The ivy had hooked its tendrils deep into the rotting wood a long time ago, and now it was practically the only thing holding the old barn up, which was hardly its job. The same rains that had warped and spoiled the planks and beams had fed their parasites well, and the occasional flash of bare grey looked out of place among the blooming, brooding green. Rusting tin hung like a corrugated cicada shell over the remnants of the roofbeams, rippling in the heat.

The pale light of the March sun was mean and bright, and I shielded my eyes with a grimy hand, oil and dirt streaked through with sweat. I didn’t want to go in. I really didn’t want to, but I had walked all the way here. I’d filled a whole water bottle at the pump before I left, and drank all of its plastic-and-iron tang on the walk, sweltering even in the dense shade of the trees, confused and alive too soon in this strange new season. And now I was here and I really didn’t want to go in, but I had already walked all that way.

It’ll be in the barn, Gramma had said when I asked her, and she was probably right; it was probably in there, right in front of me. I sucked the last drop from the bottle’s warm rim and stared at the black behind, between, the sagging doors, the deep dark filling the gaps in the sallow wood and thriving ivy. I stood there and wished it was closer to the house, watching the woods behind the barn instead of the doors. I wanted to walk back home and get an ice pop from the freezer and let the plastic wrapper’s easy-tear serrations cut the corners of my lips, but then Gramma would see me on the deck and say, It was in the barn, y’know. Just had to look, and I would feel bad, so I kept looking out across the field at the barn and the forest behind it. I saw things moving in the woods, moving in the tall grass, moving in the barn, but I didn’t look at them. If I walked all the way back and told about the things moving behind and in between, Gramma would just say, Now never you mind them, and Baby Blue would give me that look and ask why Papa had given me the bone-handled knife I was twisting around in my pocket while I didn’t look at the things moving. I hated that look, so I stepped into the field.

The knife in my pocket was a sweaty-palm comfort, the yellowed bone of its handle notched with tiny lines by another knife. I gripped it tight as I made my way through the tall grass and didn’t look at, didn’t feel, the things that were not the tall grass brushing against my bare calves. I thought about the knife that helped make my knife, and how another knife had helped to make it, and yet another knife helped to make that one. It felt good to hold, knowing it loped so far back in time, knowing that each knife before mine had been clutched, had done violence, and when I reached the clearing in front of the barn and I felt one of the things between the barn and me dig itself into my skin and try to climb my leg, I didn’t look at it. I just clutched my knife and did violence, felt it spit its not-blood on my knuckles, and wiped its angry dark on my shorts. I didn’t stop moving, hearing Baby Blue’s smirking sweet voice as I felt the sluggish wet of blood roll over my bony ankle and seep into my sock—They wouldn’t care if they killed you, after all… The early summer heat had woken all the smells the winter killed, and the air, spare and empty only a month ago, was filled with the thick smell of wet earth, mingling with the sharp metal of not-blood and filling my nose as I shifted the broken barn door just far enough to slip in. It was dark despite the beating sun and the holes in the roof, the loft too full of junk to let any light in. 

Gramma says it’s not junk, but Baby Blue and I know better. Even Mama just shakes her head when Gramma gets mad at Papa for wanting to clear it out. What I was looking for was in the cellar, beneath the bowed trapdoor that Papa always warns us not to walk on, not to yank too hard— Just ease it on up, girls. If it’s probably in the barn, it’s probably in the cellar, which is why Papa wants to clear out the loft, but I agree with Gramma. I think the cellar wants it dark, likes it dark, and I don’t think we oughta mess around too much with the cellar. I think we oughta give the cellar what it wants. 

