Seeing Buffalo
by David Rogers
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Table of Contents, parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 |
part 6
That night, I called my dad. He might be a screw-up, but he was still my dad. And I wanted to ask him a few things, like whether he had ever met Patty or if he had ever had any strange experiences on the farm. Strange, however he defined it, which might well include some idiosyncrasies.
Before I could ask, though, he said “Have you talked to your mom lately?”
“No, have you?”
“My mother has been dead for years, Tom.”
“Right. Hah hah. No, I haven’t talked to her. Didn’t figure she wanted to hear from me.” In a sudden flash of insight, I almost said, I think I remind her of you. To her, I was the half-human, half-bull offspring who should never have existed. Maybe she had never even put those thoughts together consciously. Some things are too hard to think about, much less say out loud.
He was quiet for so long I thought the call might have been cut off. Then he said, “I’m sure she’d be glad to hear from you. You are her son, after all.”
Again, I didn’t say what I thought: Don’t remind me. Instead, I asked, “Did you ever meet any of the neighbors around here?”
“You mean people in town? Sure, lots of people.”
“No, ones who live near the farm. A mile or two. Walking distance.”
“There aren’t any. The closest one lives six, maybe, seven miles toward town. Unless someone just moved there. The rest is woods and fields. Didn’t you notice?”
“I noticed.”
“Oh, you’re getting bored with farm life already and looking to go socializing?”
“No... just wondering. What about the old house a little way up the road? About a mile from the farm, on the left as you’re headed toward town?”
Dad went all quiet again and finally just said, “Stay away from there, Tommy.” A moment later, he asked, “How’s school?”
He had never asked that question before. He did not care the slightest bit if I even went to college. Or maybe he would have been happier if I didn’t, given his social and political attitudes. “Why are you trying to change the subject?” I asked.
He sighed. “There’s a bad history to that place. Sometime, oh, maybe a hundred and fifty years ago, there was a young couple who lived there, planned to clear some woods and farm the land. The wife had a child, not long after they settled in, but the child was... not normal.” He paused.
“Okay, I’ll ask: ‘Not normal’ how?”
“How should I know? Probably autistic. Maybe Down’s Syndrome. Or, I don’t know, something else they didn’t have a proper name for back then. So you know how that would go. People said the parents were cursed, and that’s why God gave them a monster-child.”
“Jeez, Dad, ‘Monster-child?’ Children are innocent.”
“I know. That’s what people said. I’m not agreeing with them. You asked for the story, so I’m telling you.”
“Okay, okay. So what happened to them?”
“Well, the farming never amounted to much — you know, the usual problems. Too much rain, not enough rain, or too many pests. This was before pesticides were invented. Also, it’s a pretty big job to clear a forest and make farmland.”
“The people, Dad. What happened to the people?”
“Same thing that happens to us all. They lived and died.”
“Died of what?” This was the crux of the matter, I could tell.
“Well, some people said the child was cursed, and others said it was just... unnatural.”
“Which meant what, in nineteenth-century euphemisms?”
“They meant the husband was not the child’s father, that the mother had been with... an animal of some sort.”
“Animal?!”
“Yeah, an animal. You know, four legs, probably some horns. Bull, deer, buffalo. Or just the plow horse. Depended on what the current gossips wanted to believe, I guess.”
“Well, okay, but gossip’s not fatal. How’d they die?”
“The husband hanged himself in the barn. The mother and daughter lived for a long time after that. The mother is supposed to have died of old age, more or less. Again, nineteenth-century medicine was vague on causes of death.”
“What happened to her daughter?” I asked. “The child that was... unusual, somehow or other.”
“That’s kind of a mystery. Nobody knows. No one I ever met, anyway.”
I considered asking him about Patty. Like, did he ever see her? Talk to her? But the words didn’t come. Between my two parents, my dad was easier for me to talk to, but that didn’t mean we were close. I did ask, “Did anything... unusual ever happen to you here?”
Another long silence. “Unusual how?” he said at last.
“Weird. Out of the ordinary. Whatever.”
“Your grandfather used to tell me stories. Ghosts and whole herds of buffalo seen in the fields. No tracks in the mornings, though.”
“Buffalo?” I didn’t think I had ever seen an actual live buffalo in my life.
“Well, ghost buffalo. But you know, it was all just stories.”
“What other stories, though? Ghosts, you said. Of people? And what about you? Did you ever see or hear anything odd?”
