By the time Murphy and I finished painting, the sun was near setting, the sky big and wide and open. The cop still hadn’t come to talk to us, and that worried me. Maybe there’d been an actual crime in Benign or something. I’d have to bug Grandma about it tonight. I hoped Murphy wouldn’t get too mad. Dinner was coming soon, but I figured we had a little time to wander the Farm. The barn was off-limits obviously, but everywhere else seemed to be allowed. Murphy was game, so we went for a ramble through the strange and ramshackle grounds.

Much of it was old cultivated land gone to seed. The Farm apparently used to be huge: There was fenced-in space for cattle grazing, a horse pen, and rows upon rows of fields now grown over with scrub grass and wildflowers. The effect was beautiful—nature rebelling against the old order of men, reclaiming its own dominion. That was the thing about nature—it was always coming back from the dead, the constantly resurrecting Christ of the world. I thought about all the strip malls back home that got thrown up and then abandoned within a year, all the businesses closed and the cheap buildings slowly falling down. I thought about plants bursting up through the cracks in the floor. I thought about trees growing through the holes in the roof. Being at the Farm made me want nature to swallow every ugly thing and smother it with the tiny yellow suns of wildflowers. It made me want a better world to walk through, a second Eden, where plastic and concrete were banned forever.

“I can’t believe how beautiful this place is,” I said.

Murphy squinted at me.

“Since when did you get outdoorsy?” she said. “You can barely go outside without something stinging you and your arm swelling up like an eggplant.”

“Not here though,” I said. “I bet I’m not allergic to anything on the Farm, and nothing has stung me yet.”

It was true. Usually when I went outside I just sat around in a hammock, reading. But I realized I didn’t want to read at the Farm. I wanted to explore, see everything there was to see out here, touch and taste and smell all of it. From what I could tell, the entire western half of the Farm was given over to forest that was there long before our great-grandfather bought this land. Grandma had said those trees would never be cleared, because how could anyone commune with nature if they tried to tame all of it? Dense thickets of trees led to wide-open pasture-land, and strange winding paths through the brush suddenly opened up onto wonderful places. It was like a sprawling maze, a haunted house of nature, where every left turn surprised you with something new and wonderful.

Murphy and I cut down a path between tall winding birch trees. It swerved around a small cabin with a chimney, a garden out back, and a whole mess of clothes hanging out to dry. A kid in a straw hat sat on a lawn chair, smoking a pipe, reading a book. Inside someone strummed a guitar.