Excerpt from the novel This Is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You
Our first spring on the farm came following our first Midwest winter and everything was a surprise. After living in a crowded neighborhood in Portland, three acres of hilly pastureland with many more below of grass cattle-field felt like an old country song — wide open spaces, the freedom of nature, virtue of the earth, easy pace.
The farmhouse was a white two-story built somewhere near the first World War. It sat on a triangle of land with a road on the eastern edge, hills and woods on all sides, a small pond to the west beyond our property line, and plenty of open ground for farming.
In front and behind the house were black walnut trees, mulberry, and oak; below it, as the field began to slope downhill to the west, a three-room barn.
Along the west-facing side was a low wooden deck with a trellised railing around it. On the opposite end of the house, eastward, a covered porch. You entered through the mud-room using the south-facing door and from there it was the kitchen, large with a big white double-oven, then the bedrooms branching off the kitchen, and a small sitting room with windows looking out across the road to a neighboring farmhouse an acre or so away, and beyond that rolling, wooded hills. At the foot of the hills, the railroad track ran along the Missouri River. You couldn’t see it, but on clear, quiet nights you could hear the river trains blowing their whistles high and long as they made their way north to Atchison or south to Kansas City.
Frankie and Jude had the large front bedroom and Frankie had the second story attic for an office — a well-lit room with warm dark wood floorboards and slanted walls where the roof made its A-frame.
My bedroom was an old solarium — two walls of windows on the northwest corner of the house with baby blue plank board walls and white and yellow trim. In the beginning, I had a twin-size mattress Frankie’s stepmom gave me pushed against one wall with a thin maroon thrift shop blanket and a dark blue pillow from a cast-off sofa. In my suitcase I’d brought a few books and a dozen copies of The New Yorker (from my unpaid subscription I’d signed up for under the name “Imma Nidiot”) which sat in a tattered, water-stained stack by the bed next to a mason jar full of pens and my tape Walkman with its solitary cassette (a Will Oldham mix Charlie made me my last night in town after Ethan dropped me off). Besides that, the room was empty.
The barn was empty too. On warm days I would open the big garage-style doors and sit on an upturned bucket and stare out into the fields. We had no mower yet so the prairie grass had grown tall. It moved in the breeze like a sea, swirling, lifting, dropping in waves. It was fragrant — an earthy, verdant smell that was part dew from the morning and warming soil and an indefinable sharpness that smelled like a world long passed, a world of the plains and primordial skies and the quiet days before the settlers came and kicked into motion the events that would ruin it all.
It was good to watch the prairie grass move. You could let your mind go inward as you spent hours sitting, watching the fields. It was the first time in years I’d let myself be calm and accept the happiness in having zero responsibilities beyond the basic upkeep of my own existence. The hustle was off the table (for a while). I had to eat, drink water, get out of bed at some point — beyond that, my day was free. This was new.
Leaving Portland I’d let my cellphone contract lapse when the bills went to collections. TV and internet were outside our budget, so the distractions we had back on the coast were gone overnight. Our days were quiet, undemanding; they were slow and long and it was soothing to feel the day sprawl out in front of you, to have nothing insubstantial dragging at your attention.
The last resident of the farmhouse had been a drug cartel hitman on the lam up from Albuquerque. When Frankie, Jude, and I were signing the papers on the place, the landlord’s father, who did the maintenance and collected rent for his son, told us the story.
(Continued in the novel This Is the End of Something But It’s Not the End of You
