The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle Read Free Page A

though. That, like the smell of death, was not an odor that faded easily.
    The Griswold place was a leaning white farmhouse badly in need of a new paint job. The roof had bald patches where shingles had fallen off. Swallows nested in the eaves. The faded red barn with its old tin roof had fallen in on itself long ago, and the collapsed remains seemed to be the home of about a hundred feral cats and several dogs with various handicaps (one had three legs, one was missing an eye, and another bulged with large growths). In the front yard, which was more packed dirt than grass, beside the big black mailbox that bore their name, hung a white sign, hand-painted in red letters:
                              EGGS
                              HAY
                              PIGS
                              POTATOS
    Beyond the sign, set back about ten feet from the road, was a little three-sided wooden shed with a rusted tin roof. There, on any given day, were three or four dozen eggs in cardboard cartons and some bushel baskets of potatoes, beans, corn, and whatever other crops happened to be in. The prices were written on scraps of paper thumbtacked to the back wall, and there was a metal box to put your money in.
    MAKE YOUR OWN CHANGE. BE HONEST ! THANK YOU read the sign taped to the top of the banged-up gray metal box. A dented scale hung from the ceiling, but the one time my mother tried to use it, the needle refused to move, the spring inside broken.
    Another sign told you to ask at the house about hay, pork, piglets, and free kittens.
    Before New Hope got chickens, my mother and I would walk down to buy eggs from the Griswolds’ stand. We rarely ran into Mr. Griswold, but sometimes we’d see him on his tractor off in the distance. His wife, we heard, had died of cancer years before, leaving him to care for his brood alone. Often we’d see one of the kids doing chores in the yard, or banging around under the hood of some rusted-out car on cinder blocks. There were so many kids—eight, including Del. All boys but her.

    Y OU LIVE UP WITH THE HIPPIES , don’t you?” Del asked me that day as we stood looking at each other in the field of peas reaching up with tiny, pale tendrils, the dead crow between us.
    “Yeah.”
    “You a hippie?”
    “No.”
    “Hippies are stupid,” she said.
    I didn’t respond, just kicked at the clumps of cold mud.
    “Hippies are stupid, I said!” Her pale gray-blue eyes gleamed with anger.
    “Sure.” I took a small step away from her, afraid she might haul off and hit me.
    “Sure what?”
    “Sure, I guess hippies are stupid.”
    Del smiled, showing her broken tooth. “I have something to show you. A secret thing. Want to see?”
    “I guess,” I said, somewhat concerned that just a few minutes before she’d asked me the same question, then led me to the decaying crow.
    I followed Del through the trellised rows of young peas, then across garden beds full of spinach, carrots, and beets. I recognized the plants from the gardens at New Hope. Our soil was darker, less clumpy, than the Griswolds’. And although our gardens were smaller, they seemed healthier and better organized, with special walking paths covered with wood chips between the planting beds. The Griswolds’ fields were full of stones, rusted plow blades, and forgotten rolls of barbed wire, and we tramped right through the crooked rows of seedlings. Watching over this landscape, as if daring any living thing to grow, was the upside-down crow, hanging from a wire.
    Del and I passed a small fenced-in pasture where a large gray mare was chomping hay. A spotted pony stood beside her. He started when he saw us, running off behind the stall, and I could see that he had a slight limp.
    “Is that your pony?”
    “Yeah. His name’s Spitfire. He bites.”
    Just past the horse pasture was the pigpen, where five enormous pigs were lounging in