I had to put my knife away to pull the cellar door open, the old wrought-iron handle loose in its screws and the screws loose in their wood. It whined on its hinges and I tried not to look inside, but looking outside meant letting my eyes slide over the dark shape rippling on the ground, so I focused on the dark shape under me, the metal ladder propped against its rim, and thought about Grandpa. This barn was really his, and so was the clearing it sat in, and the woods that surrounded it, and the house that looked out on it, and the deck that I wanted so badly to be sitting on, swinging my legs over the edge, instead of standing above the cellar where the thing I needed was. It used to be Grandpa’s grandpa’s, and before that it was his grandpa’s, all the way back to one of the first ships. The planks have changed, but the barn never has, and neither has the cellar. If you need it, it’s always been in the cellar, and even if you don’t need it, like some of the grandpas before my Grandpa didn’t, it’s still in the cellar. Now what was Grandpa’s is Papa’s, I guess, but to me the barn was still Grandpa’s. 

He was the first one who needed to go to the cellar in a long time, the one who excavated the old barn, pulling out twisted bed frames and bikes without front tires, a fridge and a pile of carpets, and a mountain of boxes that used to be full of papers but were filled with rats instead, all to get at the cellar door and shove that metal ladder down into the murk. He was the one who sat with his rifle’s worn wooden stock in the crook of his arm, teaching the things that came out of the cellar not to leave the tall grass, dozens of them etched in straight, true tally marks on the tree next to the path where he’d set the deer stand and waited. My first tally lay bleeding not-blood in the clearing. I couldn’t help but look at it as I turned around and lowered myself into to the cellar feet first, my foot pressing into damp sock and then hard metal, wondering if it was just the haze that made its outline seem to pant, wondering where I’d put my tally when I climbed up and out and walked back through the forest. Baby Blue’s tallies were angry and raw on the wall under Grandpa’s gun, and Papa’s made clean lines on the trim above the front door. Then it was gone and I was in the dark. 

Nobody had wanted to tell me anything, but Baby Blue hissed when I reached for the flashlight, and Papa shook his head, so I’d walked all that way without its weight in my backpack. Now that I was down there in the dark I wanted it real bad, but I knew that if I walked all the way back and got one, then what I needed wouldn’t be in the cellar when I got back. Lights are against the rules. Grandpa’s grandpas didn’t need the cellar, but they never forgot the rules. You can’t forget the rules, even Baby Blue knows that. So I kept on down backwards, and thought of the knife in my pocket and how Mama would be mad because the washer wouldn’t get at the not-blood that was sloughing off in there as it rubbed against my thigh. The rungs gave way to firm earth, the give of it a little wet, and my hand brushed slick stone as I reached out into the empty. The pillars felt too old to still be there, but I knew that they had stood in the cellar since those first-boat ancestors hauled them out of the forest and chipped away at them, their marks rough under my fingers, and I knew that before that they had slept in the dirt and undergrowth for a lot longer than they’d spent down here in the dark. The stones are part of the rules.

Standing between two of them, I swung my backpack off my shoulder and slipped my knife from my pocket, wiping the last of the not-blood against the rest of it on my shorts. Kneeling in front of the bag, I took out the bundle of sheets Mama had handed me and unwrapped Scooter. Papa says not to name them, but I can’t help it. Neither can Baby Blue. She pretends like she doesn’t care -- “They’re just stupid rabbits…” -- but I caught her crying last time she walked back up from the barn, her face red and throbbing like a bee sting, and I’ve seen the other tally-marks she makes under her bed; “Buttercup. Happy. Jumbo. Waylon.” Scooter couldn’t kick, first cause of the blankets and then cause of my arm around him and under him, but I could tell he wanted to. I would have. I could feel his splotchy, furry body quiver, could feel the nose I couldn’t see twitch, nervous and defeated. He wanted free, wanted up, and I did too. The wet of the stones and the earth was sinking into my shirt, into my skin, curling sickly sweet around my bones, around my hand as it clutched the knife… I didn’t want to do violence, I really didn’t want to, but I had walked all that way and here was Scooter and the heavy wet made my hand feel like not my own and then another wet spilled over my hand, and I held Scooter out in the middle of the circle I could feel but not see, heard him spilling out into the wet earth. 

Gramma had been right, what we needed was in the cellar, and I walked back with it under my clean arm, all that way back to the house to wash my knife and get an ice pop and show Baby Blue the claw marks on my leg.