The Price of Land

The rest of the family never returned to the farm after the fire. What Michael saw there he saw alone. Before the embers cooled or the bodies were laid to rest the adults decided to sell. So Michael retreated and let the prospect of a return become his guiding star. He never told reporters what drove him to dive into a tech startup, because family business was private. When the startup's buyout was on the horizon, he knew where his money would go. He would rebuild the family home, exactly as it had been.

"My grandparents lived there, and their grandparents too," he told one girlfriend. "It's important."

She'd grown up in New York, unable to name a single ancestor who had owned a square foot of land, so in a skeptical tone of voice she'd said, "Really?" It was the first sign of their relationship's inevitable doom. She was never going to live in fly-over country.

He'd said, "You can't just sell something like that."

And yet, the family had.

None of them deserve the land, so he returned alone. He'd flown out from New York, rented a car, and then driven out to the property at dusk. None of the owners who'd possessed the land in the interim had actually found a use for it, so it still bore scars from the night of the fire. A ring of iron spikes wrapped in bright orange snow-fencing blocked off the pit where the house had stood. The barn was a heap of ash. The trees around the property were as dense and overgrown as he remembered. He'd expected more charred trunks, but the forest had survived.

As a nerdy child, the forest had been Tolkien's Fangorn and Lucas's Forest Moon of Endor. Usually a late sleeper, child Michael had risen at dawn whenever he visited the grandparents. When the leaves were dewy the forest held magic like something from Lewis or Rowling. Michael would appear at breakfast full of stories to amuse his grandmother.

If the buyout went well, he could begin work on rebuilding within weeks. For the moment it was enough just to be back, even if that meant seeing the desolation.

He started down an old, familiar trail. In the old days, it would have wound around the barn, connecting the house to the watering hole and a dozen other hideouts, and in the old days it hadn't been nearly so snarled with overgrowth. He had to watch his step, so he had circled most of the way around the barn before he noticed the red structure.

Dumbfounded, he turned his phone's light towards where the barn stood, certain that it had to be an illusion. The faint illumination only certified that the barn really was standing there. The phone wobbled in Michael's grip. The growth separating him from the barn was too dense for him to fight his way through it, especially since he was wearing an expensive pair of slacks, but he knew that the path drew close to the barn's rear-end up ahead.

Jogging--and ripping a hole in the expensive slacks in the process--he rushed to where the trail should have met the clearing that surrounded the barn, except he couldn't find it. It was like the forest had, in the years that Michael had been gone, reclaimed two dozen yards of cleared ground. Thick-trunked trees that should have taken a century or more to grow stood on land that Michael knew to be empty.

How long has it been? That had to be the answer. The interim had warped Michael's memories. Further ahead, the trail would meet the clearing.

Michael held his light up towards the barn, searching for any sign of it between the trees. And it was back. Michael just needed to move around a fallen tree and he'd be able to see what had been built on his family's land. Only when he emerged from the trees, his slacks ruined and splattered with mud, the clearing was empty.

There was no barn, only ash.

From his hotel room, Michael called his mother.

"To what do I owe the honor?" she asked.

"Has anyone been back to the property?"

"What?"

"The family land. Has anyone got back?"

"Don't take that tone with me." There was a pause--room for an apology Michael had no interest in giving--then she said, "No, of course not. Why are you bringing that up?"

Why? It was the family home. Michael had spent summers there with his cousins. He had believed that he would inherit the land one day. Sometimes his grandmother had whispered as much to him.

"That's ancient history, Mikey." She hung up.

He returned in the morning. Daylight confirmed the damage. Nothing remained of the house except the pit that had once been the basement. The barn was a heap of ash. Michael parked the rental car fifty yards from the house because the driveway had gone to gravel. With daylight's assistance, Michael expected no trouble discovering what had tricked him into thinking he saw the barn.

Years later, he would wish that something had interceded to stop him.

He started down the trail, this time in blue jeans not unlike the pants he'd worn when he romped through this forest as a child. He scanned the forest for anything red, wondering exactly what kind of junk he'd stumbled across. And then, earlier than the night before, he saw the barn again.

Under daylight, there was no mistaking it: the barn was back. It was a bit smaller than he remembered. As a child, it had been a fortress no less impressive than the Alamo. The paint was chipping, but still, it was there: the barn where the fire started. The barn where his father had died.

