When Demi delivered a load of vegetables next week I asked her how things were going.

“Not well,” she said. “We’re having trouble making ends meet.”

“Not enough shares?”

“Plenty of shares,” she said, “it’s just that we’re not getting much yield out of the land.”

The weather had been crazy that spring—cool temperatures, then torrential rains followed by a heat wave. The uneven climate played havoc with their extensive gardens, resulting in low yields and poor quality in what little they were able to grow.

I made the mistake of mentioning this to Bob.

“God’s judgment,” he said simply and with conviction. “A bunch of us are thinking about going out there and preaching to them some night.”

I don’t think he and his evangelizing friends ever got around to doing that. And God’s judgment on Gaia Farms apparently loosened up a bit. When summer came the weather settled down, things grew well, and the farm ended in the black.

“But it was a nerve-racking year,” Demi told me. “We thought we’d lose the farm a couple of times. I hope we don’t have to go through that kind of thing again.”

About that same time Bob was called as pastor of a small church outside in Nortonville.

“That’s out by the Devil’s Backbone, isn’t it?” I joked.

As always, he did not appreciate my humor.

Winter passed. March was cold, as it can be in Indiana. April began raw and rainy but eventually warmed up. I renewed our share in Gaia Farms. Demi dropped a note thanking me. “I hope this is a better year!” she wrote as a post script.

One warm day in April I got a call from her.

“The guy who lives with you,” she said, her voice frantic. “He’s been in an accident. You need to get here as soon as you can.”

“Is he hurt?” I asked.

“He’s dead,” she told me.

Jill and I left the kids with a neighbor and jumped in the car. We sped out to Gaia Farms. Emergency vehicles were there, and police cars, their blue and red and strobe lights flashing. When I identified myself they let both of us into the barn where the medics had just finished covering the body. They had looked at his driver’s license but asked us if we could confirm that he was Robert Taylor Ashley. I made sure Jill was okay with it; she said she was, though I could tell by the way she set her jaw that she anticipated something that would harrow her. They pulled the sheets back.

I saw the familiar face. He had lived with us two years. Bob had round eyes, a jutting forehead, and a wide mouth. He wore a moustache. His hair was thinning (had he lived I am sure he would have been bald). He looked pale but otherwise seemed unharmed.

Jill almost fainted. I had to support her, but she was able to confirm identity, as I did also. They covered the corpse back up and wheeled it out to the ambulance, which would take it to a local hospital for an autopsy.

As the ambulance drove away I noticed the crowd. About thirty people stood around. I saw Demi and Adam and their children. Others, mostly young, though a few older figures were included, watched with sadness and shock. My eyes wandered to a flat platform near the back of the barn. Candles stood on either side of it. Squash, beans, ears of corn, sheaves of wheat, lay in stacks between the candles. Probably their altar. They had been worshipping. I glanced over at Demi. She looked desperately at me, afraid I had the wrong idea of what had happened. Just then a police officer said he needed me to go along with them to finalize the accident report and begin the task of contacting relatives.

I eventually got the full story from Demi and from the accident report.

As far as I can piece things together, Bob had been negotiating the curves on the Devil’s Backbone after a rainstorm. He skidded off the road and rolled his car. Though he was wearing a seatbelt, the roof collapsed and a piece of twisted metal slashed through the artery inside his left leg.

Bleeding badly, he managed to drag himself out of the vehicle and improvise a tourniquet. He had skidded down a bank too tall to climb in his condition, and his cell phone had been smashed. He apparently saw the lights of the farm and started out across the newly-plowed fields to the barn. Halfway there the tourniquet came loose; he had already left a trail of gore behind him, but when the tourniquet came off he once more began to shed blood copiously. Too faint to put the cloth back on, he shouted for help. Some people in the barn (who were worshipping at the time) heard him, saw him waving his arms in the distance, and rushed to help.

By the time they got there, he had passed out. Two physicians (a husband-wife team) were among the worshippers. They had their medical bags and tried everything they could do to save him, but he died only a few minutes after help arrived, his blood soaked into the soft soil of the furrows Demi and Adam had turned only two days ago.

I had the sad task of contacting his parents. Bob was not married. His parents came and took his body home for burial. Jill and I drove to the funeral. A few days later the little church where he had worked had a memorial service for him.

I gave a eulogy. When I had finished, the head deacon spoke of Bob’s dedication and gifts as a preacher.

“In his car he carried the sermon he had planned to give here that night. The text was Judges 6:32: Therefore on that day he called him Jerubbaal, saying, Let Baal plead against him, because he hath thrown down his altar. This is the passage where Gideon is going to be killed for pulling down Baal’s altar. Then his father says, ‘Can’t Baal stand up for his own self? Why do you have to take revenge for him? He is a god, isn’t he?’ They left Gideon alone and the god Baal lost face because nothing bad happened to Gideon. God, who was protecting him, showed who was the stronger of the two. It was God, not Baal, who knew how to take care of those who were his. We are puzzled why God took Bob at such a young age, but we have to trust him and know that he cares for his own.”

I saw Demi a few weeks later when she and her second-oldest daughter, Edna (age eight), made the first delivery of the year. Crops were doing extremely well, she said; their fields had produced abundantly and they were looking for a good year. They had plenty of high-quality produce to fill deliveries and enough left over to sell to the local stores, which were eager to buy what was locally grown and organic. Gaia Farms was already in the black and Demi said they might even be able to make extra payments on the mortgage.

“The goddess is really blessing us,” Edna beamed.

I smiled at her enthusiasm.

“I think your goddess knows how to take care of her own.”

They helped me carry the produce into the house. Demi told Edna to get in the truck. As she scurried off, Demi turned to me, hesitated, and then spoke.

“David, I hope you don’t think—”

I held up my hand to stop her.

“Don’t even say it.”

She nodded, smiled sadly, and left. I watched her and her daughter drive away into the green of summer under the bright blue of a cloudless sky.