Always a Hoot at the Family Farm

After a fruitless search of the crumbling farmhouse’s two under-furnished main stories, rotting attic and moldy cellar, Peter followed a series of strained and impatient hoots out into the aggressively moonlit night where he found a barn owl nested in the outhouse next to his father’s lifeless body.

Peter tried to bring himself to cry but couldn’t do it. Lawrence Nyquist had been loveless in all capacities, every sense of the word, and death failed to alter the record in the subjective terrain of Peter’s heart and in the objective balance of the Universe. But like many Michiganders, what Lawrence Nyquist lacked in love, he made up for in consideration. Peter stooped to see the damage. His father had shot himself in the head—a typically messy process—but he had been thoughtful enough to arrange it so that his head was suspended in the toilet and ninety-five percent of the carnage was contained in the outhouse’s pit.

How polite.

Peter wondered in vain how his father had managed to work his arm in alongside his head through the small hole. Oh well. It didn’t matter in the end, he supposed. And this was most certainly the end. What was done was done. Maybe he held the gun to the back of his head, Peter thought? Though that seemed equally tricky. Oh well—he reminded himself—in the end, it didn’t matter. And this was most certainly the end. Where was the gun? Peter saw a glint of metal sitting atop a pile of fermenting brains and feces. A Colt .45. A family heirloom he was meant to inherit. Peter hadn’t wanted it in the first place, had no stomach for guns, but he certainly didn’t want it now.

“Can you believe he had the audacity to call me shit for brains?” Peter asked the spooked owl, who had, in his opinion, been obnoxiously silent this whole time, letting Peter sit mercilessly in the sick of his own thoughts.

As soon as he said it, Peter hated himself for this callous response to the absurd scene before him. But it was an honest response, so he had no choice but to allow it and let it be until it passed. It was just that this whole grotesquely overwrought tableau was simply too dramatic for a family so rabidly averse to the arts.

How long had his father been slumped like this, lingering in the aftermath of his life’s final decision? Probably for a while now. Peter had been over two hours late, an expected byproduct of the dread that accompanied visits to the family farm. He was supposed to have driven up from Grand Rapids right after his beer league hockey game, but he had dawdled, nursing his two Miller Lites in the locker room (and then another in the parking lot as he sat with the heater running inside his leased Toyota Corolla) with a somber determination. His father’s body was rigid. The night was cold but there was no steam coming off either the shit or the brains.

He had come to collect corn at his father’s insistence. Peter’s dogs—both rambunctious, borderline-obese chocolate labs—loved popcorn, and the prospect of saving money by no longer buying theater-sized sacks of Orville Redenbacher popping corn kernels at Costco every other week was enough incentive to momentarily forget the guaranteed discomfort brought on by even the briefest of interactions with his father. Peter just hoped he could figure out how to dry the kernels without seeking advice from the senior Nyquist. Did the kernels stay on the cob during the drying process? He had no idea. He would have to use the internet. Peter often thought of the internet as his best friend. Whenever he did so, he made sure to immediately text one of his real, flesh-and-blood friends. The text was usually sent out too late to garner a response. Still, he felt better seeing the delivered notification below his check-in.

Lawrence Nyquist’s offer had struck Peter as uncharacteristically generous when the older man first made it. Still, he declined at first. He did not trust his father. Not in the least. But the months wore on, and the offer intensified and transformed into something more closely resembling a command, Peter grew morbidly curious as to his father’s ulterior motives. As much as he wanted to know what his father was after, he was terrified of what it might be. This led to months of delays. A whole year went by after Peter missed the harvest entirely on the first go round.

Now it was clear. He was here to clean up after his father. To clean up his father.

Peter loathed the familiar familial narrative of suicide that poisoned his bloodlines and warped intergenerational minds like a cigarette laced with PCP. Though he was the only one who viewed his family’s history in this way. As Peter saw it, he had very few relatives who hadn’t killed themselves in one fashion or another. Obesity that led to diabetes, all brought on by decades of poor diet and a near-religious abstinence from exercise. Suicide. Liver failure caused by years of drinking as if parched in the desert. Suicide. Eventual, always “accidental” overdoses on sleeping pills that had been consumed nightly, swallowed by the fistful since the onset of angst in adolescence. Suicide.

Intentional loneliness. Self-imposed isolation. The will to live incessantly waning like a haywire moon. All of these the hallmarks of the Nyquist name, emblems of the Hendricks (mother’s maiden name) family crest.

Everyone in Peter’s family gave up on each other. It was easier to sweep it all under the rug. To feign ignorance. To claim blindness. To perform indifference (with as few theatrics as possible of course). His mother gone in the night, hightailing it to Reno after meeting a man playing poker online. His brother in the Marines, begging for an honorable, maybe even glorified suicide by enemy. His sister performing mission work in South America because everything at home was beyond repair, not worth her time or energy. No one had any thanks to give her on the home front. Only Peter stayed. And even he lived a good forty-five minutes away. Out of arm’s reach and more.

It was only fitting that Peter share this moment with the owl and no one, nothing else. During his childhood, Peter had found solace and companionship in the nocturnal cries of the few mythically sage-like owls that called the three-hundred-and-twenty-five acres of the Nyquist family farm their home. He didn’t find solace in the usual sense, however, Peter was not someone who sought comfort in nature. Not growing up. Not now. Instead, he imagined the owl’s cries as distant and forlorn train whistles, mournfully beckoning, pleading with him to alight from his bed and set out on adventures beyond the vast yet confined fields of his youth.

“Was he always this sad?” Peter asked the owl.

Unsurprisingly, the owl said nothing, just sat looking at Peter with his naked eyes that had all the anger and pain and beauty of birth teeming in the shallow pools of fluid that coated the retinas. Peter allowed himself to project all of the world’s wisdom onto the owl.

Almost imperceptibly at first, and then with an uncannily fluid exaggeration that approached the robotic, the owl’s head began to move. For the smallest of moments, Peter thought the owl was going to shake his head, to deny Peter’s fatalism and suggest that there had once been hope planted somewhere in the Nyquist’s soil, but the head continued to spin until it sat facing away from him.

“Can’t even look at me?”

Nothing except a rustling of feathers so quiet it landed on the ears like a fallen leaf in autumn.

“How much time do I have left?”

Peter and the owl sat in silence for a few moments before he decided that the bird had nothing to offer him.

“I suppose I should make some calls.”

Peter exited the outhouse, and as he did, he heard a clicking. When he turned back around, the owl was staring directly at him. The clicking noise was coming from inside the owl’s beak. Peter wasn’t sure, but he thought he could recall some sort of nature program on TV that featured a segment of maybe just a shot or two of birds with strange, hard tongues that moved in mysterious ways, like the spasmodically probing fingers of newborns—maybe the owl was doing something with his tongue? Maybe that was only parrots who did that if it was even true at all. It sounded almost exactly like the tsk, tsk noise his mother used to make whenever Peter was caught doing something naughty as a child. The sound had always spelled doom. Some kind of punishment looming just beyond the horizon of his father’s return from work in the fields and coops. On second thought, the noise sounded more like a metronome. As he neared the house, the clicking finally began to fade, though not enough for him to ignore the steadily increasing tempo.