Scarecrow Hollow

Bonnie had been working other people's land for most of her sixty-four years, so house-sitting for Rae felt like a natural enough arrangement, even if the "house" was a silver Airstream trailer parked in a hay field in Tennessee. She had tended Rae's little homestead through two springs now. Watering the herbs, feeding the cat, keeping the porch swept. Easy work for a woman who had spent forty years alone with an orchard.

The Harvest Moon Folk Festival sprawled across the valley below the ridge where the trailers sat. Bonnie could hear the sound checks drifting up as she parked her old truck beside Rae's Airstream, could smell fried dough and woodsmoke even from this far off. It was Thursday evening and the crowds wouldn't swell until Saturday, but the grounds already hummed like a hive someone had poked with a stick.

Rae was standing at the trailer door in a flannel shirt and jeans, her long dark hair pulled back, thirty years old and famous in a small way that still seemed to surprise her. She looked tired and happy at the same time.

"There she is," Rae said, coming down the two steps to hug her. Bonnie noticed, as she always did, how quickly Rae hugged and let go, like warmth was something she had to ration. "You're a lifesaver, you know that? Three days of shows, three days of interviews, and I just need somebody keeping the cat alive and the plants from staging a revolt."

"Cat first, plants second," Bonnie said. "I know my priorities."

Rae laughed and handed her a list written on the back of a set list. Water the tomatoes on the little porch shelf. Leave the bathroom window cracked so the cat can get in and out. Don't let anyone from the festival crew talk you into watching the sound stage, because Josiah will put you to work and then you'll never leave.

"Josiah's the sound tech, right? The one with the laugh?"

"That's him. Forty-eight years old and still thinks patch cables grow on trees. He'll feed you dinner if you let him, so let him." Rae checked her phone, and her face did that thing it did when the world came calling. "I've got to run. There's food in the fridge, the bed's made up, and honestly just make yourself at home. You always do."

Bonnie watched her go down the hill toward the main stage, guitar case banging against her leg, and then the ridge went quiet around her. Just the trailer, the cat, the smell of damp grass, and the far-off sound of a crowd finding its seats. She made tea, read the list twice, watered the tomatoes. By nine the festival was a glow below and a murmur through the trees, and Bonnie was alone with a book she wasn't reading.

* * *

It was the tidying that did it. Bonnie couldn't help herself. Forty years of running an orchard alone had made her into a woman who organized other people's drawers without meaning to. Rae's Airstream was tidy in the way of someone who moved often, everything stowed, nothing out of place, except the little desk nook at the back where the trailer's narrowest point made a sort of alcove. There were pens there, a tin of guitar strings, a stack of receipts held down with a river stone.

And a drawer that didn't open.

Bonnie tried it the way you try a stuck drawer, reasonably at first, then with more intent. It didn't jam. It was locked. A small brass lock, old-fashioned, set into the wooden face of the drawer, which struck her as odd in a trailer where everything else was modern and light. She sat back on her heels and told herself it was none of her business, and she believed it, mostly.

She went to bed. She got up again at midnight, went to the bathroom, and came back past the desk nook, and the lock was sitting there in the dim light from the window like it had been waiting for her. There was a hairpin on the counter from that afternoon, left over from when the wind had undone her bun on the porch. She held it for a long time before she did anything.

Here is the thing Bonnie would have told you about herself, if anyone had ever asked. She had spent her whole adult life being invisible, a stocky woman in overalls whom people talked over and around, and invisibility makes a person hungry in a strange way. Not for money or even company, exactly, but for the sense that somewhere, someone had a whole private interior life, and that Bonnie might be allowed, once, to see it. She picked locks the way other people read diaries left on coffee tables. She had picked exactly one other lock in her life, her father's tool chest, at forty-two, and had felt no shame about it since.

The hairpin took four minutes. The drawer slid open with a soft wooden sound.

Inside was a leather-bound journal, fat and soft-cornered, and beneath it a stack of drawings done on heavy cream paper, clipped together with a bulldog clip. Bonnie carried them to the little dinette where the moon came through the window and set them down, and it took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.

The drawings were of Rae. That was clear right away, the sweep of the jaw, the heavy hair, the small mole below the left collarbone. Rae, nude, in charcoal, drawn with real skill, and Rae nude had a penis. In the first drawing she stood with her arms loose at her sides, unashamed, her body rendered in long careful strokes, soft breasts and narrow hips and the organ hanging heavy and plain between her thighs, and along the bottom margin, in Rae's small upright hand, a line of annotation: *still mine, still hers, both at once. Learning to stop apologizing.*

Bonnie's breath went out of her slowly. Rae was trans. Bonnie had known that the way the whole valley knew it, as a plain fact about a local singer. She had not known it like this.

