Well. Here was one part of him that couldn’t be called good-looking. Not that it was ugly. Not quite. Mainly, it was strange and unlikely. The rest of Hugh’s body was basic, well-known: his ruddy face, his wide shoulders, his knobs of biceps. Less familiar: his pale stomach with a line of dark hair that trailed down to the problematic part. Which wasn’t really a part, either. It was more a region, covered in hair darker than his head, the skin a different color than the rest of him, which was standard white-boy farmer-tan. He ducked into his T-shirt and pulled on his jeans. No underwear.
Could boys really do that? She cringed. She hated getting dressed after swim practice, when her skin was even a little damp, never mind dripping wet. Jeans, with the seams scraping between her legs, were particularly awful. Maybe it was easier for guys; they had no opening to rub against the stitching.
Carrying his boots, he walked barefoot to the bench under the willow, hopping over the gravel drive—a relief to Daisy, as her driveway had the same sharp pebbled rock—and sitting down, he pulled a tin of snuff from his jeans and stuffed a wad in his mouth. She hadn’t known Hugh Isherwood chewed; she guessed it was a recent habit. Poppy hated tobacco use of any type.
She watched as he put on his boots, the V of hair on his neck dripping and darkening the back of his shirt. Every so often, he leaned over and spat in the dirt. Then, laced up, he just sat there, his arm spread over the back of the bench.
Nobody just sat there anymore, Daisy thought. They always had to be doing something, and that something was usually looking at their phones. Because their mothers disapproved of screens (Carna because of the cost, Violet, the lack of real-world connection), the Whitsun girls had been trained to keep their hands busy with other things since they were young. Violet led by example; she was always busy weeding her garden and reading her books, her hands always tugging on a loop of hair while she watered or read or cooked. Carna and her cigarettes were less admirable, but she also had the finicky habit of stooping to pick weeds wherever she found herself having a smoke: the broken concrete outside her clinic, the cracked steps of her sister’s church.
Even during the funeral, Daisy had seen people sneak looks at their phones, pick their fingernails, scratch their dandruff, unwrap sticks of gum, pick invisible bits of lint from their dress clothes. Never mind they were at a funeral, a death ritual, a spectacle involving a huge portrait of a dead woman in front of the heavy chocolate-colored cross with its matching pulpit and a rainbow of stained glass blooming colors from the sun outside, all backdropped with heavy, sad songs played by a giant organ that made the floors and pews vibrate. All of these things designed to captivate, but in the heart of the sanctuary, the audience still fidgeted and twitched with boredom.
Because she had still been inside her mother’s body, Daisy had no memory of her own father’s funeral. Lilah had been two years old and vaguely recalled being in a rowboat. Daisy considered this another instance of being cheated by her sisters. Poppy remembered some things, as she and Carna had flown to California to help with the arrangements and the move: there had been some singing and a guitar, then a boat ride to spread ashes in the ocean near Big Sur. Her father’s mother had come, but she hadn’t been happy about the ashes; she wanted her son buried where she lived in Myrtle Beach. But Violet said that her husband had never liked it there; he’d considered California his true home. On the rare occasions they visited her paternal grandmother—there had never been a grandfather in the picture, not even when her father was a kid—there was nothing of him to remember except pictures of him that she wasn’t in. Though Daisy didn’t like her grandmother in Myrtle Beach much, she thought she had a point; there wasn’t a place to visit her father. He was a secondhand memory drifting through the Pacific, tiny ashy plankton riding the tides.
Up in the hayloft, staring at Hugh, at the fields with their still-scrawny sprouts, Daisy was undone again with sorrow. What good was it, for Evie Isherwood to watch her sons swim and play sports, to make sure the farmhouse on the land her family had owned for decades looked proper and presentable, repainting this barn, which had been put on a historic registry a few years back, opening a strawberry patch that everyone loved, if all that would happen is you’d be scattered over the dirt and probably blown away to North Dakota by summer’s end? Miles from here, in every direction. Untraceable. Mixing with rainstorms and clouds and dirt from other people’s crops, maybe ending up in the Atlantic, which Daisy had only seen the few times she visited Myrtle Beach, or perhaps the Pacific, which she had never been to, where microscopic bits of her father once floated amid kelp and sharks and plastic bottles nobody recycled. Had Mrs. Isherwood ever seen the ocean?
Daisy wiped her eyes again. It was stupid to be crying. It wasn’t her mom who was gone. It wasn’t even anyone in her family. If Poppy knew what she was doing, she might have smacked her. It was disloyal to even sympathize with Hugh Isherwood. Even from a distance. Poppy could always scent such disloyalty; and when she did, she would roust Lilah from the house, march to this hayloft, and yank Daisy down the ladder. There would be yelling, and Carna would shout to keep down the racket and Violet would arrive and attend to everyone’s story and grievance, nodding and comforting until all the girls became annoyed with her, too. Her family was exhausting sometimes.
She lay on her side. Hugh hadn’t moved. The sun had to be in his eyes because it was in hers, but he didn’t seem to mind. He was either looking at nothing or looking at everything. At the blue sky, heavy over the black-and-green fields, or at the scatter of people around his house, coiling around trees and picnic tables. Could he see his mother’s strawberry fields like she could?
The wood beneath her smelled clean and pure, different from the wood in the forest with its fans of fungus that lined the ridges of rotting bark. Violet had said once that the drier the wood, the less likely it was to harbor anything special; this was why people put pitch and shingles on their roof. The wood in the Isherwood barn had been baking under the sun for weeks, keeping fungi from exploding into life, slowing the tiny insects eager to make homes of rotting boards. Nobody had hayed horses in this barn for at least a hundred years, and it only stored tools and an old car without an engine, but Daisy knew that both Brian and Hugh had to clean it every season, raking nests from corners and sweeping dead leaves, caulking the cracks to seal out snow in order to preserve the structure as a relic. People have to work hard, Violet said, ripping creepers from her garden gate, to keep the forest from swallowing up what they’d built.
Daisy was surprisingly comfortable here, and yawned, thinking of the dream that had visited her the last few nights. It probably meant nothing, but it frightened her, and now, the sun warming her, she could feel all the sleep she had lost from it. She would lie here and look at nothing and everything, alongside Hugh, until the funeral ended and it was time to go home. How did you know when a funeral ended? Especially if you didn’t bury the body in the ground that same day?
Maybe she slept. Maybe she dreamed she was back at home, nestled beside her sisters in their shared attic bedroom. Or maybe she dreamed she was still in the hayloft, that Hugh was still below her. Maybe she imagined the forest rushing in, insects and weeds and mushrooms devouring the barn’s history, shredding it to the same timber confetti that was piling inside the dead maple in front of her house.