Seed Potatoes and Séance

I got to the farm on a Tuesday in March, which I only remember because the colleague I was house-sitting for, Professor Kim Walsh, fifty-eight, had left a note pinned to the door saying the milk delivery came Tuesdays and Thursdays and please don't let the dog into the vegetable rows. The dog was a kelpie named Noodle, eleven years old, and he took one look at me and decided I was acceptable, which was more of an endorsement than most people gave me in the first week. I was twenty-four, three years into my PhD and only just past the worst of it, and I had taken this housesitting gig because a colleague of a colleague said rural New South Wales in autumn was good for writing, and it was, mostly, except for the shed.

The shed sat at the far edge of the property, corrugated iron and timber, with a dirt floor and a long bench down one side lined with jars of saved seeds, all labeled in Kim's cramped handwriting. It was a community garden shed, technically, half a dozen families from the road had keys, but Kim had left me the key and told me to water the seed potatoes in the bags along the north wall. I went out there the first morning with my coffee, because that's what I do, I look at things until they make sense, and I noticed two things straight off. First, the window unit, an old air conditioner set into the iron wall above the bench, was running, humming along cheerfully in weather that did not need it. Second, under the bench, tucked back behind a stack of seedling trays, there was a toolbox, red, dented at one corner, with a name scratched into the lid that I couldn't read in the dim light.

I did not touch the toolbox, mostly because I was raised right and partly because the air conditioner bothered me more. It was a working farm, water was pumped by solar, and every kilowatt mattered to Kim's budget, so a unit chugging away in an empty shed seemed like a mistake somebody should fix. I looked at it for a long time, standing there with my coffee going cold, and then I turned the dial to off, and the shed went quiet, and I went back to the house feeling like I had done a small good deed, which tells you how little I understood about what was going on out there.

The next morning the unit was running again. I turned it off. The morning after that, Thursday, it was running again, and this time when I went to the dial there was a fresh greasy thumbprint on the housing and a small strip of tape over the vent seam that had not been there before. Somebody was coming out to this shed and turning this machine on, in autumn, in a shed full of seeds and potatoes that preferred the cold, and they were doing it with the steady patience of a person who had done it many times. I stood in the doorway with Noodle panting at my heel and I said, out loud, to nobody, "well, that's not right," and that was the exact moment I got obsessed, I think, though I would not have used that word yet.

I started going out in the afternoons. I told myself it was to read, and I did read, I brought a folding chair and a paperback about soil microbiology that I was supposed to be reviewing, and I set it up in the shade of the shed's iron wall where I could see the track that came up from the road. If a car came I would see it. If a ute came, white, with a ladder rack, I would see it faster. I read eleven pages in three afternoons and I watched that track for most of the rest of it, and Noodle lay in the dust beside me and did not judge me, which is the main thing dogs are for.

He came on the fifth afternoon, and I nearly missed him because I was actually reading for once. I heard the ute before I saw it, that diesel rattle, and by the time I got my feet under me he was already at the shed door with a key. He was twenty-seven or thereabouts, tall, sunburnt forearms, work shirt with a company logo on the pocket, and he stopped dead when he saw me, and I stopped dead, and we stood there like two people who had both been caught at something, which was funny, because only one of us had a key.

"You the housesitter," he said, not really asking.

"Maggie," I said, and stood up, and knocked my paperback into the dust, and picked it up, which made me feel about as dignified as a scarecrow. "You're the one leaving the toolbox."

"I'm the one leaving the..." He looked past me at the shed door. "Is my toolbox in there?"

"Under the bench, behind the trays. Has been since Tuesday."

"Tuesday." He said it the way you'd say a word that had gone off. "I've been back twice since Tuesday. For my toolbox." He rubbed his jaw and looked at me sideways, and it seemed he looked suspicious but it was more like a man working through a sum he didn't care for. "Window unit playing up?"

"Actually, it was running fine. I turned it off."

He laughed. It was a real laugh, short and surprised. "You turned it off."

"Twice. It kept coming back on."

"Yeah, well." He unlocked the door and went in, and I followed because he hadn't said I couldn't and because the shed was half mine for the month whether he liked it or not. He crouched at the unit, pulled the cover, and started poking around in there with a flathead screwdriver, muttering. "Compressor's short cycling. Relay sticks. Been meaning to swap it, keep getting called off before I..." He trailed off, head in the machine. "Farm's on a shared meter with the garden, so it runs the bills up for everyone if it cooks itself."

"So you keep coming back to babysit it."

"Keep coming back to fix it, and then something else eats my day, and then I come back and fix it again." He glanced over his shoulder at me. "Why were you reading out here every day, anyway? Bloke down the road said he kept seeing a strange car."

"That bloke down the road has a strange car himself," I said, and he laughed again, and I sat down on one of the seed potato bags to watch him work, and he let me, which I noted.

The next time, he didn't bring a screwdriver, he brought a whole relay in an anti-static bag, and he took the unit half apart on the bench while I sat on my potatoes and asked questions, and he answered most of them, and dodged the one about whether he'd been the one taping the vent seam, which he had, obviously, because the tape was his, it had a hardware store logo. "You know," he said, wrist deep in the guts of it, "most people hear a machine running and think, good, machine's working."

"Most people don't water other people's seed potatoes either," I said.

"Those are good spuds, though." He tapped the bag under me without looking. "Kim's Russian Bananas. Best in the district and she knows it."

"You know Kim?"

"Everyone knows Kim." He snapped the cover back on, turned the dial, and the unit coughed and settled into a smoother hum than it had made all week. "There. That'll hold. Probably." He wiped his hands on a rag and looked at me, and for the first time he looked like he was going to ask me something instead of the other way around, and I realized I had been waiting for that without admitting it, sitting on a bag of potatoes in a hot shed every afternoon for a week and a half the way a woman waits for a bus.

He asked me if I was going to be out here every afternoon for the rest of the month, and I said probably, and he said good, somebody should keep an eye on the place, and then he left, and I sat there realizing we had just agreed to something without either of us saying what it was.

The game started the following week, and neither of us named it, we just fell into it. He came out on a Wednesday to check the unit, which did not need checking, and he left his multimeter sitting on the bench next to the seed jars instead of putting it back in the red toolbox, and I watched him do it, and he watched me watch him do it, and neither of us said a word. Two days later I moved it. I put it behind the watering can, upright, handle facing out, the way I figured a practical man would leave it. He came back, found it, and said nothing, but the next time he came he left a spanner on the windowsill, which was a message, and I moved the spanner to the tool rack on the wall, which was my answer, and after that it was on.

"Your screwdriver's on the bench," I said to him one afternoon, not even looking up from my