The Tobacco Barn (Part 2)

The cold hit him like a fist.

Clay made it twenty steps from the barn before his hip seized, the pain so sudden and total that he dropped to his knees. Thirty steps, and his hands had gone numb. Forty steps, and he couldn't feel his feet, couldn't feel anything except the wrongness of air that wasn't fire-warm, wasn't smoke-sweet, wasn't home.

He turned back. The barn doors stood open, firelight spilling across the yard like a welcome mat. The warmth reached toward him, patient as love.

He crawled back inside.

Ezra helped him to a spot by the nearest fire, wrapped a horse blanket around his shoulders, fed him coffee that was too hot to drink but felt necessary anyway. The cold receded slowly, degree by degree, and with it went the last of Clay's denial.

"My grandfather," he said, when he could speak again. "He got out. He lived to eighty-seven. Died in his own bed."

"He found someone to take his place." Ezra's voice held no judgment. "Same as his daddy, and his daddy's daddy. Every generation, one Dawkins walks out. Someone else walks in."

"Delphine."

"Your grandmother was the last one. Before that, it was a hired hand named Jerome. Before that, a woman from the county home who nobody would miss." Ezra stirred the fire, and the flames cast moving shadows across his tobacco-brown face. "Your granddaddy picked you a long time ago, Clay. Before you went to war. Before the shrapnel, before the nightmares. He knew you'd need what this barn gives. He knew you'd be grateful enough to stay."

"But I'm not staying."

"Then you know what you have to do."

Clay stared into the fire. He thought about the sixty-two thousand dollars. About the bank, the debt, the lawyer's voice explaining that foreclosure was inevitable without a harvest to sell. He thought about his hip, which hadn't hurt in weeks. About the nightmares that had stopped. About the peace that came with warmth, the peace he'd been chasing since Kandahar without knowing what to call it.

He thought about Sergeant Peters, twenty-two years old, burning alive with his hand in Clay's grip.

"There has to be another way," he said.

"There isn't." Ezra stood, brushed off his knees. "There never is. That's what the Dawkins men learn, every generation. The barn gives, and the barn takes. The only choice is who."

#

The day labor office in Yanceyville opened at six AM.

Clay parked his truck across the street, engine running, heat on high. Even with the vents blasting, the cold crept through—sharper than it should have been for November, sharper than he remembered cold being before the barn got into him.

He watched the men gather on the sidewalk. A dozen of them, maybe more, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands, waiting for the contractors who came through looking for cheap help. Some were young—early twenties, worn-out sneakers, the hungry look of men who hadn't figured out yet how bad things could get. Some were older, harder, men who knew exactly how bad things got and had stopped expecting different.

One of them caught Clay's eye. Young, maybe twenty-three. Thin jacket not meant for this weather. He stood apart from the others, arms wrapped around himself, shivering.

Clay got out of the truck.

The cold hit him immediately—that deep, bone-wrong cold that meant the barn was already part of him, that meant he was running out of time. He walked across the street, hands in his pockets, affecting a casualness he didn't feel.

"You looking for work?"

The young man turned. Up close, he was even younger than Clay had thought. Barely out of his teens. Light brown skin, eyes that held the wary alertness of someone who'd learned not to trust offers that seemed too good.

"Depends on the work."

"Farm work. Tobacco harvest. Room and board included—warm place to sleep, three meals a day." Clay heard himself talking, heard the words coming out smooth and reasonable, and felt sick. "Pay's not much, but it's honest."

"Where?"

"Caswell County. About twenty miles east."

The young man looked at Clay's truck, at Clay's face, at the cold that was making both of them shiver. Something like calculation moved behind his eyes.

"I'm Jerome," he said. "When do we start?"

Clay thought about the Jerome that Ezra had mentioned—the hired hand who'd taken someone else's place before Delphine. He wondered if that Jerome had been young too. If he'd been cold. If he'd trusted someone who offered warmth.

"Now," Clay said. "Right now."

#

They drove in silence through the brown November countryside, bare trees and fallow fields sliding past the windows. Jerome kept his hands near the heating vents, fingers spread to catch the warmth, and Clay remembered doing the same thing on cold mornings before the barn.

"You been doing this long?" Jerome asked. "Farming, I mean."

"It was my grandfather's place. He passed a few months back."

"Sorry to hear that."

"Don't be." Clay's hands tightened on the wheel. "He wasn't a good man. He just lived a long time."

Jerome nodded like he understood, though he couldn't possibly. They drove on. The road curved through stands of pine, past abandoned tobacco barns that weren't the barn, past farmhouses where normal people lived normal lives and didn't know what waited in the Dawkins field.

"That it?" Jerome pointed through the windshield. They'd crested a hill, and the farm spread out below them—the leaning house, the fallow acres, the barn standing perfect and plumb with smoke rising from its chimney.

