Laughter in the Wind (2 page)

What’s wrong with me? Or are they the ones that are crazy?

Sandy apparently noticed she had remained withdrawn from them all evening and on the way home attempted to discover what was wrong. Rebecca wasn’t sure what was wrong or how to even begin to explain so she made an excuse about being up late all week cramming for a test in her college algebra class. The excuse must have rung true because Sandy didn’t press her further.

When Sandy dropped her off at her house it was ten-thirty, still early for a Saturday night. Rebecca suspected Sandy would meet Connie and Pam again in Freedom, the next town south of Springtown where they had all attended high school together and where the other three lived. She didn’t mind that she hadn’t been invited along for more fun cruising.

Her parents were already asleep and the house was dark and quiet. She stepped quietly down the hall and to her room where she sprawled across her bed and stared out the window. Her mind turned in circles like a runaway Ferris wheel and she wasn’t sure how to get it to stop. At her high school graduation, everyone had said that the world awaited the graduates, a world full of possibilities. Why did it feel now like the world around her had grown smaller? It was as if she had missed something, like a door to part of her life had closed behind her but another door hadn’t opened in its place, or maybe she just hadn’t been looking when it did. She imagined herself in different scenarios: in a dorm room at a four-year college, standing beside the perfect man, or as an accomplished professional in one career or another. Nothing seemed right.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw two small lights, like headlights, out her bedroom window. She guessed they were probably a mile away but was surprised when she couldn’t place where they would be coming from. She had stared out that window thousands of times over the years and couldn’t remember ever seeing lights there before.

Oh well, maybe I’m seeing things. Guess I really am crazy.

She gave up thinking about it all and went to bed. Her head hit the pillow about the same time as the strangers’ car hit the blacktop.

Chapter Two

A week later, Halloween weekend had been put out of her mind. Rebecca awoke with a single thought: fishing. She realized as she dressed for the cool outdoors how much she loved Saturday mornings. It was the only day of the week she felt totally free. No classes, no work and no family dinners meant no responsibilities and no watching the time. On this Saturday, the first weekend of November, she planned to hike across a couple of pastures to fish in her uncle’s catfish pond. It would have been quicker to drive but she enjoyed walking through the fields, seeing the changes the seasons brought to the plants and animals around her. She found it relaxing after being cooped up in a brick school building most of the week.

“Mom, I’m walking over to Uncle Jim’s catfish pond,” she yelled into the house as she headed for the garage to gather her pole and tackle box.

“Did you take a round bale out for the cows like your father asked?” her mother asked as she emerged around the corner of the garage.

“No, but I’m going now.” Rebecca put her tackle box back on the shelf and retraced her steps to the house. She donned a heavier jacket with a hood and a pair of lined leather gloves. Her rubber boots were already on so all that was left was getting the tractor key from the key rack by the door. “I’ll be back in a few,” she told her mother as she passed her on her way to the tractor.

She really didn’t mind feeding the cows and when her parents had suggested she take on more chores when she graduated from high school, she jumped at the chance for this job over something like housework. Some of it she tolerated but endlessly dusting her mother’s knickknacks she hated with a passion.

She fired up the tractor then maneuvered it over to the rows of round bales she and her father had brought in from the hayfield the previous June. Backing up to the nearest bale, she drove the spike on the back of the tractor into the center of the bale then used the hydraulic lift to pick up the bale. Climbing down from the tractor, she opened the gate to the pasture.

“Come on, Daisy, back up.” She slapped the bony hip of the black cow remaining steadfastly in the center of the opening to the pasture. Daisy was one of her favorites but was also one of the most stubborn cows in their herd. Finally satisfied they were far enough back, she jogged back to the tractor, climbed up and drove quickly through the gate. She continued out into the field without shutting the gate, knowing the cows would follow the hay and the tractor.

