Buying the Farm

The path ran out back of the house before disappearing down through the woods. It’d once been used as a logging trail though through years of disuse saplings had grown up in the middle of the dirt road making it all but impassable insofar as driving a vehicle through the valley.

That was why they carried the Wilkinson boy up that path the day they found him. Brought him right past the house where I sat watching out the kitchen window. The searchers, wet and bedraggled, had been out all night. My daddy was the one carrying the boy.

Larry Wilkinson bullied all the neighborhood kids, me included. Maybe that was why on that day he was swept away through that storm drain, nobody sounded the alarm. It wasn’t until later that evening whenever Larry didn’t come home that his mother called our house.

“Why no, Mrs. Wilkinson, far as I know Larry’s not been by here all day.”

I knew who it was calling even before my mother answered the phone, wondered momentarily if you could buy the farm for lying over something like that, buying the farm being a euphemism used by the local police referring to the Boy’s Reformatory in the town over from us where incorrigibles were sent.

“Steven? Come in here. Have you seen Larry Wilkinson today at all?”

Larry Wilkinson moved next door two years prior. He was a boy big for his age, two years older than me, and intent upon honing his terrorist tactics upon any of the neighborhood kids younger and smaller than he was. I proved his prime target.

“Not that I remember, momma.”

“Well either you have or you haven’t. Which.”

There’s a voice in my head I call Old Reliable. It has never led me wrong. And Old Reliable was whispering hot and heavy.

“No. I ain’t seen him.”

“No, I’m sorry, Mrs. Wilkinson, but Steve hasn’t seen Larry. No, no, that’s quite alright. Yes, of course I’ll be sure to call. You take care now.”

We’d never seen it rain like that before. The news said it was a tropical depression. They even had a name for it. Gilbert, I think, or maybe it was Harriet. The river didn’t come up, not at first, but by the end of two days of continual downpours when the siren in town went off, momma said it was to alert us how the levies might be breached.

I suppose the adults were pretty worried what with that water rising ever higher by the hour but for us kids it was nothing but one big adventure. Chimes Creek overflowed first, flooding out all the new houses that’d been built over the past few years, big gaudy homes on postage stamp lots where the kids never came outside to play and the moms and dads seemed off at work all the time. We noticed some of them put sandbags up around their doors but that hadn’t stopped the inrush of water.

By Saturday, the 22nd day of September 1999, the Camas River hovered right at the top of the dike that ran along its banks. The massive iron gate that guarded the town was shut for the first time I could remember, also closing off the main drag through town. Momma said for us kids not to go near but flood or no she had to work her job at the hospital so when Billy Ford and Thomas Jordan came by the house saying that’s where they were off to, well, I wasn’t about to miss out on seeing something like that.

We raced our bikes through town south to the river. Everyone seemed busy doing something. Some were loading stuff in their cars, others were filling bags with sand. When we got closer you could see rivulets running through that enormous gate. On both sides of the road water was gathered in pools deep enough to go up to your knees, bubbling up from the ground in other places too like great fountains set loose from way down under.

“Betcha won’t go in.”

I hadn’t seen Larry Wilkinson standing on top of the dike. It was like he simply materialized out of the foggy misty gray of morning. We were all soaked what with the persistent rain but it was warm so we didn’t much care. Thomas was the only one wearing a raincoat, bright school bus yellow. Larry pointed and laughed.

“Yellow fellow, yellow fellow,” he chanted, flinging a pud pie in our direction but missing hitting any of us. I wanted to shout out how he threw like a girl but thought better of it. And then, like that, he was gone.

“Wow,” Thomas said, wiping the water from his eyes. “That was actually pretty cool how he did that. Where’d he go?”

I think that’s when we heard it, a gargled scream for help. We looked one to the other, then set the kickstands on our bikes to run and climb the dike. There, at the top, filled with rushing water, was an overflow pipe meant as a final safeguard to keep the river out.

Stuck in the mouth of that pipe and hanging on for his life was Larry Wilkinson. Apparently he’d slipped while laughing at Thomas, slipped and fallen into the raging river, been drawn into that drainage pipe.

