Halfway between another bite of pumpkin spice cake and ordering a second double shot latte that I didn’t need, I stopped scrolling and stared down at my phone.
“Hmm.” Ineloquent, but it was the only thing I could think to say.
Leandra, a cohort from my days at Georgia State, didn’t glance up from her grab ‘n go salad. “What?”
“They’re going to bulldoze my whole childhood before it’s over. That damn four-lane...nothing obliterates history the way progress does.”
“Let me guess.” Leandra picked something invisible off the top of a cherry tomato with one lacquered nail. “The church where your great granny postponed her wedding so long that your great grandfather needed a blue pill to make your grandma.”
I turned the phone around to show her the picture on my news feed. “No. They didn’t have blue pills back then. This.”
Last month it had been the old rock store where Hiram Whatley ran a full service gas station for fifty years, until he had a heart attack one day while pumping Doris Tucker’s premium unleaded. Scavengers made off with the rusty Gulf sign that had hung on the side of the building since before I was born. Rumor held that one of them sold it on eBay for five hundred dollars.
This time, it was the sagging barn on the north side of Sawmill Hill, a landmark from my youth with “See Rock City” painted in stark white block letters on a black tin roof. The lettering was probably still readable under all the kudzu. I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t had a reason to drive up Sawmill Hill in more than a decade, much less poke around underneath a tangle of invasive vine that might choke me where I stood.
“Any idea how old it is?” Leandra squinted at my phone. “The wood might make some good decor pieces.”
“True. I’d like to have some for the house,” I said. “When we get around to building it. Barn wood is getting hard to find. People are buying it up as soon as folks tear shit down.”
“Yeah, and with the price of lumber nowadays--.” Leandra pushed the remains of her salad away and knitted her fingers over the plate. “You better not wait ‘til you make partner to go down there and check it out.”
She was right. Caleb and I had put our whole life on hold waiting for my career to launch, including our dream home, two-point-five kids, even getting married. But this was just a pile of old planks. I could take a risk on that. A day trip, nothing more. A three-hour drive to my old hometown, where I'd try to save what I could before the bulldozers turned it all into a memory.
“Okay.” I shut my phone off and dropped it into my handbag. “Challenge accepted. I’ll see what I can do. But right now, back to the office. Meet me here again next Tuesday?”
“Sure.” She took a big drink of her lemon water and smiled at me from behind the glass. “Send me a postcard from the kudzu jungle.”
“Kudzu jungle” turned out to be an apt description. A few days after my conversation with Leandra, I stood beside my car, sunglasses in hand, gaping at the tangled mass of vines that almost completely obscured what was left of the old barn.
The low growl at my knee startled me so badly I dropped my sunglasses. A dog stood there, one I hadn’t seen coming. Shaggy and mottled with different shades of beige and reddish fur, it had one blue eye and what looked like hundreds of sharp white teeth bared only inches from my leg.
I didn’t take time to make sense of the observations. I scrambled onto the hood of my car and scooted halfway up the windshield, feet tangled in the wipers and elbows braced on the roof.
The dog stood on its back legs, one front paw on the car’s BMW hood badge. It stared at me like it was hungry and I might be lunch.
“No.” I told it. “No! Go away. Shoo.”
An elderly man with a cane hobbled around the back bumper of my car, focused on the dog. I hadn’t seen him coming, either.
“Gypsy, get down. Let her alone.” He gestured with one hand, and the dog watched him with pricked ears. Then it snorted once and lowered its front paws back to the ground. “She don’t mean you no harm,” he said, and at first I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or the dog. “She knows how to act right. We just don’t see too many people out here these days.”
I looked at the orange “men at work” signs already erected on the shoulder of the main road. “I guess that might change with all the construction that’s coming.”
He pushed his battered straw hat back with gnarled fingers and scratched the top of his head. “Yeah, I reckon it might.” He peered up at me with a quizzical expression. “Is there something I can help you with?”
“Maybe.” I watched the dog, several yards away now, snuffling through a field of overgrown Bahia grass. “Is it safe for me to come down?”
The old man nodded. “She’s protective of me, but she won’t bite.”
No doubt he believed what he said, but I kept an eye on the dog as I slid off the hood. It paid me no attention as it continued its exploration for bugs or field mice or …. I shuddered. Snakes. Yeah, leave it to me to have that thought, at this moment. No telling what was waiting there under the kudzu for me to stumble across by accident.
“I’m curious about that old barn.” There, on the ground beside the car’s front tire, lay my sunglasses. I picked them up, checked the lenses for damage, and poked them firmly into the hair on top of my head. “Do you have any idea who owns it?”
“I used to,” he said. “Own it, I mean. But I guess the state has it now, since it’s on their right-of-way.”
