The Tobacco Barn (Part 1)

The barn was older than the farmhouse. Older than the county records, if you believed the clerk at the Register of Deeds, who'd searched back to 1847 and found no mention of its construction. It stood at the edge of the tobacco field like it had grown there, logs dark with age, chinked with mud and horsehair that never seemed to weather. The farmhouse leaned east from a foundation that had settled wrong decades ago, but the barn stood perfectly plumb against the November sky, smoke rising from its tin chimney in a white thread that didn't bend with the wind.

Clay Dawkins parked his truck in the red clay drive and sat with the engine idling, looking at what his grandfather had left him. Forty acres of scrub pine and fallow field along the Virginia border. A house that smelled of old man and mildew. A debt of sixty-two thousand dollars secured by land that might be worth half that.

And the barn, standing in the late afternoon light like something patient.

#

He'd left Caswell County at eighteen, the day after graduation, Army recruiter's signature still drying on the enlistment forms. Two tours in Afghanistan. A Bronze Star for pulling three men out of a burning Humvee outside Kandahar, though the fourth man—Sergeant Peters, twenty-two years old, from somewhere in Ohio—had died with his hand in Clay's grip. An honorable discharge and a right hip that would never stop aching, shrapnel lodged too close to the nerve to remove.

When his mother died, he'd come back for the funeral and left the same night. When his grandfather followed three months later, he'd almost done the same.

But the old man had named him in the will. The farm, the debt, the barn—all of it passed to the grandson who'd sworn never to return. The lawyer had used the word "inheritance" like it meant something good.

Clay killed the engine and stepped out into air that smelled of woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath, like cured meat, like old leaves, like warmth itself had a scent. The barn's double doors stood half-open, and the heat that drifted out reached across the yard like a hand extended in welcome.

#

The farmhouse was worse than he remembered.

His grandfather had lived alone for twenty years after Delphine died—or disappeared, depending on who you asked. The old man had never reported her missing, never held a funeral, never spoke her name again. Clay had been four years old when she vanished, and his memories of her were more sensation than image: soft hands, a voice humming hymns, the smell of lavender soap.

Now he walked through rooms thick with dust and decades of neglect. His grandfather's bedroom, sheets still tangled from the night he'd died. The kitchen, dishes crusted in the sink, a smell of rot coming from the unplugged refrigerator. The hallway closet where old coats hung like shed skins.

He found the photographs in a shoebox under the bed.

Delphine Dawkins, nee Moreau, married 1952. The wedding portrait showed a woman with dark hair and serious eyes, standing beside Clay's grandfather in his Army dress uniform. He flipped through the stack: Delphine in the tobacco field, Delphine on the farmhouse porch, Delphine standing in the open doors of the barn with firelight behind her.

The dates on the backs didn't make sense. 1954. 1962. 1978. In each photo she looked exactly the same age—mid-thirties, dark hair untouched by gray, face unlined. The last photograph was dated 1997, three years before Clay's grandfather claimed she'd "passed on."

She stood in the barn doorway, smiling at the camera, and she hadn't aged a day.

#

The interior was larger than it should have been.

Clay stood in the doorway, photographs still in his hand, letting his eyes adjust to the orange glow. Tobacco hung from every rafter in golden-brown curtains, thousands of leaves swaying in air currents he couldn't feel. Curing fires burned in stone-lined pits along the floor, flames low and steady, giving off heat that soaked through his jacket, his shirt, his skin.

Three figures moved among the hanging leaves. Two men and a woman, dressed in work clothes that looked decades old. They turned when Clay entered, and the woman's face caught the firelight.

"Delphine," he said. The word came out cracked.

She smiled. It was the same smile from the photographs, exactly the same, unchanged across forty years. "You probably don't remember me, baby. You were so small when I came to stay here."

"They told me you were dead."

"That's one way to put it." She moved toward him, and her skin had a texture he hadn't noticed in the photos—leathered, slightly crackling, like cured tobacco. "Your grandfather, he couldn't find a way to explain what happened. Easier to say I passed on. Easier than the truth."

