The Witness

There was a flutter in the hayloft. At that moment, I knew this time there had been a witness.

My little farm wasn’t much. It was situated on the western edge of Appalachia in Southern Ohio. Where most people in this area dedicated their acreage to the standard corn and soybean rotation, I chose to breed a variety of crops and sell to farmer’s markets and small niche businesses that marketed organic and local-grown wares or ingredients. I had around fifty hens and a handful of roosters. Eggs were plentiful and sold to the restaurants and local people well.

Big Daddy, the king of the roost, kept the younger cocks in line and defended the flock from foxes and the occasional mink. I had a heifer named Adelaide who was allowed to calf every other year and I sold her excess milk to a man who made artisan cheese (whatever that is) up the road. I had two miniature horses- one dapple and one black- named Max and Noah. They earned their keep by pulling a cart full of produce, supplies, or even me; whatever was needed for the day’s activity. Harriet, the old mule, was allowed to stay because, after nearly thirty years together, I owed her a comfortable retirement. Six sows and a boar yielded one to two hundred piglets per year. It wasn’t much, but I raised them farrow to finish. This meant more time and labor, but more profit for each. I had three Nubian goats. I sold their milk to the same weirdo up the road and their kids to children as 4-H projects. Two turkeys per year made Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners and sometimes I’d have ducks if the market price looked like it would be good that year. Of course, there were plenty of cats to keep the vermin at bay.

A border collie named Dewey rounded off my animal menagerie. His duties included keeping the other animals in line and alerting us to danger.

A good portion of the land was set aside for raising corn, oats, and hay.

Some of it was sold but most of it was meant to feed my own animals. The apple orchard brought tourists and money every fall. My market produces included zucchini, spaghetti squash, broccoli, carrots, corn, tomatoes, and romaine lettuce. But the one thing that attracted everyone to my booth every summer was my strawberries. They were huge, bright, and bursting with flavor.

When the farm had originally belonged to my grandparents, they were corn-growers just like their neighbors but with a small plot to grow food for the family, a few sheep, and Harriet. They had a big Anatolian shepherd named Shep who guarded the flock. On his last night on duty, he successfully defended the lambs from a hungry bobcat that moved into the area. Unfortunately, though he did hold the assailant at bay long enough for Grandpa to come out and shoot it, Shep was suffering from his own wounds and Grandpa had to turn the gun on him too. We all cried as we laid him to rest under the strawberry patch. The following summer, the fruit grew bigger and fuller than ever before. Grandma said it was his last gift to us for loving him so much. After that, any animal that died on the farm, be it lamb, barn cat, or goldfish, was given a respectful burial under the strawberries.

I loved my grandparents and I loved that farm. Every summer was spent with them and in those fields. Grandpa and I meticulously monitored the crop and tended to the animals.

He taught me to respect- not fear- the snakes in the hay bales and the owl in the loft. He said they were important workers on the farm too because they helped keep the vermin out of the feed and crops. I loved the owl. Her moon-white face in contrast to her dark brown body was beautiful. Some nights, when the light from the moon was just right, I’d catch a glimpse of her silently soaring past the bats. The snakes, however, liked to startle me. I neither found this amusing nor did I find them attractive. Despite them, the farm was my slice of Heaven on Earth.

My parents shipped my brother and me over from our home in West Virginia a week after school let out and we came home a week before school started. While I looked forward to it every year, Matthew, on the other hand, hated everything about rural life. He chose to view our summers on the farm as punishment. He wasn’t entirely wrong. My brother was prone to making the wrong friends and finding mischief with them. He bullied me mercilessly for being short and having red hair. Once, he went so far as to shave my head and told me that maybe I could grow a soul now that I was no longer a ginger. Do you have any idea how traumatizing it is for a second-grade girl to be bald? He wasn’t always that extreme, but the torment was brutal. Truth be told, I’ve always had a volatile temper and he knew just how to trigger it when he was bored. On the farm, rather than helping, he remained in the house. He slept until noon, played video games until supper, then stayed up all night barricaded in his room. It kept him away from me, so I didn’t mind. He swore every day at supper that as soon as he turned eighteen, he was off to New York or Seattle, and he was leaving this (unpleasant word) hole behind. The day he moved out for good, I celebrated.

Over the years, I stopped going to the farm only in the summers and after high school, I moved in full-time. My grandparents were aged and had difficulty keeping up. There was less profit from the corn coming in so some of the help had to be let go. I did the best I could to fill in, but the farm was steadily declining. When the unthinkable happened and my grandparents were killed in a car accident, I was twenty years old. My brother was twenty-two at the time. He hadn’t made it to Seattle yet, only as far as Cincinnati.

