Hello. I did mention things would be coming a little quicker this week, did I not?
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Will had hoped to meet Maartens, but wasn’t sure how long he could ignore the demands of his stomach. He’d tried to kill time by rearranging his campsite, which affirmed what a great job he’d done in minimizing his existence. He was back outside after fifteen minutes, deciding ogling his new kitchen floor wasn’t going to make time pass any faster. He strolled the shorn boundary around the house, worked his way down to the riverbank, threw a few sticks into the brown water, and took himself back to the edge of the of the windbreak. Closer inspection of the tended soil revealed row after row of tiny, green shoots. It didn’t take the eye of a farmboy for Will to recognize sprouting corn.
“Knee high by the Fourth of July,” he said aloud. It was a saying he got from his grandfather. He took a step into the bare earth and settled his weight on it. He stepped back and looked. He’d left a perfect cast for his shoe. He wondered how long it would take to cover the entire field with them.
As it went, the shiny floor in the kitchen may have lost its capacity as distraction and time waster, but Will found the cornfield as fresh and intriguing as a new toy. He walked perimeter, crossing west, following the top of the riverbank, occasionally leaving the grassy edge to take a winding path through the turned soil, returning to the bordering foliage to turn back and admire his tracks. At the western edge, Will turned his attention to the property beyond the trees.
There was a yard, an acre of neatly mown grass. It surrounded a house that, in design, was not very different from his grandparents. It was another foursquare, though a smaller model. The roof was hipped, as was his, but shallower without the wide dormered windows. It was shingled in green. The house was bright white clapboard, as was nearly every house in Limburg County that wasn’t in a town. The yard was treeless, with a backyard garden, clothes lines and a swingset and slide. He followed the edge of the windbreak toward the county road. The front porch was open, roofed and posted at the corners. On either side of the stoop and lining the sidewalk were flower beds. There were large, circular flower beds on either side of the sidewalk just before it met the gravel driveway. A pole rose from the center of each. From one flew the American flag, the other supported a Marten house. Well up the driveway, several outbuildings stood on either side.
Will was tempted to move into the trees for a closer look. The bang of a closing screen door stopped him. A man about his age crossed the porch. Will watched as he walked down the sidewalk. Instead of heading directly to one of the outbuildings, he turned toward the windbreak. Will suffered an instinctive rush of panic as the man moved into the trees. He bounded away from the edge of the field and ducked behind an oak. Like a little kid, he peeked from a crouch, feeling a brief thrill when the man emerged. There wasn’t thirty feet between them.
The guy didn’t stand there long, maybe a minute with his hands on his hips before he turned back into the trees. Will stayed in his crouch and waited until he heard a large door open, a vehicle start and drive away. He waited a bit longer, until he saw a pickup truck moving along the road toward Venlo. The trip around the rest of the field was made at a greater pace moving almost at a jog until he came to the access from the county road. The grade from the field to the pavement was about half as steep as the ditch on either side. Something in the back of his mind brought him to a halt.
Will had been over this place dozens of times, riding on a tractor or in a truck with his grandfather. “Hold on and here we go, Willy!…” He put his hand to the back of his head and rubbed, trying to make the connection, and it was suddenly there. Culvert. It was the most persistent and repeated argument he’d ever known his grandparents to have. “What do you say we make it back out of here alive, just to disappoint your Nan?” They’d argued endlessly about putting a culvert in, his grandmother—with sound reason—insisting the drop from the road to the field was too steep to negotiate safely.
“Someday you’re going to roll the tractor’” she’d scold. “I’ll leave you to lay out there until the buzzards pick you clean. Go and get yourself killed, but you’re not taking that boy to the devil with you.”
His grandfather always answered with a wink at Will before telling his grandmother, “Then let me put that cut in behind the machine shed.”
“And tear a ragged hole through my lilacs. That’s a fine thing for people to look at on the way to the house.”
Will had always stood in silent agreement with his grandmother. He’d taken a few trips on the tractor, first settled in the lap of his grandfather and, a few years older, leaning on a fender, when he was certain he was destined to end up as a vulture’s dinner. Whenever it had gotten to the point that her dire predictions stood a chance of coming to fruition, his grandfather would make a concession and have a dumptruck load or two of gravel added to the ditch. And while Will may have found a great deal of merit in his grandmother’s concerns, he never once spoke up. Any minute spent with Gran was worth the risk of grisly death or dismemberment.
His grandfather never did put down a culvert, not even when Nan became so exasperated she’d threatened to call the County to put one in at their expense. Will had quit riding tractors by then, and Gran didn’t cave, even under the threat of writing a check to the local government. The argument had finally been dropped, for all he knew. His time at the farm had greatly diminished by the time he’d reached his teens. And when Gran died, it was a clogged artery that killed him. Will had no doubts he rather have wound up buzzard bait.
Just before reaching the road, Will stepped into the ditch. Under the gravel slope, it was there, the dark mouth of the tube. He dropped to a knee, then lower, until he was almost lying flat. He saw a circle of light at the other end. Gran had died in March, at least a month before he’d prep the field for a crop. Nothing had been put in that year, or any year after. A farmer’s retirement, he’d heard Nan say. If Gran died never putting in a culvert, Nan wasn’t going to, either. She’d never done anything against his wishes or behind his back while he was alive. She wasn’t about to start just because he was dead.
Will stood and looked back at the house. He wasn’t one to jump to conclusions. He felt no primordial tie to eighty acres of dirt or a fierce need to defend it. He wasn’t about to get territorial over a piece of property he’d not set foot on in more than twenty years. But, there was no way in hell he was about to let some fucker pull one over on Gran and Nan.
So, a puzzle, it seems, for our hero. Ah, but more changes, difficulties, complications and, unfortunately, unpleasantry is coming his way… Yes, indeed…