Seeds of a Dead World

Chapter 1: The Man Who Came in October

The tobacco was finished for the year, the last of it hanging in the curing barn like rows of brown leather gloves, when the stranger drove into Fallow Creek.

I remember the car first. A dark green Buick Riviera, 1968 or '69, dusty from the county road but otherwise clean, the kind of car that turned heads in a town where half the trucks had primer patches and the other half had rust. It pulled up to the old Compton place on a Tuesday afternoon in October 1973, and the man who stepped out of it stood for a long time in the overgrown yard, looking at the house, the collapsing tobacco barn, the fields gone to goldenrod and foxtail, as though he were reading a book written in a language he was still learning.

My name is Joseph Garland. I was fifteen years old that autumn, and I watched the stranger from the fence line that separated our property from the Compton land. I was supposed to be mending a section of wire where the posts had rotted through, but I'd stopped working the moment the Buick appeared, and I stood there with the pliers in my hand like some kind of country statue.

The man was tall and thin—gaunt, really, the way a person gets when they've been sick for a long time or simply forgotten to eat. He wore a dark coat that didn't quite fit, as though he'd bought it off a rack without trying it on, and sunglasses with heavy frames that hid his eyes completely. His hair was the color of straw left out in the rain, not blond exactly, but a washed-out yellow-brown that didn't match his pale skin. He moved carefully, deliberately, the way you move in someone else's house when you don't want to break anything.

I didn't call out to him. In Fallow Creek, you watched first. You let a thing settle before you approached it. That was how my mother had raised me, and it was how her people had lived in these hills for four generations.

The Compton place had been empty for two years. Old Earl Compton had died of a stroke in the kitchen, and his daughter in Lexington had been trying to sell the property ever since. Nobody wanted it. The house needed a new roof, the barn needed tearing down, and the sixty acres of bottomland had gone sour from neglect. The soil was tired. That's how people talked about it—tired, as if the earth itself had given up.

The stranger walked the perimeter of the house, then crossed to the nearest field and knelt down. He scooped up a handful of dirt, held it close to his face, and—this is the part I remember most clearly—he smelled it. Not a quick sniff the way a farmer might check for dampness or mold. He held that handful of Kentucky clay to his nose and breathed it in the way you'd breathe in a flower, slowly and deeply, with his eyes closed behind those dark glasses. Then he let it fall through his fingers, stood up, brushed his hands on his coat, and went back to the car.

He was gone before I finished the fence.

Three days later, my mother came home from the post office with the news. Someone had bought the Compton place. Paid cash. The daughter in Lexington had signed the papers that morning.

"His name is Nils Dettmer," my mother said, setting a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. "That's what Louise told me. German, she thinks. Or maybe Scandinavian."

"I saw him," I said. "Tuesday. He was looking at the dirt."

My mother gave me one of her looks—the kind that carried an entire conversation in a single glance. Anne Garland was a small woman with strong hands and a face that could have been carved from hickory, all sharp angles and deep-set eyes. She'd been running our farm alone since my father died in 1968, killed when his tractor overturned on a hillside, and the years of solitary work had made her efficient with words the same way they'd made her efficient with everything else.

"Looking at the dirt," she repeated.

"Smelling it, actually."

"Well." She began putting cans into the cupboard. "I suppose that's his business."

But I could tell she was curious. Everyone was. Fallow Creek wasn't the kind of place where people arrived. It was the kind of place where people stayed or left, and the ones who stayed did so because they'd been born to it, because the land was in their blood the way iron is in well water—you couldn't see it, but you could taste it.

Nils Dettmer moved in on a Saturday. I watched from my bedroom window as a single moving truck backed up the Compton driveway. Two men from the trucking company carried in furniture—not much of it. A bed frame, a desk, several wooden crates that looked heavy, and box after box of what I later learned were books. No television. No radio that I could see. No photographs in frames, no lamps with decorative shades, none of the ordinary clutter of a life. It looked like someone furnishing a room in a hospital.

Nils himself directed the movers with quiet, precise gestures, pointing to where things should go. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't smile. When the truck left, he stood on the porch of his new house and looked out at the ruined fields, and I had the strangest feeling—even at fifteen, even from a distance—that he was looking at something much farther away than the tree line.

I met him for the first time two days later.

