The Farmhouse Down the Road

It was one of those October afternoons Holmes County is famous for. The maples along the road had gone gold, the corn was off the fields and the stubble shone, and the air smelled like woodsmoke from somebody’s cookstove.

I parked at the farmhouse and popped the trunk and gave every one of us a job. Ivy got the lamp from her bedroom, the one with the cream shade, and carried it like it was made of glass, her brown braids swinging.

Theo was five. He had on the red knit hat his grandma made him the winter before she died, too big for him then and finally just right. He dragged his little duffel bag up the porch steps, bumping it on every single one.

I was halfway up the steps myself with a cardboard box of kitchen things when I heard a truck slow down out on the road. I knew the sound of that engine before I turned around.

It was Dad’s dark gray pickup. He had stopped out on the road, right in front of the Hershbergers’ windmill, the engine running.

He sat there in his tan work jacket and his cap, his hands on the wheel, watching us carry our things into another man’s house.

He didn’t get out. He didn’t wave. I stood there with the box on my hip, and for a long minute neither of us moved.

Then Theo yelled, “Grandpa!” and waved with his whole arm, and Dad lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, the way men out here wave at every car they pass. Then he put the truck in gear and drove on toward town.

“Is Grandpa coming in?” Theo asked.

“Not today, bud,” I said. “Grab your bag. Let’s go find your room.”

The first week, nobody slept much. The old house creaked and settled and talked all night, and the windmill across the road groaned every time the wind picked up. Theo crawled into my bed three nights out of five.

But by the second week the windmill was just a sound, like a clock. And by the third week Theo was asleep before I finished the second page of his book.

The school bus stopped at the end of our lane at a quarter to four.

Ivy and Theo would hop off, look both ways, and walk across the road to the Hershbergers’ place, and when I pulled in from my shift, they’d come running back to me smelling like bread and barn.

Mary had six children: Levi, who was seventeen and mostly in the fields with his father; Esther, twelve; Abe, ten; Joe, six; and two little girls who were still at home all day. Ivy fell in with Esther in about an hour.

Within a month Ivy could make bread. Real bread, the kind you knead and punch down and wait on.

Esther taught her, standing on a crate at Mary’s big kitchen table, and Ivy came home with flour to her elbows and a lopsided loaf she had made herself.

“Esther says I knead too hard,” Ivy told me proudly. “She says I knead like I’m mad at it.”

“Are you mad at it?” I asked.

She thought about that. “A little,” she said. “At Grandpa. But the bread came out good anyway.”

Theo, meanwhile, had fallen in love with a pony. The Hershbergers had a fat brown pony named Pepper that pulled a little cart, and Abe and Joe drove it up and down the lane with Theo wedged between them, his red hat pulled down over his ears.