Nathaniel sat at the dining table, listening to the birds chirp outside as he thumbed through the pages of a well-worn book. It was no Great Expectations, maybe, but The Old Man and the Sea had been one of his favorites when he was a boy, and he never tired of rereading it. It brought back memories of different times – not happier, perhaps, but certainly different.
Em was seated in an armchair by the window, singing quietly to herself as she darned one of the more unfortunate rips in his well-worn jeans. She seemed to be struggling with both vocations. He pretended not to notice as she fumbled the words, voice trailing off into a pause as she searched for the end of her thread.
“Goddammit,” she swore, and Lord help him he chuckled.
She glanced upwards and narrowed those vicious slants of green at him immediately. “You better not be laughing at me, Nathaniel Erasmus Hawthorne.”
Fuck, did Gordon not keep anything from his wife?
“Not at all,” he replied, though he was still grinning at his book as he chomped through another mouthful of cereal.
“Asshats, the lot of you,” she grumbled, threading her needle again with an added vengeance and doubling down on her efforts unbothered when the point of it caught her sleeve. “You try focusing on the perils of needlework when you’ve got that going on around you.”
Most of the noise had (thankfully) been muffled by the partitioning wall that closed off the entry to the back porch – even still, snapping taunts and grating exclaimations travelled through the plaster with ease, puncturing through their otherwise idyllic morning like a dozen jabs to the face. For the most part, they’d simply ignored Gordon and Colleen’s fruitless efforts to keep their voices down, and their scathing opinions to themselves.
Nathaniel didn’t mind too much. If anything, watching his older brother get pushback from a diminuitive townie with twice his vocabulary was kind of amusing, and incredibly satisfying. Though you wouldn’t catch him voicing that out loud.
He suspected, somewhere, that Em felt the same. She’d taken a liking to her old classmate remarkably fast.
A door slammed beyond his periphery and Gordon sailed into the kitchen. Well… his loping gait might have been slow and easy, but his face definitely seemed as dark as the thunder outside. He met Nathaniel’s gaze with a cold glower.
“What are you lookin’ at?” he snapped.
Nathaniel only raised an eyebrow. “You hungry, Gord?” he asked. “We still got some apples left.”
“Where?”
“Fruit bowl. Countertop.”
Muttering something indistinctive beneath his breath, Gordon marched over to the wicker basket resting beneath the cabinets and tossed the fruit beneath his fingertips.
“She’s a nightmare,” he grated out. “I can’t stand that she’s livin’ under my roof.”
“It’s the middle of a storm, Gordon!” As involved as she was in her needlework, Em’s tone was indignant as she chastised him. “You can’t throw her out now! And, as I recall, you were the one who invited her in off the porch.”
“Yeah, I know.” He seemed to rub the apple into his puffer jacket as an afterthought, scoffing to himself before biting off a hunk. “Fault a man for his good conscience why don’t ya? Not like I knew what a primadonna she’d be ‘fore I let her in.”
“So you would’ve left her out there?” Nathaniel butted in. “Let her freeze to her death, if you know she was a bitch?”
Gordon’s gaze narrowed to a sniper’s precision. “Don’t tell me you’re goin’ soft on her now, boy.”
The notion was so ridiculous Nathaniel’s mouth curled into a smirk. “Of course not.” God, for all the wisdom he’d attained at thirty-five, the guy was such a goddamned baby when he lost his cool. In another lifetime Nathaniel might have rolled his eyes, raised his a voice a little or simply grasped with both hands the opportunity to purposefully antagonize the fool and force him to reckon with the kind of shitty, sore loser he became when things departed from his control. You know. The way real brothers do.
But in this life, when their fraying connection swung between them like the telephone wires in the unpredictable wind, he couldn’t. Those sleeping rattlesnakes he’d leave to lie in the grass another day.
“It’s just psychology, Gord.” He kept his voice even as he flipped through his book, measured swipes resonating through the surly silence. “She’s been here, what, two days now? She’s going stir-crazy. Just like the rest of us.” Flicking his eyes up to meet his brother’s, he chanced another smirk. “Perhaps you’re just an easy target.”
