The Tale Of Jon Handshaker Chapter Twenty Five
68The Tale Of Jon Handshaker
Click HERE to start at Chapter One.
Chapter Twenty Five
The WInd Is A Ghoul
Jon approached the edge of the woods cautiously. The smell of old char was strong in the air, and Jon wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of something rotten. The cow paths leading down to this farm had a disused look about them. There was nary a hoof track nor a fresh pie to be seen. By the state of the trail Jon guessed it might be a month since the cows had last been sent out to forage.
It was daybreak and Jon had spent the night in a protected hollow, just under the ridge of the hill overlooking this farm. He had seen through the treetops the fields and the rooftop of a small farmhouse, late the previous afternoon. He had decided to rest first, then investigate the next morning. Even from that distance the place had looked abandoned, no smoke coming from the chimney, the small fields losing their neat lines as weeds filled in between the rows of crops. He had slept soundly in a bed of dried leaves and now his belly was empty, giving him some added courage.
Maybe I can scavenge something useful, and it isn’t stealing if the place really is abandoned. Some fresh corn would be good, even with no butter or salt. Jon considered the problem of stealing. Eating windfall fruit was no trouble, it spoiled so fast on the ground that nobody but the most stingy begrudged a few windfall apples to a hungry man.
In the Reservation Lands and elsewhere, a favorite autumn holiday had the children raiding all the neighbors’ fruit trees, shaking for "windfalls" and filling their bags. The owners always pretended great anger and chased the "thieves" wildly around the orchards, swinging long whippy switches and occasionally catching some unlucky youngster across the bottom. The older kids of course make it a game to concentrate on the grumpier and more stingy people, those miserable souls who really do begrudge a child the occasional windfall apple. Jon smiled in nostalgic pleasure as he recalled his gang looting Old Man Hillfield's apple orchard, then winced as he remembered the one time the Old Man had caught him. That hadn't felt much like a holiday prank!
A trickier problem than fruit was abandoned property. Stealing is a kind of small murder. You kill a man's past if you take away what he has worked for, his hope for the future. The Old Uncle, his mother, everyone throughout his childhood had drilled into him never to steal. Stealing is murder. But if the farm truly was abandoned? It was a question.
He wanted a bottle, one of the hourglass-shaped gourds that most farmers used to carry water. Traveling endlessly as he was through unfamiliar territory, he never knew how far it was to the next stream. Several times already he had had to sleep dry, hoping to find water the next morning. This was a well watered land, with streams every few miles, but it was a dryer summer than usual, and many of the smaller washes were failing.
Would taking a bottle gourd be stealing? As a child he wouldn't have thought so, but since the day his brothers died, his whole view of life had become more serious. I’ll just have to look the place over and decide if it is really abandoned. If I am not sure, I won’t touch anything. Who knows what might be there. Recalling the view from the ridge above, Jon’s mind filled with images of all the treasures he might find in an abandoned farmhouse. Salt. A fry pan. Eggs from the chickens left behind. Didn’t hear a rooster this morning though. So what? Roosters don’t lay eggs. An iron knife. An ax? Too heavy. The edge of the clearing cut short his greedy imaginings, and he slowed and stood, screened behind a tree and the scrub at the forest verge.
He stood still for what seemed to him a long time, listening and watching carefully, then he slid carefully a step nearer the field. The house and it’s contents were forgotten as he spotted a smooth dapple-green globe amidst the knee high weeds. Watermelon! How under the Sun did that get here! Watermelon didn’t grow anywhere in the Middle Kingdom as far as he knew. Something to do with a mold or fungus or something. It was a rare treat even in the Kings house, brought up by riverboat, tribute from the Free Cities. Jon remembered his hopeless attempts to get seeds to grow, just like every other boy who got a piece of watermelon. They never even sprouted.
Forgetting his solemn resolution of a minute before, Jon pulled his stone knife and slipped into the field. In a second he had the melon cut free and was back in the shelter of the trees. Just like the old days back home. But no one to share the booty with. He recalled wistfully his friends back in the Reservation Lands, and more darkly, his now lost half brothers from the Lamb’s Home, whom he had often gone on midnight kitchen raids with.
