I sneezed.
The sneeze sent a bolt of lightning through my bruised ribs, and I fled back to the porch.
The dust would need a few minutes to settle, and after the pain in my side lessened to mildly excruciating, I decided to do some exploring. First stop, the chicken coop. The roof was slightly angled, and there was a thin door. The door was ajar, and I stuck my head in. Inside were thirty little cubbies. No chickens.
I walked around to the back and saw the small opening where the chickens could go in and out. Hypothetically, of course. Like I said, there were no chickens. The ramp leading to the opening was gone, most likely scavenged by someone many years earlier.
I continued plowing through the waist-high grass until I came to a barn with a steeply sloped roof. The entrance to the barn was two large sliding panels, but they were held together by a thick lock and chain. I put my ear to the crack between the two panels and listened. I could hear a bit of rustling, but that was probably my subconscious wanting a family of barn owls to be living there.
I was headed back toward the farmhouse when a rectangle of fencing hidden in the tall grass caught my eye. It took me a long minute to reach the crumbling enclosure: a 1000-square-foot area of dirt with the occasional outcropping of weeds.
It was a pigpen.
Harold had told several stories about the pigs on the farm, about how smart they were, and how they each had a different personality. He said it always broke his heart when they had to slaughter one.
They were just pigs, I remembered thinking. Delicious pigs.
A few minutes later, I returned to the farmhouse. The dust had settled and I stepped inside. Mark the Lawyer had said that Harold rented the land out from the mid-eighties up until the early 2000s so I half expected the inside of the house to be nicer than the outside.
And it was.
Marginally.
The interior walls were covered in wallpaper—beige with maroon flowers. At the corners, the wallpaper was peeling away, and a few sections had fallen and were lying prostrate on the brown tiled floor.
From the entry, there was a dining room to the right and a living area to the left. The dining room was filled with a scarred wooden table and three chairs. A chandelier hung above the table at a thirty-degree angle. The many light bulbs were colored nearly black by time. Cobwebs clung to the chandelier, stretching to the brass rods and thick beige curtains that held the sunlight at bay.
I slowly peeled the curtains back—sending years of dust sprinkling into the air—then unlocked the window and pushed it upward with a loud creak. I did the same with a second window, then made my way to the living area.
The living area was occupied by a gray upholstered couch, a wooden rocking chair, and a tan La-Z-Boy, which easily could have been the first one off the assembly line. A rectangular rug, striped brown and white, centered the room. An oval coffee table sat atop the rug. Everything faced an oak entertainment center where a monstrosity of a TV stood.
I sat down in the rocking chair and rocked a couple times, the chair’s stiff joints groaning under my weight. I pushed myself up and out of the chair and drew a smiley face in the layer of dust caking the sixty-inch, half-ton Zenith.
There was a light switch against the wall, and I flipped it up. The lights didn’t turn on, which didn’t mean a whole lot since few light bulbs lived to see their teenage years. Still, I made a mental note to find out the names of the utility companies.
Next, I made my way to the kitchen. There was a large steel oven with huge handles which made me think about the oven Hansel and Gretel shoved the mean old witch into. Above the oven hung a series of cast iron pots and pans. I gave a skillet a light push, sending it rocking back and forth.
Next to the stove was a small sink, and I turned the faucet. Nothing came out. No water. No air. No noise.
Lastly, I checked the fridge. It was light blue and looked fit to survive a nuclear holocaust. I pulled the door open. It was empty.
On the counter next to the fridge was the solitary anachronism. An espresso machine. It must have been left over by whoever last rented the place or was brought over later by some extravagant squatters.
I chuckled lightly then headed for the staircase opposite the kitchen. The wooden stairs creaked loudly, and I was reminded of that one time when I climbed out onto a tree branch and it started to creak. And then I fell twelve feet.
I involuntarily shuddered.
Delirious.
Concussed.
And now I had PTSD.
Awesome.
Keeping with the color scheme, the top floor was maroon carpet. A narrow hallway connected three bedrooms: one master, then two identical smaller ones.
I checked the master bedroom first. There was a queen-size bed with a floral bedspread, but other than that, the room was void of any character, its trinkets and possessions long boxed up or given away.
Next, I checked the two smaller bedrooms. Both had a single bed, stripped to the mattress and two naked pillows. The sun shone through the lone window of the bedroom facing west, a box of gold on the maroon carpet. I sat down on the mattress—sending a plume of dust jettisoning into the air—and knew the room once belonged to Harold. It sounds odd, but I could feel him in the room, could sense his spirit. Almost as if the millions of dust molecules dancing in the sunlight were his ashes.
“Sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye,” I said softly.
I waited for Harold to answer. For a quick gust of wind. For the rattling of the window. For the ashes to spell out “Goodbye, Thomas” on
