Where You Go
Schoenfeld’s Farm
Birch Island, New York
Danelaw Strong’s hands were in the dirt while his mind was on his wife.
He had let Nomi’s magnificent vegetable garden lie fallow last year.
In the wake of her sudden death, he had neither the energy nor the heart to prepare, plant, cultivate and tend the ten raised beds.
He was still so bitter and angry. His Persephone had been cruelly disappeared into the underworld, and the advent of spring wouldn’t bring her back.
He’d play the role of Demeter and let it all wither and die.
He missed having the bounty outside his kitchen door, but it took everything he had that first season just to get out of bed, make coffee, manage the day-to-day business of the farm, remember to stick some food in his mouth, and go to bed again.
His soul was a city under siege, and the flower beds and vegetable garden were unnecessary mouths.
He threw them over the battlements and refused to feel guilty, figuring if Nomi was displeased with his decision, she’d give him a sign.
When the wildflowers re-seeded themselves, and the roses put out flush after flush of blooms, and a few rogue tomato plants produced some respectable clusters of fruit, Dane felt Nomi was not just signaling, but rewarding him.
The earth was still on his side, and maybe even grateful for the sabbatical.
Thanks for the time off, it said. I miss her, too. Got your back. We’ll try next year.
Dane felt stronger this spring, ready to give it a go, and he called on his friend Fred to help him.
Fred Pierce didn’t put a toe outside their house unless dressed completely in black, and they managed to retain an air of impeccable chic even when shoveling manure.
“Look at you giving immaculate horseshit vibes,” Dane said. “How do you do it?”
Fred smiled behind their aviator shades, which were unnecessary on this cloudy day, but an integral accessory to their black cargo pants and form-fitting black T-shirt. Any dirt on them was fashionable and intentional.
“Promise me,” they said. “If it gets to be too much, you let it go to weeds and try again next year.”
“I promise.” Dane’s garden plan was nothing close to what it would’ve been in Nomi’s hands.
She started everything from seed and mapped out every square inch on graph paper.
The raised beds would be crammed with vegetables, flowers and herbs planted in symbiotic combinations and carefully rotated every year.
Her treasured rosebushes grew between the beds, spoiled by layers of compost and whole bananas buried by their roots.
By July, the garden would be a riot of color, bursting with blooms and produce, stalks and stems and foliage wrestling, dancing, tangling, vying for the best of the sun.
Pollinators of all kinds made the garden buzz with activity.
Birds swooped through, along with the farm’s chickens and ducks, looking for worms and bugs and snails.
After a rainstorm, everything sagged and drooped, which made a simple task like gathering lettuce into a rainforest trek.
Dane could never do what Nomi did.
“You’re sighing again,” Fred said. “You don’t have to start perfect, you just have to start. And this is a great start.”
Being conservative on his first solo flight, Dane had prepped just four of the beds.
He planted only what he’d enjoy picking and eating on a daily basis, and what wouldn’t break his heart if he killed it.
Lettuce, peas, scallions, parsley, lemon balm, basil, a few cucumber plants, two cherry tomato plants, and two big squares of green beans.
Maybe later he’d add some flowers in between. Maybe.
“That it?” Fred said, dusting off their thighs.
“All done.” Dane stood up and stretched against the crick in his lower back. “And perfect timing,” he said, glancing at the skies. “Looks like rain coming through.”
“Nomi’s doing.”
Dane smiled, gathering up the empty pots and seed packets. “Want a drink?”
“Hell yeah. I expect payment for manual labor.”
“Go on in, pour and nosh whatever you want. I just need to grab the mail.”
Dane walked down the driveway of Schoenfeld’s, worrying at a miniscule barb stuck in the pad of his thumb.
The farm looked soft and cool under the darkening skies.
He could hear the hum of tractors growing louder as the crew came in from the fields to take shelter.
The din of chickens and ducks rose up as if answering a challenge.
One of the barn cats was coming up the road, an old tom who had to be on his seventh life.
He made no eye contact, but did a neat sashay to slide his ribs against Dane’s legs before moving on.
A stone wall divided the property from its adjacent roadways, with two pillars on each side of the driveway opening.
One was adorned with a carved medallion of the Green Man: a foliate face of pagan origin.
He was the beloved sigil of Schoenfeld’s, the wise man and guardian angel of the farm.