I was walking the fence line again, this time with our dog, a half-blind beagle named Captain who was too old to hunt but too stubborn to stay home. Captain had wandered through a gap in the wire onto the Compton—now Dettmer—property, and I went after him, calling his name in that embarrassed whisper you use when you're trespassing and trying not to be noticed.

Nils was standing at the edge of his nearest field, holding something I didn't recognize—a small device, roughly the size of a transistor radio, made of a material that caught the light strangely, not quite metal and not quite plastic. He was pointing it at the ground. When he heard me, he slipped it into his coat pocket with a motion so smooth it seemed practiced.

"Your dog," he said. His voice was quiet, with an accent I couldn't place. Not German, not Scandinavian, not anything I'd heard on television. The consonants were too soft, the vowels too round, as though English were a suit of clothes he'd tailored to fit but that still pulled slightly at the seams.

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry. He got through the fence."

"He is old."

"Thirteen. That's old for a beagle."

Nils looked at Captain, who had stopped to sniff a clump of dead thistle, and tilted his head slightly. "Does he know he is old?"

It was such an odd question that I laughed before I could stop myself. "I don't think dogs think about it that way."

"No," Nils said. "I suppose they don't." He paused. "You are from the next property."

"Yes, sir. Joseph Garland. My mother and I run the farm."

"Your father?"

"He died. Five years ago."

Nils was quiet for a moment. With those sunglasses on, I couldn't read his expression, but something in the set of his mouth changed—a softening, maybe, or a recognition.

"I am sorry for your loss," he said, and the way he said it—slowly, carefully, as though each word had been weighed before he spoke it—made me believe him in a way that the same phrase from neighbors and church ladies never had.

"Thank you."

"Joseph. I have a question. The soil here—your mother's land and this land—it was once productive?"

"Yes, sir. Tobacco, mostly. Some corn. The Comptons grew good burley for thirty years."

"And now?"

"Now it's played out. That's what people say. Too many years of the same crop, not enough put back in."

Nils nodded slowly. "Played out," he repeated, as though filing the phrase away. "And the weather here—the rainfall, the temperature ranges through the year—this is consistent? Predictable?"

"More or less. We get about forty-five inches of rain. Cold winters, hot summers. Spring comes on fast."

He asked me three more questions about the soil—its composition, its drainage, whether it held water after heavy rains—and I answered as well as I could, drawing on everything my mother and grandfather had taught me. He listened with an intensity I'd never encountered in an adult, as though my answers mattered in some urgent, fundamental way.

When I'd finished, he said, "You are knowledgeable."

"I grew up here."

"Yes. That is a kind of knowledge that cannot be learned from books." He paused again. "Joseph, may I ask you something else? Something different?"

"Sure."

"When you are sad—when you feel grief, for instance, for your father—where do you feel it? In your body, I mean. Where does it reside?"

I stared at him. No one had ever asked me anything like that. No one in Fallow Creek talked about grief as though it were a physical thing with a location, like a stone in your shoe or a bruise on your shin.

"I don't know," I said. "My chest, I guess. It feels heavy."

"Heavy," Nils said. "Yes. I have read that. Thank you, Joseph."

He turned back to his field, and I understood I'd been dismissed. I collected Captain and went home through the gap in the fence, and for the rest of that evening I sat at the kitchen table with my homework and thought about the man next door who asked where sadness lived in your body as though he were taking notes for a report.

My mother noticed.

"You met him," she said. It wasn't a question.

"He's strange."

"Strange how?"

"He asks questions like he's never been around people before."

My mother dried a plate and set it in the rack. "Some people are like that. Educated people, sometimes. People who've spent too much time alone."

"He asked me where I feel sadness in my body."

She stopped drying. "And what did you tell him?"

"My chest."

She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "Stay on our side of the fence, Joseph," and went to bed.

But I didn't stay on our side of the fence. I couldn't. There was something about Nils Dettmer that pulled at me the way a current pulls at a leaf in a creek—not violently, but steadily, and in a direction I couldn't have predicted. I was fifteen and fatherless in a small town where every man I knew was either a farmer who'd never left the county or a farmer who wished he hadn't come back, and here was someone who looked at the world as though it were new, as though every blade of grass and cloud formation and human expression contained information worth recording.

I went back the next day, and the day after that.

By the end of October, I was spending every afternoon on the Dettmer property.