As his mother had asked his grandmother about Ben Findley, so too had Michael asked Ryan Shields again about the man next door. They were in the barn with a third boy-Damon Hollings-whom Michael had met only today.
"How come he's not here?"
"Are you kidding?" Damon replied, though Michael had directed his question to his cousin. "He never goes out of that weird house, and he never speaks to anyone. And he wouldn't help anyone, even if they were dying on the road in front of his driveway." Damon paused, enjoying the effect his words were having on Michael. "And his place is haunted," he added, his voice dropping to a loud whisper. "There's ghosts there."
"There's no such thing as ghosts," Michael protested, but nonetheless his gaze shifted away from Damon toward the loft door. Beyond, only a few hundred yards away, lay the ramshackle buildings of the Findley farm. And in the depths of his consciousness, a memory-or was it a dream? -stirred. "What kind of a ghost?" he asked, his voice noticeably less certain than it had been a moment earlier.
"It's someone who died a long time ago," Damon told him. "And sometimes you can see it, at night, out in Potter's Field. It looks like lights moving around out there."
"Lights?" Michael asked. "What kind of lights?"
"I-I never saw it myself," Damon admitted.
"You never saw it 'cause it doesn't exist. Right, Ryan?" Michael said, turning to his cousin, but Ryan didn't answer.
Damon shrugged with exaggerated indifference and ran a hand through the tangle of blond hair that capped his mischievous face. "Well, who cares what you think?" he said to Michael. "All I'm telling you is what I heard. And what I heard, and what everybody around here knows, is that old man Findley's place is haunted. So there!"
"Well, I don't believe it," Michael shot back. "I don't believe in ghosts, and I bet there's nothing wrong with Mr. Findley. I bet nobody around here likes him 'cause he's not related to anybody," he said with sudden certainty.
"Well, why don't you go find out?" Damon challenged.
"Maybe I will," Michael replied, taking up the challenge. He turned to Ryan again. "Will you go with me?"
Ryan stared at him, then emphatically shook his head. "And you better not go, either," he said.
Michael's expression set stubbornly as the beginnings of a headache shot through his temples. "I'll do what I want," he said in a tight voice. He turned away from the other two boys and concentrated his attention on the old barn in the distance. As he stared at it, the pain in his head began to ease. From somewhere inside his head, he could almost hear a voice whispering to him. The words were unclear, but the tone was somehow familiar…
By six-thirty the heavy work was done, and only the Halls remained at the little farm.
"Doesn't look much like it did this morning, does it?" Anna Hall commented.
Indeed, it did not. Gone was the tangle of weeds that had nearly hidden the house, and the lawn, mown and trimmed, needed only water and some fertilizer to restore it to the luxuriant green that was the norm in Prairie Bend. The driveway, scraped and graveled, formed a graceful curve to the highway, and the buildings, denuded of the last remnants of their faded and peeling paint, seemed almost to be anticipating the morrow, when a coat of fresh white would restore them to their former respectability. Behind the buildings, forty acres of newly plowed earth awaited whatever plantings Amos eventually decided on. Even Michael had to admit that the place had changed.
"Maybe we really can live here," he murmured. Then his eyes shifted westward toward the sagging buildings of the Findley farm, and he fell silent.
Misunderstanding Michael's silence, Amos reached out and drew him close, his arm around the boy's shoulders. "You don't like that place?" he asked, then interpreted Michael's continued silence as assent. "Well, that's just as well. If I'd had my way, I'd have bought Ben's place long ago, but he wouldn't hear of it. Said he'd found the place where he was going to die, and he was too old to change his mind. So there he is, and if I were you, I'd leave him alone."
With an effort, Michael tore his eyes away from the old barn and looked up at his grandfather. "Is there really a ghost there?" he asked.
Janet had not been paying much attention to the conversation. Now she turned to look at her son. "A ghost?" she asked, her voice incredulous. "What on earth are you talking about?"
Michael shifted uncomfortably. "Damon Hollings says Mr. Findley's farm is haunted."
"Oh, for heaven's sake. You didn't believe him, did you, honey?" When Michael hesitated, Janet's voice lost some of its lightness. "There's no such thing as ghosts, Michael, and there never have been." She turned to Amos and Anna, expecting them to support her, but Amos seemed lost in thought, while Anna had turned away and was slowly pushing her chair toward the car. "Amos, tell him there's no such thing as ghosts."
"I'm not going to tell him something I don't know about, Janet," he said at last.
Janet stared at him. "Something you don't know about?" she repeated. "Amos, you aren't going to tell me you believe in ghosts!"
"All I can tell you is that there've been stories," Amos said at last. "So I guess I'll just have to say I don't know."
"What kind of stories?" Michael demanded.
"Things," Amos told him after a long silence. Then he smiled grimly. "Maybe, if you're good, I'll tell you all about them, just before you go to bed tonight."
Michael tried to keep his excitement from showing, tried to keep his expression disinterested. He failed completely.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The prairie was different then; the grass was tall, and in the summer you couldn't even see where you were going. It would grow five, maybe six feet high, and it was like a great sea, green at first, during the spring, and then, in the summer, it would turn brown, and as far as you could see, there it was, waving in the wind just like in the song. Then the cattle came, and the grass started getting more like it is now -still thick, and still tall in the spring, but cut down as the summer goes on. It never used to get cut at all. It would just stand, bloom, go to seed, and die.
And in the winter, the prairie would turn white, and the snow would be so thick no one could go out in it. No one except the Indians, with their travois. And even they didn't travel much in the winter. They'd pitch their tepees, and huddle together, and somehow they'd get through it.
That was what the white people didn't know. They didn't understand the prairie, didn't have any idea of what it could be like. The thing of the prairie is that it just seems to go on and on forever. And there's nothing to measure it by. So what used to happen is that people would lose track out on the prairie. Not of where they were -they always knew that. But they'd lose track of who they were, and what they were.
It would happen slowly, so slowly that most people ever knew it was happening to them. They'd come out here from the east, and they'd be looking for land. A lot of them were city people, and what they wanted was to be out of the city. So at first they didn't even have towns. Instead, they'd claim tracts of land-big tracts -and they'd build their houses right in the middle of it, and everything they could see was theirs. And they didn't have any neighbors, not to speak of. Oh, there were other people, but they lived miles away, and the only time you saw your neighbors was during a house-raising or a wedding, a birth or a death. For the rest of the time, you were by yourself, with no one but your family. And sometimes you'd be snowbound for months on end.
It seems like it was the women it got to the most. They'd go on for years, raising their children and taking care of their husbands, and everything would seem to be fine. But inside, they'd start losing their sense of themselves. They'd start feeling like they were disappearing into the prairie. Every day, little by little, getting smaller and smaller, until they'd start to feel like one morning they just wouldn't be there anymore. And then it would happen. One day something would just sort of snap inside their heads.