Gordon launched the apple across the room so hard it bounced against the kitchen archway – Nathaniel heard the splatter against the beam as it sank to it’s pulpy demise. He sighed and shook his head at his clockwork display of dumbassery before sinking back into his chair, Em’s shrieks ringing in his ears.
“You’re not exactly disproving his point, Gordon,” she snapped up at him. “For crying out loud, get over yourself!”
Gordon simply rolled his shoulders and leant back against the countertops, sporting a self-satisfied grin. Creaks ran through the floorboards as a figure brushed in from the far side of the room.
“What happened?” Colleen’s voice was soft, confused. “I heard a scream.”
It wiped the humor from Gordon’s face so quickly Nathaniel should have laughed – but he didn’t. No, instead he felt the cereal spoon go slack in his hand and all the moisture disappear from his mouth, because the last time he’d seen her she’d been buried in a shirt two sizes too large and hand-me-down jeans covered in grass stains and wilderness filth.
And now?
She fiddled with the cuff of her sleeve, the white lace underlayers just brushing her wrist, and frowned at the lack of response from her hosts.
His spoon clanged against the bowl. They all turned to him, and Nathaniel had to duck his head and force out a cough from his sandpapered larynx to hide the heat crawling up his neck.
Because surely, surely he wasn’t so sex-deprived and starved these days that all it took to get him going was a boring, bumbling townie in a fucking prairie skirt.
Em snorted, derisive and cold. “Don’t you mind, babe,” she said. “S’just a whole lot of hell rolling through here with the storm.” She threw her darning back onto the table in front of her, muttering to herself in a frenzy. “Asshats.”
Nathaniel said nothing; Gordon rattled around some plates in the sink in an attempt to look busy. Blank-faced and seemingly at a loss, Colleen simply nodded.
“I see.”
Delicately, so as not to disturb the fragile situation, Nathaniel slid out of his chair and walked his bowl over the sink. He nudged his brother with a swift elbow to the ribs.
Gordon buried the yelp beneath the sudden, harried clearing of this throat, and Nathaniel studiously ignored his glare.
“How’s Penny?”
The girl pursed her lips. Leaning a shoulder into the white metal of the fridge, she shrugged, opting to fidget some more with her sleeve. “She’ll live.”
Ahh, yes. The dog. He didn’t know much about the situation, having been holed up in his brother’s study searching for the field plans for tarp calculations when she’d thundered down the stairs. But then she’d skated into the kitchen, asking if she could ‘borrow’ Gordon for something before dinner, which no one would have guessed was his expert verterinary opinion or advice. She’d spent the rest of the evening yelling down the phone at at someone named Irwin – who could just have easily been called ‘dipshit’, or ‘moron’, or ‘idiot’, considering how often he was knighted those too – and that was the last he’d seen of her until today.
Nathaniel tried not to stare at her. Really, he did. But Em had taken to her responsibilities as homemaker on a humble farm like a bright-eyed thespian making her broadway debut, stacking her bureaus with swishing skirts and thick layers to stave of the chill of the mountains and adding smocks and headscarfs as and when her plain gowns weren’t enough. It had thrown him at first, sure. But seeing as how the air around here sank instead of flowing, how the floors creaked and groaned with the souls of a thousand satisfied generations and how the impenetrable fortress of the woods outside prevented any sense of time or industry from permeating the hexed little haven – forever steeped in a frozen legacy of tradition and honor and qualities he could not name, much less pronounce – on Em, it looked normal. On Em it looked goddamned proper.
On Colleen, however… Jesus how could he say it. On Colleen, with her skin as rich as the hewn insides of a sunsoaked oak, the darkness of her hair, the never-ending depths to her grave, serious eyes, it was a revelation. He half-imagined men across battlefields worldwide pausing in their slaughter and gunfire the moment she strode across their land – gazing upon her like a painting, wondering what careful, soulful substance had taken those old and faded garments and stitched them anew.
It didn’t help that that sage and paisley bodice left nothing to the imagination. Not the slender slope of her neck, not the pinch of her waist, not the rise and fall of her abdomen as she breathed or the soft, supple curves of her –
Nathaniel had to drag his gaze away to the farthest corner of the room. The blood draining from his face was already straining to redeposit itself somewhere else, and he didn’t feel like giving the whole room a floorshow.
