Fern

I stand at the bottom of the ladder, looking up. The floor of the first loft is still solid and why would I expect any less? It’s been twenty years since this was a working farm, but Mother wouldn’t let it fall to ruin.

I curl my fingers over a rung, rough wood against my skin bringing a wash of memory. Cold fingers, the shiver under my heaviest coat because the warmth of the house is gone and I’ve not yet done enough to activate my own.

I shake the feeling away; it’s summer, now and twenty-five years later. I pull myself up, climbing the ladder, breathing air full of the ghosts of hay and manure.

I reach the first loft and look up, pushing away the urge to crawl back down and run for my car. What we called he winter loft is above me. Outside, still and silent, the July cornfields stretch away, brilliant green and gold, unmoving in the humidity. The heat is suffocating. But it comes again, that memory of January cold, of hiding under my bed while my parents talked about me again.

The problem with Fern.

Fern, who cried until she was sick when it came time to slaughter the pigs. Fern, who raised her cow, Buttermilk, then screamed herself silent when the cow was sold to the butcher. Fern, who named all the chickens and refused to eat meat when she realized it came from the animals she treated like pets. Fern, who now refused to climb into the winter loft to get the reserve hay because she thought it was haunted. Who swore she saw a man hanging from the rafters there or lurking in the corners, glowering at her with burning eyes.

Face your fears, my father used to say, exasperated with me, his youngest and strangest child. I look up now, searching the rafters. I see only ordinary shadows and cobwebs, but I can still feel it, that sense of something more waiting. My demon.

I really did try. I wanted to be like my brothers and sisters. But I lacked whatever it was that made them capable of enduring the harsh reality of farm life and the cruelty that permeated it. My father insisted I would eventually grow used to it, but, no matter how hard he pushed me, I never did.

He didn’t make me watch the pig slaughter after I became so hysterical I was violently ill; to me, every pig had a personality all its own and their squeals of fear tore at my heart, made me desperate to save them.

After Buttermilk, he decided to try a different track. He gave me a single goat - I made cheese from her milk - and bid me to gather the eggs; chickens don’t cling to them often and they are happy enough to scratch and peck their way through life.

But there was one thing he absolutely would not budge on. The winter loft. There was no blood there. No cruelty. Only the fear he considered irrational and, therefore, not acceptable.

I’d always wanted to climb up to the winter loft, but I was always too young and too small; it was over a hundred feet above the packed floor of the biggest cow barn and there was nothing to catch onto if you happened to stumble off the edge. With only a few boards in place to offer a rail along the edge, it was not a place for small girls.

At last, though, I was big enough to be offered the coveted chore of fetching the reserve hay. Here, finally, was something that did not mean facing the undercurrent of cruelty that ran through farm life like a dark, cold river under a crust of pale ice. This was something I wanted to do, something that would finally prove that I had my uses.

Up the ladder I went, that afternoon, into the dusty dim of the winter loft, to push the hay into open space and watch the bales tumble down the dizzy feet to the barn floor far below where my siblings would use hay forks to pick it up - the bales always broke open when they hit - and into the cow enclosure on the other side of a low rail. We all knew which one was the preferred task; pushing the hay over the edge was fun. Getting stuck with a hay fork was not.

Father told me that fall that I would be pushing the hay out of the winter loft, the chosen one at last, and I’d waited impatiently for the day when I would get to go up to that new height.

All through October and November, I’d been watching the piles of hay dwindle in the first loft, ready to clamber up to the second, much higher one. I don’t know what I thought I’d find up there. A new world, perhaps. Or a perspective that would allow me to be more like my brothers and sisters so Mom and Dad would stop talking about all the things that were worrisome about me.

Then, my sister, Kelly, jealous that I’d have the honor of the winter loft that year, told me about the farmer’s ghost.

She whispered the terrible tale, how he’d thrown his own daughter from that terrible height. How he’d shot his wife. Then what he’d done to himself. She told me about the rope he used, wrapping its rough length into a noose, but how he didn’t leave enough to break his neck when he jumped. She grinned while telling the spooky tale of how he dangled, clawing at his throat, choking to death alone and cold at the top of that dark barn, knowing it would frighten me.

But I wasn’t really afraid of ghosts, I told myself the next evening. I’d gone up that ladder, swift as a cat up a tree, into undiscovered country.