He had completely cut contact with the family when he moved out. I didn’t miss him. I had assumed he was dead in a ditch from a drug overdose. When they died, my mother hired a private investigator to track him down and tell him when and where the funeral was.

To this day, I’m not sure why Grandma and Grandpa left the farm to both of us.

Maybe, it was out of some sense of obligation. They felt like they had to leave at least something to him. I didn’t think it was fair.

They weren’t even in the ground yet before he started talking about how much we would get when we sold the farm. I reminded him that it was half mine and I was not selling. This resulted in a screaming match next to the graves. Our parents, who sided with me (which only enraged him more), pulled us apart and kept us separated for the remainder of the day.

That night, he found me in the barn. I was sitting on an old tack trunk, sobbing over the loss of my family. My heartache meant nothing to him. He was soulless and cruel. Initially feigning sympathy, he again started talking about the old dump. He told me not to be unreasonable. He picked the wrong place and more so, the wrong time to rekindle the fight. My emotions were already running high from the last week’s events and I had barely kept them in check for the sake of my parents. But that was the final straw. He took me from feeling blue to seeing red. I unleashed two decades of anger, hatred, hurt, and everything in between. The resulting battle was more visceral than any we had ever had before. And I hit him. Hard. He fell back with a look of shock and disbelief on his face.

More quickly than it had come, the rage left me. I looked to Heaven for guidance, knowing my grandparents were looking down in disapproval. In a fleeting moment of absentmindedness, I noticed the owl was not in her roost. I looked out the open barn door and saw a purple night that was full of stars.

I didn’t see my brother again for more than ten years. It would take another death to bring us back together. Most everyone assumed he had returned to his life in the city without contact again. I didn’t care. He didn’t come after me for the farm or try to sell it out from under me and that was all that mattered.

Over the next few years, I allowed some of the largest equipment to be repossessed and sold others. This was how the farm became so diversified. Without the large equipment, I needed something I could manage with a small tractor and minimal help. I repurposed most of the land and expanded the strawberry patch. It was hard to turn anything close to a profit, but once I had the farm certified as organic, the money became much better. It took some time, but I eventually created something sustainable and I was happy.

The weekdays were spent toiling and working with the local businesses. The weekends (for two seasons of the year) were spent at the farmer’s markets to sell the excess produce. Whatever was left on Monday went to a small grocer about forty miles away that sold smoothies and organic fruits and vegetables to yuppies from the city. Other than my animals and a handful of friends, my life was a fairly solitary one.

On the Ninth of July, just before my thirtieth birthday, I was sitting at my booth at the farmer’s market and working on a crossword puzzle. It was a sticky, hot day. It had been busy but uneventful a few hours earlier. The afternoon rush was winding down and some of the other people were packing up early, being driven off by the heat. A shadow cast over my table. Assuming it was a cloud, I didn’t bother to look up until it spoke.

“I was told this was the place to come for strawberries,” it said.

Slightly startled, I looked up. The suspected cloud that had cast the shadow was, in fact, a very large man.

He was well over six feet tall and more than half as wide, with a little bit of a belly in the middle. His thick brown beard was well-groomed and trimmed in stark contrast to the messy mop of matching curls on top of his head. His dingy white t-shirt was drenched with sweat and his well-formed muscles threatened the seams of the sleeves. Clutched in his hands was a faded and frayed red ball cap. Clear blue eyes sparkled above a wide, toothy grin.

Forgetting that I had been balancing on two legs on my chair, I fell backward and hit the ground with a thud.

“Are you okay?” He shuffled around to the back of the booth and lifted me to my feet with ease.

Feeling more than slightly embarrassed, I tried to smile. “Oh, yes. I’m fine. Momma always said it was a good thing she didn’t name me Grace.”

He chuckled. “Well, Not-Grace, I’m Josh.” He held out this hand.

“Most people call me Andi.” I put my hand in his. It completely engulfed mine.

“Okay, Andi. Do you have any strawberries left?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I sold out a couple of hours ago.”

His exceedingly masculine features became crestfallen. “Darn it. They were for my niece’s birthday party Sunday. I can get ‘em from the grocery but I wanted something special.

Everybody says this was the place to come.”

“No need for flattery.” I put my hand on his hairy forearm. “You had me at ‘birthday.’”

