THE TURKEY VULTURES had been circling the southern acreage all morning, descending in lazy loops and drawing closer to the ground with each pass. Whatever they were eyeballing in the bunchgrass below was about to give up the ghost.
Jim Hawkshaw hated turkey vultures, always had. They looked beautiful and almost noble from afar, high in the sky as they rode the thermals in slow arcs without ever flapping a wing, but up close they were monsters. Their bald heads looked boiled and reptilian and the damn things stank to high heaven of rotten flesh.
And he had a bad feeling about what they were stalking.
At last count Jim had four barn cats, all friendly but still part feral as barn cats will be. The wildest of the bunch was a slim calico he had nicknamed Killer for his skill in catching field mice. Killer was a scrapper who refused to back down no matter how big the other animal was. Jim had seen the damn cat tear hell after raccoons, possums and once, even a fox. He admired Killer’s spunk but knew that sooner or later the calico would cross an animal that wouldn’t back down and then there would be trouble. It finally happened two days ago. Early Sunday morning, Jim came out to the barn and spotted Killer slinking awkwardly out the door, limping badly and bleeding from its hind leg. He’d called to it, trying to coax it back inside the barn but there are few things as skittish as an injured cat. Killer looked back at him once before slipping into the briars and vanishing completely.
When he spied the vultures circling his field early this morning, he knew the calico was out there and in very bad shape.
He’d be damned if he let those red-headed monsters have his cat. Jim climbed up into the tractor, knowing the evil birds would clear off if he roared up in the noisy old Massey Ferguson but when he turned the ignition, the damned thing wouldn’t start. The Massey was old and the timing was off and the starter often shrieked loud enough to bleed your ears. He adjusted the choke and tried again. The engine rolled over but refused to catch.
He looked up. The vultures swooped down, dropping fifty feet. Closing in for the kill. Or after-kill. Turkey vultures were scavengers, garbage-pickers that waited for things to die, never killing their own prey. All the more reason to hate them and get the goddamn tractor started.
It finally caught and Jim dropped it into gear and roared off alongside the old fieldstone fence, hammering hard for the back forty. A plume of dirty diesel exhaust roiled behind the Massey and Jim wished he had brought the shotgun. A scattershot would drive the ugly birds away, maybe even bringing one or two down, but the shotgun was back at the house, locked in a cabinet in the basement. No time to go back for it now.
He gunned the engine and jostled along in the hard seat. The vultures flapped to the ground. Three of the damned things, pouncing after whatever lay on the ground.
The Massey sputtered and popped towards them and the vultures backed off. They hissed and spread their wings in a span of defiance. Jim popped the handbrake and jumped down, already smelling their stench from here. He scrounged up a good sized stone and flung it at the birds. They hopped about in the peculiar way of those birds and snapped out their wings but didn’t fly off.
Killer lay in a row of freshly tilled earth, dead but still warm to the touch. His fur was matted and wet, the tongue lolling between the teeth and peppered with grit. At least the monsters hadn’t gotten to him yet. Small mercies. The scavengers withdrew, hissing and spanning their wings to scare him off. Bold as brass, waiting for him to leave so they could get at it. For a second time Jim wished he had brought the shotgun.
He scooped up the dead cat, limbs flopping loose as a sock puppet in his hands and carried it to the tractor. The vultures hopped and screeched in protest, cheated out of their breakfast. There was a spade mounted onto the back of the Massey Ferguson and Jim pulled it down and crossed to the stone fence that demarcated the property line of the Hawkshaw farm. The stones had been cleared from these fields two hundred years ago and stacked up to form a low wall, like some defensive barricade against an army of dwarves. On the other side was more acreage, untouched for generations and left to seed. Nature had made small forays to reclaim these neglected fields, creeping up from the creek at the southern end but most of the untended acres remained clear, with stalks of timothy and barley that grew and died and grew again each season.
Jim chose a spot next to the ancient fieldstone, a small pocket in the fence. He laid the cat in the weeds and started digging. Ten minutes in and his shirt clung with sweat as he dug the little grave under the hot sun. It was silly, going to this much trouble for an old barn cat but Jim didn’t care. His hatred for the foul birds was that strong.
Truth was he felt an affinity for the poor cat, wounded as it was with those grotesque birds waiting for it to die. Vultures were circling over Jim’s head too, waiting for him to croak so they could swoop in and gobble it all up. Banks and creditors, all eyeballing the Hawkshaw farm, clacking their beaks in anticipation of an easy meal.
He wasn’t going to last another season, of that he was sure. He would lose it all; the farm, the land, the house. Five generations of Hawkshaws had farmed this land down here on the Roman Line and he would be the fool to lose it. He’d be the one to betray the family, betray all those who had come before him and broken their backs on this hard clay soil.
The debts had snowballed into a dead weight he couldn’t hold up anymore. Each season yielding worse returns than the last, no matter how many times he alternated crops. He stopped lying to himself about the “one good crop, the one good year” that would balance the books and set them on the climb out of debt. He’d maintained this lie to his wife and by proxy, his son but now there were simply no more lies to tell.
Jim tossed the spade into the bunchgrass and looked down into the hole he had dug. Deep enough. He gathered up Killer and nestled him into the bottom of the hole. He smoothed his hand down the calico fur and then took up the spade and backfilled the little grave.
