The Barn at the End of Ritchie Lane

I loved the old barn at the back of our property at the end of Ritchie Lane. It wasn’t love in the sense of infatuation—that would be weird—and it wasn’t love in the sense of comfort, either, which is normally what love is confused with. No, it was love in the sense of peace as it was the only place I could get away from my father’s wrath. Wrath was normally associated with the wrath of God—or Gods, take your pick, I don’t believe in either—but I guess the correct sense would be to point out being wrathful is associated with vengeance or retributory punishment. In this case, is it wrathful to beat a child when they are clumsy and spill things or drop plates? Or when they talk a little too much? Maybe I’m annoying and that’s why father roughs me up from time to time, but I’m just a kid and I got a lot of things going on in my head and the constant beatings maybe contribute to my shaking hands that lead to me dropping things that lead to the beatings. A perfect circle, if there ever was one.

Whatever the reason for the beatings, that is why I like the barn. I have allergies and I spend most of my time sneezing because of the hay and I don’t particularly like the rats—the furry creatures that spread the plague and people like John at school who told on me for saying I thought the teacher was a whale. Calling my teacher a whale rounded out in a wrathful beating from father, though I’d heard him call my whale of a teacher much, much worse. I don’t like the horse in the barn either because it’s covered in flies that I swear on a stack of bibles are as large as a full-grown robin—don’t even get me started on the horse shit. No, I like the barn because in the barn nobody bothers me.

I woke up a little past seven in the morning. It was mid-summer in Arkansas and the humidity was like a brick wall. I stretched out and brushed the hay from my clothes, yawned, swatted at a fly, and then clenched my teeth as I watched a rat the size of a Shetland pony rush from one side of the floor to the other.

The day was going to be ungodly hot but I wasn’t sweating, I didn’t have to use the bathroom, and my stomach wasn’t rumbling. I decided to check on my parents to see if they were in good humor—as a kid you always hope for things you know will never happen because you’re not jaded enough to know better. I slipped out of the barn and looked across our jungle of a yard to the rundown house by the road.

My parents were both decent students in high school, but they had what my uncle Ben called a lot of quit in them. Uncle Ben was an assistant editor for a decent sized paper in Little Rock. He wasn’t rich, but his house had AC. Dad got a scholarship to play football, but college required him to work harder than he wanted to. Mom was a stunner and then after me, she wasn’t. They got married because that’s what you did in the bible belt following an accident—which basically meant someone refused to wrap up or the other forgot what the afternoon alarm on their phone was for—but I knew they would have been happier if they’d gotten rid of me.

I slipped across the yard, trying to dodge the dew on the grass, but it wasn’t really soaking into my pants. I hopped up on the rickety front porch without making a sound and could immediately hear the yelling.

“Why?” my mother screamed on the other side of the paper-thin walls.

“Why what?” dad snarled. “You told me you were taking the pill but we had him all the same. And now we got all of this shit to deal with.”

“You’re trash you always were.”

I heard three quick footsteps followed by a quick no and then what sounded like a mallet hitting a slab of meat. Dad had good form on his backhand from lots of practice. Mom and I had good strong jaws from lots of beatings from dad’s good formed backhand.

I rolled my eyes. I wasn’t sure what I did this time, but it was time to go back to my barn. I turned on my heel to head back to the barn and out of the corner of my eye I saw a massive dump truck rolling down the drive. I looked around the property at the piles of garbage and the rusted-out cars but couldn’t believe they were going to pay—or had the money to pay—for someone to clean this place up. Either way, I wasn’t going to ask.

I slipped back into the quiet serenity of the barn and waited for the rush of pollen but nothing happened. It was a little early in the year for my allergies to subside, but maybe my luck was turning. I went over to the bin in the corner next to an old tractor that had rusted to the point it looked like one good backhand from dad would turn it into dust. I propped open the bin to grab one of the books that uncle Ben gave me but the bin was empty.

I frowned. Maybe dad had found them again. Last time dad found my books he sold them for a case of beer. One case of beer. It’s not like they were worth anything, they were just books.

“Well,” I said, turning to the horse. “What now?”

The horse shook its head and swished its tail.

I shrugged. I took two steps and a rat jumped out of a haystack and stopped right in front of me. I lunged back and waited for it to run away but it didn’t. I took a few tentative steps towards the furry creature; the tail was absolutely disgusting, but they didn’t look nearly as frightening up close. The fur was brown and soft and when they weren’t scurrying around they looked like plump squirrel.

