Darrel’s own father would beat him on a whim when he was younger, the most innocuous reason being when Darrel stirred the ice cream in his bowl, turning it into soup before he ate it, one Sunday afternoon at the age of twelve. Ruby did nothing to stop Fred’s tirades and even laughed at Darrel for consistently being the brunt of his father’s anger. The worst came when Darrel was sixteen. Three years before, he’d saved up and purchased two Treeing Walker Coonhounds from the car dealer in their small town. Rock and Trixie were almost genetically obedient purebloods that won blue ribbons for Darrel at the county fair two years in a row and earned him a little cash each time they had a litter of puppies. Every weekend, he would take them out hunting, and he learned to skin, tan, and sale the dozens of raccoon pellets that he claimed as a result of their teamwork. Growing up on the McAllisters’ back hills farm, Rock and Trixie were in many ways the only light in Darrel’s otherwise isolated life, shining faithful to the bitter end. And when the end did come one night, Darrel suddenly understood what love was.
He had just gotten back home from coon hunting with his buddy Allen. That night they hadn’t managed to kill a thing, but they had polished off a six-pack and had started laughing about a girl in their junior class with goggle glasses and a large rear end, whom they had dubbed “heifer” and teased each other about dating. It was one of those silly teenage boy jokes that really made no sense to anyone other than them but that tickled them endlessly. However, when Fred was woken up by their laughter, he was so irate, he took Darrel’s shotgun and killed Rock and Trixie in their cages. He demanded Allen leave immediately and told Darrel not to come to bed until he’d buried Rock and Trixie’s bodies and cleaned up the mess.
It was almost light outside before Darrel was finished burying his dogs. All throughout the process in the dark of night he’d cried, a thing he’d never been allowed to do growing up. In fact, if he cried while he was getting a whipping, it just meant the beating would last longer. And it was as he smoothed the fresh earth over the graves of his coonhounds, with tears and snot trailing down his face, he suddenly realized what love was because, in an instant, there was no more of it in his world. It had come unbeknownst to him in the form of two animals, and now, it had disappeared again, leaving him in an even darker place than the physical world around him ever could have, leaving him in a shadow that he became so used to. Even when love showed up for him in other forms as he grew older, he retreated back to it because it was most familiar.
After months of looking around, Darrel and Sheila decided to buy a farm on a plot of land thirty minutes from Hartville in a town called Nebo with a population of 30. The town was hardly anything to boast about, but the farm was a steal, surrounded on three sides by the Mark Twain National Forest. So, as Darrel pointed out, they would never have to worry about neighbors encroaching on their privacy.
The farm was three hundred acres that included at least three big hills, four valleys, four ponds, five streams, two springs, and a half dozen fields. Darrel had everything planned out. In the two large fields near the house, he would plant alfalfa to bale, half of which he would sell and the other half would be fed in the wintertime to the thirty to forty head of cows he intended to buy. The calves born to these cows in the spring could then be sold in the fall to make the mortgage, and the whole herd could be moved about the different valleys over the course of the year to prevent overgrazing. In the smaller fields, tucked in the back corners of the property, he intended to plant wheat and corn to attract wildlife that would make for freezers full of deer and turkey meat for his growing family. And he would stock the ponds with catfish while keeping the spring-fed streams clear of debris for easy canoeing in the summertime.
The Reese family, who was selling the land, had constructed a split-level house on the property, which Darrel intended to tear down because it wasn’t much more than a run-down trailer with an addition on one end, painted baby blue where the faux bricks had come loose. Mostly he was interested in the deep and limitless well that had been dug nearby to provide water to the property and the more-than-sufficient electricity that Intercounty Electric had strung out to provide power.
There was a lopsided barn whose wood had petrified over the years on the north end of the weed- and rock-strewn yard and a chicken coup with a rusted-through corrugated roof ready to cave in to the south. Darrel decided to keep both structures for storage and build a house down the hill in the forest, where a thicket of Dogwood trees would provide natural landscaping in the spring. The McAllisters’ new home would be two stories, six bedrooms, two bathrooms, a living room, dining room, and kitchen with a two-car garage in the basement. It wasn’t going to be fancy, but it would certainly hold the large family that Sheila and Darrel planned to have. And in the meantime, he rented a bright yellow trailer with a brown front door that he parked just up from the construction site in a small field that sported a wild apple tree, which had sprung up from the fertile soil at some point ages ago.
The day the concrete was poured for the foundation of the new house was a Saturday, and Darrel brought Sheila and the girls down so they could leave their footprints in the gray wet concrete, along with their names and the date. Rebecca cried when Darrel gently smushed her feet into the cold grit, leaving two tiny indentations that hardly resembled feet, while Kristy couldn’t get enough of the fun. The contractor and his crew enjoyed the spectacle, and by the time Sheila and Darrel were done washing their little girls’ feet off, they were laughing full-heartedly, too.