“A time or two. Thought I heard voices. In the barn. But that was probably just the result of too much whiskey. Or not enough sleep. Or both.”
Remarkable honesty, for him. Maybe his new approach to life was doing him some good, despite Aunt Will’s cynicism. But I wasn’t going to get my hopes up just yet. “Anything else?”
“Once, I thought I saw someone. A girl, down by the woods. Near the creek. But it was almost sundown and shadowy, and I was a long way off. Probably a deer. Or if it really was a girl, someone could have stopped along the highway and gotten lost.”
“Girls don’t really look like deer. Not ones I’ve seen, anyway,” I said.
“Like I said, it — or she — was a long way off. Who knows?” Then he asked me about the farm, the horses and equipment. I told him the horses were all still there, generator and pump were working, and I was planning to see if the truck would start, the next morning, maybe take a look around the fields. He said the keys were in a drawer in the kitchen.
“Okay, Dad,” I said. “Nice talking to you. Enjoy your retreat.”
“You too, Son. Be careful.”
Be careful. Careful of what? Not to get trampled by ghosts? I remembered why I didn’t talk to my dad that much, anymore, either. I hadn’t learned anything but vague family legends and a scary story. Nothing actually useful.
But he had heard voices in the barn. So was I turning into my dad, or was the farm haunted? Of the two possibilities, I much preferred a haunted farm.
I slept and dreamed of climbing the ladder to the barn loft. It seemed to go up for miles, and when finally I reached the top, a herd of buffalo were in the loft. Hundreds of them, feasting on the hay. I don’t know how they all fit. It was a dream. They mostly ignored me, but one looked up, turned and said, “The Sirens work for Hera. Shouldn’t trust them, if I were you.” The animal spoke with a British accent.
* * *
The next morning I saw the deer or, according to Aunt Will, the vagrant bull, again, across the field and near the woods. It was neither bull nor deer. I was still brushing the cobwebs of the night’s strange dreams out of my head, but I remembered I had gotten out my binoculars the night before, the ones I sometimes used for stargazing. I focused them on the animal. It was a buffalo. I focused and refocused and stared for several minutes before it vanished in the shadow of the trees.
Patty turned up just after breakfast, as promised. When I put on my new boots, hoping they wouldn’t give me blisters and started out the back door to see if the truck would start, I had no particular mission in mind except to get a good look around the farm I was supposed to be taking care of.
At least I could check the fences in a place or two, where my dad had told me the creek bank was not so steep, nor the water so deep, as to form a hard boundary. And count the horses, of course. Three were in sight, the rest elsewhere.
Patty was standing halfway to the barn, still as a statue, with her back to the house when I came out. I stopped and looked at her for a moment, her long legs, short-cropped brown hair and the ever-present brown coveralls tucked into scuffed rubber boots. If her motionless form had not been so perfectly woman-shaped, she might have reminded me of a scarecrow.
“Have you been standing there all night?” I joked, walking closer. She turned slowly, as if she had been aware of my presence all along. “No. Why would I do that?” It seemed like a very serious question.
“No reason, I guess. You know, you said we knew each other when we were kids, but I don’t really remember you. I thought I did, for a moment, the other day. But I can’t put my mental finger on any actual memories of you. I remember playing with someone, just not exactly who she was. Isn’t that odd?”
“What were you doing at ten in the morning on July 19, ten years ago?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No idea.”
“There you go. Memory is like the wind. It comes and goes.”
“I guess it is, sometimes. Where did you say you lived? I didn’t see any houses that looked lived in. Out on the road to town.”
“Oh, my family has been here for generations,” she said.
“You must live far away from the road, then?”
“They’re listening,” she said. “I can’t talk about that.”
“Who’s listening? There’s nobody here but us,” I said, looking around.
“The wind is always listening.” She noticed the key in my hand, which I assumed must be for the truck, as it was the only automotive key I found in the kitchen drawer. “Are we going for a ride?”
“’We?’ Sure, why not? If the truck will start.” I guessed it would do no good to ask how the wind could listen, or why it shouldn’t know where she lived.
The doors on the truck squeaked and screeched when opened. The inside had a musty smell, cobwebs on the steering wheel and green mold on the rear-view mirror. A rusty adjustable wrench lay on the seat. The wrench was useful, my dad had said, for tapping on battery cables if the engine refused to turn over. Sure enough, nothing but a few clicking noises resulted from turning the key. “Lucky it didn’t do anything,” Patty said. “You forgot to take it out of gear.”