Gordon was shifting his weight and drawing himself tall the way he always did when he had something to say, as if those couple extra inches of height would make any difference to the levity of the words that came out his mouth. He wasn’t short, the motherfucker, but damn if the way he viewed the world at five foot and eight inches hadn’t given him some kind of Napolean complex. Nathaniel took the chance to shuffle over to his chair and slowly crouch to his knees, gathering the remains of the bruised fruit and Gordon’s battered ego.
“The rain’s held off some this mornin’,” Gordon said, levelly, “but I doubt it’s ’bout to stay that way. Those clouds are as dark as Hades and if we’re in for anything as bad as the past two days, our priority is takin’ care of the plots outside. What’s left of ’em, anyway.” He swiftly locked eyes with Colleen. “Sorry kid, but you’re gonna be stuck here a little while longer.”
She gave him a gentle grimace. “That’s fine. I can… hang back here, check on Penny, maybe help Em out with some chores or what have you. Seems like the the least I could do.”
Gordon’s snort sounded borderline sympathetic, before he opened his brazen mouth. “Oh no. I don’t think so. Listen, I get that dog means the world to you, and we don’t quite know what’s going on with her yet -”
“- she’s my dad’s dog, not mine – and she’s fucking PREGNANT, not afflicted by some kind of canine flu. You confirmed it yourself -”
“I did not, Miss Pfieffer -”
“Well I wouldn’t call it rocket science, Mister Hawthorne, not from where I’m standing. She’s an older dog carrying her first litter and it’s fucking tiring her out.”
“This is what I’m talking about.” His hands flew about, fabric of his cotton shirt bunching at the shoulders as he gestured in exasperation. “You’re driving me nuts. And as it was pointed out to me, it’s probably because you’re goin’ a little nuts, stuck in this goddamn farmhouse all day with nothin’ to do and no change of scenery.”
She blinked at him, stunned. “I – excuse me?”
“You’re comin’ with us. The fresh air’ll do you good. We got a lot to get done before them clouds open up again, and we could use the extra hands.” Raking a hand through the short hair on his scalp and shaking it out with finality, he moved from the counter and strode purposefully towards the hall. “You made some big talk about gettin’ useful? Now’s your chance.”
Em’s head was propped up on her hand, needlework abandoned as she watched the scene unfold with bemusement. She seemed to furrow her brows at the harsh edge to his tone, but said nothing as he turned away from them. Nathaniel flicked his gaze from her tight frown to Colleen’s gaping jaw, neck and face flushed with rage and humiliation.
Gordon paused by the archway to cast a glance at his brother, still crouching by the floor. He leaned a little and squinted. “The heck are you doin’ down there? Come on, boy – there’s a whole lot to get done before the rain comes down, and if this doesn’t work out, I’m blamin’ it on you.”
There was a fierce finger-jab in his direction before Gordon’s shadow turned the corner, presumably to grab those master plans. Nathaniel quickly threw the apple bits in his bowl and set it on the counter besides the sink, diligently cowering from two sets of sharpened stares before he hurried off to grab his windbreaker.
~
Colleen took it all back. Every single word of her shadow and doubt.
Because the truth was, yes, she found the life that Em had shunken herself to numb and surprising and painfully dull – ostensibly so – and could not for the life of her figure out what possessed her old friend to wake up every morning and find joy and meaning in her small little world, or her small-minded little husband. She just couldn’t grasp it.
But in a choice between sweeping another layer of dust off the floors of that decrepit, moth-eaten farmhouse or spending the rest of this goddamn hour in the thick inches of mulch creeping up the wool of her leggings, wind stinging her face and the stench of several different types of faeces killing every single receptor in her nostrils dead, she would take the housework.
How a woman of Em’s magnificent spirit, charm or caliber had ended up in a place like this was beyond her. It was also besides the point though, she thought, grumbling loudly to herself as she sunk the pitchfork once more into the flapping tarp at her feet. She was too riled up to even consider censoring herself – those two farmbums could barely hear each other over the whipping of the wind, so why would they spare a thought for the crazy dog lady still holed up in their backwards neck of the woods?
God she was mad. She was so mad. Em should never have allowed this to happen. There was a whole world out there with combine harvesters and high-speed internet, and yet everyone here was clearly struggling under the thumb of a man who had spun a time vortex back to the middle ages.