“Go ask the Green Man” was a thing sighed often at Schoenfeld’s, when a problem couldn’t be easily sorted.
A mailbox was built into the other stone pillar, and Dane collected the day’s junk. It was an election year, so a waterfall of campaign fliers and envelopes spilled out, along with catalogs, the weekly circular from ShopRite, and the cable bill.
And a postcard.
Dane almost flipped past it. Then a fleeting thought, Wait, that looked legit, and he doubled back with a flattered curiosity. An actual piece of mail, addressed to him, Danelaw Strong, c/o Schoenfeld’s, 1543 Oak Hill Road, Birch Island, NY.
The message side read: “But Ruth replied to Naomi, ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.’”
Later, Dane would insist it took him a minute to figure it out.
“I thought the Jehovah’s Witnesses were getting creative,” he joked.
But really, he knew right away. The verse went over his head but he recognized the handwriting instantly.
His mouth grew dry. Inside his chest, his heart groped for a chair and sat down.
He turned the card over, then he backed up two steps and sat down on the stone wall next to the Green Man.
Never mind the handwriting. He’d recognize the artwork even if he were blind.
The finished style of Ethan Hasen’s paintings could only be described as hyper-realism.
Or as he called it, pathological perfectionism.
When he sketched, however, whether with pencil, or pen and ink, he was more relaxed, which lent these drawings a rustic, charming air, reminiscent of Ethan’s early career as a children’s book illustrator.
Sketched on the postcard was a stylized lotus flower, its inner petals white, the outer petals cross-hatched to black. Within the center circle ran three black hares, their shared ears making a triangle.
Dane flipped the card over, even though he knew no caption was there, describing the drawing. Front and back, this was a bespoke piece of art. The drawing was the ceiling of Mogao Cave 407 in Dunghua, China.
Where you go, I will go.
Dane looked up at the Green Man, as if the carved foliate face had been reading over his shoulder all this time.
Go ask the Green Man.
“He’s really doing it, huh?” Dane asked.
The pagan bastard refused to give an answer or even make eye contact.
Dane reached for his phone and called his daughter.
“Deddy,” she said grandly.
“Saskia Mary Ruta Hasen-Strong von Schoenfeld.”
“Pardon your French.”
“Guess what I just found in my mailbox?”
She sighed. “My student loan remittance?”
“No, a postcard from China.”
“From Ethan?” A long silence, followed by another sigh. “What’s it say?”
He described it to her. “And I just noticed, underneath the quote is a fingerprint.”
“Of course,” she said. “Ain’t no romantic like Ethan Hasen romantic. Well, we knew he was planning this pilgrimage. A blog isn’t his style, he wouldn’t be caught dead on social media, so this is his way of giving us a status.”
“Us? You got a postcard, too?”
“No. Why would I? Dad, he’s been texting or emailing between every point A and B. I know where he is. I think he’s letting you know.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s doing this for Mammu.”
“Right,” Dane said, starting up the drive toward the house.
“And,” Saskia said slowly, “if more cards are coming? If he’s going to send one from each location? Well, those could be worth a lot of money someday.”
“Christ,” Dane said, rubbing his eyes.
“How many locations along the route?”
“Fifty-two.”
“Fifty-two postcards of every location in the Three Hares game. Hand-drawn by Ethan Hasen. That’s some serious bank, Dad. I suggest you curb the desire to chuck it in the compost.”
“I would do no such thing.”
“You were thinking about it. Put it in a safe place for now. If no more arrive, then do what you want with it. Promise?”
“I promise.”
“What else are you up to?”
“Me and Fred started the veggie garden. They’re in the kitchen, pouring us a drink.”
“Perfectly pressed cargos and an Armani T-shirt?”
“With designer work boots.”
She laughed. “Give them a hug for me. I gotta run, Deddy. I love you. Keep me…posted.”
“Love you, smartass.”
He jammed his phone in his pocket and went inside. Fred had poured two glasses of chardonnay and put out some cheese and crackers.
“I thought you wandered off,” they said.
“No, I was talking to Saskia.”
“How’s my babygirl?”
“Good. She says hi.” Dane’s dog, Salma, put paws on his leg and stretched up to sniff him. “Hello, you.” He put down the bundle of mail and slid onto a chair, sighing heavily.
“Jesus,” Fred said. “AmEx bill that bad?”
Dane tried to laugh but it came out a shrill yelp.
“Dude, what’s going on?”
