When Sasha reaches the old Keller farmhouse later, it grins toothlessly at her from between the withered gnarls of the pecan trees. A Grey Gardens gloom surrounds the place, the windows of the top floor broken out, the front door boarded over. It looks like it’s been abandoned for about a hundred years. Kudzu—that blanket of invasive plant they say is slowly swallowing the whole of the South—already sprawls in a heavy tangle across half the roof and one side. That choking vine will put that place down before too long.
It has depth, that greenery, a swampy density. No air reaches the inner chambers of those vines. When Sasha and Lil were teenagers, Chuck Vickers dove into a kudzu hill and never came back out. His friends waited and waited, laughing, rowdy and amused, then assumed he’d snuck off somewhere without them seeing. The town only realized later. Suffocated, everybody said. But Sasha lay awake in her bed after, imagining him eaten up, vines forcing their way under his eyelids, under his nails, sucking him dry, just like the land—
Sasha forces her mind back and moves to the end of the cracked cement driveway, long brown grasses tickling her legs. There are no cars parked out here, the place a bleached husk. “If you ever get a funny feeling about a place, just give me a call and I’ll meet ya out there,” Dale had told her. She tries not to call him in too often, especially after his double knee replacement. With her own array of life experiences—from being out with girlfriends in bars full of aggressive men, for instance—Sasha doesn’t spook easy, anyway. The potential of encountering squatters or meth cookers hadn’t stopped her from taking the job. But this place? A Stephen King shiver creeps up her back just looking at it. It has a gobbling look, like the kudzu that devoured that boy all those years ago. Maybe she takes another step, and this dead grass heaves her down by the ankles.
With a deep breath, Sasha steps off the driveway, picking her way through the tall grass to scout toward the property line. She’d be covered in ticks and red bugs if not for that bug spray she’d soaked her legs with as she left the grocery store.
The trees are silent spectators, their gaunt forms twisting away on every side. This orchard doesn’t speak with humans anymore; they gossip about her deep underground, their root systems whispering, Intruder. Dead leaves melt to mulch under her sneakers. She touches one of the orchard’s trunks, and bark crumbles away under her hand. Bad blight. One look at this hollow carcass and Lil would keel right over. Pocketing her lens cover, Sasha leans back. Her viewfinder holds the bony fingers of the orchard’s upper branches. The Clearwater orchard will never look like this, not in a million years. Sometimes Sasha imagines that under the earth, there is a single place where all the roots of the town’s trees meet, a sweet, husked heart at the center of everything. If there is, the Clearwater orchard lies the closest to it. Sometimes, more and more in recent decades, something—a death or a sale or a sin—lops trees free from that heart, and they wither, just like this.
A chill breeze is kicking up between the trees, their shadows stretching away toward the backwoods. Sasha photographs what’s left of the weaving drunkard of a fence on the west side of the land. After early trips out to places like this with Dale, Sasha tried to tell Lil about it, things she was learning about the land around here. Something in her is drawn to this decay, this weirdness. But for Lil, thoughts always turn to what had once been and was now gone. A family that had moved on, or a property that had once produced. Sasha’s photos aren’t a road back for Lil but a closed window.
Just for something to do with her hands, Sasha snaps a photo of the house. Immediately she senses a shiver of movement there, the vines jangling together. The sound of the shutter startled something. The kudzu rustles like dead hair as the thing crawls around, stuffing itself under the house. A possum? Sasha backs away, and—
Snap.
Her heel has cracked a fallen branch on the—wait. No, Sasha realizes, eyeing the gray shards pinned under her foot. It’s a bone, the thin femur of some little animal, left here from a picked-over kill. She leans down to peer at it. And there’s another, just a foot away. Nearby, a narrow rib cage.
Sasha backs up a step, her legs suddenly unsteady under her. Now that she’s looking, there are bones everywhere here under the trees. Little skulls, scattered teeth, tufts of fur. Leftovers from the meager hunting of some small animal—maybe whatever is now hiding under the house.
So that’s the smell that hangs over this place, the soft twist of decay. Not the trees, but the brown blood curdling at their roots.
The long honeyed afternoons of summer are long gone out here, and twilight is a fast fade. Sasha finishes the job, but it’s hurried. After that, the only pictures she takes are for Dale’s survey. She rushes through them, skin jumping. Her body urges her to bolt, and there’s none of the usual calm to be found in the routine of the work. Everything in her longs to be gone. Even as they crowd the ground, she never steps on the bones.