The vultures screeched and flapped around him.
To hell with them. To hell with himself too.
“Go on,” he said, looking for another rock to throw. “Find something else to tear apart.”
Smokey refused to cooperate.
The bay mare stood on the flagstone floor of the barn, tethered between the stalls and refused to budge. Emma Hawkshaw wagged her finger at the horse. Smokey was a beautiful horse to ride but oddly temperamental. Spookily so, the way she would nip at Emma out of the blue, like payback for some slight she had suffered. Other times, like now, the horse simply refused to do anything. Just swing her head up and look at her and then turn away. It was almost a challenge.
“Okay,” Emma said, blowing the bangs from her eyes. “Let’s try this again.”
She leaned into the horse’s shoulder and tapped the foreleg until Smokey relented and lifted the leg. Emma scraped dirt away from the hoof but when the pick touched the frog, Smokey winced and swung her head down.
“Okay, okay,” Emma cooed, leaning harder into the horse to keep Smokey from dropping her leg. She gently plucked away the straw and dirt to get a better look at the hoof. Thrush was common enough and the mare had it when Emma bought her three years ago. She had treated the hoof then but every spring it would flare up again. This season was no different. She let the bay drop her leg and smoothed her palm down its withers, talking softly into her ear until the horse settled. She’d have to mix up some more sugardine and treat it.
There used to be two horses in the barn. Both quarter horses, bay Smokey and a young pinto that Emma had fawned over. Skittish and harder to control than the older bay, the pinto had been untrained and barely broken. Emma suspected the animal had been badly used. She spent hours with the pinto, just walking him around the paddock to gain its trust, easing him into a saddle. She had only sat him a dozen times, each time a struggle to keep the horse from bolting or bucking. It would take time and Emma was patient but reality had bitten down and knew she couldn’t keep him. Arguments with Jim over the expense and Emma crunching numbers but to no avail. She sold the pinto in the fall and still regretted it. There was simply no way to justify the expense to keep the little pinto. It was sold off, the money dumped into the black hole of debt and Emma had bought two goats on the cheap from Norman Meyerside down the road, companion animals for lonely Smokey. They were odd looking animals and Jim hated them but she didn’t care. Smokey seemed calmer with the nannering things around and that was all that mattered.
She rooted around the cupboard, pulling down what she needed to mix an ointment for thrush. Her dad’s own recipe, but there wasn’t a lot of betadine scrub left. There wasn’t a lot of anything, she thought looking over the shelves of the tack room. They had scrimped on everything to get through the winter, making everything go twice as far and Emma winced at her meagre supplies. This, their current state, the thriftiness of it all. If their situation didn’t improve this season, she’d be forced to sell the bay. There was just no other way. The horse wouldn’t fetch a lot of money but she simply couldn’t keep Smokey anymore. God forbid something happened to the animal that required a veterinary visit.
The horse stood patiently and swished its tail as Emma washed and treated the infected hoof. She cleaned the other hoofs for good measure and led the bay out to the upper paddock where the ground was dry. The two goats clopped out of their stall and followed them out to the grass like dutiful escorts. Emma looked up when she heard the tractor rumble up out of the back field.
It didn’t sound right, the rhythm of the engine was off and a sharp pop belched from the exhaust. It laboured into the yard and Jim killed the engine. He removed a side panel and reached into the engine of the old Massey Ferguson. He snapped his hand back suddenly, burning his finger. The index finger was bent at a slight angle, having been broken as a kid, and was forever getting burnt or cut or hammered.
Emma closed the gate and crossed the yard towards him. “When are you going to put that old thing out of its misery?”
“About the time we can afford a new one, I guess.” Jim sucked on his blistering finger and then flapped it in the breeze. “Which means never. Day after never.”
She nodded at his hand. “Do you want some ice for that?”
“It’s nothing.” He stopped flapping his hand. “Did Kate call?”
“No. What time was she supposed to be here?”
“An hour ago.”
“I guess that means it didn’t go well,” she said.
“Just means she’s late is all. Kate’s always late.”
Jim looked up at his wife and smiled and shrugged. Her nose had already turned a bit red from the sun, as it did every spring. The rain and overcast skies of the last two weeks had finally given way to three straight days of hard sunshine and Emma had spent every moment outside soaking it up. That first blast of sunshine tinged her nose pink and brought out the freckles on her cheeks. In a few days her nose would peel and then darken. A spring ritual as reliable as tulips opening up along the veranda.
Those three days of sun had been enough to dry up the dirt road they lived on and Jim could see a spume of dust rising above the trees. A car coming down the Roman Line.
“Maybe that’s her,” he said.
A Ford Explorer turned into the drive and trundled through the potholes. The wedgewood blue exterior shiny and clean, the grill free of bug spatter. Not a farm vehicle. The Explorer hewed up beside Jim’s battered pickup and the driver stepped out. A dark haired woman in nice clothes, good shoes crunching over gravel. Kate Farrell smiled wide and waved at Jim and Emma. An old friend of the Hawkshaws, and mayor of the township of Pennyluck, Ontario.
Emma took her husband’s hand and gave it a little squeeze for good luck.