That afternoon, Darrel didn’t spend as much time working on the house with the construction crew as he planned. Instead, he had a leisurely lunch of potatoes and deer brisket with the girls and Sheila. Then he and Sheila laid the girls down for their naps, and they walked out the back door to the apple tree that stood in the clearing behind the trailer. It was a particularly warm October day, and the apples dangling down from the gnarled limbs were perfectly ripe, though even ripe they were exceptionally tart. As Sheila watched on, Darrel thoroughly searched the branches for the most ready fruit. And when he found it, a red-and-yellow dappled apple with no spots or blemishes, he fogged it with his breath and rubbed it on his shirt so that it was shiny when he presented it to Sheila with a smile.
“It’s perfect. See,” he said.
It was perfect in ways Darrel couldn’t have even imagined. This fruit that Sheila held in her hand, whether he meant for it to be or not, was, in a single moment, representative of everything in Sheila’s life as it was currently—a real-life Eden.
“I love you,” she said.
Darrel just kissed Sheila on the forehead before moving on around the tree to look for more apples. As Sheila watched him on his intent mission, she appreciated Darrel’s thoughtful blue eyes, Ivory-cleaned skin, and straight black hair that smelled of aged Head and Shoulder’s shampoo. She liked the way he dressed in his grubbies, a pair of ragged blue Levis and a worn-through western shirt topped off with a brown vest, like a man who had no idea that the ensemble he’d carelessly thrown on only made him more of a man and thusly more desirable to her. And it was the desire she felt for Darrel, like when she had first met him and they had first kissed and first made love, that scared her. For even though she knew without a doubt she was his, she had discovered that he wasn’t necessarily hers. And when she said that she loved him but he didn’t say it back, she was reminded of this truth, whether that was his intent or not. She was reminded that he went off to work in Hartville every day, leaving her alone in the middle of the woods with their two girls, more secluded than ever, more dependent on him than she could have ever imagined. And though she tried to tell herself the past was in the past, she was left to wonder each day when he came home from work how much of him was truly returning. How silently he had met whomever it was that had almost kept them from getting married. How stealthily he had engaged with Sharon. And if he did meet someone again over lunch, while he was buying a few groceries, walking down the street—another whoever—S
heila wondered what she would do this time.
Darrel brought half a dozen apples back to Sheila, and she held out her shirt to take them. “Baby, I love you,” she said again. Darrel looked at her, a bit annoyed, and nodded.
“I know,” he said before moving back to the tree.
Sheila’s chest seized up inside of her. Why won’t he say he loves me back? Oh, God, please don’t let him leave me again. Please help him to not be cheating on me. She didn’t know what else to pray. But it’s not like her pleas to God seemed to help in these times of panic anyway, in these times when the realities of her world came into sharp focus along with the fears Darrel had framed those realities in.
“Darrel, I said I love you.”
Darrel stopped picking apples from the tree and walked back over to Sheila, having only found a few more choice pieces to add to the collection. “I love you, too,” he sighed. “Please don’t say it that way.”
“Fine. How do you want me to say it?”
“I don’t know. Darrel, I’m just… scared.”
Darrel sighed again, even more exasperated. “Sheila…”
“I’m sorry.”
“Where is this coming from?”
“Things have just been so… good, and I… I… I’ve felt this way before and then…” Tears came to Sheila’s eyes.
Darrel watched her, unresponsive to her emotion. He was now agitated. More and more, Sheila had begun to “freak out” on him in the middle of a perfectly good day because of his past indiscretions, and it pissed him off. If she didn’t want him to go cheat on her again, this was hardly the way to assure that, he thought. Her needy behavior made him want to go cheat on her again. It made him think of her as some weak, dependent thing, not the proud girl he’d married. Why was she so goddamned insecure? He was here, wasn’t he? He took care of her and the girls. So he’d made a couple mistakes. What was so important about him saying “I love you” right now?
Darrel was staring up at the apple tree as though he were looking for more apples, but really he was building a case against Sheila for why he had the right to suddenly be angry with her. And second by second, in his mind, the case was becoming a no-brainer with him as the clear winner. “I should just cut this fucking tree down,” Darrel said, giving up on finding any more apples and heading back for the house.
Sheila followed him. “Darrel?”
He didn’t answer.
“Darrel, don’t be mad at me please.”
“I’m not mad,” he called back over his shoulder. But he was angry, and Sheila would pay for every bit of it because it was all her fault! Even though he wasn’t looking back at her, he could hear her trying to keep up with his long gait, trying to keep from spilling the apples she cradled in her shirt. Once again, she was being so ridiculous, and her ridiculousness made her less attractive to him, which only made him more right for being upset, he thought.
When they reached the trailer, Darrel wasn’t going to hold the door for Sheila, but she asked him to. So he did with a roll of his eyes. Then, when they got into the trailer, he went over to the TV and turned it on, which he knew would annoy Sheila, who preferred their rare moments alone be spent whispering lovingly into each other’s ears and holding one another as though they were locked in some Hallmark card nightmare.
