She Asked Me Why I Sold The Farm She Never Lived On

My daughter has a thin pale line on the inside of her left wrist, like an old scar that healed a long time ago. She has had it since birth. When she was small enough to still be carried everywhere she would rub it and say, that is where the wire caught me. I never knew what wire. We do not have wire.

She grew up talking about a farm. Not wishing for one, not the way children want a pony. She talked about it like a place she had lost. She missed it. She would ask me, in the middle of an ordinary day, why we sold the farm, and when I told her we never had a farm she would look at me like I had told a cruel joke and go quiet.

She talked about a brother named Peter. She said Peter was older and he taught her to whistle and he carried the buckets when the yard was frozen so she would not slip. She said Peter cried when she was sick. She had no brother named Peter. She had no brother at all. But she spoke about him with such plain love that I found myself, more than once, wanting to ask how he was, as if he were a real person out in the world somewhere.

The mark on her wrist came into her stories a lot. She said she caught it on the fence taking the washing in, that the wire on the top was loose and it opened her arm, and that Peter wrapped it in his shirt and she was not allowed to help with the fence after that. She would tell me this while tracing the pale line, matching the story to the skin, like she was reading it off.

The thing I keep coming back to happened on a drive. We were going to see my sister and we took a road we do not usually take, through open country, past fields and old barns. My daughter, who had been half asleep, sat up suddenly and pressed her face to the glass and started to cry. Not a tantrum. Real crying, the quiet kind. She said, that was ours, that field, we used to have the sheep there. I slowed the car. There was nothing to see but a field and a broken gate and a stand of trees. But she cried for it. She grieved for a field.

I asked her, gently, what happened at the farm, why she was not there anymore. She said she got sick one winter and could not get warm and she went to sleep in the small room and did not wake up. She said Peter sat with her. She said it plainly, the way she says everything, and then she asked if we could have chips for tea. That is what it is like living with this. The grief and the chips, side by side.

I have not gone looking for a farm or a Peter. I would not know where to start, and part of me does not want to find out that it is real, and part of me does not want to find out that it is not. My mother, when I told her, said children carry old souls sometimes, that her own village believed it plainly and made no fuss about it. My husband thinks it is imagination stitched from picture books. I think I have stopped needing an answer.

What I do is this. When my daughter misses the farm, I sit with her and let her tell me about it. I ask after Peter. She tells me he was good. She rubs the pale line on her wrist, the place the wire caught her, and I do not correct her anymore. Whoever she was, she was loved, and she loved a brother, and that is not the worst thing to carry into a new life.