I waited anxiously as Daniels revved the engine, only to have the fence jangle forward and lean precariously, threatening to crash to the ground. Complicating the situation, the gate’s ornament, the horn-blowing angel, had somehow been dislodged, dangled down and wedged onto the tractor’s antenna. I pulled off the road and Hannah and I watched as four industrious-looking men scrambled onto the tractor, intent on freeing it.
Daniels glanced at me, and then hastily back to the task at hand. I thought about how odd the man had seemed the day before, the way he burst out of the cornfield. Max had said he’d always struck him as a bit strange.
“Tell me about that guy driving the tractor.”
“Jim Daniels?” Hannah asked.
“Yeah. That guy.” By then Daniels straddled the tractor seat, personally tugging on the angel.
“I don’t know much,” she said. “He’s been here a while. His family came from a neighboring town. Someone told me that he has an agriculture degree from someplace in Iowa. Maybe five or six years back, the town co-op hired him to manage the community fields, the corn and alfalfa. Sometimes he works on private gardens. Gives advice, helps if there’s a bug or a blight problem.”
“He seems okay?”
Hannah looked stunned. “I never thought about it. Jim’s kind of standoffish, maybe. But he’s so quiet, he’s always just blended into the background.”
“Never any talk about him?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
“Just wondering.” I pointed at the gate, the men still trying to jerk the arch off the tractor. “This could be a problem.”
“They’ll get it,” Hannah dismissed. “You know, Jim’s family of yours.”
I shot her a curious look and she explained, “His second wife is your younger sister Karyn. Well, half-sister. Constance’s youngest.”
I thought about Karyn, all the others. My family, people I hardly knew.
The clock ticking, my nervous energy built as I worried about Delilah. “Let’s walk around the tractor.”
“The Heatons live on a far back lot on the west,” Hannah protested. “It doesn’t make sense to leave the car here. We would have to walk back and get it to drive to the other end of the trailer park, to the Coombs’ house.”
“Shoot,” I said.
“Patience,” she urged.
“Does this happen often?”
“No, but we had a lot of wind last Thursday, came with that morning rain. It must have loosened the arch.”
Moments later, Daniels, a man I now knew was my brother-in-law, sprung the antenna free and pushed the arch back up, righting the angel. The men cheered and threw victory punches toward the sky. As the tractor lurched forward, the wagon rattled behind it like a burlap bag of loose bolts.
Hannah and I followed in the Pathfinder, passing rows of trailers. Crumpled cardboard boxes, abandoned tools, old furniture and worn-out children’s playground gear cluttered the yards. When we reached the cornfield, the tractor veered to the right toward my family’s double-wide, but Hannah instructed me to keep driving straight back on the field’s western edge, heading toward the mountains.
“There it is,” she said a short time later, pointing at a single-wide with a small camper beside it. The blue-sided trailer looked decades old, but it was clean and well-tended. It faced the road, and the cornfield spread out behind it.
I parked a bit down the road.
“That was the Heaton place back there,” Hannah said.
“I don’t want to telegraph that we’re here. This gives us a few minutes to walk around unnoticed,” I explained. I grabbed my bag, and Hannah and I swung the Pathfinder’s doors open. “Let’s go.”
As we approached the trailer, I motioned for Hannah to continue on toward the back. Hidden behind the single-wide sat a rickety, three-door outhouse, and off to the side in addition to the camper stood a half-dozen good-size tents, large enough for three or four people to sleep in, bordering the cornfield.
“For the older kids,” Hannah whispered. “This isn’t unusual. Not enough room inside for beds. The camper is their quilting shop, where they keep the sewing machines.”
A lean-to on one side had an opening to store hay beneath a corrugated tin roof, and a frail-looking bay greeted us, shaking its head and ruffling its mane. The horse was tied up next to a water trough. Most of the families in Alber had horses when I lived there, and I suddenly realized this was the first one I’d noticed since my return. “Where did the horses go? Why haven’t I seen more of them?”
Hannah shrugged. “Most had to be sold. The women can barely feed their kids, much less a horse or two. Looks like the Heatons managed to keep one.”
A small tribe of goats in a pen elbowed to get past one other, attempting to greet us, kicking up dust and bleating as we walked by. A black-and-white one with short horns threw his head back and let out a throaty call as something rustled past us overhead. I looked up and saw three young girls trampling across the trailer’s flat roof as if playing a game of chase, the metal quaking under each step.
I couldn’t help laughing, and one apparently heard me. Six or seven, she shook her head in surprise, no doubt unaccustomed to intruding strangers. She jerked back and pointed at us, while the other two rumbled to stops beside her.
The tallest girl, perhaps ten, looked warily from Hannah to me and yanked the other two back. In seconds, they’d vanished. I assumed they must have scurried down a ladder on the trailer’s rear, when one of