When she reached the slope where she would unroll the hay, she climbed down again, removed the green netting from the hay then pushed the cows out of her way to get back to the side of the tractor so she could climb back onto it. She lowered the bale to the ground then eased the tractor forward, sliding the bale off the spike. She pulled the tractor around to the uphill side of the bale, honked a few times to move the cows out of her way and used the loader on the front of the tractor to roll the bale down the slope. The bale unrolled as it slowly tumbled down the hill and the cows quickly stepped up and began eating hay along the length of the yellow path it left.

Rebecca stood on the tractor and counted the cows and their calves. “All present and accounted for,” she said aloud.

She turned the tractor around and drove it out of the field. After parking it beside the rows of bales, she shut and latched the gate. “Now it’s time to fish,” she said.

Her mother heard her come into the house to change jackets and followed her back outside afterward. “Be back by five,” she said, shaking her head as she watched Rebecca gather worms from her worm bed then pick up a smelly bag of chicken livers and toss it in a bucket to take along.

“Yes Mom,” Rebecca groaned. Actually she had no other plans for the day and would probably be home well before then, but she felt like she should protest a little just to remind her mother she wasn’t a kid anymore. She would be nineteen in four months and she had been a college student for the past three months. She headed out across the yard to the pasture fence, her mind already moving ahead to the upcoming battle between her and the fish, or at least to a few hours lazing on the pond bank letting the fish steal her bait.

It was a cool morning, only thirty-eight degrees, but it was supposed to hit sixty degrees by two o’clock. Fishing today probably wouldn’t be good but Rebecca didn’t care. It wasn’t really about catching fish. Something about sitting on the bank of a pond or river, watching the water move and listening to it lap gently onto the bank, was as pleasurable to her as the ballet she had attended the previous year with the High School Honor Society. She didn’t want to miss out on what might be the last nice weekend of the year for being outside. This time of year in Missouri, the weather could change on you suddenly and there could be snow on the ground the following weekend. Just as likely, a sudden warm spell could pass through with record high temperatures. Rebecca was familiar with the uncertainties of a Missouri autumn and wasn’t taking chances.

In the back of her mind, she admitted that fishing would give her an opportunity to think and maybe she would finally be able to sort out some of the chaos that was going on in her head. Sometimes she felt like she was spinning her wheels, yet she knew she was taking steps that should keep her life moving forward. She was more than halfway through her first semester of classes at the community college in Rockford where she attended morning classes and worked a work-study job in the afternoon. Deciding on a major was a task she had deemed currently impossible, so she was taking the basics toward an Associate of Arts degree until she could figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Her tentative plan was to move to a larger university after a couple of years. The thought of this frightened her some, especially when she tried to imagine life away from the farm.

Rebecca crossed the fence into the second pasture, picked up her things from where she had pushed them under the fence and continued her hike. While she doubted she could be happy staying in this small area all of her life, she also dreaded the thought of leaving a place where she knew everyone and was known by everyone. She had grown up as the middle grandchild in a generational group of forty-five, most of them living within a twenty-mile radius. For several generations, her father’s family had lived in the area, so distant cousins lived in all of the surrounding communities. The feeling that someone was watching out for her was ever-present and no one was a stranger. Sometimes life here felt stifling but usually it just felt good to know you always belonged. This secure feeling was something she knew she would have to leave behind.

As she crossed the second pasture she glanced over at the old Peacock Cemetery in the northwest corner of the pasture. There hadn’t been a burial there for years and some of her school friends claimed it was haunted, not too much of a worry on a bright sunny morning. Something seemed different about the cemetery today though, and she stopped to really look for a few seconds. The gate had been hanging crooked for years but it had been closed and latched two weeks ago when she had last cut through the pasture on foot.
Maybe someone was up here fooling around on Halloween.

She and her father had talked about fixing up the old cemetery someday, maybe putting a new fence around it and leveling up the ground. No one was caretaker for the cemetery anymore and people only visited it in attempts to see a ghost. Rebecca felt it was a shame that all of those interred there had been forgotten by the world.

