Even Nana Ingrid, who remembered it firsthand, hadn’t had an explanation for that.
“She kept it in good repair, whatever it was for,” Ingrid said from her wheelchair. “We used to call it her cattle chute. Even though she didn’t raise no cattle.”
They stopped to explore a series of ruined farmhouses that seemed like possible candidates, each little different from the others, all sagging roofs and disintegrating walls, collapsed chimneys and wood eaten to sponges and splinters by the onslaught of the seasons.
“Even if she did, you wouldn’t want to bring the cattle straight to your door.”
They found sofas reduced to shapeless masses erupting with rusty springs, and boxy old televisions whose tubes had shattered, and it was these castoffs that made him think no, none of these were the place, because as old and neglected as these features were, they were still too modern.
“What about there?” Will said, back on the hunt and pointing at a spot they’d passed twice already.
It was the gentle slope of the land that first made Clarence suspect they’d found it at last. The place was farther off the road than anywhere else they’d tried, and if these were the same trees in the background of Willard’s photo, then they were willows with another fifty years of growth behind them, nearly sweeping the ground now to screen the house from sight from the road.
House? What they found was a slumping hovel, a single-story dwelling made of both durable stone and vulnerable timber. It seemed far older than the other ruins they’d inspected, something a pioneer might have built as a first outpost for taming a wild frontier. Behind the willows that bowed and bobbed in the wind, it sat in the midst of an immense stillness pregnant with the whispers of rustling leaves and insects whose chirring in the weeds sounded as sharp as a drill.
It felt right. This was the place. It felt right because something about it felt deeply wrong. This was a place poisoned by time.
And now that they knew, Young Will went back to the car, parked along the side of the road, to retrieve Will Senior’s heirloom camera. The vintage Leica still worked. They’d been built to last decades, to survive wars. He brought it with him every year, but until this moment, Clarence had always assumed it was some sort of totem, the only physical connection he could have to the man whose name he’d been born to carry. He’d never mentioned an intention to actually use it.
His brother stationed himself down below, camera at his eye as he framed up the incline, until he was satisfied he’d found the vantage point from which Willard had shot his final photo. He then pointed at a spot on the ground that had once been striped by a ladder of shadows.
“Stand there,” he told Paulette.
“What for?” She didn’t sound happy about it.
“For scale.”
She complied, but seemed to find the act physically repugnant, as if Daisy had left behind contaminants that would infect anyone who stood where she had. Good luck. If she’d lived here as long as legend suggested, there couldn’t be a square inch of earth her gnarled feet hadn’t cursed.
Clarence was more captivated by the thought of where Will Senior had hidden away, probably the night before, to make his recording. He’d gotten close, perhaps within twenty yards. There was a hint of distance in the sound, but not much; for comparison, they had the voice of Willard himself, the parts they never played for anyone else.
He pondered the ground he stood on. From here. Maybe the old man had hunkered low and listened to what he should never have heard and sealed his fate from right here.
They moved on, toward the remains of the house, finally ready to touch it. It was a shelter no longer, the outside world having invaded long ago, through the glassless windows and crumbling walls and the entrances whose doors had fallen off their hinges. Where the roof had drooped inward, it was open to the sun and moon alike. Weeds grew in every crack, and generations of predators had denned in the corners to gnaw the bones of their prey.
Yet even in its disintegration, traces of the life once lived here lingered: a chipped mug, a blue enamel coffee percolator, a salvageable spindle-back chair and the table it accompanied. A row of large cans, rusted almost to lace, remained on a cupboard shelf. In an alcove that might have been a closet sat a battered washtub whose accumulated filth couldn’t quite hide the suggestion of ancient stains.
Gutbucket — the word came to him before he knew why, then he remembered it from his own digging into Willard’s obsessions, as a folk term for a cheap upright bass made from a washtub.
He kept coming back to that improbable row of cans.
“Did she ever die, that anyone knew of?” Clarence asked.
“You got me,” Paulette said. “If she did, Nana never heard about it.”
“Wouldn’t it have been news if she had?” He squatted in front of a block of iron, half hidden by weeds and tumbled rafters, and realized it was a wood-fired stove. “She kept to herself, okay, but one day, someone’s got to realize nobody’s seen her out for a year. Somebody’s going to check eventually. They wouldn’t let her rot in here forever.”
“Maybe she just walked away,” Will said.
“To go where? Where do you go from here?”
“You’d have to ask her,” Paulette said, quieter now. “Maybe that’s why Nana was always looking for her on the road.”
They made their way around back, where the land rolled away into fields of nothing. A minute’s walk in one direction led to a heap of fungus-eaten wood, the collapsed shell of an outhouse. It made his stomach roll to speculate what might turn up if they started scraping through the dried-out layers down in the trench. A minute’s walk in another led to her well, the bucket and rope long gone, but the mortared stone wall around it remained intact. It was too dark down the well’s gullet to see. He pried a rock from the grassy soil and lobbed it in, and seconds later heard a splat of thickest mud.
“How stupid are we, we didn’t even bring a flashlight?” he said.
But there would be nothing to see, would there? He doubted she would poison her own well with a corpse. This was someone, something, resourceful enough to make a Chevrolet vanish, so surely she had better options for her dead. And it occurred to him that while he still thought of her as female, at some point he had ceased thinking of her as a woman.
“Clarence. Get over here.”
He hadn’t realized that Will and Paulette had drifted back to the house, where they both stood peering at the foundation.
He must have listened to the full recording a thousand times throughout his life.
It begins with the sound of clunks and fumbling, and spread atop the creamy hiss of tape is an ambience of crickets and tree frogs. If fireflies could make a sound, he imagined it would’ve captured them too.
“There we go. Missed it. Shoot. Not used to doing this in the dark.” Willard’s voice is close and hushed, the voice of a man hugging the ground. “Welp . . . if she’s gonna do it again, she better do it while the batteries are still good.” His disappointment is palpable. “Now that I’ve heard it, I don’t know what to make of it. Nothing about it seems to point to any tradition I ever heard. That just might be my own gaps.” He falls silent, musing as the night fills in around him. “The feeling I get from it . . . it . . . it’s like some kind of lamentation. There’s sorrow in it. Sorrow and rage.” Then a miniscule break in the sound as Willard pauses the tape. When it resumes after an indeterminate recess, his whisper is taut with excitement. “Here she goes again.”