Seeing Buffalo
by David Rogers
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
part 2
Eight days later, my car rattled over the wooden bridge that surely needed a good safety inspection, across the creek that gave Horseshoe Farm its name. The farm had been called that since long before anyone kept horses there.
Sterling Branch, as the creek is known, loops in a long curve — which, at some point in history, must have reminded someone of a horseshoe — around the acres that make up the farm. The loop is far too long to see in its entirety from any one place, but it is obvious on a map. At one corner of the farm, strands of the loop run close together. There, you can stand on one bank and throw a stone across the ten-foot bar of solid ground between the two loops of the stream, to the other bank on the far side of the loop.
A day’s work with a shovel could turn the farm into an actual island. Following the water, though, you would travel miles to reach the other side. It is as if nature picked those acres to set aside from the rest of the world, with the creek as sentinel. To enter that world, you must acknowledge the water and be acknowledged, if the stories about ghosts and water spirits were true. Not that I believed them for a second.
The farm was half-wooded, half-pasture, or what had been pasture, anyway. Saplings and wild roses were taking over many of the disused fields. I doubted if anyone knew exactly how many acres it covered. It was bounded on all sides by the creek, which had been known to flood during especially heavy rains, though never enough to reach the house or barn. On the side where the loop nearly converged with itself lay the mostly-wooded state park. Lewis and Clark would have felt right at home.
I did not know or care to know exactly which of the dozen or so horses on the farm had lineages connected with something vaguely prestigious: race winners or show horses of some kind. They represented just another of my dad’s lapsed obsessions. Aunt Will must have known Dad was unlikely to make equestrian history. Maybe she figured taking care of the horses, making sure they had food and water and a barn that didn’t leak, would give him something harmless to do between other temporary pursuits and perhaps riskier ambitions.
I had brought plenty of books to read over the summer and no plans to do anything else except feed and count horses and explore fields and woods and compare them to memories of the landscape formed when I was a child. Everything looks bigger when you are smaller.
Reading and reminiscing would surely get old soon enough, so maybe I would spend some time thinking about whether or not to go back to school in the fall or... what? That was the big question. The only thing I felt sure of was, I wasn’t going to be a farmhand for the rest of my life. Nice place to visit. Didn’t want to live there.
When I called Aunt Will back to tell her I would take the job, but I wasn’t promising anything more than the summer, I asked who had been taking care of the horses. She said my dad had been there up until that week when not haunting the church, but he was now gone to start his retreat. I was therefore surprised and a little alarmed to see the front door of the house ajar.
I parked at the end of the driveway, at the edge of the broad front yard and stepped out of the car. The door on the wide porch was shaded but definitely open. I wondered if Dad had already abandoned his retreat and come back to the farm. Or perhaps changed his mind and never left.
I had not spoken to the man in over six months. The last time, he called on a Friday night, when I was at school, “to check on me.” He was sentimental-drunk, verging on incoherent by the time I hung up. The time before that, he was sober but still rankled that I had chosen to go to college in another state, “with all those Democrats, hipsters and liberals.” For Ernest James, those were about the most serious insults possible. I doubted he was even registered to vote, but he always spoke in favor of right-wing causes. Another reason we didn’t talk much.
While I stood on the edge of the grass, remembering and staring, a young woman with short brown hair, wearing dirty coveralls tucked into ankle-high rubber boots, stepped out the door. She appeared to be about my height and age, twenty-ish, tall and lanky but very much girl-shaped. And pretty, coveralls and dirt or not. She waved and called, “There you are, finally!” as if we were were old friends, though I had never seen her before. Hers was a face worth remembering.
I started across the grass as she came down the porch steps. We met in the middle of the yard.
“You look surprised to see me,” she said. “Your Aunt Willa asked me to feed the horses. She didn’t know if you would be here today or tomorrow.” She looked me up and down and said, “Looks like school is treating you well.”
“Do I know you?” I said at last, trying not to sound rude but wondering if I should be rude. It’s not every day you find a stranger in your ancestral farmhouse, acting like you and she are old friends.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess we haven’t seen each other in a long time. I’m Patty. Well, Pasiphae, but everyone calls me Patty. I live across the creek and up the road. We used to play tag when we were about ten years old, I guess. Don’t you recall? Then we must have gone in different directions.”
A twinkle of recognition seemed to spark in the back of my mind and a dark shadow of memory. “I think we must have been something like six or seven,” I said. The memory shadow faded and vanished. “I did play games of tag and hide and seek with... someone.”
“Yes. That was it. Hide and seek, in the woods. Also in the fields,” she said. “We trampled down grass to make mazes. Pretended we were bulls and cows. The grass was almost as tall as we were. Taller, if we were on hands and knees.”
“There were mazes in the barn, too. Made with bales of hay. The rectangular ones,” I said, smiling at the memory. That one clarified, like water when mud settles to the bottom of the creek or washes downstream. “The bales were bigger than I was. Don’t know how I managed to move them.”
“I should be getting along,” Patty said. “I’m not even really supposed to be here right now. I guess you can handle everything. The horses are out in the fields. Food and water all taken care of.”
“Right... thanks,” I said, a bit confused by her switch in tone from childhood reminiscence to goodbye, gotta run. I also wondered where else she was supposed to be. “Stop by tomorrow or the next day, and we can catch up,” I said. “I’ll show you around the farm.”
It occurred to me she might know the place better than I did. In any case, it would be an excuse to spend time with her. She was too pretty not to want to know better, and I had no girlfriend, as such. Girls who were friends, yes. Some who were very close friends but no commitments, and everyone scattered to the four winds, at least for the summer.
Before I could say anything else, she turned and walked swiftly up the driveway. “You want a ride?” I asked, looking around for a vehicle she might have driven and seeing none.
“No thanks, I like to walk,” she called over her shoulder.
“Wait... Remind me where you live again?”
“Other side of the creek,” she said, not slowing down. “Easy to find, if you need me.”
Strange girl, I said to myself and went inside. After the long drive from school, I desperately needed to use the bathroom. Fortunately, it was down the hall on the right, where I remembered. Finished, I looked myself over in the long mirror on the back of the bathroom door: brown hair a shade darker than Patty’s, low-top Converse basketball shoes, jeans ripped in the fashionable places, and my X-Files t-shirt. “Well, you don’t look much like a farmer, but you’ll do for now, I guess,” I told the mirror. But I would at least need to find some boots soon. You can’t hang around a farm for long without stepping in mud or other wet, squishy stuff.
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Copyright © 2021 by David Rogers