The rat didn’t move as I got closer; I wanted to try and touch it. What would happen? I was curious why it wasn’t running away.

I was so close, no more than an inch away, when the rumbling sound of the big truck pulling into our drive rattled the old barn and the rat shot back into the hay stack. Our front door banged open and I walked over to the barn doors to peer through the crack.

Dad was wearing his best shirt, which wasn’t saying much, and had combed his hair. The man in the dump truck hopped down with the grace of a drunken sloth. The man was massive and overweight. He shook my father’s outstretched hand and looked around the property before eyeing the big barn.

“That it?” the driver said.

“Yup,” dad said. “Say, how much is this going to cost?”

“Five thousand,” the man said. “Already went over this with the foreman.”

“Yes, but that’s a lot,” dad said. “I was wondering if we could discuss it.”

“Flat rate, you want this barn gone or not?”

“Yes,” my mom said, coming down the steps. “We want it gone.”

They are getting rid of my barn? Why? God damnit where else will I hide?

“Right,” the driver said. “Crane is right behind me.”

I thought about rushing out and telling mom and dad they better not get rid of the barn, but thought better of it. That beating would be a bad one, so instead I sat down and thought over what to do next.

The crane arrived a few minutes later and dad came marching into the barn. I hid behind some crates and he grabbed the horse and roughly pulled it into the yard, muttering something about making jerky out of her. He didn’t even look for me, which was odd. The barn was where I spent most of my time. I was just about ready to march out and ask my questions, regardless of the consequences, when I heard the sound of more cars coming down the drive, these ones driving fast, their engines roaring.

I went back to the barn doors and looked across the yard as five sheriffs slammed to a stop in front of our drive. The officers rushed from their cars, pistols out, trained on my dad and my mom. Dad’s skin was pale, but he was a drunk and a coke head so that was sort of par for the course. I recognized sheriff Hornsby and his cowboy hat; he was the only one who didn’t have his gun out, but his eyes were hard and his mouth was nothing more than a thin line.

“Morning sheriff,” dad said. Mom was hiding behind dad, which I thought was comical. “Why the fuss?”

“Vern,” the sheriff said. “I think you know why we are here.”

“Not in the slightest,” dad said.

The sheriff took off his hat and wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “FBI handles missing persons,” Hornsby said. “But murder over the county line is ours.” The sheriff turned to the confused driver and the crane operator. “What are you doing here?”

“Here to demolish the old barn,” the driver said.

“You know this man’s son disappeared a week ago?” the sheriff said.

No, I didn’t, I’m right here. Why didn’t they just check the barn?

“Heard something about it,” the driver said.

“Vern,” Hornsby said. “You never were all that smart.”

“My boy run off,” dad said, but his voice was shaking. “I don’t know where he is.”

“He’s at the morgue, Vern,” Hornsby said. “Fisherman hooked the body few miles upriver where you weighed him down. Beaten pretty badly with a split skull. And when we go into that barn that you were trying to have torn down, I wonder what we’ll find?”

“Nothing,” dad said. “Nothing.”

Mom was slinking away from dad.

“Easy, Tess,” the sheriff said.

“I didn’t do it,” mom said, her voice high and panicked. “I didn’t do it. It was Vern. He was always beating on the boy.”

Dad whirled on mom and hit her across the mouth. She went down. The deputies converged on dad and he tried to fight them all, but a pistol whip to the back of the head and he dropped into the yard.

“Christ on his throne,” the driver said, slinking back.

“I’d like to kill you here, Vern,” Hornsby said. “You were always a drunk and a drug addict, but a kid? Your own kid?”

“He fell!” dad shrieked, fighting the deputies. They were young and strong and flipped him over and drove his face into the dirt.

I stepped away from the barn doors and looked around. The air was filled with dust, but I wasn’t sneezing. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t sweating even though it was hot.

A man appeared beside me in plain clothes with a plane face. For some reason, I wasn’t surprised to see him.

“Are you ready?” he said.

“Am I dead?”

He nodded.

“Why am I still here?”

“People who are murdered have restless souls,” the man said. “If you think you are still alive, it’s hard to get you to come with.”

“Where will I go now?”

“A better place than this,” the man said.

“Can’t be hotter than Arkansas in mid-July,” I said over the noise of my dad screaming as he fought the sheriffs.

The man smiled but didn’t reply.

I didn’t have any books here, so there was no point in staying. “Lead on.”

The End