'You have time to talk?' Jacob asked.
'Sure.' I opened the door wide. 'You eat lunch yet? I could fix you a sandwich.'
He glanced past me into the house. He was shy around Sarah -- shy around women in general -- and always tried to avoid coming inside when she was around. 'I thought maybe we could go for a drive,' he said.
'We can't talk here?'
'It's kind of about the money,' he whispered.
I stepped down onto the porch, pulling the door shut behind me. 'What's wrong?' I asked.
'Nothing's wrong.'
'Is it about Pederson?'
He shook his head. 'It's just something I want to show you. It's a surprise.'
'A surprise?'
He nodded. 'You'll like it. It's a good thing.'
I stared at my brother, debating for a moment, then pushed the door back open. 'Let me get my jacket,' I said.
AS SOON as I got into the truck, I asked him what was going on, but he wouldn't tell me.
'Just wait,' he said. 'I have to show you.'
We drove west out of Delphia, toward Ashenville. At first I thought we were going back to the nature preserve, but then we took a left onto Burnt Road rather than a right, and headed south. It was a cold, sunny day. The snow on the fields had an icy crust to it, and no matter where you looked it seemed to sparkle. It wasn't until we were almost there, turning off onto the dirt road that had once led to our driveway, that I realized Jacob was taking me to our father's farm.
I stared through the window at the fields as the truck slowed to a stop. I hadn't been out to the farm in years, and I was startled to see it now, shocked by how little still remained to show me that it had once been my home. The house and barn and outbuildings had been dismantled and carted away, the basement filled in and seeded over. The huge circle of shade trees that had once marked the boundary of our front yard had been chopped down and sold for lumber. The only vestige of our family's presence on the land was our father's windmill, which still stood -- at a slight angle now -- about a quarter mile to the west.
'Do you come by here a lot?' I asked Jacob.
He shrugged. 'Sometimes,' he said. He was staring out toward where our house was supposed to be. You could see for more than a mile, and all of it was the same. With the flatness and the snow covering everything, it was hard to keep your eyes from wandering; there was nothing to pick out and focus on over anything else. It was like looking up into the sky.
'Do you want to get out?' Jacob asked.
I didn't, but it seemed like he did, so I said, 'Sure,' and pushed open my door.
We hiked straight into the field, along where we guessed our gravel driveway had once run. Mary Beth bounded ahead of us through the knee-deep snow, pausing now and then to sniff at things we couldn't see. We stopped about a hundred yards in from the road, when we reached the place where our house had once stood. We may've had the wrong spot; there were no clues to help us orient ourselves, no hearthstone or pump handle, not even a slight depression in the earth to mark the filled-in basement. It was just like everything else around it. The windmill stood off to the left in the distance, looking derelict and disused. There was a little breeze coming down out of the north, and when it gusted, it spun the windmill's sails. They creaked as they lurched into motion, like an old rocking chair, but the sound took a second to reach us, and by the time we turned to look, the sails had stopped.
Jacob was trying to guess where things had stood -- the barn, the tractor shed, the grain bins, the metal hut our father had used to store seed. He rotated on his heels, pointing out the different spots. His leather shoes were wet from the snow.
'Jacob,' I said finally, interrupting him. 'Why'd you bring me here?'
He grinned at me. 'I've decided what I'm going to do with my share of the money.'
'And what's that?'
'I want to buy back the farm.'
'This farm?'
He nodded. 'I'm going to rebuild the house, the barn, everything just like it used to be.'
'You can't do that,' I said, appalled. 'We have to leave.'
The dog was digging in the snow at our feet, and Jacob watched him for a moment before answering. Then he looked up at me. 'Where am I going to go, Hank?' he asked. 'It's different for you guys. You've got Sarah, and Lou's got Nancy, but I don't have anyone. You want me to just drive off all alone?'
'You can't buy the farm, Jacob. Where would you say you got your money?'
'I thought we could tell people that Sarah had come into an inheritance. Nobody around here knows anything about her family. We'll say that you guys bought the farm before you left, and set me up to run it.'
I stared off around us at the empty fields, at our tracks running crookedly back through the snow to the road, and tried to imagine my brother staying here, rebuilding the house, putting up fences, planting crops. I couldn't believe that it would ever happen.
'I thought you'd be happy,' he said. 'It's our farm. I'm going to bring it back.'
I frowned at him. He was wrong: I was anything but happy. The farm was something I'd been running away from all my life. For as long as I could remember, I'd seen it as a place where things broke down and fell apart, where nothing ever worked out as planned. Even now, looking out at the vacant space that had once held my home, I was filled with an overwhelming surge of hopelessness. Nothing good had ever happened here.
'It's so hard, Jacob,' I said. 'Do you realize that? You don't just buy a farm, you have to work it. You have to know about machines and seed and fertilizers and pesticides and herbicides and drainage and irrigation and the weather and the government. You don't know about any of that. You'd end up just like Dad.'
As soon as I said it, I realized I'd been too harsh. I could tell just from the way my brother was standing that I'd hurt him. His jacket was hitched up, his shoulders hunched, his hands sunk deep in the pockets of his flannel pants. He wasn't looking at me.
'I was supposed to get the farm,' he said. 'Dad had promised it to me.'
I nodded, still ashamed by what I'd said. Our father had wanted one of us to be a farmer, the other to be a lawyer. I'd done better in school, so I was the one they sent to college. We'd both failed him, though; neither of us had managed to live up to his dreams.
'I'm asking for your help,' Jacob said. 'I've never done it before, but I'm doing it now. Help me get the farm back.'
I didn't say anything. I didn't want him to stay here after we split up the money -- I knew that only bad would come of it -- but I couldn't find a way to tell him this.
'I'm not asking for any money,' he said. 'I just want you to tell people in town that Sarah's come into an inheritance.'
'You don't even know if Muller would sell it to you.'
'If I offer him enough money, he'll sell it.'
'Can't you buy a different farm? Something out west, where people don't know us?'
Jacob shook his head. 'I want
'What happens if I refuse to help?'
He considered that briefly, then shrugged. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I guess I'd try to think up another story.'
'But don't you see the danger, Jacob? How your remaining here would be a threat to all of us? The only way we'll really be safe is if everyone disappears.'
'I can't leave,' he said. 'I don't have any place to go.'
'You've got the whole world. You can settle anywhere you want.'
'This is where I want to go.' He stamped his shoe in the snow. 'Right here. Home.'
Neither of us spoke for nearly a minute after that. Another breeze came up, and we stared out toward the
