Half Wild by Robin MacArthur

Author:Robin MacArthur
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

8

WHERE FIELDS TRY TO LIE

It’s April, and the kitchen where I sit, sipping a cup of black coffee and watching the light on Round Mountain, has yet to warm from the sun or from the log I put in the cookstove two hours ago, so I get up and throw another log on and open the damper. The wet wood hisses—it will not burst into flame—and I stand there for a moment with my hands searching the matte black surface for warmth, and then go back to the table, and to my still-warm coffee, to stare at the view and watch the sun come.

It’s my first morning here: rising in the cold house at five because I can’t sleep, stepping outside the kitchen door to take a leak—the remains of last night’s liquor streaming through my yellow piss—heating water for coffee and drinking it black at this table where the names of my siblings and me are carved into the southeast corner leg with the dull blade of a child-size jackknife. I was the one who did the carving, as I was the one who did most things, being oldest, and least daunted. Which seems funny to me now, considering how my surviving siblings’ lives have been freer than mine, less constricted, less haunted by this place, and that summer some twenty years ago.

This place: a rugged hillside farm with a view of New Hampshire to the east and Round Mountain to the south, built on ledges of granite with red-dirt rivers that look like veins digging trenches where fields try to lie. The buildings: a two-hundred-year-old Cape with peeling white paint, a gray barn, and three smaller barns, each at various degrees of communion with earth. No one has slept in the house since my father killed himself three years ago. When I arrived last night at dusk I found the counters covered in mouse shit, the kitchen door, not latched properly and never locked, blown open in the wind. Which is maybe why this place has seemed so inhabited by ghosts this time around: my sisters in their thin dresses running barefoot up cold stairs; our father’s dark eyes glistening toward the television; my mother’s bent shoulders and eyes stretched as far as she can see out the window toward the horizon; and my brother—most of all my little brother—with his thin bones and hooded eyes and habit of always turning away.

But enough. It’s too early.

I get up and look out the window at the barns and fields that now belong to me. What on earth will I do with them? Because my sisters have chosen to marry men who live eight hundred miles away, and because I’m the one who can afford to pay the taxes and the farmer next door to mow the fields once a year, they are now mine. I thought I had hired the farmer’s daughter as well—sixteen, red hair, the spitting image of her mother at that age—to check on the house

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