The Farm

nesting boxes were arrayed across the front of the barn, screened with chicken wire tied in a series of hexagons. The nests had little holes carved in the front and were covered with rubber flaps so the gatherer, in this case Katy, could reach an arm into the dark box and feel around in the straw for eggs. Gordon had explained the design discouraged possums, foxes, and other lazy ovum-stealing predators.

But that didn't make Katy feel any better about reaching through those black little curtains that looked all the world like sharp, rotted teeth. At least she didn't have to go inside the barn, where the goats had spooked her and Jett had suffered some sort of delusion.

The farm was too quiet. She'd expected a big change from the city, but she had imagined barking dogs, crowing roosters, badly tuned tractors, and the rattle and clank of distant, rusty machinery. This was autumn. Where were all the chain saws turning hardwood forests into firewood?

The guineas were strangely hushed in their boxes and the goats watched her as they usually did, standing stiff-legged in the field, their beards drifting slightly in the breeze, ears flapping at the flies. In her mind, she imagined them skinned for meat, their oblong pupils regarding her from the slope of their skinned skulls.

She shook the woven basket farther up her left elbow and reached into the first nest. Gordon didn't have names for the hens, so Katy thought of them collectively as 'Martha.' The first one was M, the second one A, and so on. If they were fryers instead of lay ing hens, she couldn't bear to name them. It was bad enough just eating their eggs. Even though they were unfertilized, it was hard not to think of the yolks as little abortion victims. She had never considered such a thing before, despite being a lifelong omelet lover. Funny how being on a farm made you more aware of and connected to the food, whether it was the seeds that grew into turnips or the steers that turned into ground round.

'My, M, you must be feeling your oats today,' Katy said, finding two eggs in the first nest. She laid them gently in the basket as M clucked in either motherly anguish or pea-brained hunger. Katy peered through the chicken- wired slot at A in the next box. All she could see was the serrated, black-and-gray pattern of the hen's feathers. A's head was tucked under one wing, making her look like a soft wad of thrift-shop rags.

'Okay, girl, here I come.' Katy reached her arm into the cur tained slot. She felt around in the straw, finding nothing. Maybe A was sitting on her egg. The hens sometimes did that, driven by an instinct stronger than the memory of all the previous unhatched eggs that had gone before. Katy felt the soft downy feathers of A's chest, then slid her hand underneath.

She nearly broke her wrist snatching her hand free. Something cool and scaly had writhed away from her touch.

It wasn't a chicken leg. This thing had rippled.

Did snakes eat eggs? Could one have crawled through the cur tain, or dropped onto the wire from above and slithered into A's nest?

Katy didn't know, but she wasn't about to stick her hand in to find out.

But what would Gordon say when he saw only two eggs in the refrigerator? He would ask why, and Katy would have to say 'Chickenshit.' Because she was too chickenshit to stick her hand into the nests. And Gordon's forehead would furrow slightly, ac companied by a gratuitous, understanding, demeaning smile, all the while his eyes saying, 'I thought I'd found a replacement for Rebecca, but all I got was this skinny Irish redhead who can't even pluck an egg, much less a whole chicken.'

'Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit,' she said to herself. She had placed a moratorium on cussing because she didn't want Jessie picking up the habit, but she was alone and who gave a good god damn what the goats thought?

She looked around for something to poke into the nest. Maybe if she could get A to move, she would be able to see the snake. Or whatever it was.

God, please let it be a snake, because, sure, they are scary as seven hells, but at least snakes live and breathe and are listed in zoology catalogs.

Katy was about to give up, to go out into the cornfield to find Gordon, when she remembered the pitchfork inside the barn. She hadn't mentioned the scarecrow to Gordon, because he would have laughed. And she had been scared out of her wits by Jett's strange bout of amnesia. And then there was the goat that had somehow locked itself in the loft. The barn was a place to avoid. Nothing good seemed to happen there. Just ask all the livestock that had been slaughtered over that straw-scattered floor, that had been de capitated and strung up on chains and turned from livestock into deadstock.