Dane’s friendship with Fred had only one rule: no bullshit. Without a word, he handed over the postcard and watched Fred examine the front, the back, then the front again.
“This looks like Ethan’s work,” they finally said.
“It is.”
“He’s in China?”
Dane nodded and drank some wine. “He’s making a pilgrimage.”
Fred narrowed their eyes. “Don’t people usually do that in Spain? Or Canterbury or Mecca?”
“He’s following the route of the Three Hares game. Sprinkling some of Nomi’s ashes in each location.”
“How do you know?”
“He told Saskia.”
“Oh.” Fred ate some cheese, flipping the card over and back.
“Don’t get smudges on it,” Dane said. “Sask said if more are coming, they could be worth something.”
“Like you don’t own enough Ethan Hasen originals.” They put the card down far from the food and drinks and looked at Dane closely. “You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“In my humble opinion, the Bible verse is kind of cringe.”
“What else could he have written?”
“Oh, I don’t know. How about, I love you. I miss you. Having a wonderful time, wish you were here. I’m doing this to process my grief and when I get home, maybe we can talk?”
“Maybe all that is in the fingerprint,” Dane said, touching the back of his neck where that same print was tattooed.
Fred nodded. “I’ll be quiet now. No bullshit.”
“No bullshit.”
When the wine was gone, Fred hugged and kissed Dane, then left.
Dane went on sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the rain.
He poured another drink. He looked at the postcard another twenty times.
He sighed a lot. He contemplated throwing his glass against the wall but didn’t want to clean up afterward.
Instead, glass in hand, he wandered along the walls of the kitchen, which were still hung with Ethan’s artwork.
Oil paintings, watercolors, pencil sketches.
Most of them depicting rabbits or hares.
Dane sat back down and drew his laptop toward him. He’d never deleted the Three Hares game off his hard drive, but he’d taken its icon out of the dock at the bottom of the screen. He had to open applications and search for it. His index finger dithered over the tracking pad. Then he clicked.
To the strains of haunting, ominous music, the opening sequence began. First the stylized letters of the Jonathan Henshe Games logo, and the tagline beneath: Greater Understanding Through Play.
The logo dissolved and a map of Eurasia took its place.
Bounding out of the United Kingdom, a hare jumped the English Channel and began running east. It was joined by a second hare who materialized from the Black Sea and joined its mate’s journey, now heading for the Ural mountains.
At the same time, a third hare sprang from China and began running west.
“Along the old Silk Road they traveled,” a voiceover narrated. “Leaving their mark in art and architecture. Who were they chasing? Or were they themselves being hunted? What secrets did their three shared ears hear? What stories are contained in their eternal circle?”
The music swelled as the hares converged, their separate paths wheeling into a circle. Nose to tail, they chased one another. Until their six separate ears melded to become three, forming a perfect triangle. A threefold rotating symmetry known as a triskelion or a triskele.
The title materialized over the motif: Three Hares. A Jonathan Henshe Production.
The screen faded to black again, then a blinding sun burst over the horizon.
The player was treated to a breathless, sweeping vista along the Great Wall of China before being taken west, across the Gobi Desert, following the ancient route of the Silk Road.
The aerial perspective zoomed in on a city.
Subtitles named it Dunhuang, Gansu Province.
The player touched down in front of a tall pagoda, built into the face of a rock outcropping. Mogao, the subtitles informed. The Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.
Dane went inside the pagoda and was faced with a warren of passageways, with numbered cave openings on either side.
New players could get lost for hours in this phase of the game, but Dane knew to go straight to cave 407.
A panorama around the beautifully decorated space, then a zoom up to the caisson ceiling.
And there was the full, technicolor version of the sketched postcard on Dane’s kitchen table.
Dane drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. He moved the cursor to the ceiling and clicked the motif of the Three Hares. They began to spin, making the triangle of their three shared ears rotate.
“Welcome, young explorer,” a voice boomed.
The player perspective came down from the ceiling and rotated to see the Green Man lounging against the door to the cave.
The same foliate face that hung on Schoenfeld’s driveway pillar evolved, expanded and transformed into a living god.
Leaves grew all over his muscle-packed body, which was robed in flowing shades of pine, leaf, and moss.
“So,” he said. “Are you ready to begin?”
Dane dragged fingertips from forehead to chin and blinked at the screen.
“I thought I was done,” he said.