“What do you mean?” He brightened a little.

“You know the green farmhouse with the orchard on the bend of Rosewood Road?”

“Yes, ma’am. The Birmingham farm.”

Hearing my grandparents’ name stung a little, but I refused to let it show. “I’m their granddaughter. Strawberries are best picked after the dew is lifted but before the heat so be at the back door tomorrow morning at nine and bring a basket.”

His face lit up like a Christmas tree. “Thank you! Thank you, so much!” His hand swallowed mine once more as he shook it hard enough to throw me off balance.

He turned and almost skipped towards the parking lot.

The next morning, right on time, I saw a dust cloud headed down my long dirt drive.

He parked his red truck next to my blue one. He hopped out of the driver’s seat wearing the faded red hat, a clean, grey t-shirt that was, again, stretched to the limit at the sleeves, blue jeans, and that big, toothy smile. In his hands, he held a wicker basket with pink, frilly lace around the edges. The sight made me giggle a little.

“Mornin’,” I called as I approached from the shed, Dewey running ahead to greet the stranger.

“Mornin’,” he said back as he crouched to pet the border collie. “Can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”

“It’s no trouble. Can’t have Uncle Josh be a liar, now, can we?”

As I spoke, he stood and I suddenly became aware that I was maybe a third of his size. It was an intimidating realization and I suddenly wondered if the Ruger 380 I had tucked in a holster in my pants would slow him down should his intentions prove anything other than genuine.

As we walked towards the strawberry patch, we made small talk. It was strange that we had never met. His own family’s farm was about ten miles from mine as the crows fly.

I’d passed it a thousand times and watched the cows grow year after year, but never knew who ran it. We knew all of the same people in town, all of the same hiking and hunting spots, and I was even friends with a few of his old schoolmates. I felt silly for questioning if I was safe with him.

After we had filled his basket, I gave him a little tour of the farm. I felt at ease as I explained what I was doing and how I had made changes since my grandparents’ passing. We exchanged stories and laughed. He had a deep, bellowing laugh. It was nearing lunchtime when we ended the tour back at his truck.

He pulled a handful of neatly folded bills from his back pocket and handed them toward me. I gently pushed his hand back.

“Consider it a birthday present,” I said.

He smiled. “Well, thank you. Then would you let me use it to take you to dinner?”

I felt my heart do a summersault. “I think that’d be alright.”

He excitedly opened his truck. He set the basket in the passenger seat and re-emerged with a pencil and a receipt.

“Your phone number?” he asked as he handed them to me.

I was a little caught off guard. It had been years since someone had asked me to handwrite a phone number. Most people just plugged it into their cellphone or I handed them a business card and that was that. I shrugged my shoulders and complied. He thanked me again and I watched the cloud of dust roll back down my driveway.

The rest of the day was a blur. I was walking on air as I completed my tasks for the day. Having spent so much time with Josh that morning had completely demolished my schedule and I ended up not finishing until after dark. But I didn’t mind.

He called me that night. In fact, he called me every night right up until our date the following Friday. The quaint, family-owned restaurant was packed but we only saw each other. I told him about the tumultuous relationship with my brother, my parents back in West Virginia, and how I hoped I was making my grandparents proud by continuing on with the farm. In turn, he told me about how he was the youngest of four. He was his mother’s favorite but he never really got along with his dad. He was married right out of high school but divorced by twenty-five. He said he refused to let it make him bitter. Young and dumb was nothing to be bitter about.

As we ate, we laid out our entire pasts for the other to see. It was pure honesty; almost as if we were seeing what it would take to scare the other one off. We both stayed. At the end of the night, he walked me back to my truck. He wrapped his arms around me. Getting lost in his bulk and muscle brought new meaning to the term ‘bear hug.’

I hardly slept that night. I was completely cloud-worthy. The next night, we resumed our regular phone calls. It was the thing I looked forward to most of all. The weekend after our date, he came to my house for a home-cooked meal and to sit around a fire and watch the lightning bugs. He didn’t leave until the next morning.

That was it. For the next three years, we were each other’s entire world. We helped on each other’s farms and attended holidays and family gatherings together. He even helped me bury my favorite barn cat on the North side of the strawberry patch where I was sure we wouldn’t disturb any other remains. He was protective- almost to a fault. He often worried that I would get hurt in a field by myself and he didn’t trust the hogs. His watchful nature was the source of virtually the only arguments we ever had. We shared a bed several nights a week and more in the cold winters. It was a happiness I had never known I was missing.

