Listen ...Homesong

HOMESONG by Misha Crews
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Prologue

August 1989

Everything about the little house said dead and gone.

It stood, empty and alone, at the intersection of two old dirt roads. Scraggly bushes had grown up over the peeling walls, poking their way inside through broken window panes. The skeletal remains of an old vegetable garden jutted long bony fingers out of the brown scrap of yard by the front door, and the house's shingled sides had been spray-painted with graffiti. But that too had turned brown, as if even the vandals had moved on to greener pastures.

Reed sat silently in his car, biting on his thumb as he looked out at the place where he had grown up. Cicadas, stirred by the heavy heat of the early August morning, whirred their drowsing song in the tall grass by the side of the road. The sun hadn't even crested the far hills yet, and already the inside of his ancient yellow VW felt like an oven, with sweat gathering along his hairline to drip down his neck, sticking his shirt to the small of his back.

It was strange to think that he hadn't laid eyes on the place in almost a year. He had been born in that house, as had generations of Fitzgeralds before him. His grandmother had raised him there: he had crawled along the bare, uneven floorboards, taken his first wobbly steps in the patchy front yard. The old place had never been beautiful. It wasn't some picturesque cottage nestled in the heart of rural Virginia. It was a squat, ugly dwelling that had seen too many deaths and not enough births, but which knew the pain of both.

The original foundation had been laid by a long-ago Fitzgerald ancestor in the hardscrabble years following the Civil War – a tough little house built by a tough little man, who had gone on to found the very town that sprawled not two miles from here. Later, of course, the Fitzgerald family had built themselves a home more suited to their own sense of importance – an elegant country house high on the hill. It had been a gracious building that rode the crest of the hill as pretty as a boat on the water. From the front of its wide wraparound porch, you could look right past this tiny hovel to the town that lay beyond.

The big house had burned down when Reed's grandmother was a child. But money and a kind of careless confidence had resurrected it in the late '60s, just a few years before Reed had been born. A new family – outsiders, as his grandmother always said, her voice thick with anger – had come in from out of town, snapped up the land, and rebuilt the house from the original blueprints.

Kate's family, Reed reminded himself, trying not to notice the way his heart snaked in his chest at the thought of her. He tugged at the handle on the car door and pushed outward with his shoulder, ignoring the painful squeal of rusty hinges as the door swung open. He unfolded himself from the front seat, peeling himself carefully away from the old plastic covers, then stretched his long and lanky frame before leaning backward against the car, crossing his ankles with a casualness that he did not actually feel.

If he had turned his head and looked upward, he would have been able to see that big house – empty now, but still all white and shining with majestic beauty. Instead, he just shoved his hands into his pockets and looked down, contemplating the dirt at his feet. He was on his way out of town. Everything that he owned was packed into two cardboard boxes on the cracked back seat of his car. One box held his clothes, which were secondhand but clean and carefully folded. The other held a dozen books and what Grand had once scornfully called the family legacy – an old photo album covered in crumbling black leather, and lined with stained and threadbare purple silk.

And that was it. That was all that was left of his family. Generations of men and women who had lived and loved, killed and healed, taught and raised children. Some kind and generous, some mean and scheming. But all of them Fitzgeralds, and all of them dead. And with all of that history…there was nothing left but a broken, faded photo album at the bottom of an old cardboard box. By this time next week, even the shack in front of him would be gone.

And so would he.