David's Voice

This is a slightly fictionalized version of a real scene from my life.  I telescoped time a bit.  Otherwise everything happened as stated.  Fair warning: I leave you hanging at the end of the scene and there is no guarantee that I'll have time to get back to this piece anytime soon.  With that in mind:

     My sister Wilma is the doer in our family and it showed the morning that the court order came down giving my aunt the right to take back possession of her son David's farm.  Wilma managed to get a locksmith and a deputy sheriff to the gate in front of David's farm, along with a workman to change the locks on the doors, all within fifteen minutes of one another.  That may not sound like a lot of coordination, but it was.  I couldn't have done it.
    With all of the coordination, Wilma herself was late, and since she had the court order, I stood outside David's gate with the locksmith and Deputy Sheriff and tried not to look as nervous as I felt.  I doubt if I succeeded.  I look nervous even when I'm not.
    As I stood in front of that gate on a sunny early June morning, I wondered what we would find when we went in.  David's farm was no longer a familiar place, the site of family outings and our annual potluck.  It was enemy-held territory.  It had been for a year and a half.  The enemy—we've nicknamed them the DD and forgotten what it stands for—schemed, manipulated and lied to get the farm after David died mysteriously at age 46, and then waged a bitter court fight to keep it.  We had speculated for weeks about what we would find on the farm when and if my aunt actually got possession back.  We had contingency plans for everything from booby-trapped electric wires to being met at the gate by armed men.  We didn't really expect either of those things, but given the circumstances we couldn't entirely rule them out.
     The deputy noticed tire tracks, made since last night's rain.  “Someone has been in there this morning.”
    Actually going in turned out to be tense but anticlimactic.  Wilma arrived with the court order.  I cut the lock off the gate with a bolt cutter, and the deputy sheriff went in with us trailing him.  The locksmith got the doors to the house and garage open in short order, and after an embarrassing delay as I struggled with a balky video camera we went into the house.  Whoever had been there earlier that morning was gone.  I kept the video camera running as we went through it, recording the condition of the house as we took possession for my aunt.   That condition wasn't good.   A bucket of filthy water stood under an unrepaired leak in the roof of the sitting room.  When we walked through the house, our feet crunched through the corpses of hundreds of those phony ladybugs.  At least the place hadn't been systematically looted.  That was one of the things we had feared.  It almost the way David had left it, except for years of neglect and the fact that almost all of the small generic tools like saws, hammers, pliers, and wrenches were either missing or broken.
    Outside the house, saplings grew roof-high or higher around the foundations of the garage, the barn, the farrowing house, and every other outbuilding.  Chest-high fields of thistles dominated the areas that weren't overgrown by thickets of scrub trees.  Farm machinery sat abandoned and rusting among the thistles and thickets.  Half of the area between the house and the barn was so overgrown that we couldn't even get back into parts of it, or even see what was back there.  A jeep Wagoneer sat half in and half out of the overgrown area, almost as if it had tried to escape the encroaching brush, but hadn't quite made it.  
    The deputy and the locksmith left.  The workman who was changing the locks had to leave to get some parts, and he left the gate open when he left.  Wilma and I were now alone in the house, acutely aware of how vulnerable we were.  A white SUV stopped along the highway about a hundred yards from David's house and sat there, mostly obscured by a thicket of trees.  Wilma and I stayed inside as much as possible, wary.  How would the DD react to our presence in what had been their stronghold?  We were pretty sure they knew we were there.  The white SUV was evidence of that.
    I rambled through the house nervously.  I noticed an answering machine and several tapes in what had been David's bedroom.  I played one of the tapes, and had the eerie experience of hearing David's voice again nearly five years after he died.  The only unusual message was obviously a crank call.  An African American, about eleven years old based on the voice and content of the message, called and did a really incoherent rap.  The rest was mundane.  Somebody called asking David to help them fix a machine.  Someone else just left a number.  David picked up once after the machine came on and talked to his mom, half-amused and half-irritated as she told him at great length not to go out in the rain without a raincoat.  He didn't say, “I love you mom, but I'm 46 years old.  I know this stuff.”  He just said, “Yes,  mother” in a tone that also said all of those other things.
    I finally decided to go out and close the gate.  As I went out to do that, a rusty blue pickup truck pulled into the driveway, its cab crowded with three muscular, tough-looking guys.  One of them yelled, “Do you own this place?”

 Hopefully I'll get back and finish this at some point.  It is on my todo list. 

 
Shameless self-promotion section: If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy reading reading my chapter in the gather.com First Chapters competition.  It's at:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976924766

If you enjoy reading science fiction, you may also want to look at the science fiction synopses from the First Chapters competition at:

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474976932299