Chapter One

As he turned to go in for the evening, Gus saw the tractor.

It was brief and out of the corner of his eye, but he was certain he’d seen it. Rationally, he knew he was probably hallucinating: he was tired, and the pasture was almost dark. The moon was a dim sliver, and Venus, hovering just above the fading sunset, didn’t provide enough light to be sure. Not even close.

You need a lot of light to figure out how your dad died.

For the past three weeks, ever since their neighbor found Dad dead under the tractor, Gus had a rock-solid routine. School, homework, and then, at dusk, stand in the pasture where Dad died and try to figure out what happened.

No one had been there. No one knew if his dad had seen it coming, if he had been afraid, if he had suffered. Gus didn’t think about those things so much. He just wanted to know how. How could this man who had been farming all sixty-five years of his life end up underneath a tractor? Or maybe he died and then the tractor ended up on him. That was the crux. Gus didn’t know.

Sixty-five. Old enough that people could say “he lived a full life” when offering clumsy condolences. Old enough that folks teased him fifteen years ago when, at age fifty, he had fathered Gus. But not old old, not really. He had lots of great years left. It was an accident—a tragic, horrible accident—and it didn’t matter if he was sixty-five or twenty-five. Either way, he died under a tractor.

The tractor hadn’t been flipped over. That’s usually how tractor accidents work. A mistake with the brakes, locking the wheels, misjudging a slope, and the tractor’s flipped over on top of you before you know what’s happened and that’s that.

But it wasn’t flipped. Somehow, his dad wound up under the wheel of an upright tractor, which meant it had stopped on top of him. If it was out of gear, how did it get on him? If it was in gear, how did it stop?

Gus didn’t even know which wheel Dad had been under. Their neighbor, Will Yepp, had been there first, and Gus’s mom right afterward. Will had moved the tractor. Mom was too traumatized to remember which wheel was which, and Will wouldn’t talk about it because he said Gus was too young for the gory details. So even though Gus was standing right now at the exact spot—up the hill from the pond, slightly north of the fallen tree, maybe sixty feet from the fence where the meadow began—he couldn’t accurately picture the scene.

Not yet, at least.

Gus raced around The Spot, focusing on where he had seen the tractor. That was nonsensical, of course. He knew for a fact the tractor was in the shed: he had parked it there himself, the day after Dad died under it. Still, whatever he had seen demanded one more survey of the site, no matter how dark the sky might be.

Gus leapt atop the fallen hickory his dad had apparently been trying to tow in his final moments. Gus balanced along the trunk, shimmying around branches, staying focused on where he had seen the tractor. There was nothing there.

Gus slid off the trunk and strode downhill to the pond. Standing on its bank, he squinted uphill in the fading light. Nothing.

He jogged uphill past The Spot to the fence between the pasture and the meadow beyond. He scanned from the tree to the pond and back. No tractor.

Gus hurried back to The Spot and passed his phone’s flashlight close over the ground, looking for any grass out of place. He had combed through this grass so often over the last three weeks that he knew where every blade should be. The rain earlier that evening had done little to disturb the ground, but if a tractor had popped into and out of existence five minutes before, he would surely see something. He didn’t.

Gus switched off his phone’s flashlight and looked to the western horizon. The sun’s glow had entirely disappeared. It was officially too dark: he had to pack it in for the night.

If I really saw the tractor, Gus thought, even just peripherally, even for just a moment, that would be… well, that would be impossible, wouldn’t it? Gus had relived—or rather, reconstructed—this scene so many times these past three weeks that now he must be seeing what he wanted to see.

Gus sighed. There was no tractor. Whatever he had seen was a figment of his exhausted imagination.

Shoulders slumped, he trudged up the hill and back across the pasture toward the house.

The smell of a farm is unmistakable. The aroma of grass is ever-present—sometimes new-mown, sometimes freshly sprung from the ground. The scent of animals is earthy, robust. The manure that wafts from in and around the barn might be a “stench” to city folk, but to a farmer, it’s both the natural byproduct of livestock and fertilizer to enrich the soil. Manure is evidence of life lived and nourishment for life to come, and farmers don’t just tolerate the smell. They love it.