“Oh, right,” I said and fumbled with the clutch and gear shift lever before getting out to struggle with the hood latch. A few taps of the wrench against corroded battery cables, and the old machine roared to life. The tailpipe and muffler were probably full of holes, as rusty as the rest of the truck. More fumbling with the gearshift lever got the transmission in first gear. The engine stalled twice because I let out the clutch too quickly.
“Wow, you really are a college boy aren’t you? Want me to drive?” Patty asked, laughing.
“My dad did show me how to do this, years ago.” I started the engine again and let out the clutch pedal more slowly. Then we were off. “I must have been eight or nine, and I could barely reach the pedals. Or maybe he shifted and just let me steer. Anyway, there’s not much traffic. I think I can manage,” I said.
I am not one of those males whose ego depends on mastering all things mechanical, but I was having fun. A couple of horses near the barn had enough sense to keep clear of anything that made as much noise and moved as erratically as the truck.
Patty rolled down her window and sniffed the air. “Rain,” she said. “Soon.”
“So you said, yesterday. How do you know?”
“Just a feeling. And you can smell it on the wind. Or I can, anyway. Maybe your nose hasn’t cleared up from the city air, yet. Look out for that ditch. The closer you come to the creek, the deeper they get.”
“It’s okay. This truck has four-wheel drive,” I said.
“Don’t you have to shift it somehow to get the four-wheel drive to work?”
“Probably. I’m no expert. Best to just not get stuck, I guess.”
The truck started to roll downhill faster than first gear was propelling it, so instead of shifting to second, I put it in neutral and steered between two more ditches. The truck rolled still faster. Now, I realized, would be a good time to make sure the brakes worked. Deceleration was accompanied by more squeaks and screeches. I breathed a little sigh of relief.
“I guess if the brakes give up, I can turn off the engine and leave the transmission in gear,” I said. “That ought to slow it down. Enough to jump out before it goes up against a tree or into the creek. Death by drowning seems inelegant. As well as unpleasant.”
“Fear of death is overrated. Nothing ever dies,” Patty said. “It’s only transformed.”
“Well, that’s true in myth and religion, I guess.”
“True in real life, too. And physics. The laws of conservation of matter and energy. Don’t they teach you anything in college these days? Everything survives. The only question is what form it takes next.”
“Well, I like the form I have right now, thanks. No rush to trade it in. And how did you even know I went to college? I don’t remember telling you.”
“Oh, it’s in the air.”
“In the air... like rain is in the air?”
“Exactly. Look out for that ditch. Some of them are deeper than they look.” Either she didn’t think I was being mildly sarcastic in response to her evasive answers, or she chose not to notice.
Soon the truck rolled to a stop near a ditch too deep to drive through and too long to go around. The ditch ran parallel to a line of trees, beyond which lay the creek. When I shut off the engine, the rapid flow of water could be heard from a couple of hundred feet away.
“I guess we walk” — I started to say, but Patty had already jumped out, leaving the door open and was running for the trees — “or fly? From here,” I finished. Her feet seemed barely to touch the ground. “What’s the rush?” I called after her, but she did not slow until she reached the shadow of the trees. There, she seemed to blend into the landscape. I followed at a more leisurely pace.
When I caught up, she stood at the precipice of the steep, high part of the creek bank. The water below flowed noisily through a narrow passage. There was something hungry about the sound. The other bank lay an easy stone’s throw away. I picked up a stick, tossed it in the water and watched it swirl away.
“Isn’t this exciting — the water, the trees, everything — it’s all so alive!” Patty said, breathlessly and stepped off the bank and disappeared.
I cried out in dismay and stepped closer, cautiously, to look down. She smiled up at me, standing on a path along a narrow stone ledge that could be seen only from the very edge of the upper bank.
“Come on down,” she said. “I’ll show you the islands.”
We walked single file. The stone path was too narrow to go side by side. I stepped carefully and kept as far from the edge as I could. Which was not far enough. The dark water looked deep and cold, and I wasn’t that great a swimmer, anyway. If I had been told a week ago what I would be doing today, I would have said the messenger was crazy. I didn’t remember being near this path when I was a child. The adults had wisely kept me away, I guess.
The creek bent sharply to the right, then left in the next quarter of a mile or so. Overall, its shape around the farm was a horseshoe but with many turns and twists along the way. In places, the upper bank jutted out overhead, a stone ceiling forming rock shelters that shaded the path.
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by David Rogers