There were nine drawings. In one, Rae sat on the edge of a bed, head tipped back, one hand between her own thighs, and the note read *the first time I touched myself as myself, age twenty-five, cried after, would not call it crying.* In another she faced away, showing the long line of her back, and the note said *Lily says my shoulders are the best part. Lily was wrong. The best part is that they are mine.* Some of the notes were plainly about desire. One drawing showed her on her knees, drawn with a tenderness that made Bonnie's throat hurt, and the annotation was only four words: *want to be wanted.*

Bonnie sat there in the moonlight with her hand pressed flat against her own sternum, reading page after page of the journal where it fell open, entries about hormones and surgeries and the years before, about the boy Rae had been called, who learned to sing so that people would look at her face instead of her body, about wanting hands on her that knew what they were touching and wanted it anyway. It was the most honest thing Bonnie had ever held in her two hands, and she had held newborn lambs and her dying mother.

She knew she should put it back. She knew it the way you know a storm is coming, with a heavy, resigned certainty, and she kept reading anyway, and that was the mistake, and she suspected even then it was the best mistake of her life.

* * *

The trailer steps creaked at one in the morning.

Bonnie heard them the way you hear a thing you have been dreading, too late and all at once. The door opened and cold festival air came in with it, woodsmoke and fried dough and the far bass thump of the late stage, and Rae stood in the doorway with her guitar still slung across her back, frozen, her eyes going from Bonnie's face to the journal open on the dinette to the nine drawings spread beside it like a fan of strange tarot cards.

Neither of them said anything. The silence went on so long that Bonnie could hear the cat purring in the bedroom nook, could hear a drum kit starting up somewhere down in the valley, could hear her own pulse in her ears. Rae set her guitar down against the wall very slowly, the way a person sets down something when their hands are not steady.

"Okay," Rae said finally, and her voice was quiet and strange. "Okay. So."

Bonnie did not try to explain. There was nothing to explain that the floor around her didn't already say, an old woman in her nightgown sitting cross-legged on the floor of another woman's home, surrounded by her secrets. She just stayed where she was and looked up, because running would have been worse, and because some stubborn part of her had decided, sometime in the last hour, that she wanted to be the kind of person who stayed.

"How much," Rae said, and stopped, and started again. "How much did you read?"

"Most of it," Bonnie said. "I'm sorry. I picked the lock. That was wrong, and I don't have any excuse except that I wanted to know you, and I had no right to want it that way."

Rae looked at her for what felt like an eternity, her jaw working, her eyes bright in the dim light, and then she did the last thing Bonnie expected, which was to sit down on the floor across from her, cross-legged, still in her stage clothes, and reach out and turn the journal back to the page Bonnie had been reading.

"Then you know about Lily," Rae said.

Rae said it lightly, almost carelessly, the way a person says a thing they have rehearsed saying so many times that the edges have worn off it. Bonnie nodded. Her throat was too tight for much talking, but she managed a yes, and Rae tipped her head back against the cabinet under the dinette and looked at the ceiling.

"I keep thinking I should hide this drawer better," Rae said. "Locks are for burglars, though. You're not a burglar. You're the lady who keeps my tomatoes alive and argues with my cat about the couch. I don't want a better lock against you. I want to know what you think."

"What I think," Bonnie repeated. It came out as half a question.

"About the drawings. That's why I make them. Not to hide them. To show them, eventually, to somebody. I just never figured out who." Rae's long dark hair was loose around her shoulders and there was still a smudge of stage makeup at her temple. She looked, Bonnie thought, about a hundred years old and brand new at the same time, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with the late hour. "So. You've seen them. Say something."

Bonnie looked down at the cream-colored paper spread around her knees, at the woman drawn nine times, the woman with the soft chest and the heavy cock and the careful annotations, and she thought about all the years she had spent not saying things to anyone.

"I think they're beautiful," she said. "I think they're the bravest things I ever saw. I think you drew your own body more honestly than I've ever thought about mine." She paused, and then, because it seemed disloyal to stop there, "I think the shoulders note is right. Lily was wrong. But not for the reason she wrote it."

Rae laughed, a short startled bark of a laugh, and pressed her hand over her mouth.

"God," she said through her fingers. "You're the first person to see these besides me, you know that? And you. A sixty-four-year-old orchard farmer in a nightgown, sitting on my floor at one in the morning."