All those scents—grass, cattle, manure, as well as trees, earth, and the asphalt of Ridge Road which bisected Gus Marsh’s family farm—were intensified by the brief summer downpour that had fallen just before Gus’s nightly vigil at The Spot where Dad died. As he strode across the pasture, Gus breathed them in, and loved them. They smelled like life, a welcome respite from Gus’s obsession with death.

From just beyond the pasture gate, Gus could see into Deb’s bedroom window. Gus saw the flicker of the television, which meant Deb was playing Madden or Grand Theft Auto on his Xbox.

“Deb” was short for “Delbert,” a family name, but he went by “Deb”—and he was cool enough to pull that off. “Gus” was a family name, too. Gus’s dad’s dad was Caesar Augustus Marsh. His mom’s dad was David Solomon Greene. His parents could have chosen something like “David Augustus,” and then he would be, you know, “Dave,” or something. Nope. He was Augustus Solomon Marsh, and the only thing they could salvage out of that was “Gus.” He wasn’t even cool enough for that.

As best Gus could tell, his older brother didn’t care that Dad was dead, and Deb’s indifference made Gus furious. Yes, Deb was a senior, and yes, Deb was a star free safety and wide receiver, and yes, Deb’s cheerleader girlfriend Meghan Bartlett was the hottest girl at Unionville High School (at least, Gus thought so). Deb had plenty to keep him busy, but he owed everything to their dad. Without the trips back and forth to football camps and practices, without the hours of route running and catching in the back yard, would there be scouts from the Big Ten, the Big Twelve, the ACC, or the SEC stopping by Unionville High’s homecoming next month? If Deb was a scholarship athlete, it was because Dad helped him get there, just like he helped Gus with academic pursuits. But Deb was too busy leading the league in touchdown catches and interceptions, and too busy doing whatever it was he and hot-cheerleader-Meghan did, to notice that Dad was gone now.

Gone, and not coming back.

Gus closed the pasture gate behind him and glanced both ways before crossing Ridge Road. There wouldn’t be anyone coming—it was a country road, so there hardly ever was. And even if someone were coming their headlights would be visible half a mile away. But when he was three, Gus’s mom taught him to check both ways before crossing the street. That stuff sticks with you.

He could see Mom now. Through the bay window, through the living room, through the kitchen doorway, he could see her washing the plates from dinner. The dishwasher hadn’t worked in years. Dad was always going to fix it, but never did. Never would.

Mom went about her daily routine as sturdily as she could, keeping up appearances for the boys. She was born Julia Lizbeth Pierson, but because of the way it sounded, everyone thought she was “Julie Elizabeth,” so she went by Julie to eliminate any confusion. She was the light of the world for Deb and Gus. As far as they knew, she was the best cook and the kindest listener the world had ever known. They had also heard that she was quite the catch back in the day, but being teenage boys, picturing Mom as “hot” was flat-out gross.

Today was Labor Day, a day off from school that had always in the past featured a picnic smörgåsbord. Dad had been an only child, and Mom’s two sisters had only one child between them. Even the biggest family gatherings never topped seven people, but Labor Day was a feast fit for a brigade. Or always had been, until today.

Dad would hand-make burgers. Ground beef, ground lamb, eggs, salt, pepper, and a whole blend of dried herbs and spices that changed according to Dad’s whim, all mushed together and formed with a slice each of swiss and sharp muenster enclosed inside. When he took them off the grill, they were juicy, melty masterpieces.

Mom made all the fixin’s from scratch. Her specialty was potato salad, with the potatoes boiled al dente, the crunch of celery, the bite of green onion and mustard, and the acid of apple cider vinegar. She also threw in fresh-chopped bacon, which was the pièce de résistance. Gus didn’t usually resort to Italian or French expressions, but those al dente potatoes and pièce-de-résistance bacon bits more than earned their highfalutin designations.

But melty burgers and multi-textured potato salad were from Labor Days gone by.

This Labor Day, Julie Marsh—that is, Mom—heated frozen pierogis for dinner, and when Gus told her about the history paper he was working on, her eyes never quite met his. Her periodic “uh huhs” were timed correctly, but sounded empty. The world’s best cook and kindest listener had left the same day Dad did.

Gus missed Mom almost as much as he missed Dad.

Eager to avoid Mom and Deb, Gus slipped in the front door, slunk down the hallway, slid into his bedroom, and locked the door behind him.

