and almost lose my balance at what I see: hanging from a hook in the center beam and swaying above the drain is George's body, or what's left of it. The kid—and I'm certain it's only the one of them what did this—he's field dressed his dad, then bled and skinned him—classic cuts, just like you'd do to a buck in hunting season. He's rammed a rod through each of his dad's shanks and used that to hoist him upside down. But first the kid must've gutted him. It's all there on the floor: the entrails, kidneys, liver, spleen, gall bladder, heart, lungs. Christ, the kid even cut out the testicles. Although Justin's no more'n fifty kilos, once he'd gutted his dad, and taking into account all the blood George had lost, it would've been easy to hoist the carcass. Hell, George was so skinny by the end of the summer, he'd mostly disappeared already. Once the kid had got his dad upside down, he slit the jugular and finished draining the body. There's the slit on the side of his neck. Then he cut the skin in a circle around each of the calves and slit it up the inside of each leg to the groin, peeling away the skin until he had enough in each hand that he could yank it down all the way to the head and shoulders. Jesus, but there's the skin stretched out on the work bench. What'll I tell Maddie when I get home? Will I ever be able to tell her anything?

That ain't the end of it, though. The captain and the medical examiner have driven around to this side of the field and they're coming up from the ditch and crossing the last stretch past the drive shed. Josh refuses to come with them, says he'll watch after the boy. Blaine says more or less the same thing. Paramedics bring up the rear, although one of them hurls his lunch and has to leave while the captain cusses him out for contaminating a crime scene. The other paramedic forces me to stop hopping around before I fall over and make my knee worse. She eases me onto the floor and stretches me out so she can bandage and splint my right leg. She injects me with painkiller and douses my wounds with an antiseptic something-or-other, and while she does her best to hold my attention with all her questions, I can't help but stare at the body hanging from the ceiling not a car's length away from me. The captain and the medical examiner are circling the scene with flashlights and trying hard not to muck up their shoes with blood and innards. As they walk their circuit, the medical examiner touches a latex-covered finger to the tip of the rod that runs through George's shanks, and that motion is enough to set the body rotating in a leisurely twist. From my place on the floor, I gaze up and back, watching the blood-drenched hair turning its way to the ear, the ear turning its way to the cheekbone, the cheekbone turning its way to the nose, and when at last George has turned to face me, I see the eyes.

Only there ain't no eyes. The kid has cut the eyes cross-wise in X's. Whatever jelly was in those eyes has dribbled out, or been squeezed out, or been plucked out. Whatever happened, those eyes ain't seeing a damn thing now.

Once they've got me stabilized and splinted and IV'd and stretchered out to the side of the road, it feels to me like I'm floating up, up and away in a beautiful fucking balloon. I'm telling them to call Maddie and tell her I'll be home in half an hour, then I'm telling them not to bother about it; I'll call her myself. As they wheel me to the ambulance, they push me past Hendershot, who leans against a police car, an arm around each of the boys and pulling them close. There's Nadine from Children's Aid, pushed outside the circle; she don't stand a chance here. She's government. Everybody knows government don't stand a chance when it comes up against Jesus Christ and the Lord God Almighty. I smile at the boys and wave at them the way I waved when I was laid out on the ground, pivoting my hand like I'm the Queen of England. Ford gives a half smile. Justin's expression don't change. When I pass Justin, I make a finger-pistol and fire it.

See ya 'round, Tex, I says.

I may as well be drunk. Those painkillers are really starting to take hold. I'm floating off the face of the planet now and I'm somewhere past Mars. Wonder if they've got Ruger thirty-eights on Mars.

PART V - LEONARD WINTER II

SEPT. 25TH, 2---

Dear Chester,

It was a pleasure talking to you informally last week. We always enjoy talking to our associates. It keeps us current with trends on the ground, so to speak. In addition, our informal chat gave us some background so that we could better understand the context of your more formal proposal which we received at the beginning of this week and which we thoroughly reviewed thereafter.

Nevertheless, as fascinating as your concerns appear, we must confess some puzzlement as to which of these concerns is driving your proposal. To be honest, we are not sure the puzzlement is entirely ours, and may have to do more with the fact that you yourself may be experiencing some of this puzzlement. We don't mean this to sound disparaging. On the contrary, if we understand correctly, the sad events you spoke of happened recently, and so it may be too soon for you to know, even within your own heart, what precisely is driving your proposal.

Let us be more direct. While the idea of a green burial facility has a certain cachet, especially given the times, nevertheless it is not the sort of venture which the Winter Family of Companies wishes to support nor is it the sort of activity with which we wish to associate our brand. The idea of placing a body directly into the ground is repugnant to us for two reasons: first, we believe it would evoke in the average client a feeling of revulsion, which is not the sort of feeling any businessman should seek to evoke from a potential client; and second, such a shift in our operations would effectively put us in a conflict of interest position vis-à-vis two of our most important subsidiaries, viz. Casket Wholesalers Inc. and Cherry-Red Embalming Fluids LLP. Simply put, it cannot be reconciled to the interests of our shareholders.

I recognize there was once a time when the Beamsworths, like many of our associates in the Winter Family, held a station of considerable influence within a rural community, every bit as important as the country doctor or the clergyman. Sole proprietors such as yourself were the backbone of our country's rural economy. But times have changed, as have the economic realities of our world. Consolidation, acquisitions and mergers, branding, globalization, vertical integration. These are today's realities. The Beamsworths had the foresight to recognize these realities even while others struggled to accept them. That is why your father became an associate within the Winter Family, and that is why—or so I believed—you continued this association after your father retired.

There are obvious advantages to standardized procedures. From the point of view of a single location in a single small town, those advantages may not seem significant, but when you apply them to nearly two thousand locations across a continent, the savings become substantial. I recall a complaint you made in passing about the impersonality of our embalming procedures, suggesting that they were somehow an indignity. On the contrary, it is precisely in their impersonality that our procedures become invested with a dignity that was impossible until the modern era. The procedural efficiencies which we at the Winter Family bring to the business of passing are the ultimate celebration of the very methods which make our age great. One might almost say that in our work we strive to embody the truth of the modern world. What could be more dignified than that?

Yet you have proposed to purchase a one hundred acre lot and to apply for a zoning by-law amendment so you can convert a farm—an organic farm no less—into a chapel and green burial ground. If we understand correctly, you propose to forego embalming altogether, and instead, to clean your clients, wrap them in a shroud, and lower them unprotected into the ground. In other words, you would make it easier for the worms. But what is more, and which I can hardly comprehend, you will not permit headstones or grave markers of any sort but will track grave locations by GPS.

How can you seriously suppose that the Winter Family would wish to associate its highly valued and respected brand with such practices? They strike us as a reversion to more primitive times. As sad as the fate which has befallen your friend, there is good reason why he found himself in conflict with the authorities. You don't go around simply digging holes and dumping bodies into them. Where is the dignity in that?

And so it is that we must reject your proposal. There is, of course, nothing to prevent you from selling your interest to a suitable purchaser and pursuing this proposal independently. That, however, may place you in conflict with the non-competition agreement which is an essential term of our association and which we would be unlikely to waive without due compensation.

Wishing you all the best in all your undertakings,

Leonard Winter II