The Farmhouse

Mrs Sixkiller showed them the well first.

She was waiting in the yard when the car came up the gravel road at five to one, standing in the shade of an oak beside a low concrete box with a steel lid, in a navy dress and black shoes and a hat with a small brim, a woman of seventy with very straight grey hair cut level at the jaw and a face that did not move until it decided to; and she did not come to meet the car. She waited for them to get out of it and come to her. Then she looked at the four of them in a row in front of her, in the heat, one after another, from the left, the way Mr Abernathy looked along a row before he took the roll, and Frederick knew before she opened her mouth that she had been a teacher.

“I taught school in this county for forty-one years,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Fourth grade and then eighth. I know who you are. I am going to say so once and then I am not going to say it again, because I have a funeral at two and because it is not interesting.” She looked at Frederick. “You’re the King.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good. That’s done.” She looked at the others. “Which one of you can cook?”

There was a pause.

“I can do eggs,” said Theo.

“How many eggs?”

Theo thought about it honestly.

“One at a time,” he said.

Mrs Sixkiller looked at him for a moment, and something happened at the corner of her mouth, very small, and went away.

“Then you’ll learn,” she said. “Come and look at the well.”

---

The well was the most important thing on the place. She said so. She lifted the steel lid of the concrete box, and inside, in the cool dark, there was a pipe and a pump and a round blue tank like a fat torpedo and a dial with a needle.

“Everything in that house comes out of the ground through this,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Every drop. The kitchen, the bathroom, the hose. It’s a good well. My husband’s father dug it in 1923 and it has never once gone dry, and it is not going to go dry this summer because four boys from New Westminster took forty-minute showers.” She pointed at the dial. “If that needle goes under twenty, you stop. Everybody stops. You don’t run the washing machine and the shower at the same time. You don’t water anything. You don’t fill anything up for fun.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you hear the pump running and nobody’s running water, that’s a leak, and you come and find me.” She shut the lid. “I’m in the town. Third house past the Methodist church, the one with the blue door. Everybody knows it. If you don’t know it, ask anybody, and they’ll walk you there.”

Behind them, at the car, Castellanos had got out and was standing in the full sun in his sports jacket, looking at the yard. At the house, and the oak, and the gravel road, and the barn, and the fence, and the fields going down beyond the fence to a line of trees, and the glint of water through the trees. He looked at all of it slowly, the whole circle, the way he looked at a room.

Mrs Sixkiller looked at him.

“You’ll be the police,” she said.

“Ma’am.”

“There’s a trailer for you by the barn. A man brought it from Grove on Thursday. It has its own air conditioning.” She said this to Castellanos without any expression at all, and then she turned and looked at the four boys, still without any expression. “The house does not.”

---

The house did not have air conditioning.

It had been built in 1923, by her husband’s father, at the same time as the well; and it had been hot, Mrs Sixkiller said, since 1923, and nobody in her family had died of it, and nobody was going to start now. It was a white frame house of two storeys with a deep porch along the front with a swing at one end, and a screen door, and a tin roof that Theo said would be very loud in rain, and windows on every side, tall, with screens in them, so that whatever wind there was could go through.

There was no wind.

There were two box fans. One in the kitchen and one at the top of the stairs. They were square and white and made a noise like a small aircraft a long way off, and she showed them how to turn them on and which way to point them, out of the windows at night to pull the cool air in from the other side, which Frederick did not understand at all and Felix understood at once, and explained, and Mrs Sixkiller looked at Felix with approval.

“The screen door,” said Mrs Sixkiller, at the screen door.

She stood in it, with her hand on the frame. It was a wooden frame with a mesh panel and a long spring at the top that pulled it shut behind you with a bang.

“You shut it,” she said. “Every time. You don’t hold it open while you go back for something. You don’t prop it with a chair while you carry the shopping in. If you leave this door open for two minutes you will have every wasp and every fly and every moth in Craig County in that kitchen, and they will not leave, and I will know, because I always know.” She let it go. It banged. “That’s the second rule.”

“What’s the first?” said Marcus.

“The well.”

“What’s the third?”

Mrs Sixkiller looked at him.

“The cellar,” she said.

---

The cellar was in the yard.

He had not seen it. It was a mound of earth, grassed over, between the house and the barn, about the height of his knee, with a slanting wooden door set into the end of it like the cover of a book, and a padlock on a hasp that was not locked.