By the time she starts the walk home, the final crickets of the season have started up their lonely serenades from the woods. Holding tight to her camera, she doesn’t look back at that slack-jawed old ruin again.
Sometimes when Sasha is out—which is frequent—and even Lil is tired of shaking trees and shelling pecans, she sits in the kitchen window and makes her calls. It’s one of her least favorite chores. Worse than laundry, but just as necessary. Lil uses the same beige phone Mom had installed herself over the kitchen table, its coiled cord bouncing. The paint still bears drill holes from her first attempts. She rests her cheek on the table, next to her mug, and checks names off her list, reduced to dial tones and answering machines.
“Hi, Mrs. Franklin, it’s Lil. Just wanted to confirm that you’re coming to the quarterly town hall. As you probably remember, I want to have a good show of support for the town council, because they’re supposed to be discussing additional funding programs for small farms…”
“Hi, Cork, it’s Lil. Just wanted to see if you’d heard anything about those funding programs. I know it got taken off the docket for the last meeting, but it’s already autumn…”
Bureaucracy bores her. But there are still plenty of people left—fewer each year, it seems—who care about the town’s future, who want to see orchards like Lil’s succeed. She can already picture it: showing up at the next town hall with an army of grandmothers behind her, packing the seats with baked goods and fancy hats until the council has to listen to her. Lil’s speech is almost done. If she can just get enough people there listening, then maybe—
Maybe. She holds that possibility like a prayer deep under her ribs as she makes every call except the one that she should. The most important one.
Jason only just got back to town and already she owes him an apology. She is thrown right back in time like it hasn’t passed at all. Jason is just as she remembers. He hasn’t gone to seed; he’s kept his lean track star muscle and his politician’s mouth. But that doesn’t mean Lil knows him anymore. People change when they leave home. They blossom; Sasha came back from New York more confident and artistic than ever. Lil might be the only one who is caught in time. She can look at Jason and be sixteen again, feel his varsity jacket on her shoulders. Lil straightens and takes the phone, dialing the number she still remembers—only these days, it won’t be Russ’s rusty voice on the other end, but Jason’s. Still. She can do this.
She has punched three numbers in and is nowhere near ready when the wind, the branches in the orchard, and even the house stills. The world around her slows to a wary halt.
She sets the handset back into the cradle, her chair screeching when she stands. Outside the window, there is nothing to see but the line of trees and a crooked bit of fencing she’s still fixing. No movement. But there’s an alarm going off inside her.
Then, like a hidden picture, an optical illusion, Theon appears behind the tree line.
Lil rushes out of the kitchen and onto the porch, charging down the steps. But there she stops, because he isn’t on her land. Not yet. He stands on the edge of the property, where the fence is broken, his hands braced like he’s thinking of leaping over it. When he sees her, Theon smiles and backs off a little, pacing the edge of the boundary.
Once, when Lil and Sasha were ten, a developer had come to their land. Lil only remembers the vague impression of height and stretched buttons over his stomach. Mom shuffled the girls upstairs, but Lil and Sasha creeped on sock feet to the top of the stairs. They knelt against the rail where they could see Mom’s slender legs and ankles under the dirty cuffs of her jeans.
“A good offer for the land. Best you’ll get. Take the money. Move to Memphis, raise those cute girls there.” Lil doesn’t remember the whole conversation, just phrases that flashed at her amid babble, and Sasha’s tawny, curious eyes and quiet breathing. “There’s no man of the house. Tough industry—that’s just the truth. Product’s good, but no profit.”
Mom didn’t say anything while the man talked. Not a single word. But Lil felt that Mom’s silence wasn’t a lack of things to say but an abundance of emotion and energy, of horror. She couldn’t move or she would explode.
When she finally spoke, her voice was unrecognizable in its chill. “Leave and don’t come back.”
Lil forces herself to take another stride forward. And Theon reaches over the fence and rests a hand on the nearest tree.
She feels it. Warm, square fingers on her cheek and she can’t hold back a shudder. Theon drags his fingers down the bark, a lover’s caress she feels against her ribs. Lil breaks into a dead run straight at him. When the orchard doesn’t let him in, doesn’t accept his touch or his smile, Theon raises his hands and backs off. He’s out of sight before she reaches the fence.