Nathaniel by John Saul Read Free Book Online

put down her fork, then looked from Amos to Anna. At last her eyes came to rest on Michael. “I think perhaps it’s time you went up to your room.”
    “Aw, Mom …”
    “Do as your mother says,” Amos snapped, and after a moment of hesitation, Michael got up and left the table. Only when his footsteps had stopped echoing in the stairwell did Janet speak again. When she did, her voice was quavering.
    “Now what is all this about?” she asked. “I thought you meant that Mark owned a farm a long time ago, before I met him. But when you mentioned taxes, and the estate—”
    “He’s always owned a farm,” Amos said. “It was a wedding present, just as half of Laura and Buck’s farm was a wedding present to them. Buck’s parents gave them the other half. They don’t live on it, but they still own it and take the responsibility for it. And if Mark had married a local girl—”
    But Janet had stopped listening. “A wedding present,” she whispered. “But you sent us silverware—”
    “Well, of course there was that, too,” Anna replied.
    “But that was
all
there was,” Janet insisted, her voice growing shrill in spite of herself. “If there’d been anything else, Mark would have told me. Wouldn’t he?
Wouldn’t he?”
    Amos reached out and took her hand. “You really don’t know anything about it, do you?”
    Mutely, Janet shook her head.
    “It’s forty acres,” Amos said. “It was deeded to Mark on your wedding day, and he’s owned it ever since. I know, because I was afraid he might try to sell it, so I’ve kept track. I always hoped he’d come and live on it someday, but I guess I always knew that wouldn’t happen. Not ever, not the way he felt. But he did pay the taxes on it. As far as I know, he never tried to sell it.”
    “But what’s happened to it?” Janet asked. “And why haven’t I ever heard of it before?”
    “I don’t know why you’ve never heard of it,” Amos replied. “But it’s still there. It’s yours now.”
    For a long moment, Janet stared at her husband’s parents, her mind churning. When at last she spoke, it was without thinking.
    “He hated you very much, didn’t he? All of you.”
    Amos Hall’s eyes flashed with anger, but Anna only stared ahead, looking into space.
    “Yes, I suppose he did,” Amos finally said, the anger in his eyes disappearing as quickly as it had come. “But he’s dead, now. All that’s behind us, isn’t it?”

CHAPTER 3
    Though she went to bed early that night, Janet Hall did not go to sleep. She sat up, staring out over the moonlit prairie, her robe drawn tightly around her as if it could protect her from her own thoughts. For a while she tried to concentrate on the stars, laboriously picking out constellations she hadn’t seen so clearly since her childhood, but then, as the night wore on, her thoughts bore in on her.
    It wasn’t just his sister Mark had never mentioned.
    There was a farm, too.
    All along, there had been a farm.
    Painfully, she made herself remember all the talks they’d had, she and Mark, all the nights—nights like this—when they’d sat up talking about the future.
    For Janet, the future had always held a farm.
    Nothing concrete, nothing real. For Janet, the farm of her dream was something from a child’s picture book—a small place, somewhere in New England, with a whitewashed clapboard house, a bright red barn with white trim, an immaculate barnyard populated with hens and tiny fuzzy chicks, the whole thing neatly fenced off with white post-and-rail. There would be stone walls, of course, old stone walls meandering through the pastures, but the borders, the limits of her world, would be edged in white. And there they would live, their small family, released at last from the congestion of the city, their senses no longer dunned by the smells of garbage and exhaust, the sounds of jackhammers and blasting horns, but expanding to the aroma of fresh-mown hay and the crowing of roosters at dawn.
    All