Michael couldn't make sense of what he saw. And yet, there it was. He lurched towards it, his legs unsteady and his vision blurry. He emerged into the clearing, and the barn vanished like a mirage on the highway.

Michael pivoted, as if the entire barn might be tiptoeing around behind him, prepared to lurch out for the ultimate surprise. There was nothing but the dense foliage and the debris heap. Something rational protested, and his stomach felt on the verge of disgorging its contents, but the barn was gone. He pulled his hair back and tried to take a deep breath, but his lungs had shrunk, and breathing felt like inviting hyperventilation.

There was no explanation for the illusion except that his own mind was crumbling from the inside out.

Back in the rental, he cranked the AC up to max and hoped it was heatstroke. He drove back to town slowly, afraid that he might faint and dip into opposing traffic--not that there was much traffic--at any moment. Eventually he forced a meal into his mouth at a diner and drank a few glasses of water.

His third time walking the trail, he stared to the left the entire way. Twice he lost his footing, earning himself a nice bruise and a gash in the process, but he watched the barn flicker in and out of reality. It emerged as it had when Michael was a child, before being renovated. It disappeared, replaced by the woods that had lived here before European settlers carved out the clearing. And then it had the fresh red paint from the renovation that happened when Michael was 12. At the trail's very end, after a half-dozen junctions to trails that wound off into the trees, Michael hesitated. The barn was out of sight, but just over the sound of insectile buzzing and the swaying branches conversation murmured from the barn's direction.

Michael couldn't make out the words, but he knew those voices.

Dad, grandpa, aunts and uncles...

Impossible, of course. Grandpa was dead, dad was dead, some of those aunts and uncles were dead. But what he saw was already impossible. Why should he hear anything different?

He stood in place for an hour, concentrating on teasing syllables out of that murmur without any success.

At the hotel, Michael's phone rang. His partner at the startup sounded frantic. "I need you back in New York. You're coming in tomorrow afternoon? Change it to the morning."

"I can't."

"You can't?"

The hotel and the phone-call seemed unreal. They held none of the sway of the barn. Those voices from his childhood were true. His partner was just a business bro who couldn't even code. Michael only required him to handle meetings and bullshit.

"Maybe you don't understand. Big things are happening. Big things. Eight figure things--"

"I can't." The thought of the afternoon flight was unpalatable. Losing more time with the barn? Impossible.

"You're really screwing me here, pal."

Michael hung up. They'd figure it out without him, or they wouldn't. Michael tried to sleep with an alarm set for dawn, but he couldn't rest. He kept thinking about the barn. If it wasn't there, he was losing his mind, and he was of no use to the startup anyways. And if he wasn't losing his mind...

After midnight he gave up on sleep.

Could he have known, even then, that this would be a trend for him? That he'd already established a pattern?

He drove back to the property. With a flashlight in hand, he started the trail again. The barn appeared. Sometimes it was decked out in streamers, like it had been for the final family reunion. Sometimes he heard the unmistakable sound of a wedding and Canon in D. But still, their words eluded Michael. Voices, yes. Words? Reduced to sound without meaning.

And then there was the light: bright orange and unmistakable. Michael could have turned away. If he just ran down the trail that moment would pass as quickly as any of the others. Instead, he stopped and watched the man who had been his father. Here was the source of the family shame. Here was the reason why the land had been taken from them.

The family always claimed that the fire was an accident, but he'd never believed them. He knew why they cringed at his father's name.

His father stared out into the woods. Maybe they locked their gaze then, or maybe they would lock their gaze at some other point on the trail, but he screamed and even though his words were lost, Michael understood. He wanted to destroy the barn, destroy the family, destroy everything. Why?

Michael would ask the same question on future laps through the trail: Why?

When Michael missed meetings in New York, instead walking the trail, he would wonder why. When he missed his mother's wedding by peering into the past, he would wonder why. The others could move on, change their lives, make and lose fortunes. Michael didn't care. He was addicted to the trail and he knew it. Because somewhere on that loop, peering between the trees, there could be the answer to the question that haunted him. Why did you do it, Dad? Why?

Someday Michael would have the money to rebuild, but he would always put it off, because if he rebuilt the barn perhaps the trail would just be a trail again. Without this lens into the past, he might never have his answer.

Michael's phone buzzed. He turned it off. And through the trunks of the trees, unable to step forward, he watched his father feed the fire.