Laughter in the Wind Read online

  “Yes Mom,” Rebecca groaned. Actually she had no other plans for the day and would probably be home well before then, but she felt like she should protest a little just to remind her mother she wasn’t a kid anymore. She would be nineteen in four months and she had been a college student for the past three months. She headed out across the yard to the pasture fence, her mind already moving ahead to the upcoming battle between her and the fish, or at least to a few hours lazing on the pond bank letting the fish steal her bait.

  It was a cool morning, only thirty-eight degrees, but it was supposed to hit sixty degrees by two o’clock. Fishing today probably wouldn’t be good but Rebecca didn’t care. It wasn’t really about catching fish. Something about sitting on the bank of a pond or river, watching the water move and listening to it lap gently onto the bank, was as pleasurable to her as the ballet she had attended the previous year with the High School Honor Society. She didn’t want to miss out on what might be the last nice weekend of the year for being outside. This time of year in Missouri, the weather could change on you suddenly and there could be snow on the ground the following weekend. Just as likely, a sudden warm spell could pass through with record high temperatures. Rebecca was familiar with the uncertainties of a Missouri autumn and wasn’t taking chances.

  In the back of her mind, she admitted that fishing would give her an opportunity to think and maybe she would finally be able to sort out some of the chaos that was going on in her head. Sometimes she felt like she was spinning her wheels, yet she knew she was taking steps that should keep her life moving forward. She was more than halfway through her first semester of classes at the community college in Rockford where she attended morning classes and worked a work-study job in the afternoon. Deciding on a major was a task she had deemed currently impossible, so she was taking the basics toward an Associate of Arts degree until she could figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Her tentative plan was to move to a larger university after a couple of years. The thought of this frightened her some, especially when she tried to imagine life away from the farm.

  Rebecca crossed the fence into the second pasture, picked up her things from where she had pushed them under the fence and continued her hike. While she doubted she could be happy staying in this small area all of her life, she also dreaded the thought of leaving a place where she knew everyone and was known by everyone. She had grown up as the middle grandchild in a generational group of forty-five, most of them living within a twenty-mile radius. For several generations, her father’s family had lived in the area, so distant cousins lived in all of the surrounding communities. The feeling that someone was watching out for her was ever-present and no one was a stranger. Sometimes life here felt stifling but usually it just felt good to know you always belonged. This secure feeling was something she knew she would have to leave behind.

  As she crossed the second pasture she glanced over at the old Peacock Cemetery in the northwest corner of the pasture. There hadn’t been a burial there for years and some of her school friends claimed it was haunted, not too much of a worry on a bright sunny morning. Something seemed different about the cemetery today though, and she stopped to really look for a few seconds. The gate had been hanging crooked for years but it had been closed and latched two weeks ago when she had last cut through the pasture on foot. Maybe someone was up here fooling around on Halloween.

  She and her father had talked about fixing up the old cemetery someday, maybe putting a new fence around it and leveling up the ground. No one was caretaker for the cemetery anymore and people only visited it in attempts to see a ghost. Rebecca felt it was a shame that all of those interred there had been forgotten by the world.

  As she walked up to the gate, she was afraid she would see vandalism. Instead she saw a fresh mound of dirt in front of an old headstone. The inscription on the stone was nearly worn away by the weather but by kneeling close to it she could make it out.

  MARY J. FARTHING

  March 1, 1907 – February 3, 1933

  “Sad. She was so young.” Rebecca spoke quietly but her voice sounded much louder in the still morning air. Only eight years older than me. She stood and looked around for any other signs of disturbance to the cemetery. The loose dirt near the mound revealed a couple of different shoe prints and the grass was trodden down around the headstone and in a path to the gate but the rest of the cemetery looked as if a human had not been there for many years. Her curiosity nearly got the best of her as she considered looking for a stick to loosen the dirt so she could move it aside and discover whether something had been hidden there. Her curiosity was stifled as she recalled her father’s warnings about cave-ins of old graves. As she walked back out the gate, she stopped to carefully close it. She picked up her tackle box and pole then turned to walk away.