“What should we do?” Thomas said. He looked to each of us, then back at Larry. I knew there was nothing we could do. Even if we had a rope, which we didn’t, to attempt a rescue would only mean losing our lives too. And there was no way the boy’d be able to hang on long enough for us to get help.

“Looks like Larry bought the farm,” I said. I shrugged, slid back down the dike, and got gingerly on my bike. Thomas and Billy followed. We rode back to town parting at the fork in the road where I took a left to go home and they took a right.

Sealing Thomas Jordan inside that tomb was not difficult. Part of that had to do with the shame I felt, probably, that there are things what happen to us we’d rather nobody know, and those that do are best buried deep and dark on nights the moon don’t shine and the stars are all out. That Thomas wasn’t dead ought maybe to have troubled me more than it did but on the other hand allowances are made for things that pass between friends.

No one was surprised when Thomas disappeared. His old man had finished with drinking himself to death the year before. His mother was whoring herself to pay the rent and threatening to do him the same way. Could be today the authorities might well have stepped in, removed him from that home, put him in foster care, but probably not. Don’t nobody much concern themselves with poor black trash littering the neighborhood.

We used to play the game all the time. We called it cemetery man. Most doors open inward. That one didn’t. They all just figured Thomas had had his fill, packed up what meager belongings he had and left town. Didn’t nobody much go to that old cemetery, not in the dead of winter. Not when the ground was so frozen you couldn’t blast through it with dynamite. Far as I know, he’s still there. Will be until someone comes roll away that stone.

His body was swollen, puffy, his long hair hanging like black seaweed from his head, and there was dirt clogging one of his ears. His eyes were gone, those same eyes I remembered staring up at me filled with something akin to terror as he clung to the edges of that drainage pipe for all he was worth. I wondered how long he managed to hang on, if in fact one of us had gone to an adult with the tale that he might’ve been saved.

I hadn’t wanted to go to the funeral but my mom made me. She said the entire school was going and it wouldn’t look right if I didn’t too. Larry Wilkinson was the first dead boy I’d ever seen, the first I’d known to die. As he lay inside the coffin I kept thinking how normal he looked, like at any moment he might jump up jeering at everyone, laughing at how he fooled us all.

Mrs. Wilkinson was a single mother, Larry her only child. Nobody knew where Mr. Wilkinson was or what had happened that he was absent though rumor was he’d been sentenced to a long prison term for unspecified crimes, bought the farm is what Billy Ford said.

Thomas said he heard how when they found his body that it looked as if he’d been tended to by person or persons unknown, how he was laid out just so with his arms crossed over his chest, that his face had been wiped clean.

“I thought maybe you’d say something,” Billy Ford whispered to me when the three of us got together before the memorial service started. “To your moms. I thought you’d tell her what happened. That’s why I didn’t.”

“Said something about what?”

“Oh, hi Mrs. Wilkinson. Nothing. We was just talking.”

“You wait. I know your mother, Billy Ford. And yours too, Thomas Jordan. And you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Steven Justice. I know all about you. How you tormented my boy. All three of you. Oh yes, you just wait.”

Her voice had risen an octave with each word until the entire funeral home had gone silent listening to the tirade. I saw my mother working her way across the room with that look in her eyes that only appeared when she knew I good and truly fucked up.

“What is it, Mrs. Wilkinson? What’s going on here, boys?”

The trip was only supposed to last two weeks but then I decided to stay on another month and then before I realized what was happening I’d become a full time resident of Cairo once more. Probably part of it had to do with the drinking, though if I am honest with myself that’s why I was there again in the first place, the prodigal returned to the scene of his many and greatest crimes.

Like the rest of the town the old place looked as though it had suffered through one too many. With my mother and father long since dead and me the only child, the estate fell to me. I’d wanted nothing to do with it, stayed away as long as I could.

I’d been yanked back by word of the death of Billy Ford. I had yet to marry though I’d stood as Billy’s Best Man at his wedding some ten years prior, just before I left. It was his wife Tiffany who contacted me, notified me of his death, how he’d left me something she thought I really needed to see.

