The Knocking

The realtor had promised Jonah Reyes that Redbank, Montana, was four hundred people and a grain elevator, and he found she had been generous on both counts. He came out from Chicago in the first week of September, a travel writer with a dead marriage behind him and a lease in his pocket for the guest cabin at Fairhill Ranch, and he drove the last thirty miles on a washboard road with the wind pressing his rental car sideways like a bored hand.

Fairhill belonged to a woman named Wren Frost, who signed his lease without ceremony and told him the cabin had good light and bad plumbing and that the nearest decent coffee was ninety miles east. She was twenty-some years old, quick-eyed, with a laugh she kept holstered. Jonah liked her immediately and asked, because writers ask, what the strange house on the northern ridge was called.

"Windrow," she said, and then said nothing else.

He went up anyway. The house sat on the spine of a ridge with nothing between it and the sunset but eleven miles of wheat, and the wind came off the high ground all night, a long exhalation that never quite ended. A man answered the door. He was broad, slow-moving, with a handsome ruined face and hands like dried rope, and when Jonah explained he was renting at Fairhill, something crossed the man's face that was not welcome and was not anger either. It was older than both.

"Come in, then," he said. "The wind's driving you anyway."

The inside of the house was clean and bare and wrong in a way Jonah couldn't name until he did: there were no pictures of anyone. No wedding photographs, no school portraits, none of the crumpled family archive every farmhouse he'd ever entered wore on its walls. A woman left the kitchen as he was shown in, gray-haired, upright, with an expression he would spend a long time trying to read. A young man — enormous, shy, with the same rope-handed build — moved firewood in the back room and did not look at the guest.

Jonah stayed for supper because it was offered grudgingly and he was starved. He drank too much of the man's whiskey — the man was called Colt, the woman was called Pearl, the silent boy did not get called anything in his hearing — and when the wind rose to a shriek around eleven he asked to stay on the parlor sofa rather than drive the ridge road blind.

He woke at two in the morning with a branch tapping the glass and a sound he decided was the same thing. Tap. Tap. Then, unmistakably, a voice, thin as paper: "Let me in. I've been out here twenty years. Let me in."

He told himself it was dream logic, because he had been dreaming — something about a church, a child, a book he couldn't read. But when he hauled the sash up and stuck his head into the dark, the wind hit him with snow in it, though it was September, and nothing was there at all.

He went back at dawn instead of going home. Colt was in the yard with the firewood and looked at him for a long moment before he said, "You slept bad."

"I heard something at the window," Jonah said. "A voice. A woman's."

Colt set down the axe. He did not laugh, and he did not explain, and Jonah understood that whatever lived in this silence had been living in it for a very long time. "The wheat keeps its own dead," he said, which was either a local idiom or the strangest sentence Jonah had ever been handed, and carried the wood inside.

It was Pearl, over coffee at Fairhill that afternoon, who finally told him the story was not his business and then, watching his face, sighed and poured another cup. She had managed houses up and down this country for thirty years, she said — Windrow's kitchen and Fairhill's both, in her time. She had buried everyone the story was about, most of them badly.

"I knew her," Pearl said, meaning, Jonah understood, the woman at the window. "I knew her before she was a voice. If you've got nowhere to be until the wind turns, I'll tell it straight. It isn't a kind story."