  Her attention was captured by broken and leaning grass in two parallel lines outside the fence. She recognized them as tire tracks and they headed from the cemetery in a gentle curve until they were out of sight around a small grove of trees. A memory of headlights on Halloween night returned to her and she knew immediately this was where the lights had been. She assumed the old lane the tracks followed came out beside the old house she knew was down the road from her uncle’s house. She thought about following the tracks but decided against it, heading on her way after latching the crooked gate, her thoughts still preoccupied with the fresh mound of dirt.

  The area of disturbed dirt wasn’t large enough for a coffin, not even a very small one. Maybe a shoe box or something that size could have been buried there, maybe even a small, beloved pet. But Mary Farthing had died in 1933 and surely there weren’t any pets, even parrots, that could outlive their owners by more than eighty years.

  Rebecca wasn’t even sure there would be anyone around who would remember Mary Farthing. She decided she would take another walk that day, after fishing of course. Her grandmother lived past her house about a mile and might have some ideas.

  * * *

  Rebecca’s first cast set the tone for the day. She immediately snagged her line on an old post at the bottom of the pond, left over from when a fence had divided the pond in half. “Shit!” she said loudly as she snapped her line. She tried to avoid cussing for her mother’s sake but she enjoyed being able to let go and say what she felt when she was out of earshot of others. She quickly slipped the end of the line through the eye of another hook and tied it into place with practiced fingers then used needle-nose pliers from the tackle box to squeeze a couple of split-shot weights onto the line above the hook. The small knife she always carried in her pocket trimmed the end of the line. Then she baited her hook and tried again.

  She caught a couple of small catfish, but mostly her bait fed the fish. Her attention was not on the vibrations coming through her line as the fish nibbled the worms or liver from her hook, but on that mysterious pile of freshly overturned dirt at Mary Farthing’s grave. Early in the afternoon, she gave up on fishing. Feeling generous, she threw the remainder of the liver into the pond for a free meal for the fish if they could beat the turtles to it. She wasn’t sure if she would get back to the pond before spring and she knew her mother wouldn’t allow her to keep the old liver in her freezer until then. As far as moms go, her mother was pretty understanding, but she knew better than to push her luck.

  She gathered up her things, including the empty chip bag and Vienna sausage can from which had come lunch. The Vienna sausages were a common meal for her when fishing, a tradition started by her father when he first began taking her to the river. Rebecca realized as she started the trek back toward her house that she hadn’t spent any of her fishing time as planned, thinking about where her life was headed.

  She walked back across the fields, turning south after dropping her tackle and pole behind the barn at her house. If she took them to the house, her mother might want to go along and then they would have to drive. Rebecca was enjoying her time alone, walking through the cool, crisp autumn air. Her reverie was inter
rupted by a piece of tin clanging loudly where it had pulled free from the screws that held it in place on the back corner of the barn roof. Rebecca made a mental note to tell her father about it before the wind caught it and carried it off into the field. She cut across the back pasture behind the barn to the county road on the other side, climbed over the fence and followed the dusty gravel road to her grandmother’s house.

  Grandma was her father’s mother but nearly everyone around, relative or not, called her by that name. She was a head shorter than Rebecca but her personality was larger than life and she was the toughest woman Rebecca had ever met. Her nine children were all grown, with children and grandchildren of their own, but Rebecca knew they would all bow to her will if she exerted it. She usually opted to let them live their own lives and only used her power if she were really upset about something, like the time Uncle Fred forbade Aunt Jean from giving their daughter a baby shower because she wasn’t married. By the time Grandma had finished with him, Uncle Fred had stepped meekly in line and even grilled burgers and hot dogs for all the ladies who attended the shower.

