“Up, children!” she said, shooing us from the table. “Up and to work! Half the day is already wasted, and on a farm, there’s no bigger sin than wasting daylight.”

Grandma wasn’t kidding about work. By noon she had Murphy up on a John Deere mowing the back lot and me in the garden yanking weeds. The sun was nightmare-hot, and my neck got burned, and my back ached from hunching over the ground. I’m pretty sure I got poison ivy too. Grandma kept walking by, gathering up veggies, watering plants, clipping at things, shouting at me to get down in the soil, to get my hands all good and dirty. I kept chancing glances back at the barn when I could, at that narrow path cut through the woods. I wondered what lay back there.

Every couple of hours Grandma called a “hydration break,” where she served us some green homemade goop out of mason jars. It tasted horrible, like chalk and weird spinach. I would have preferred water, or really anything else, but Grandma said it was her secret concoction and that nothing was better on a hot day.

“Believe me,” she said. “I’ve been at this for forty years now.”

After the garden was good and weeded and the back lot was mowed, Grandma put me to work feeding the chickens while she went to show Murphy where the paint was, since the porch needed a touch-up. I stood next to the chickens—dumb colorful squawking things strutting around in their wire cage like they didn’t know their destiny was to be food—and hated them a little bit, how they didn’t rise up and murder us when we came for their eggs. The ultimate suckers, those chickens were. Sure, they got fed and protected, but to what end? A comfortable life serving the ones who will ring your neck one day and eat you and all your children? It was a bad deal no matter how you cut it. I watched the chickens and waited, thinking on all this and other stuff, until Grandma was out of sight, then chucked all the feed that was left and took off across the back lot. I knew I only had a few minutes before Grandma came back, and I needed to hurry.

The barn was about twenty feet tall and maybe sixty long with a whole second floor to it. The barn doors were ten feet tall at least, and they were on rails so they would slide open, wide and grand. The barn was huge, is what I’m saying.

Up close it didn’t even look much like a barn. For one, it was painted yellow—faded and chipped and long-neglected, but still yellow, not the normal red you’d imagine. Second, it seemed somehow cozier than a barn should, like it had been constructed for much more than just housing hay and equipment, or whatever it was you stuck in a barn. There were windows too, big ones, but they were all boarded up now. The whole thing was shut tighter than a bank vault. A metal chain thick as my arm was draped over the door handles, fixed by a padlock that looked almost too heavy to lift—a real padlock, not a fake one like on the gate at the end of the drive. The barn had an abandoned look to it—not like it fell gradually out of use but like it had been closed up quick and deliberate, for a reason.