The lawyer in me woke with a jolt. “They purchased the land from you outright?”
He laughed and rubbed his jaw. “Not from me, no. This old homeplace hasn’t been mine for a while now. I didn’t need it any more, so I guess my son did what he had to with it. You get my age, some things just aren’t as important as they used to be.”
His age. I studied him in the sunlight, curious. He had to be ninety if he was a day. His skin hung like crepe, dotted with dark patches and blotches of all shapes and sizes. His arms were bone-thin, and his denim overalls looked two sizes too big. Under them, his plaid shirt was light-colored and threadbare, serviceable, but just barely. And that hat--my goodness. A relic, for sure.
“Okay--who would I need to ask about reclaiming some of the wood from that barn before they tear it down?”
He shrugged. “Construction foreman, probably. I really don’t know.”
“But you would know what kind of wood it’s made from, right? Since you owned it before?”
“Yeah, I suppose I would.”
“Oak, maybe?”
“Probably. And black walnut. Maybe some locust. Back then they always used what was handy. See, there was a sawmill up there a ways.” He pointed toward the pine-covered hill that would soon be graded and flattened by heavy equipment. “I’d say all the lumber was cut right here close by.”
“So it has a story. Even better.”
“There’s always a story.” He looked at a house sitting at the edge of the pine forest, and I tracked his gaze.
“Like that house right there,” he said. “I grew up in it. Planned to remodel it after my mama died so my wife and I could retire here. Margaret was the branch manager of a bank down in Fort Lauderdale--we lived there for about twenty years. But we always wanted to come home when we retired. Once I hit sixty-five, I started driving up and working on the house every week or so. Did a little bit along, you know--trying to get it ready. Every year she planned to retire, but something always came up that caused her to stay on a while longer.
“So I got these two dogs, you see--Australian Shepherd puppies--to keep me company while I was here. Gypsy was mine and Prince was going to be hers. They grew up with her still in Florida. She finally left the bank in eighty-seven and we moved up here full time. Six months later, she died from brain cancer. We shouldn’t have waited. You hear me? If you have things you want to do, and somebody you want to do them with, do them now. Don’t put it off. Because if you keep dragging your feet waiting on things to be perfect, you’ll die old and alone and nothing will ever get done like you want.”
Oh dear lord. Caleb.
How could I not think about him, hearing those words? Or the engagement diamond I’d been wearing for five years? Our dream house, the kids we had yet to conceive…all of our ideas for the future, everything. What were we waiting for? Me, to make partner in a law firm I wasn’t even sure was the right place for me to settle?
I turned to acknowledge the truth in what the old man had told me, but he was already walking away. He threw up one hand as he hobbled up the driveway toward the house, a firm grip on his cane with the other. “You talk to that fella coming up the road behind you,” he said. “He looks like he might be able to help.”
Speechless, I turned to see. Sure enough, a white pickup with orange cones stacked behind the cab was turning into the driveway.
“But, sir!” I called after the old man. “What is your name?”
He showed no indication of hearing me. Behind him, Gypsy trotted along with her nose to the ground and mottled fur gleaming in the sun.
Gypsy?
Wait. What did he say he’d named those Australian Shepherd puppies back in the eighties? That was thirty-something years ago. How long did dogs live, anyway?
“Can I help you with something?” The white pickup had rolled to a stop beside my car and a man sat appraising me through its lowered window.
“You're with the road crew?”
He nodded.
“I’m looking for the right person to ask about the lumber in that old barn--can I salvage it before your crew razes everything? I talked to the old man who lives here, and he said--”
The driver of the pickup shut off the engine and climbed out, interrupting me with an odd look.
“I’d be the one to talk to about that, and yeah, you can get whatever you want. Just take it. But ma’am, nobody lives here. That old house up there has been empty for years.”
“But he was ….” This time it didn’t take an odd look to silence me. Just the realization that the path between the barn and the house was empty, no man, and no dog. Nothing but open land with overgrown Bahia grass ruffling in the breeze.
“Old guy who used to live there died about ten years ago,” the man told me. “His son has the property listed, though… you interested? I can put you in touch.”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not looking for land. Just wondering about the barn wood, whatever’s still there under all the kudzu. My boyfriend… fiance...well, he’s going to be my husband soon--he and I want to build a house.” I cast one more glance up the hill toward the empty path. “And I think we need to get started on it really soon.”
This original short story appeared first on Vocal at the following link: https://vocal.media/fiction/under-the-kudzu
Hive is attributed in the comments as of the publication date on this blockchain, also with a link.
Short stories that I publish here from Vocal are published here with the intention of preservation, as Vocal is not a blockchain nor is it decentralized. The publications there could disappear without notice therefore I choose the stability of this platform to ensure their permanence.