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Tiffany.” I’ve never been good at funerals so I rely on stock clichés. I suppose most people are like that though some seem more adept at the handling of the bereaved, assuaging the grief.

“Thank you for coming, Steven.”

Jesus. There it was, that same flickering desire threatening at any moment to burst into a full-fledged wildfire like it did the night of the wedding reception. Not two hours after the ‘I do’s’ where said and solemnized, I had her wedding gown hiked as Billy Ford snored drunkenly in the next room.

“Of course. He was my friend,” I said, unsure whether she’d take me seriously or not. Do friends do each other like that? We did. Maybe they all do. Either way, after their wedding I knew it was way past time for me to leave Cairo, to make my own vow never to return. Yet there I was, back again.

We had a thing in high school. Actually, more than a thing, more like we had a raging fire for one another. Tiffany Barnes was my first love and despite her marriage to one of my best friends and all the years that had flowed past, still my only.

It wasn’t difficult, taking up where we left off. Oh, I knew better. Old Reliable was all the while whispering to me how she’d just use me then break my heart all over again. It was a special time, though, having reunited with the girl of my dreams, so I brushed past the warnings of my intuition to delve headfirst into the throes of passion.

Maybe she needed me like I did her. More likely she just didn’t want to be alone and I was convenient. That was always Tiffany’s greatest fear, of ending up alone.

I done bought the farm, boys.

Maybe it was selective memory, the thought of a thing so terrible my mind simply blotted out all traces of what occurred on the dike that morning. It hadn’t been Larry Wilkinson’s ear full of mud but mine, the result of being held forcibly down on top of that levee, penetrated from behind, something up until that time I didn’t even know was possible.

Reading that first line of Billy Ford’s journal brought everything roaring back to the forefront of my consciousness, the shame I felt, my own inaction when I’d seen my friends similarly violated, the grinning leer on the face of Larry Wilkinson as he slammed himself into them, and now here it was: my turn.

I hadn’t seen Billy walk away from us. I think the first point I was aware of his absence was that pinging sound his aluminum bat made connecting against the side of Larry’s head, a noise which coincided with feeling his entire body spasm, a gurgle in my non-occluded ear, his death throes settling in even before the second blow landed.

Later, there’d been a good deal of whispering about how the Wilkinson boy was found without his pants, that perhaps his death wasn’t due to natural causes. Newspaper articles abounded with stories about how when one of the town vagrants had been arrested for peeping in windows, how when he was searched the police found Larry’s iPhone shoved way down inside his knapsack.

“Maybe we should say something, Billy.”

“Come on, Steve. Say something about what? You want to turn me in? Is that it?”

“No, never.”

Learning to hate was easy. Larry Wilkinson taught me well. It wasn’t until I began reading Billy Ford’s journal that I realized how widespread the lesson had been, how destructive, of all the hurt left in its wake, the bodies.

Mrs. Wilkinson passed a month after Larry’d been buried. Thomas said how he heard she pulled her car into the garage one night, left it running, and as the house filled with fumes went to bed. I don’t think anyone cared all that much. She was a mean spiteful woman full of venom even before her only son’s death. Afterwards, she was all but insufferable.

“Hey, Steve.”

“What up, Thomas.”

“You hear about Mrs. Wilkinson?”

“Yeah. Heard she killed herself.”

“That ain’t what happened.”

“How you know?”

“You promise not to say anything?”

“Sure, sure.”

“No. I mean really promise. Swear on your life. On your mother’s life. On pain of your pecker shriveling.”

“I swear. Now tell me.”

“Billy did it.”

“Did what? What’re you talking about, Thomas?”

“He went into her garage, found her keys, and started her car while she was asleep. That’s why they didn’t find any suicide note. People always leave notes if they kill themselves.”

“Wait. How you know all this?”

“Never mind that. Just watch out for Billy. He said something made me nervous. Said how three can keep a secret if two of them’s dead.”

We all got secrets. I suppose that’s something Thomas never reckoned on. How it was him spreading rumors and not Billy Ford, a thing I did not know, not until Thomas confided in the wrong boy.