I had dated enough men to count on my fingers and toes throughout the entirety of my life. Never before had I felt like one could make me utter the words ‘’til death do us part.’ On September eighteenth, when I was thirty-two, he presented me with a ring and I agreed that in a year’s time, I would say those words to him.

A year was not enough time. The following nine months were a whirlwind. His sister wanted to host a bridal shower for me and my mother wanted to take me dress shopping. She also wanted to hire another PI to find Matthew and invite him to the wedding, but I told her not to bother. Even if I thought he would show up, he wasn’t welcome. This made her cry which made my father angry. There were flowers, a caterer, and a church to coordinate as well.

All of this was on top of my already busy farm life. It was almost too much. I was under a tremendous amount of pressure and finding it harder to keep it contained.

One evening, about two months from our wedding, I was sitting back on the old tack trunk and trying not to cry. Josh came in and found me. He pulled me to my feet and into him.

“Feeling emotional?” he asked.

I nodded into his chest.

“It’s not going to be easy for you to let go of this place. I get that. But I’m here for you,” he said.

I pushed back from him. “What do you mean ‘let go?’” I asked.

He looked puzzled. “Isn’t that why you’re upset? Getting rid of the farm?”

I stared at him. “I’m overwhelmed from all of this wedding business. Why would I get rid of the farm?” I asked.

“We’re getting married,” he laughed. “We can’t keep living in separate houses.”

“I know that, but it still doesn’t explain why I would need to sell this farm.” I could feel my heart beating faster and my muscles begin to tingle.

“My farm is actually profitable. You barely make ends meet here. It makes more sense for you to focus on our farm.”

I looked around the barn. I realized that in all the years of honest conversations we’d had together, this was never among them. By putting a ring on my finger, he expected me to sell my childhood, my inheritance, and my life’s labor. I felt tears burning my eyes.

“I’m not selling this farm,” I stated as I felt my cheeks get hot.

“Well, you can’t keep it,” he challenged.

“Watch me!” I almost yelled.

“I forbid it!” he blurted out.

“Forbid?!”

Everything I had suppressed over the previous year came boiling to the surface despite my best efforts to restrain it. I could no longer hold back the tears of raw emotion and they came streaming down my face.

His anger started to match my own. “I’m not going to keep letting you be out here by yourself day after day until something bad happens to you. This argument is ridiculous. Now, we’re getting married and you’re selling this farm!”

“Wrong on both!” I ripped the ring off my finger and threw it at his feet.

“Andi! Now don’t be unreasonable!” I heard my brother’s voice leave his lips.

More than ten years before, those same words had been spoken in that same tack room over the same dispute. My vision went white with rage. I grabbed the steel scoop shovel that was leaning against the stall door. Before he could react, I brought it across his temple. I was small, but decades of hard labor had left me strong for my size. He stumbled. This time, I didn’t stop after one blow. I kept hitting even after he was lying motionless on the ground. I kept swinging until I could no longer lift my arms.

There was a flutter in the hayloft. In that moment, I knew this time there had been a witness. The pale, moon face of the owl looked down at me. I looked out the barn door and into the stary night. She should have still been hunting, but instead, she had returned early to behold what I had done.

Feeling physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted, I hitched one of his legs each to Max and Noah. They dragged him out to the South side of the strawberry patch. I carefully peeled up the top layer of soil that was knitted together by the roots of the plants. It was difficult, but it came up like a carpet with a little coaxing from a pickaxe. I had done this many times and I had developed a tried-and-true technique for it. The soil underneath was mixed with hard Ohio clay. I drove my Bobcat out to the patch and used the backhoe to dig the grave. As I moved the earth, I saw a brown orb surface. I jumped down to get a better look. I pulled it from the soil. My brother’s eyeless orbits looked back at me. On the side was a crack from where that same shovel had hit him more than a decade before. He had taken quite some time to die that night while I had dug his resting place. He was never missed.

I had hoped he would have been more decayed, but I put the skull back and continued digging. After several hours, Josh was laid to rest. I put the plants over his grave, confident that next year’s crop would be beautiful. In a few days, after a good rain helped the soil settle, I would file a missing person report and frantically call his family a mess with worry.

Tears returned and flowed over my cheeks. Despite this argument and that we had seen such different futures together, I truly did love him. ‘Til death did us part.

I glanced back at the barn. The owl watched me through the loft window. She was my only witness, and she would never tell.