  On the outside, Grandma appeared to be the typical gray-haired country grandma, wearing glasses, black SAS shoes and usually with a hint of something she had cooked that day adorning the front of her favorite duster. Behind that clever disguise was a combination teacher, psychologist, doctor and mind reader. Rebecca didn’t think Grandma was afraid of anything, especially letting her feelings show, including showing you where you stood with her. Rebecca suspected that was why everyone loved her so much. She wished she had that same fearlessness but she tended to be more like her Dad, self-contained and less expressive when it came to emotions.

  Grandma saw her walking up the sidewalk and came to the door to meet her. She grabbed Rebecca on either side of her face as she came into the house. Rebecca felt the skin of her cheeks tighten as she was pulled down to Grandma’s height for a bear hug. It was hard to breathe when she squeezed you but the intensity of the hug told you to never doubt how much she loved you.

  “Are you keeping out of trouble?” Grandma asked when she finally released her from her bone-squeezing grip.

  “No, are you?” This was always asked and answered the same way. Grandma said she had so many kids that she was always in trouble with one of them. Rebecca was at the age where some of her older cousins really had been in trouble a time or two, whether from minor offenses such as staying out too late, skipping class or missing work, or more serious brushes with the local police over drag racing through town. She had the reputation in her family of being squeaky clean and she thought it actually concerned Grandma that she hadn’t gotten into any trouble, so she always pretended that she had. Grandma knew the truth and knew her grandchildren better than they knew themselves.

  “What have you been up to today?” Grandma asked, sitting down in her favorite recliner.

  “I went fishing over in Uncle Jim’s pond for a while but didn’t catch anything. On the way, I walked past the old Peacock Cemetery. I noticed someone had disturbed some dirt around a grave there. It belonged to a Mary Farthing. Do you remember her?”

  Grandma’s sparkling blue eyes would get a cloudy, distant look when she thought back many years and today she looked like she was really searching to find a memory.

  “She lived with her parents in that old two-story farmhouse that sits by where the lane turns down to the cemetery. I think she moved to the city when she was in her early twenties although I was pretty young at the time, so I might be wrong.”

  Rebecca knew her grandmother was talking about St. Louis. Everyone in the area just referred to it as “the city.”

  “She was still a young woman when she died. I recall there was a lot of secrecy about her death. Her folks went to the city on the train and brought her body back for a private funeral, family only. No one really ever knew what happened. There were a lot of illnesses at that time, so we supposed she had caught something and it upset her family to talk about it. She was their only child, except for maybe an infant who had died very young. You know, we were raised that you didn’t ask questions. If people wanted you to know something they would tell you. The Farthings didn’t talk about it so nobody asked, nobody knew exactly what had happened. It wasn’t but a few years later that her folks sold the place and moved closer to the city too.”

  Rebecca was thinking aloud. “Well, if she didn’t have any family around then who could have been messing around with her grave?”

  “Are you sure it wasn’t a molehill or maybe one of those armadillos dug a hole then filled it in again?”

  “I don’t think so, Grandma. Armadillos and moles don’t pat down the dirt with shovels. I saw footprints around where they’d been digging and tire tracks in the tall grass on the lane to the cemetery where they’d driven in and back out again.”

  “Well, Bec, you’re always looking for something to think about. Looks like you’ve got something to occupy you for a while. Let me know if I can help any more.”

  “Okay, Grandma. Thanks. I love you,” Rebecca said as she hugged Grandma good-bye.

  * * *

  Sunday morning, Rebecca sat staring into her coffee wondering what she would bury in an old grave on Halloween night. So far all she had conjured up were ideas for pranks. She heard her father clear his throat and turned away from the black depths of her cup, surprised to see both her mother and father looking at her expectantly. Rebecca had always been a bit of a dreamer and this wasn’t the first time they had caught her when her mind was wandering far from its present location. She should have been used to the look of mild irritation in their eyes when it happened, but she wasn’t.

  “I’m sorry,” she apologized sincerely. “What did you say?”