“When the siren goes,” said Mrs Sixkiller, “you go in there. Not into the house. Not under a table. Not into the trailer.” She looked at Castellanos. “Especially not into the trailer. The trailer will go to Missouri in a good wind and you will go with it. You go into the cellar and you shut the door from the inside and you stay there until it stops.”

“There’s a siren?” said Felix.

“In the town. You’ll hear it from here. It goes at noon on the first Wednesday of the month to show it works, and the rest of the time it means come in.” She looked at the mound of grass. “It’s not the season. Spring is the season. But it can come in August, and it has, and when it comes it does not ask whether you are on holiday.”

She turned to go back to the house. Then she stopped, and turned back, and looked at all of them, the four boys and the two officers, in the heat, in her funeral hat.

“And there’s the law,” she said.

“Ma’am?”

“In this State,” said Mrs Sixkiller, “when the warning is out, nobody may be turned away from a shelter. Public or private. If you’re in that cellar and somebody comes to the door, anybody, you let them in.” She looked at Castellanos, who had opened his mouth. “Anybody. That’s the law, Sergeant. It’s been the law since 1947, and it is the only law in this State that nobody has ever once argued about.”

Castellanos shut his mouth.

---

She left at twenty to two for the funeral. She did not say whose it was, and nobody asked; but at the car door, a blue car, old, very clean, she turned round and looked at the house, at the four of them on the porch, and at the screen door, which was shut.

“There’s food in the kitchen for two days,” she said. “After that it’s the store in town, or Vinita. Church is at ten if you want it. You don’t have to want it.” She got into the car. Then she wound the window down. “And there’s a magnet on the refrigerator door in the shape of the State. It’s for holding things up. It was my mother’s.” She looked at Frederick. “Hold something up with it.”

She drove away down the gravel road in a cloud of pale dust that hung in the still air behind her for a long time after the car had gone.

---

They held the list up with it.

Theo took the envelope out of his bag in the kitchen, the Programme’s envelope with KETCHUM on it in capitals, underlined twice, and took out the Programme, and turned it to the back of page fourteen; and they all looked at the refrigerator, which was old and white and rounded at the corners and hummed, and at the magnet on its door, which was brown, and the exact shape of Oklahoma-Sequoyah, the long body and the panhandle, with a little gold star where Guthrie was.

Theo held the back of page fourteen against the refrigerator door, and Frederick put the magnet on it, over the panhandle, so that it held the corner of the page with the ten things on it in four hands, and the rest of the Programme hung down below it, all fourteen pages, cream, with the crest, upside down.

They stood back and looked at it.

“Ms Fenner would die,” said Felix.

“Ms Fenner left it,” said Frederick.

“She left it in case.”

“Well,” said Theo. “This is in case.”

---

They could cook one egg between them, as it turned out, at a time, and they cooked eleven.

Mrs Sixkiller had left bread and butter and eggs and a ham in the refrigerator, and tomatoes from somebody’s garden, enormous, split at the top from the heat, and a jar of something red that Marcus opened and smelled and closed again quickly, and a pie under a cloth on the table, and a note in very clear handwriting that said PEACH. NOT FOR BREAKFAST. And Theo stood at the gas stove in the kitchen with the box fan roaring behind him and cooked eggs, one at a time, in a black iron pan, the way his mother did, with too much butter, and handed each one over his shoulder on a fork onto whichever plate was held out, and they ate them standing up in the kitchen at six in the evening in ninety-eight degrees with sweat running down their backs, with bread, and the tomatoes, which were the best tomatoes Frederick had eaten in his life.

Then they ate the pie. All of it. It was not breakfast.

Castellanos came to the screen door at seven, and stood outside it, and did not open it, and looked through the mesh at the four of them at the kitchen table with the empty pie dish in the middle.

“Everything all right, sir?” he said, through the screen.

“Everything’s fine, Sergeant. Do you want some eggs?”

Castellanos looked at the eggs, and at the pan, and at Theo.

“No thank you, sir,” he said. “Sergeant Kimura is making something in the trailer.” A pause. “In the air conditioning.”

He went away. They heard his feet on the porch steps, one at a time.

Marcus put his forehead down on the kitchen table.

“They’ve got air conditioning,” he said, into the table.

“They’re the detail,” said Frederick. “They have to be able to think.”

“I have to be able to think.”

