The Bucolic Plague: How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

followed by Michelle. I wasn’t quite ready yet. I listened to their voices inside.
    “I’ve always thought this would make a great wine cellar,” I heard Michelle telling Brent.
    “Or a great place for a Halloween party,” Brent offered.
    Call me superstitious, but I didn’t think Old Judge Beekman would have appreciated sharing his final resting place with a case of Sutter Home.
    “Come on in, Josh,” Brent called out. “It’s cool.”
    I took a calming breath and stepped into the darkness. There was a slight step down, and immediately the temperature dropped at least 10 degrees. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the near complete darkness. My skin felt wet.
    In the dim light I began to make out shapes. The crypt was larger than I’d expected. It was difficult to tell how cavernous it was from the outside since it was built into a hill. The interior looked to be about ten feet by fifteen feet. It was entirely made of stone, and the ceiling was constructed in a graceful barrel arch. From it hung an iron candle chandelier. At the far end of the wall were what looked to be shelving. I deduced that that was where the coffins were once stacked.
    “What happened to the caskets?” I asked.
    “Dunno,” Michelle said. “Long gone.”
    Not everything was long gone I quickly realized, as I rested my hand on the shelf only to discover I was petting a human jawbone.
    I gasped. “It’s someone’s head!” I said.
    Brent, the doctor, immediately inspected my find and offered positive identification—as if a bone that looked like someone’s chin could have been anything other than a jaw.
    “Yep,” Brent concurred. “And here’s a tooth. And here’s a sheet of lead left over from someone’s coffin.” He tried to hand me the tooth. I politely declined.
    “The workers found a lot of bones around here when they were restoring the grounds,” Michelle explained. “Most of them were reburied under the slate floor. But some they found later, I guess, and just put them inside. Rumor has it Beekman went through a lot of slaves.”
    As if it wasn’t bad enough to have been desecrating some rich white guy’s bones, we were also fondling the remains of people who had good reason to hold a grudge.
    “And now let’s see the pool,” Michelle called out, exiting back into the light. “It’s right next to the crypt,” she added, “so if any of your guests drown, you won’t have far to drag them.”
    I assumed she was joking. Then again, we were dealing with people who live in a veritable ghost town. Death and dying probably didn’t faze them much.
    The rest of the tour went by quickly—too quickly. I forgot to take any pictures of the interior, or the crypt, or the pool, or the historic barn, or anything, really. I had nothing to remember the place by—the place that for a couple of hours at least, I imagined would be mine.
    But it was all too grand anyway. I couldn’t think of a single reason why I deserved to have a place like this. This was not a place where I would live. This was a place where Martha would live.
    I was the first to head back to the car while Brent and Michelle pointlessly exchanged e-mails and whatnots. I rolled down the window to breathe in the country air one last time. Now we’d have to race to get back to the city in time for Brent’s dinner meeting.
    Brent slid into the driver’s seat.
    “We are going to own this place,” he proclaimed with steely determination.
    “We can’t afford a million dollars.”
    “Then we’ll talk her down.”
    “To what? Half?”
    “To whatever we need to,” Brent said. “Don’t you like it?”
    “That’s not really the issue,” I answered.
    “Just answer the question.”
    “Yes, I like it. Of course I like it. I love it, in fact.”
    “Then we’re going to get it,” Brent answered. I still looked dubious. “Look, I get paid a lot of money. You get paid a lot of money. We’re very fortunate that way.”
    He was right. We