As she walked up to the gate, she was afraid she would see vandalism. Instead she saw a fresh mound of dirt in front of an old headstone. The inscription on the stone was nearly worn away by the weather but by kneeling close to it she could make it out.

MARY J. FARTHING

March 1, 1907 – February 3, 1933

“Sad. She was so young.” Rebecca spoke quietly but her voice sounded much louder in the still morning air.
Only eight years older than me.
She stood and looked around for any other signs of disturbance to the cemetery. The loose dirt near the mound revealed a couple of different shoe prints and the grass was trodden down around the headstone and in a path to the gate but the rest of the cemetery looked as if a human had not been there for many years. Her curiosity nearly got the best of her as she considered looking for a stick to loosen the dirt so she could move it aside and discover whether something had been hidden there. Her curiosity was stifled as she recalled her father’s warnings about cave-ins of old graves. As she walked back out the gate, she stopped to carefully close it. She picked up her tackle box and pole then turned to walk away.

Her attention was captured by broken and leaning grass in two parallel lines outside the fence. She recognized them as tire tracks and they headed from the cemetery in a gentle curve until they were out of sight around a small grove of trees. A memory of headlights on Halloween night returned to her and she knew immediately this was where the lights had been. She assumed the old lane the tracks followed came out beside the old house she knew was down the road from her uncle’s house. She thought about following the tracks but decided against it, heading on her way after latching the crooked gate, her thoughts still preoccupied with the fresh mound of dirt.

The area of disturbed dirt wasn’t large enough for a coffin, not even a very small one. Maybe a shoe box or something that size could have been buried there, maybe even a small, beloved pet. But Mary Farthing had died in 1933 and surely there weren’t any pets, even parrots, that could outlive their owners by more than eighty years.

Rebecca wasn’t even sure there would be anyone around who would remember Mary Farthing. She decided she would take another walk that day, after fishing of course. Her grandmother lived past her house about a mile and might have some ideas.

* * *

Rebecca’s first cast set the tone for the day. She immediately snagged her line on an old post at the bottom of the pond, left over from when a fence had divided the pond in half. “Shit!” she said loudly as she snapped her line. She tried to avoid cussing for her mother’s sake but she enjoyed being able to let go and say what she felt when she was out of earshot of others. She quickly slipped the end of the line through the eye of another hook and tied it into place with practiced fingers then used needle-nose pliers from the tackle box to squeeze a couple of split-shot weights onto the line above the hook. The small knife she always carried in her pocket trimmed the end of the line. Then she baited her hook and tried again.

She caught a couple of small catfish, but mostly her bait fed the fish. Her attention was not on the vibrations coming through her line as the fish nibbled the worms or liver from her hook, but on that mysterious pile of freshly overturned dirt at Mary Farthing’s grave. Early in the afternoon, she gave up on fishing. Feeling generous, she threw the remainder of the liver into the pond for a free meal for the fish if they could beat the turtles to it. She wasn’t sure if she would get back to the pond before spring and she knew her mother wouldn’t allow her to keep the old liver in her freezer until then. As far as moms go, her mother was pretty understanding, but she knew better than to push her luck.

She gathered up her things, including the empty chip bag and Vienna sausage can from which had come lunch. The Vienna sausages were a common meal for her when fishing, a tradition started by her father when he first began taking her to the river. Rebecca realized as she started the trek back toward her house that she hadn’t spent any of her fishing time as planned, thinking about where her life was headed.

She walked back across the fields, turning south after dropping her tackle and pole behind the barn at her house. If she took them to the house, her mother might want to go along and then they would have to drive. Rebecca was enjoying her time alone, walking through the cool, crisp autumn air. Her reverie was interrupted by a piece of tin clanging loudly where it had pulled free from the screws that held it in place on the back corner of the barn roof. Rebecca made a mental note to tell her father about it before the wind caught it and carried it off into the field. She cut across the back pasture behind the barn to the county road on the other side, climbed over the fence and followed the dusty gravel road to her grandmother’s house.