  “I asked how your classes are going.” Her father didn’t involve himself in her studies much, although he had quizzed her in history a few times in high school to help her prepare for tests.

  Throughout most of Rebecca’s life her father had seemed content to remain quiet while a houseful of females moved around him like miniature whirlwinds. Now that both of her sisters were married and no longer living at home, he had slowly become more vocal. It still surprised her when she found herself in a real conversation with him. Even when they worked together on the farm, he was often silent. Sure, he taught her how to use equipment and tools. He taught her about the livestock and the hay. But all of this was completed with a paucity of words.

  The exception to this was when he was telling a story. He had a real gift for telling a tale. She and her sisters had always chosen him over their mother to read them a bedtime story. In his deep voice he would be the troll under the bridge, or he would adopt a falsetto tone as the three pigs sang out to taunt the wolf. His blue eyes would sparkle and he would laugh with delight as he entertained an always captivated audience.

  “Classes are going fine, Dad. I did well on my mid terms.”

  “I went by Grandma’s last night on my way home. She said you’d been by.”

  “Yeah. I had a few questions I wanted to ask her about Peacock Cemetery. When I walked past it yesterday on my way over to Uncle Jim’s, I noticed someone had been messing around with a grave there.”

  Her parents exchanged worried looks. “What do you mean?” her father asked.

  “It looked like something small had been buried over a grave, right up next to the marker.”

  “Could you read the name on the grave?”

  “Mary Farthing. She died in 1933.”

  “I don’t remember any Farthings,” her dad said. He looked at Beth but she shook her head also.

  “Grandma said they used to live in the old house just past the cemetery.”

  Her father nodded. “It’s been abandoned for at least thirty years. I don’t remember the names of any of the people who lived there when I was a kid, but nobody ever lived there for long.” His eyes sparkled as he continued, “Must have been the ghost that ran them off.” He lifted his shaggy eyebrows in mock horror.


  Rebecca smiled at his expression. “On Halloween night I saw headlights out my bedroom window and I think they were coming from the cemetery. You could see where someone had driven down to it. It just doesn’t make sense to me what someone would be burying at such an old grave.”

  “Hard to tell. It’s a wonder it didn’t cave in on them. Those old graves can collapse like a sink hole, Rebecca, and next thing you know, you’re in the coffin with the corpse. Pretty gruesome, huh?”

  Rebecca shuddered at the thought. “Sure would be a lot easier to figure out what’s buried there if we could just dig it up,” she hinted, hoping her father would think of a way for her to do just that without falling in.

  “It’s not safe, Bec. Promise me you won’t be digging around that old grave,” he ordered.

  “Don’t worry, Dad. I won’t,” she said dejectedly, thinking her chances of ever solving her little mystery were slim-to-none.

  Chapter Three

  Sitting in her college algebra class Monday morning, Rebecca was in the same time zone but decades away from the polynomials on the blackboard. She had excelled in math in high school and much of her current class was a review of her advanced classes of the previous two years so there was little to keep her attention.

  On the bulletin board in the hallway before class she had seen a notice about the local Genealogical Society. They were having their monthly meeting that evening at six. She thought that might be a good place to ask a few questions or look for some clues about the Farthings. Work ended at five-thirty so she would have time to grab a bite to eat and get to the old courthouse in time for the meeting.

  The old courthouse was an historic building, which in Rebecca’s opinion meant tall ceilings, cold, drafty rooms, poor lighting and hard, uncomfortable seats. When she entered the room where the Genealogical Society met, it was exactly what she had expected. There were several tables arranged in a square around the center of the room surrounded by folding metal chairs. She had expected to find a group dominated by older women and was surprised to see only three people she thought were sixty or older, two women and a man. Six of those seated around the square of tables were probably between thirty and sixty, and two men and four women comprised this group. Rebecca was relieved to see there were even two young women present who appeared to be close to her own age. One sat next to two other women and the resemblance between them led Rebecca to believe they were probably three generations from the same family, most likely grandmother, mother and daughter.