The older of the two men stepped forward. He was Black, somewhere between sixty and forever, skin the same cured-leather brown as Delphine's. "Ezra Cole," he said. "Worked for your granddaddy. Worked for his daddy before that. Been tending these fires since before your grandmother was born."

"I don't understand."

"You will." Delphine took his hand, and her fingers were fever-hot. "The barn takes care of its people, Clay. It kept me warm when I had nothing. It healed me when I was sick. All it asks is that we tend the fires and bring in the harvest." Her thumb traced circles on his palm. "Your hip hurts, doesn't it? The one with the shrapnel. And you don't sleep—I can see it in your eyes. When's the last time you slept through the night without dreaming of fire?"

Clay pulled his hand away. "How do you know about that?"

"The barn knows what people need." Ezra fed a log to the nearest fire—where had the wood come from?—and the flames climbed higher. "It's been waiting for you. Your granddaddy, he knew you'd come back eventually. Knew you needed what only this place can give."

#

The work was harder than he remembered. And easier than it should have been.

They started before dawn, Clay and Ezra and Delphine and the third worker, a young woman named June who said she'd walked into the barn during the Depression and never walked out. The tobacco came down in heavy stalks, leaves broad as dinner plates, sticky with resin that coated Clay's hands until his skin felt like it belonged to someone else.

By midday his hip should have been screaming. His shoulders should have locked, his back seized, his body reminding him that he was thirty-one years old and running on six years of interrupted sleep. Instead, he felt good. Loose. The ache that had lived in his right side since Kandahar faded to nothing, then disappeared entirely.

"The heat helps," June said. They were hanging the morning's harvest, passing stalks up to Ezra on the ladder. "Gets into your muscles. Works out the damage."

"I've had that pain for six years. Doctors said it was permanent."

"Nothing's permanent." She handed him another stalk, her fingers brushing his. Her skin was hot enough to sting. "The barn's been curing things a lot longer than you've been hurting."

That night, Clay slept in the farmhouse for the last time. He expected the old nightmares—Kandahar, the burning Humvee, Peters screaming as the flames took him—but instead he dreamed of warmth. Orange light and sweet smoke and a peace so complete it felt like being held.

He woke at dawn feeling better than he had since before the war.

#

The nights got longer in the barn. Clay told himself he was just checking the fires, just making sure the temperature held, just doing due diligence on the crop that would save the farm. But each night he stayed later, sat closer to the flames, let the heat work deeper into the places that had been cold for years.

Delphine found him there on the seventh night, asleep on the dirt floor with his back against a post and his face turned toward the fire.

"You're settling in," she said. Not a question.

Clay sat up. His body felt loose, easy, younger than it had in years. "Just tired. The work's hard."

"The work's nothing." She sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. The heat coming off her was like sitting next to a furnace. "Your grandfather used to sleep in here too. Before he found his way out."

"His way out?"

"The barn keeps what it cures." Delphine's voice was soft, patient. The voice of someone explaining something difficult to a child. "The heat gets into you. Becomes part of you. After long enough, you can't survive without it. Try to leave, and the cold—" She shook her head. "I watched a man try once. Made it about a hundred yards before he collapsed. By the time we got to him, he was already gone."

Clay's throat tightened. "How long? Before it's permanent?"

"Different for everyone. Ezra says he felt the change after a month. For me, it was quicker." Her hand found his, fingers interlacing. "You've been here almost three weeks, baby. Sleeping in the barn for the last seven days. I can feel the heat in you already. Building."

He stood up. His legs worked fine—better than fine. No stiffness, no ache, no reminder of the shrapnel lodged against his nerve.

"I'm leaving," he said.

Delphine didn't try to stop him. She just looked up with those unchanged eyes, the same eyes from the 1952 wedding portrait, and said: "Your grandfather said the same thing. Every Dawkins man says it, eventually. But there's only one way out of this barn, and you know what it is."

"What?"

"Someone has to take your place." She smiled, and her teeth were very white. "The fires need tending. The tobacco needs curing. The barn needs workers. You can walk out of here tomorrow—but only if someone else walks in."

#