Gus’s bedroom was the same baby blue it had been when its central feature was his crib. Where his crib once stood now sat a twin bed. The pool-table-themed comforter was mussed. If it were up to Gus, it would always be mussed, but his mom made the bed for him. Or used to, at least.

Where his diaper-changing table had once been now sat a computer desk, flanked by bookshelves. Gus sat down at the desk and opened his laptop.

He didn’t glance at the boy in the dresser mirror, the boy with disheveled hair so dark brown it was usually mistaken for black, the boy whose blue-green eyes peered out of purple sockets sunken by three weeks of sleeplessness, the boy who hadn’t shaved in almost a week but still sported only a two o’clock shadow—and that only in patches. He wasn’t tall, though not short either—average—but a scant appetite and lack of sleep had left him gaunt, creating the illusion that he was taller than he was.

Nighttime was unkind to this boy in the mirror. During the day, at school, he could almost forget his obsession. But at night, alone, it was all-consuming. The boy in the mirror reflected what Gus had become. He had aged three months in three weeks, and a two-ton tractor weighed on his mind. The same weight slumped his shoulders.

Gus began to type in the Google search bar, as he had every night for three weeks. A collection of still-open browser tabs told the story of last night’s searches: tractor gears, tractor wheels, tractor in gear stops, tractor in neutral rolls, troubleshooting tractor, 1970 Satoh Bison manual.

But tonight, halfway through typing “weight tractor tires,” he stopped. Instead of launching into hours of fervent Googling, he stared at the blinking cursor.

After a few cursor blinks, Gus deleted what he had typed, shut the laptop, and gazed out the window. By the glow of Will Yepp’s distant dusk-to-dawn light, Gus could see the lip of the hill that led down toward the pond, down to that fateful Spot in the pasture. His window was the only one in the house that offered a view of the pasture uphill from The Spot—Deb’s was blocked by a few trees, and all the others faced the wrong way. Gus was grateful for that. It was easier to say “I’m going out for a walk” than “I’m going out into the pasture to stare at the spot Dad died.” No one needed to know about his nightly vigil.

He closed his eyes, tightened his jaw, and focused his mind on The Spot.

“Please, God,” Gus prayed, “Dad was my… I don’t know, I miss him.”

Gus reviewed his prayer’s inauspicious start and almost laughed at himself, despite the earnestness of his intent. He hadn’t been to church in years, and he was clearly out of practice.

He pressed on. “I don’t know if I believe in you—who am I kidding? I’m pretty sure I don’t—but I’m talking and I’d like you to listen if you’re there.”

Gus wasn’t sure that directly telling God you probably didn’t believe in him was the most effective way to pray, but he figured he might as well be forthright. If God actually were listening, he’d know the truth anyway.

“I don’t want to know why. I don’t believe in ‘why,’ for the most part. But I have to know how. I don’t know why I have to know, but I do. People talk about closure, and maybe that’s it?”

Gus wasn’t sure he believed in closure, either. Wow, there certainly were a lot of things he maybe-believed-in but probably-didn’t. If nothing else, this praying thing was useful for sorting out his (lack of) convictions.

“Doesn’t matter. God, let me figure out how. It’s been three weeks. I don’t know what to do next.”

Gus paused. How do you finish one of these?

“In the name of Jesus? Is that what you say? Well, whatever. Amen.”

Gus sat in silence for a few seconds, listening for an answer. None came.

Gus lurched from his desk chair and flopped onto his bed. He had assumed God would be a dead end, but he couldn’t go to Mom or Deb or his friends or teachers because they’d just tell him not to obsess over it. Or like Will Yepp, they’d say he was too young for the gory details.

He closed his eyes, hoping for sleep but not expecting it. His mind raced like an Oldsmobile in a blizzard—it spun and spun but went nowhere. He felt like the punchline of his Dad’s favorite joke: “The bad news is, we’re lost. The good news is, we’re making good time!”

Gus rolled onto his stomach, tucked his right hand under his pillow, and sighed. No divine intervention. No help from friends or family. No clues, no leads, no threads to tug on. He had nothing.

Gus drifted into something like sleep, not realizing he did have one tiny foothold. Even though Gus had dismissed it, even though it had been dark and out of the corner of his eye…

…Gus really had seen the tractor.