The End and Everything Before It by Finegan Kruckemeyer

Author:Finegan Kruckemeyer [Finegan Kruckemeyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2024-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

∞

The thick ropes pull taut and the machinery groans. Horses strain, hooves digging into sand as farmers drive them step by desperate step forward, white spit foaming at their bits. The ropes run high, pass over a cantilevered frame (two trunks hammered into the earth, a crossbar between them) and then descend to the shed, to large hooks drilled into the floor joists.

Slowly, creaking its protests, the shed lifts off the earth eighty years after first settling there. It hangs suspended for a magical second, Nella and the kids watching open-mouthed. Then Alistair and the farmers guide it sideways and with a triumphant doof, it lands on the long wide bed of McGinley’s truck.

The farmers (paid up and hands shook) pat the sweated necks of their beloved horses and untie their ropes.

The frame is lowered and broken down and the truck drives away, McGinley waving his hat out the window of his beast of a machine, proudest man in a thousand miles. Max and Toby run along the driveway after it, jumping onto the back beside their dad, Al’s hands pulling them aboard.

Nella watches her garden shed and her three men head up the Coast Road, swinging their legs and talking excitedly.

The noise of trucks and kids and horses and effort fades to nothing. Nella stands in her garden, the day warm and still, the large bare rectangle of dirt suddenly marring a corner of her plot. She goes over to inspect it, wondering whether to plant a bed of vegetables, or seed it more wild, or play no part at all and just let the dunes slowly take it back—the sand has appetite for anything if not kept in check.

Kicking around the granular earth, Nella sees something unexpected. She bends down and loops a finger under it—a bit of leather strapping. She pulls and the earth breaks as the strap is freed in a long furrow, opening up the soil as it goes. Not just a strap but a strap attached to something. She digs a bit, kicks with her toe a bit, gives a bit more heft and loosens it—it is a worn canvas bag, long buried. An Aladdin’s lamp, but twenty times the weight. She pulls at it, keeps digging, a farm beast driven by no one but herself.

Success. She frees it and stands back to look at it, as is her way. Maybe she could divine its secrets like she does her humans. But Nella has earned her reputation not by making things complicated—this is a bag. A bag can be opened. She opens it.

She closes it. Her head swims with its contents, and now she is a chess grandmaster mapping a hundred moves in any direction, finding flaws and victories both. What they could do. What the boys could become. Where she and Al could roam. What prosperities the town might know. What horrors.

Nella sits back in the dirt and stares at the coins that offer no explanation, that are so much more inscrutable than a human.

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