"That's it."

"Looks warm," Jerome said, and Clay heard in his voice the same thing he'd heard in his own voice three weeks ago: relief, gratitude, the desperate hope of someone who'd been cold for too long.

#

The barn doors stood open.

Clay led Jerome across the yard, past the rusting equipment and the weed-choked garden, toward the light and heat that spilled from the entrance. Each step felt heavier than the last. His hip had started aching again, faint but present, a reminder of what he was giving up.

Ezra waited just inside, silhouette dark against the orange glow. Delphine stood beside him, and June, all three of them watching with expressions that might have been hunger or might have been pity.

"This is Jerome," Clay said. "He's going to help with the harvest."

Ezra nodded slowly. "Welcome. Come in, warm yourself."

Jerome stepped past Clay into the barn. His face changed immediately—the tension draining out, the cold-pinched look softening, his shoulders dropping as the heat wrapped around him. "Jesus," he breathed. "It's like a sauna in here."

"The fires burn hot." Delphine moved toward him, and Clay saw her the way Jerome must see her: a kind-faced woman, maybe forty, offering warmth and welcome. Not the grandmother who'd been curing in this barn for decades. Not the woman who'd watched generation after generation of Dawkins men make the choice Clay was making now.

"You'll want to take off that jacket," June said. "Let the heat get to you."

Jerome stripped off his thin coat, handed it to her without thinking. He moved deeper into the barn, drawn toward the fires like a moth to flame, and Clay watched him go.

"You're doing the right thing," Delphine said, quiet enough that only Clay could hear. "He was cold. He was hungry. You're giving him what he needs."

"I'm trapping him."

"You're surviving." Her hand touched his arm, and her skin was furnace-hot. "That's what the Dawkins men do. That's what you were raised for, even if you didn't know it."

Clay looked at Jerome, who stood by the nearest fire with his arms spread, face tilted up toward the hanging tobacco, a smile on his lips that was already starting to look like home.

"How long?" Clay asked. "Before he can't leave?"

"A few weeks. Maybe less—he's young, and he wants to stay." Delphine's smile was gentle. "You should go now. Before the heat takes you back."

Clay turned toward the door. The November cold waited outside, sharp and real, the cold of a world that didn't offer warmth without cost. His hip throbbed with each step. His hands had started to shake.

He stopped at the threshold.

Behind him, Jerome laughed at something Ezra said—a real laugh, surprised and genuine, the laugh of someone who'd finally found a place to rest. The sound followed Clay out into the yard, across the red clay drive, into the cab of his truck where the heater struggled against the cold that had already begun to feel permanent.

He started the engine. He drove away.

He didn't look back.

#

The buyer's agent called it "a unique property with development potential."

Clay signed the papers in a lawyer's office in Burlington, three weeks after leaving the farm. The signatures were witnessed, notarized, filed with the county. Forty acres and everything on it, sold to a developer who planned to subdivide for housing. The barn wasn't mentioned in the deed—couldn't be mentioned, since it didn't exist in any official record.

"What about the people living there?" the agent had asked, flipping through the disclosure forms. "The property report mentions occupants."

"Caretakers," Clay said. "They'll stay on through the transition."

He pocketed the check. Walked out into a December afternoon that felt colder than any winter he remembered. His hip ached constantly now, a deep grinding pain that no amount of medication could touch. The nightmares had returned—Kandahar, the burning Humvee, Peters screaming—and he'd stopped trying to sleep through them.

The barn had given him three weeks of peace. It had taken back the debt with interest.

He drove south, away from Caswell County, away from the tobacco fields and the pine ridges and the barn that stood patient and plumb at the edge of the Dawkins land. The check in his pocket would cover a fresh start somewhere warm. Florida, maybe. Arizona. Somewhere the cold couldn't reach him.

But even as he drove, he knew the truth. The cold wasn't in the air. The cold was in him now, lodged as deep as shrapnel, as permanent as memory. He'd traded Jerome for his freedom, and the price would follow him wherever he went.

Somewhere behind him, smoke rose from a tin chimney. Somewhere behind him, a young man learned to tend fires that never needed fuel, to cure tobacco that never ran out, to stay warm in a way that would slowly become the only warmth he could feel.

Somewhere behind him, Delphine and Ezra and June welcomed the newest member of their family.

And somewhere ahead, in a future Clay couldn't see, another Dawkins would inherit the farm. Another desperate person would wander in looking for shelter. Another generation would learn what the barn offered, and what it cost.

The cycle would continue. It always had.

Clay merged onto the highway, heading south, the heater on full blast against a cold that would never quite go away.

He was free.

He was freezing.

He was exactly what his grandfather had made him.

# # #