She snarled, letting the gale rip her straggling hair from her matted ponytail and turning her face up into the first vestiges of rain. It was oddly cathartic, actually. She felt like she might let herself go and be carried away on the currents, howling like the wind that ravaged her.
There was sudden movement around her calves as something rooted about in the mulch by her feet, causing her to shriek and her foot to slip from where it was resting atop the pitchfork’s prongs.
“Hey, it’s alright.” The voice had to strain to be heard – partially because of the sheer volume of the wind as it roared, and partially because its soft and silken tone dipped so easily beneath the violence of the elements. “Almost over now.”
Colleen glared back into blue-green eyes – eyes of a foe, she supposed, because they certainly didn’t belong to a friend. She didn’t deem his words worthy of comment.
The tarps had been pegged into the ground at a pace fast enough to break a sweat on the nape of her neck and down the back of her legs, hauling the swathes of synthetic blue to the boundary of each plot as Gordon and Nathaniel ran like madmen to secure them. They used bricks and pegs and treestumps, whatever seemed most likely to survive the duration of the the storm, breaking dikes as they went to provide an outlet for rainwater that threatened to render the fields untillable and a savage waste of the spring’s upcoming bounty. But for all their efforts and rampant screaming about strategy, they’d only covered ten of the fifteen fields so far.
Nathaniel stood quickly, dashing the sweat from his hairline and blowing out a rough exhale. He glanced down at the pitchfork by her side.
“Want me to take that?”
Anger bubbled up inside of her immediately. “No,” she snapped. Never minding the offending piece of gardenware was tall enough to knock the bottom of her ribs when sunken in the dirt, and keeled her off balance no matter how she carried it or which way she bent to counteract its weight. She’d rather drag this thing around with her all day than concede another simple favor to –
Nathaniel tugged the pitchfork out of the ground with surprising ease and mobility. Throwing its weight upwards to catch it closer towards the base, he slung the bar of it over his shoulders.
A rumble of thunder rippled across the fields just as he spoke, but she managed to catch the ‘come on’ written on his lips before he turned turned to trudge towards the next plot. Gordon was already there, unwinding the next coil of rope for the pegs and grimacing at the darkening sky.
Their delegation system crumbled as they raced against the clouds, pegs and mallets thrown in haste to the closest person before they slipped from shaking hands into the sluiced mud. Em’s dress started to slow her down as it soaked up the dirt and soil; she had to kick it as she walked, spraying any unsuspecting heathen in her midst with collateral spray. Gordon had only stink-eyed her the first time it happened, which spoke volumes on how preoccupied he must have been.
They celebrated the final tarp being laid out by letting out a collective, soul-shattering groan – Gordon braced himself, panting, against the tops of his thighs, while Colleen collapsed into the nearest fence. Nathaniel only rolled out his shoulders, tilting his neck back into the cradle of his interlocked hands.
She looked at him for longer than she should have, watching the way those thick lashes clumped together under the drizzle – shuttered eyelids giving him the privacy to wince through the aches in his body. His raven hair had turned pitch in the falling rain, plastered to the sides of his face and neck like hers.
A flash of lightning shook them all back to the present. Gordon swore, loudly.
“Pass me the tools,” he barked at them both. “I’ll load this all back up. Tanny, get the girl back inside the house.”
Colleen’s hands slipped on the mallet she passed him. Tanny?
“I can’t.” Nathaniel’s voice was loud and insistent. “I’m catching fish for dinner.”
The farmer snapped his gaze to him with incredulous disdain. “Are you out of your mind?? Look at the clouds, boy. That rain’s about to fall like gunfire.”
Colleen was hard-pressed to disagree with him. But she felt the splatter of droplets against her as Nathaniel shook his head.
“We promised Em, Gord. There’s no food left. And I for one am not about to starve to death out here.”
“You’re shiverin’ in your skin already. Give it an hour or two – if it’s clear by then, I’ll come with you.”
“You just said it’s about to get worse.” Nathaniel was yelling now, hammering his words against the roar of the wind. His galoshes squelched and echoed as he strode off in the opposite direction. “Don’t wait for me. I’m taking the boat.”
