Chapter 15: The Barn

Johnny kept the four pieces of the note in his shirt pocket, and he did not look at them.

He climbed into the hayloft instead, where there was a gap in the boards, and watched the yard.

His grandmother had put the Silvers on the porch with coffee.

They sat in a row on her mismatched chairs, the matriarch in the good one.

Every cousin held a mug and had a clear view of the barn.

Nobody pretended they were not watching.

Johnny had left at dawn for one reason, and it was not the soil.

He did not care what Rachel thought of soil.

He cared that he had sat at that table with a hand on Daniel's knee, and had watched Daniel look at his plate.

Then Daniel had shown him what that looked like from the other side of the table.

Around two in the morning he had decided something.

If he was going to be let go, he would walk out first.

It had seemed a clean plan, in the dark.

It seemed worse in daylight, with Daniel in a mud-streaked chair in the middle of his yard, holding a tomato plant in both hands.

Johnny rubbed his face.

"He won't come back by being told to," his grandmother had said at the door that morning.

"He'll come back by being a damn fool where you can see it."

So he watched.

Daniel was a damn fool for three hours.

He started with the chicken coop.

He had no idea what to do there, so he sat and let the hens walk over his lap.

Then he found the carrot rows behind the barn, and Johnny's stomach went tight.

Daniel had a hand trowel from the porch.

He rolled the chair to the first row and leaned out over the arm.

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