The Farm House
The hour of midnight was cleaved open by the ringing of a telephone. It reverberated through the valley, thickening the fields of late summer wheat with the sound. There between the yawning fields and the hills that migrated ever skyward rested a farmhouse, which cast its shadow into the night and was known to the sparse inhabitants of the valley as kin to the river and the woods that huddled thickly on all sides.
The farmhouse, which was built with beams of those same forest’s bones and stones carried in from a quarry that served its time now as a lake beloved in high summer afternoons, had housed a family, as most houses have at one time or another. That family, referred to as sturdy farm folk by the kind, and less favorable words by others, kept to themselves, the animals, and their farm duties with the exceptions of holy days, when mass or other devotional inclinations might lead them to make a pilgrimage to church or someone’s front stoop.
Many families that traced their roots to the valley had dwindled into the dusk of the years, losing generations to the greedy hand of war, the booming call of industry, or the silver tongued allure of academia in far off universities. Still, the houses never fully emptied, the scents of evening meals and the glow of muted fires never fully abandoned the valley to that witching darkness.
The farmhouse loomed over the dead end of the village’s one winding road, better known to the hooves of cattle than any sparse automobile or even the booted feet of workers weary from work beneath the glaring sun. The front yard busied itself from dawn until dusk with roaming chickens, cats that stalked vermin from the attic to the furthest of fields, and children, blonde haired and bare footed, exchanging cries for laughter with the frequency of September storms. If you were to ask, in a friendly exchange with the grocer perhaps or the pastor after mass, in that offhanded way of country gossip, how many children the farmhouse and its keepers managed, or really much else about the family outside of the recipe for the mother’s rhubarb pie that she brought to the Easter picnic each year, you’d be left with little more than a shrug or a shared whisper of curiosity.
What was best known about the family was that there was never a lonely one among them for all the company they kept within those walls, they had always been there in the valley like wild garlic or the riverbed, and it seemed they always would be.
Now if you had asked anyone in the village or valley proper what they were up to now, no one could quite remember the last time the family had come by, to the one room chapel or the bakery on Main Street, but no one honestly put much thought into remembering. If they had, they may have also wondered about the last time they had heard the bellowing of a cow being herded into the barn out of the evening chill, or the last piercing squeal of a pig being led to the chopping block behind the barn for slaughter. No one noticed how tall and thick the wheat had grown over these blistering summer months, how they had waned from green to gold and still sent their collective whisper into the early mornings and timid dusks.
The phone rang, fracturing the night as windows in the distance awoke into curious gold. As the night stretched onwards over the spectral hour of deepest night, the farmhouse remained dark, silent in between those shrill rings, like the beating of a furious heart.