I didn’t see him right away. There was no body dangling from the rafters, then. Just sweet smelling hay and dust motes floating in the fading gold light that slipped through the vents in the cupola above.

Then.

Then.

I turned and saw, standing in a darkened corner, the shape of a tall, broad shouldered man. I stumbled back, forgetting how high I was. Forgetting that I was near a dangerous edge. I nearly tumbled over. Would have fallen, if Kelly hadn’t snuck up behind me, maybe to see what havoc her words had wrought, and caught my arm just as I lost my balance.

Nightmares followed that night. I tried to please my father, tried to climb up into the winter loft and drop the hay bales down without letting him know I was terrified. But I began to see the man at night, standing in the corner of my room, glowering at me with eyes that burned like two, red coals. My own, personal demon.

“Face your fears,” my father told me over and over. I tried, but, sometimes, in the twilight, when the bitter chill of winter was at its worst I would look up and see something terrible, like a man, twitching and kicking, hanging from a rope around his neck. Other times, he would just be standing at the edge of the loft, hands fisted at his sides, the glitter of eyes just visible. And I could not force myself to climb up.

Now I stand in the first loft, fingers clutching at the dusty ladder. There are no cattle below. No pigs in the barns further down the lane, no chickens in the coup.In a week, it will all be gone forever. No house, no barns, not coup, nothing. It will all be leveled so there can be a few more bushels of corn next year. My siblings’ answer to the place no one wants to live. Destroy it all. Farm mentality; if you can’t use it, kill it off.

I didn’t argue with them.

But I need to do this. Face my fears. Just this one time, I need to face him. The floor above me creaks, as if shifting under the weight of a large man.

I remember the first time I wrote about home. About the screaming of the pigs and the way Buttermilk would look at me with her large, limpid eyes, trusting me in every way, about the chill of winter and the man who wasn’t there haunting me. My demon, the embodiment of all the things I could not do. Face your fears, my father had said so often that it became my mantra. And writing had become my way of doing it.

My college professor comes to mind, staring at me over the pages of my first short story ever. “If we didn’t have fears,” he said quietly, as I blushed to be at the center of his attention, “what the hell would any of us have to write about?”

My fingers clench the old wood ladder and I begin to climb, even though I want to turn back. Fern with her irrational fears and her imagination running away with her all the time. Fern, who thinks the animals can secretly talk and loses her mind over a cow. Oh, how often did my parents talk, worrying I would never be able to function in the real world?

Each rung I count. One, five, twenty. Each one bringing me back to that girl. Fern, who sees a man, lank hair hanging over wicked, angry, tortured, dead eyes, haunting her. That Fern makes a practiced swing off the top of the ladder; I did face my fears, but I never stopped being me.

I look around at the winter loft. Dusty, empty, and hung with the soft veils of spider webs. There are shadows in the corners, but they are just shadows.

I sigh, cross my legs under me, and sit on the floor. I put my bag in my lap. Close my eyes, listening.

He was at least a little real. He wasn’t the monster of Kelly’s story, though. There was a farmer. He did hang himself one January night after his daughter, playing up in the loft where she was was not meant to be, lost her balance and fell. After his wife, unable to heal, killed herself. And he was wholly real for me, that demon who chased me away from the one thing I thought would finally win me approval from my family.

My demon.

I feel the air shifting behind me.

My angel.

I pull out the flowers. Pale white, perfect and beautiful, not fully open yet. I put them in the vase and pour water from a bottle. The floor creaks. Soft rustling, like someone walking behind me.

I swallow hard. My fingers find the last item swiftly. A book. Slim. Dark. Full of winter nightmares. I lay it by the flowers, trailing my fingers over the name on the cover. My name. Fern.

“Thank you,” I say softly. And then I stand. Make measured movements to the ladder, hands shaking just a little; there is still a child in me afraid of the winter loft and what lives there.

I swing onto the ladder, smiling because it has been a lifetime, but there is still a little of the farm in me. I allow myself, safely on my way down, to look at the corner. The shadows have become thicker, more solid. Almost the shape of a man. I see two, red glints, what could be sharp eyes or just the glimmer of sun finding its way through a crack in the boards.

“Thank you,” I say again and get down the ladder, away from him. I learned long ago that facing your fears doesn’t mean they are gone, just that it makes you stronger. Strong enough to make them work for you.