Tales The Farmer Tells Me

Farmer H said he saw a wreck when he came home from town around noon. Not a bad wreck, with an ambulance or Life Flight helicopter. Just a car off the road in the woods. He tried to explain where, but you know how that goes...

 

"On that curve where we stopped to help."

 

"Oh. When you picked up that lady."

 

"It was the son of the Bad-Hay-Baling Lawyer's wife. There was two highway patrol cars, and a county cop. I guess he was going too fast, and run that little silver car off in the woods."

 

When I went to town, I looked all around that area, but didn't see anything amiss. No tire marks. No weeds or trees down. When I got back, Farmer H asked if all the law enforcement vehicles were still there.

 

"No. I didn't see ANYTHING where you said it was. Right there on the curve? Where we picked up that lady in the purple car, who slid off in the snow, and we drove her up to that barn house where they later found the headless body in the septic tank?"

 

"Nooo. You don't listen, HM. Not that curve."

 

"That's the only place we every stopped to help anyone!"

 

"Nooo. Remember when we just got married, and we came out here to Buddy's New Year's Eve party?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Well, on the way home, there was a guy stuck on the curve, and we stopped to help him push his car."

 

"I don't remember any of that! That didn't happen."

 

"You cain't remember NOTHIN'!"

 

"I know that after the New Year's Eve Party, we'd been drinking. So we spent the night in Buddy's third bedroom. And I got up in the night for the bathroom, and jammed my foot on something in the dark, and thought I broke my toe, and teased Buddy about having a gosh-darn typewriter sitting on the floor. Even though I never knew what I hit my foot on."

 

"Well. Yeah. We spent the night. But then the next morning when we went home, we helped that guy."

 

"I don't think so."

 

"Anyway, it was on that other curve. You know, by the goat guy."

 

"GOAT guy? Nobody out here has goats! Only out on the county road, up by the prison."

 

"Nooo. By the rich hotel guy's house, their rental house, that's his son's, and they just got a new garage."

 

"WHAT? Nobody has a new garage."

 

"By Miz Outman's house."

 

"Oh. You mean the old lady who locked herself out going to the mailbox in the snow, and I stopped to ask if she needed to sit in my car?"

 

"Yeah. Go on up from there, around the curve, then at the next curve is where it happened."

 

"Sweet Gummi Mary! That's nowhere NEAR how you've been describing it."

 

"Anyway, so they were gone? I think maybe that kid was running from the cops. And that's why the highway patrol was there, instead of just the county cop."

 

"I don't know. Is that the same kid who knocked out our power that one winter, by hitting an electric pole down by the mailboxes?"

 

"No. This is his younger brother."

 

"I'm pretty sure they're the ones who've been messing with that bus-waiting shed! It has to be somebody who lives out here. Nobody's going to drive out just to do that. And they're the type. Remember when they took all your election signs up, and laid them down flat?"

 

"Yeah. It could be them."

 

Anyhoo... life is like a continuous game of CLUE when you live with Farmer H.