Gordon didn’t say anything – just let out a growl of some sort as he threw the remaining tools into the muddied sack. Colleen watched intently as Nathaniel’s form got smaller and smaller, clutching onto his hat as he stooped beneath the elements.
“You just gonna let him go, then?” she asked, observing with finality the mist that ate into his silhouette and caused him to finally disintegrate.
There was some heaving and heavy breaths. She supposed the farmer was tired, after all, but there was also something akin to concern under the acrid turn of his scowl.
“What am I supposed to do?” he spat. “Chase after him every time he tries somethin’ stupid? He looked off into the mist, eyes gleaming with dissatisfaction. “I’d have me damn tin plates for kneecaps by now.”
Colleen couldn’t help it – she laughed. It was absurd and awful and it ended up coming out as a squawk as she tried to stuff the sound back where it came from. But something about her inane, stupid humor had the farmer smiling, too.
“You must think us all imbeciles up here, Miss Pfeiffer,” he said. “Too stubborn for our own good.”
Stuffing her hands into the pockets of her raincoat, she decided to simply shrug. “I don’t know, Mr Hawthorne. I’m starting to think there’s something in this gosh-darn mountain air.”
He barked out another laugh. “You wouldn’t be the first. Em seems to think that, too.”
A crackle of thunder swept up the tail-end of his words. Gordon glanced forebodingly at the sky, and Colleen unthinkingly shivered. He shifted his beady eyes to hers.
“I think it’s time you get inside, Miss Pfeiffer,” he sighed with resignation. “My brother may be all gas and no forethought, but I trust you have a touch more common sense.”
She tensed, briefly. Was it wise to leave both of them out here on their own, angry and equally untethered?
“I’ll see you inside, Mister Hawthorne.”
He nodded, adjusting his cap over his forehead and hoisting the bag of tools over his shoulder. As if on a sudden afterthought, he frowned.
“You can call me Gordon, Misss Pfeiffer.”
He started to forge a finnicky pathway back to the barn and the toolshed on the other side of the lot, examining their handiwork as he went. Colleen stared after him, blankly, until another flash of lightning broke through her reverie and coaxed her freezing legs into a cautious jog.
The screen door slammed against the internal wall with a bang and a screech as soon as she reached the back porch. A flurry of movement resounded from inside the house.
“Colleen!” Em and her skirts hurried swiftly to where she was peeling off her shoes. “Are you alright? God, where are those two; it’s about to start pouring!”
She held back a snort as she arranged her shoes on the sheets of newspaper that had been laid out for them. “They’re just coming in. Gordon’s putting the tools away – and Nathaniel…”
“Yes?”
Em stood at rapt attention as she waited for her to finish her sentence. Hesitantly, Colleen chewed on her lip.
“Where’s Penny?” she asked quickly.
Em’s eyebrows furrowed. “Um, right here.” She gestured towards a mess of old blankets laid out on the floor by the fridge. The dog was fast asleep. “She dozed off in the middle of one of my stories – I was talking to her while I finished the chores. Why? Where’s Nathaniel?”
“Did you know they were brothers?”
A beat passed in white, static silence.
“Yes.” If Em was confused, she hid it well. The usual shine of her cat-like eyes was clouded as she answered the question. “Yes, I did. He doesn’t show it that much, but Gordon’s quite attached to him. Asked if we could put him up for a few months when he got into some trouble last June.”
“June??”
Em sighed, exasperatedly, and it caused one of her curls to escape the wrap that kept them pinned them away from her face. “I can’t tell you any more than that. What happened, Colleen? Is something wrong?”
“No, uh, not – nothing. Nothing’s happened.” Colleen looked away from the grain of the floorboard. Two dull peridots reflected overcast skies and Em simply waited for her to elaborate. Anxious. Needy.
A surge of something reckless and protective surged through her.
“He – um – went to rope a few of the fences that fell down last night, ’round the backside of the farm. I think I’m supposed to bring him an umbrella.”
“Oh.” Em glaced down at her dripping boots and sodden leggings. “Right.”
Colleen grimaced. “Yeah. I, uh, need to change.” Her feet made an audible suctioning sound as she lifted them away from the floor. “My legs are so cold right now I feel like they might fall off. There’s no way I’m gonna ride out the hour in these things.”