The Legend of Youngs Corner XXXII

PART XXXII
Farmers

I no longer felt comfortable in this place. For a second, the journey seemed to have regained its excitement, the thrill of adventure. But too many questions now came to pass, too many horrible realities were revealed. What were children doing here? Who would put them here? I stood in front of the table, silent. Nothing was simple anymore.

“Yo, check this out,” Nathan called me over. “I think I found your cousins old furniture.”
“What are you talking about?”
Nathan was standing in front of the large crate filled with clothes, or so I thought. From the looks of it, it appeared that the pile of clothes was contained in one large crate, but there were actually two crates and some of the clothes had spilled over into the other, covering the contents. Nathan removed these garments to reveal this hidden treasure.

“Don’t your cousins live in that house with the big red barn?” Nathan asked.
I moved closer to the crate to discover a trove of farming tools. Chains and wood brought together to create rakes, pitchforks, and cradle scythes. There was even a large plow connected by straps of leather to a brace apparatus that would have gone around the neck of a horse. This was an authentic collection from an age that did not know paved roads, or even electricity. When these tools were last used, Youngs Corner Rd. was probably no more than a beaten dirt path, if it existed at all.

“You think all this belonged to your cousins, I mean, the people who first built the farm?” asked Nico.
“Probably. This equipment is old,” I said. “But what is it doing here? Did this Old Woman once live in that barn? Did her family work there? That must have been over a hundred years ago. It hasn’t been an active farmland at least since then.”
“But it must have been from that farm,” Nick spoke up. “I mean, just look around, there’s no other farm or anything resembling one anywhere near here. It probably even belonged to the Cox family, you know, the boy's grave next to your house. It can’t be coincidence that all this stuff is what, half a mile away from your cousins? And look, horse plows. That must be where that obsession comes from. Whoever owns this cabin must have lived on that farm.”
“So the question is, why’d they leave?” I asked.

Those in the cabin stood there for a moment. There was a history here, a family’s history, all contained in this one room. The other two cabins didn’t offer this trove of information; this cabin had personality. We could hear it speaking to us; we could feel its desire to have its story told.

“Yo, guys,” Gaeten came in, “it’s almost dawn.”
“I think we’ve seen everything,” Amanda said. “And I’m freezing.”
“Alright,” I said.
I think it was the sense of discovery that prevented me from noticing the dropping temperatures. But once the cabin’s trance was broken, the cold came in. I wanted to stay, and I bet some others did as well. But the cabin was telling us, it was time to go.