But the pitchfork was a weapon. If she could hoist a skewered snake before Gordon, show off her grit and determination, then perhaps Gordon would at last accept her as a suitable replacement and draw her into his arms at midnight, accept her and take her and finally make her his wife.

Besides, next to a confrontation with a snake, a little trip inside the barn was nothing. The pitchfork was hanging twenty feet from me front sliding doors. She could be in and out with barely enough time to smell the trampled manure. And once she had the pitch fork, even a goat wouldn't scare her.

She set the basket on top of R's nesting box and went to the slid ing doors. The oaken, crudely planked doors were suspended on rusty wheels that rolled across a steel track overhead. The left one was partially pulled back, and cool air wafted from the opening. The midmorning sun cut an orange sliver into the darkness, but the great, hulking black beyond gave off an almost palpable weight, like oily water held back by a dam.

Twenty feet. Ten steps max, each way.

She leaned against the edge of the left door and shoved. It slid across its track with a metal scream. The sun poured in at her back like a sacred ally. She was sweating, though the temperature was in the fifties. She looked into the pasture. The goats seemed curious and faintly amused.

'Chickenshit, chickenshit, chickenshit.'

Katy squinted into the barn, trying to locate the pitchfork on its wooden-pegged resting place.

Twenty feet. She could be there and back before you could say 'Children of the Corn, Part Thirteen.'

Now she saw it, hanging among some coils of rope, a thick length of rusted chain, a strange set of clamps that looked like a medieval torture device, and a crooked-handled scythe whose blade was brown with age. She didn't remember the scythe from before, but it didn't look like an effective weapon against a snake.

She stepped into the barn, breath held. Eighteen feet to go. No biggie. Six yards. Not even as far as a first down in football, and she didn't have eleven steroid-inflated males trying to stop her. All she had was her fear.

Another big step and she was on the dividing line between sun and shadow. One of the goats bleated behind her, and it sounded terribly like laughter. Another joined in, and another, and Katy screamed as she ran, 'Chickenshit, chickenshit, CHICKENSHIT!' Then she had her hands around the rough, grainy handle of the pitchfork and she was pulling it from the wall and it felt good and right and powerful and she could take on any damned snake in the world and she was already halfway back to the bright square of the barn door when she happened to look up at the wall above the loft stairs.

There hung the scarecrow, fully articulated its straw planter's hat resting on the gunnysack head the bone- button eyes catching and reflecting the sun, burning like autumn bonfires, staring bold and red and hellish, and Katy didn't know what she screamed, it may have been 'Chickenshiiiiiiiit,' but the sound was swallowed by the dry timber of the walls and the hay bales above and the packed dirt below and the pitchfork bounced to the ground and Katy was running across the yard toward the house where Gordon's dead wife might be drifting around the kitchen and tears were streaming down Katy's face, the goats were joined in a chorus of gleeful laughter, a snake was in the henhouse, but all she could think of was the two eggs in the basket, those sad orange yolks and twin chicks that would never be born.

Mrs. Stansberry had to stay after school for a meeting, so Jett rode the lame-o school bus home. She sat near the front with the first graders because she didn't want to be teased by Tommy Williamson and Grady Eggers, who sat in the back and ruled their keep like warlords. Grady had toned down a bit since yesterday, when he and Jett had suffered their mutual acid flashback in English class. But Tommy was still Tommy, and he tried to play grab- ass with her whenever she wasn't paying attention and drifted within reach.

The bus was half-empty when it reached her road. She wrestled her book bag down the steps and the bus was pulling away when Tommy called from the rear window, 'Hey, shake it for me, Plucky Duck.'

She flipped a middle finger without looking back, then checked the mail. Phone bill, Mom's October issue of Better Homes & Gardens, a seed catalog, a Honda dealership circular. At the bottom of the pile lay a crisp white envelope. She recognized the handwriting right