Talking with the farm-lads
Good: the farm-lads are still here, though they’re just wrapping up.
They’ve stripped the barns already. Nothing much in there, they said. A few workbenches, perhaps from a plant-nursery; a few peculiar plants each making a kind of bucket or cauldron out of their leaves, but long-dead now. A few old hand-tools for the orchard – a lopper, a handsaw, a two-wheeled wheel-barrow – they’d kept those for themselves, as agreed. Some other odd tools that they’ve got no idea what they’re for. And the rusted-out remains of what might have been an old motor-bike, long past any kind of repair – the metal-scrap guy had taken that away for them.
Otherwise just old wood. Some hayracks, odd-looking things, like a flat tree-trunk some fifteen foot long and four foot wide with four legs either side, body and legs all of a piece as if they’d been grown that way. Would have been kinda difficult to move, but they solved that by cutting the legs off with a chainsaw. Wood was a lot harder than it looked, and kinda glued up the chainsaw a bit, with that strange thick resin that it had inside. Dark red. Like blood, almost. Joking about it – you know, cutting the limbs off a corpse and all that, like a horror-film. But it was just wood, of course. Should be good firewood, anyway.
A shiver down my spine at all of that. A chill. Something wrong – very wrong – but I can’t put my finger on what it is.
—
More comments from the lads. After Uncle George had died, Aunt Kat never ploughed the fields again. Told them she didn’t know how to work the trees, and too old to learn now. She let those fields run to pasture; the only part of the farm she kept going was the orchard.
Never did work out how she moved the crop back to the barn for shipping out, they said. All she had was one wheel-barrow, and she was an old woman by then, she couldn’t have done more than two or three trips a day with it. But she must’ve, somehow.
I’m listening to this, and it feels like alarm-bells are going off all round my head and more with every word they say. But I don’t know why.
Good: the farm-lads are still here, though they’re just wrapping up.
They’ve stripped the barns already. Nothing much in there, they said. A few workbenches, perhaps from a plant-nursery; a few peculiar plants each making a kind of bucket or cauldron out of their leaves, but long-dead now. A few old hand-tools for the orchard – a lopper, a handsaw, a two-wheeled wheel-barrow – they’d kept those for themselves, as agreed. Some other odd tools that they’ve got no idea what they’re for. And the rusted-out remains of what might have been an old motor-bike, long past any kind of repair – the metal-scrap guy had taken that away for them.
Otherwise just old wood. Some hayracks, odd-looking things, like a flat tree-trunk some fifteen foot long and four foot wide with four legs either side, body and legs all of a piece as if they’d been grown that way. Would have been kinda difficult to move, but they solved that by cutting the legs off with a chainsaw. Wood was a lot harder than it looked, and kinda glued up the chainsaw a bit, with that strange thick resin that it had inside. Dark red. Like blood, almost. Joking about it – you know, cutting the limbs off a corpse and all that, like a horror-film. But it was just wood, of course. Should be good firewood, anyway.
A shiver down my spine at all of that. A chill. Something wrong – very wrong – but I can’t put my finger on what it is.
—
More comments from the lads. After Uncle George had died, Aunt Kat never ploughed the fields again. Told them she didn’t know how to work the trees, and too old to learn now. She let those fields run to pasture; the only part of the farm she kept going was the orchard.
Never did work out how she moved the crop back to the barn for shipping out, they said. All she had was one wheel-barrow, and she was an old woman by then, she couldn’t have done more than two or three trips a day with it. But she must’ve, somehow.
I’m listening to this, and it feels like alarm-bells are going off all round my head and more with every word they say. But I don’t know why.
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