“You don’t,” said Felix. “You’re on holiday. Nobody on holiday has to think.” He looked at the box fan. “Turn it round. Mrs Sixkiller said. Out of the window at night. To pull the cool air in from the other side.”

“There isn’t any cool air on the other side.”

“There will be,” said Felix, with total confidence, “at night.”

---

There was not, at night.

But there was the porch.

They went out onto it at nine, when the light had gone out of the sky over the trees and the heat had gone from unbearable to only very bad, and sat on it: Theo on the swing, which creaked, and Felix and Marcus on the steps, and Frederick on the boards with his back against the wall of the house beside the screen door and his legs out in front of him, in a T-shirt and shorts and bare feet, with the wood of the porch still warm under him from the day.

It was dark. Darker than anywhere he had ever been. At the Palace there was always light, the lamps along the avenue and the glow over the city and the lights in the guardroom and the security lights on the lawn. At Solliden there was the lighthouse at the end of the point. Here there was nothing. The yard, black. The oak, a darker black against the black. The barn. And beyond the fence, through the trees, the lake, which you could not see, except that you could, because there were lights on the far side of it, a long way off, across the water, a few yellow dots, the town, and they were doubled in the water below them so that each one had a twin.

And the noise. He had thought it would be quiet. It was the loudest place he had ever been. Insects, in the trees, thousands of them, a dry shrill buzzing that rose and fell in waves across the whole dark, from one side of the yard to the other and back, like something breathing; and frogs, down at the water, deep, slow, a sound like somebody plucking a loose string; and once, very close, in the oak, a bird that said the same three notes over and over again, so many times that Felix started counting and gave up at sixty.

“What is that?” said Marcus.

“A whip-poor-will,” said a voice from the yard.

It was Kimura. She was standing at the bottom of the porch steps in the dark, in a T-shirt, with a bottle of water in each hand, which she held up. Frederick had not heard her come. Nobody ever heard Kimura come.

“It says its name,” said Kimura. “Listen. Whip-poor-will.”

They listened. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will. Whip-poor-will.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said Theo, from the swing, delighted.

Kimura came up the steps and gave out the water, four bottles, cold, from the trailer, with the cold coming off them in the dark; and went down the steps again, and stopped at the bottom, and looked back up at the porch, at the four of them on it, and at the screen door, which was shut.

“Seven out of ten,” she said.

“What is?”

“The first day.” She thought about it. “Eight. For the pie.”

She went away across the yard in the dark towards the trailer, where there was a light in the window and the low steady hum of the air conditioning; and the whip-poor-will in the oak said its name again, and again.

---

At midnight he was still on the porch.

The others had gone up at eleven, to the two hot rooms under the tin roof, Theo with him and Felix with Marcus, with the box fan at the top of the stairs roaring between them; and he had gone up too, and lain on top of the sheet in the dark in the heat, and listened to Theo fall asleep in the other bed at once, the way Theo always did, all of him at once; and then he had got up again, very quietly, and gone down the stairs, and through the kitchen past the refrigerator with the list on it, and out through the screen door, holding it so it did not bang, and shut it.

He lay down on the boards of the porch on his back. They were cooler now. Not cool; cooler.

Above him there were stars. More than at Solliden, even. More than he had known there were. They went from one side of the sky to the other, thick, so many that the dark between them looked grey; and across the middle of them, from the trees on one side to the barn on the other, there was a pale band, faint, like a cloud that was not a cloud, and he lay and looked at it for a long time before he understood that it was the galaxy, the whole of it, edge on, which he had read about in books and never seen.

The insects breathed in the trees. The frogs plucked at their strings down by the water. The windmill by the barn, which pumped nothing, turned once, slowly, with a long creak, as some wind he could not feel came across the yard, and stopped.

He thought about the diary on the Private Secretary’s desk in New Westminster. Tomorrow, Sunday. Nothing. Monday. Nothing. Tuesday. Nothing. Seven weeks of it, going away.

He thought: I am lying on a porch in the dark in Oklahoma, and nobody in the world knows where I am, except the Household, and three sets of parents, and my mother, and the Prime Minister, and Mrs Sixkiller.

He thought: and Mr Vollmer.

He lay on his back on the boards of the porch in Ketchum and laughed, very quietly, at the galaxy, until the whip-poor-will in the oak, which had stopped, started again, as though it had taken it personally.