Feeling rather lonely, he jogged back up the path till he came to a remembered thicket of young trees, springing up into the gap where an old oak had gone down some years before. Weaving his way in with considerable difficulty, juggling the melon, his bow and his pack, trying not to get caught on the dense growth of tree branches, he worked into the center of the thicket. Sitting down in a sheltered spot under the dead oak’s trunk, he immediately split open the melon with his knife. In seconds he was covered chin to belly with sweet red juice, as he dug into big hunks of melon.
Ahh. But not quite ripe. A few more days in the sun... Forgetting his dark humor of a few minutes before, Jon very nearly finished the whole thing in one sitting. He managed to restrain himself with a quarter or so left, his stomach rounded out taut. No need to eat myself sick. I’ll get another one tonight. And I need to find some real food too. Old Uncle would beat me silly if he caught me stealing a melon. The watermelon filled his belly and killed his sugar hunger, but he knew from past experience that fruit alone would leave him hungry again too soon. Some rich meat was what he needed now. And salt!
After few more minutes to rest, and a futile attempt to get the juice off of his body with some leaves, Jon gave it up and decided to head back down to the farm to do some serious scouting. He set out from the thicket and down an old cow path. There’ll be a well or a stream by the farmhouse where I can wash off.
Back at the edge of the watermelon field, Jon spent a few more minutes looking things over. The weeds were over knee high among the watermelon vines. That's probably why the melon wasn't so sweet. No good farmer would allow that. Even one weed was too much for the farmers of his boyhood home. He well remembered being drafted to hoe corn or vegetables in his stepfather's fields.
Still no smoke from the house. It was more than two hours past dawn, any respectable farm wife would long since have started breakfast. This place was looking better and better.
Cautiously, Jon skirted the edge of the fields, circling around to where he hoped to get a better view of the house and farmyard. As he approached the outbuildings, unconsciously he began to wrinkle his nose at an unpleasant smell, at first almost unnoticed, but slowly strengthening. A sudden shift in the breeze brought him the heavy reek of putrefying animals. He stopped dead in his tracks, as the implications hit home. An untenanted farm with the livestock dead.
“Maybe it’s just a dead cow,” he muttered through clenched teeth, not believing it. The stench of death was much too strong. It reminded him of a midsummer butcher yard and tannery rolled into one. “Smells like a whole herd of cows, and some sheep thrown in! Could be a plague, black-leg, or anthrax.”
People don’t usually catch either disease, but it would easily explain why the farm was abandoned. The spores slept in the soil, contaminating it for a generation and more, killing overnight any cow, horse, sheep or goat pastured there. A whole herd could look fine one day, and all be dead the next. Anthrax plague farms were usually just abandoned, until the wind and sun and time purified the land. That would also explain the smell of char, the carcasses were generally burned.
Still, it’s funny they don’t come back to take care of the melons. Lot of money there. A single melon might fetch a handful of silver, even gold, in the capitol. And how under the Sun and Moons did they get it to grow! That was a much bigger mystery than an abandoned farm or some dead animals. He began breathing through his mouth as the stench of rotten meat grew. Less cautiously now, having the situation figured out to his satisfaction, Jon approached the farmyard through a field of weedy corn. He noted in passing that the corn looked about ready for roasting.
In fact, somebody’s been picking it. Jon got to the last row of the twelve-foot tall corn and peered out across the split-rail fence. The barn and sheds around the house had all been burned, but he hardly noticed, he was frozen on the open farmyard, filled with dead animals. A dozen bloated cows, some ponies, a small herd of sheep and more. He was vaguely aware of arrows protruding from their sides.
A long, forgotten minute later Jon raised his eyes to the farmhouse. The majestic white oak left to shelter the house from the winter wind and summer sun had made an ideal gibbet. The human bodies had been strung up in order of size, he noticed, largest to his left, a pitiful tiny one all the way to the right next to the great trunk, all along one sturdy branch. A wind blew and twisted them around, neatly, one by one, a ghoul displaying his wares. Jon saw that arrows were thick in the faces of all of them, on the side facing the house.
