A Dunwich Farmhouse
Originally published in This Side of West (2014 issue)
Colten Dom
My mother was the first of the uninvolved parties to notice the red stain seeping under the barn door. She delicately raised the matter over breakfast, directing it to my father and my brother: my brother went upstairs and brought down an antler from the elk they had shot the night before.
It started after my brother had spent another summer afternoon indoors. He was on the computer all day, all night: I rarely saw him off of it, and generally during these moments he was asleep, spread-eagled on the living room floor or suspended mid-fall from the couch. My father had come in from his job in town: accounting work for a small firm twenty minutes away. He hung up his beaten leather jacket, took off his cap and dusted his jeans of pollen; he noticed my brother only then, sitting in front of the screen. His features narrowed, and he walked over to the boy.
How long have you been on? He asked.
About seven hours, my brother said.
My father sighed, his button-up vest deflating. I folded Blood Meridian, slotting a finger in the binding—I observed from the armchair, legs slung together and hands bent, as my father went into the kitchen for a moment to kiss my mother silently on the cheek. The chair had been grandfather’s before he relocated indefinitely to the attic; he eventually couldn’t take the noise of simple everyday living after so many hours of gunshots and artillery blasts. I found myself pressing one hand to my temple reflexively, as he had once did; his short white hair was like pig bristles, mine like coils of silk. My father came back in.
Get your coat. I’m going to take you hunting.
Ok, my brother said, neither sad nor angry nor anxious: I’ll get my jacket.
They went out that night and didn’t return for another four hours. My mother watched the clock. She had baked a quaint little pie for dessert, playing to her stereotype. When they took too long I asked for a slice; we sat and chatted little.
Do you think they caught something? I asked her after my second slice. The plate was green with flecks of vermillion around the edge.
No, she said. Maybe— your father has steady hands. Do you ever look at his hands?
We sat in the living room for a while. I sat in my chair and read McCarthy.
When they roared back up the drive in the old Cadillac there was the doe strapped to the hood—they called us outside to see it. The sky was deep blue-black and the house lamps barely touched the gravel; they left the headlights on. My brother had killed it, the old man told us proudly, patting the boy on the back. My brother was blank-faced, uncaring.
They dragged the thing out to the barn, where they skinned it and I assume that that was where the leg came off. We ate the meat the next evening: it was delicious. We were out of cutlery and my mother didn’t feel like doing dishes until the plates had come in. I tried to tear the meat delicately; the man and boy ripped theirs apart, starving. My brother had two helpings; my father had three.
*
The farm was only half-operational by the time my brother and I were born. I enjoyed living there: my childhood was filled with golden days and warm purple nights. As a young man I would go out to stand on the porch with a cigarette and watch the moon over the fields or the bluish-green halogen light on the barn door. The air was soothing even with the smoke, and I’d sit on the railing with my hair pushed back and my sleeves rolled up and smell the rich soil on the roof of my mouth.
My father and my brother hunted more and more while my mother got quieter and quieter; I’d watch them leave from my bedroom window above my desk. They get into the Cadillac, long gleaming guns over their shoulders, as if in the middle of a church rite. My grandfather stirred each time the car pulled away with a cough. His room was above mine, the attic, and I often heard him wake in the middle of the night, stammering about jungles and traps and muttering racial expletives. He came down for dinner, sometimes. It was always nice when he did.
My mother stopped coming out to the porch to see the kills; I stopped getting invited to come with them on the hunts. They would enter the house covered in blood, clothes soaked in it, and my mother would joke nervously about the amount of vinegar she would have to use to get the colour out. My brother was emotionless; my father would grin, and pour himself a drink. They started staying out later and later—my brother had always had long dark circles under his eyes, but now my father began to get them too: bruised half-moons beneath glittering blue eyes.
I asked my brother once, sitting in my armchair with a notepad in my lap, what it felt like to kill so many things. He had been looking at his screen, glancing at a screaming brown child in some war-torn country or another.
What? He asked.
I said how does it feel to kill so many animals? I repeated.
He looked back at the screen and closed the window.
*
In hindsight, the incidents were inevitable. The signs appeared all over my family’s genetic history. My grandfather had joined every war, every riot and every bar fight he could; he had been shot, stabbed, and even lit on fire at one time or another in his long bloody life. He was the first to let the farm fall into disuse. My father merely continued the trend.
My father had started to hunt after he put down the dog. Old Missy, she had been our hound for as long as I could remember—she was hit by a car delivering seed. She was buried out beside the barn because she liked to lay there on the hottest days.
Even I felt it sometimes: one morning I went out to feed the sow—one of the last surviving fetishes of true farm life. I pulled on the oversized denim next to the screen door, went out: The morning was grey, as most farm mornings are. I knelt in the muck, feeling grit and feces crush against my knee, the coolness pressing through the fabric. The sow turned in front of me; I watched the way its muscles moved under the suet. I found myself suddenly nauseated, disgusted, enraged by the pig. I punched it straight in the face; its piggy eyes rolled as it darted away squealing. My father came down out the back to see what was the matter. I told him that the dumb thing had knocked over the bucket.
One of the rare times that my grandpa came down for dinner my father asked him if he could borrow one of his old war grenades to hunt with. My grandfather had grinned at him senselessly, nodding; my father smiled at my brother. My brother did nothing.
My girlfriend was the daughter of the town sheriff—she told me, toying with the bed sheets, that her pa had pictures of my dad up on the police wall. She thought he was investigating him; I know now she was right. I smiled at her and petted her hair. She thought I should tell my dad about it. I softly spread her flesh with my hand: she shivered warmly and tucked her chin over my shoulder.
*
A few days after they had asked for it, my brother and my dad went out with the grenade. Lighting that night, but no rain. Thunder boomed, and wind whistled through the farmhouse. My mother went to bed early; I saw under her apron she had hidden a bottle of brandy. My grandfather’s medication was doubled and he passed out almost immediately, weathering out the storm in sleep. I stayed awake, watching the taillights of the Cadillac drift into the night. I listened to every bang with morbid interest.
The next morning I went out with the rising sun. I traced the fresh tire tracks, following the car a few miles into familiar woods. It was noon when I found the spot of the grenade. The space around the blast was coated in red: thick blood and animal viscera dripped from the tree trunks. I threw up, but the scene did not disturb me—it was a gut reaction. I examined the small crater, noting the absence of the body and the extent of the gore.
*
It was that week after that my mother noticed the blood coming from the barn. My father told her it was nothing to worry about, just the remnants of their nightly hunting. His cheeks were sunken and grey, the bruises under his eyes deep in his skin; he didn’t shave anymore. My brother simply stared. He had stopped blinking, recently.
The next day, my father came home quiet and withdrawn. He had been fired for falling asleep on the job and assaulting a co-worker. We ate dinner in silence and tension; my father and my brother left immediately afterwards to go hunting. I fell asleep before the Cadillac returned.
My brother and my father didn’t come home that night. I went out the next morning to feed the sow when I noticed a trail of blood leading from the carport to the front of the barn. On the handle of the door, my brother’s arm dangled. I sagged, tilting my head: shock. The palm was wrapped tightly around the iron. Just the arm; it was severed at the shoulder, as if by an axe. I looked at the farmhouse and back at the arm. I couldn’t blink. There was dirt and red caught in the fine blonde hair of the forearm.
I went to the porch and told my mother to stay inside and call the police. Alone outside the barn door, I placed my hand over my brothers: it was cold and wet with the morning dew. Tensile young skin, solid and cold and firm. I opened the barn.