As he watched the Texas vs. OSU football game, which was in the third quarter, Darrel knew Sheila wasn’t completely wrong to worry. He had pulled away again recently. It happened a few months after Kristy was born and now it was happening once more, only months after the birth of Rebecca. Darrel didn’t know why. He didn’t even particularly like it, but he couldn’t help himself. He hadn’t cheated. He hadn’t done anything since they had moved to Hartville. He flirted with a few of the secretaries at the extension office. Who didn’t? Them with their tight asses and frosted hair and big breasts. He wouldn’t actually do anything this time, though. Or maybe he would. Maybe it scared him, too, the perfection of the world he held in his hands. Maybe throwing it away and disappearing into the shadows of pain was what he needed to stand the otherwise startling purity and light that Sheila and his girls and this farm all represented more and more each day. Or maybe it was that he felt trapped, even if the trap was a velvet one. Maybe he just needed to be reminded that he had other options.
“Would you like an apple pie if I made one?” Sheila slipped over to Darrel, who was luckily sitting on the couch, where she could snuggle up next to him.
“Do whatever you want,” Darrel replied without looking at her.
“Darrel, please don’t be mad at me. I wasn’t trying to cause a problem. It’s just sometimes I get scared,”
“Well, baby, it’s annoying,” Darrel huffed. “Now can you get off of me? You’re making me hot.”
Sheila didn’t know what to do. Her and Darrel’s perfect afternoon was falling apart like an angel food cake that isn’t allowed to rest properly. She slipped her hand down to Darrel’s crotch and massaged it.
“Don’t,” he said, but he didn’t shrug her off. So she continued. And after a moment, she achieved the desired result of her actions. He was getting hard and had to spread his legs to let his dick move into a more comfortable position. When he did this, she took the opportunity to kiss his neck. Once again, he didn’t move. So Sheila continued, her hands now unzipping his fly and digging past the zipper and his boxer shorts to his bush and his erection, grabbing hold of it and tugging at the uncut member. “Don’t,” he said again, but she knew he didn’t mean it. So she pulled his penis out of his pants and went down on him, eliciting a sigh of the pleasurable sort from Darrel that allowed her to know that things would be all right between them again. Then he shoved his hand down her pants, and in moments they were stripping each other, kissing passionately, fucking each other with their hands, their tongues, their sex organs, lifting themselves to a place beyond this world they lived in the present, where the past and the future didn’t matter, where only the moment then and there mattered. And as time passed, sex between them would become the only place they could find happiness together. It would produce three more beautiful children, including the boy they conceived that day on the couch. It would temporarily erase the tears when Darrel cheated on Sheila again and again, and it would be the reason they stayed together long after the flame of love that Sheila had entered into their marriage with was snuffed out.
Part Three
He Loves Me
Lonnie Dulane McAllister was unique from the moment he entered the world, which was around noon on Memorial Day 1981. Sheila hardly worried about her pregnancy with Lonnie. Darrel was the same way. When she went into labor, they stopped for an early breakfast at a donut shop, where Darrel ordered coffee and chocolate-covered Long Johns for him and Sheila to enjoy before heading to the hospital. Lonnie looked like his sisters with a full head of chestnut hair and his mother’s slightly upturned nose. However, unlike his sisters, he cried consistently almost from the moment he was born, only stopping to nurse and sleep. When Sheila asked the doctor about this, he deduced that Lonnie was simply growing so fast he couldn’t get enough to eat.
Gwen and Willie drove up to visit days after Lonnie’s birth as they had done when both Kristy and Rebecca had come into the world. It was an excursion both Gwen and Willie weren’t keen on making due to the cramped quarters of the yellow trailer the McAllisters had been living in. However, the top story of the new house was finished, and so the McAllister clan had moved in with what little they had, selling the trailer and finally feeling settled in a place that was not only much bigger than their former residences but completely and uniquely their own.
The plain, brown front door with French windows resided on a landing halfway between the upstairs of the house and the unfinished basement. And visitors who lighted the stairs found the kitchen, dining room, and living room waiting at the top, as these main rooms were basically one big space, distinguished only by their furniture and appliances. The kitchen are
a was large with cabinets and a counter running its perimeter, allowing ample room for cooking and eating where the counter expanded over six barstools. The dinning room was mainly distinguished from the kitchen by a large mahogany table also ready for six. The living room was the part of this large area that was carpeted with orange-and-brown shag and held the couches, coffee table, and a few lamps. The most stunning features of all, however, were the almost floor-to-ceiling windows that stood like framed paintings of the world outside and offered the McAllister household a respite of peace in the midst of the drama that couldn’t help but unfold inside between the many personalities, especially when Gwen and Willie were visiting.
“Soodie, where are your placemats?” Gwen huffed, looking through the kitchen drawers, slamming each one impatiently to rip open the next in her exasperated search.
“Momma, I told you I don’t have any placemats,” Sheila said from the couch, where she sat in a satin green nightgown breast-feeding Lonnie.
“What am I supposed to serve dinner on?”
“Just use the Corningware, Momma.”
Gwen huffed again and shook her head, talking under her breath about dinner getting cold before she could get it to the table. A few minutes before, it had been Rebecca and Kristy balling their eyes out over a doll neither of them wanted to share. And there was still tension in the air from the day before, when Willie’s insistence on finishing up parts of the house still in need of a little caulk, sandpaper, and paint had embarrassed Darrel because Darrel had to tell Willie that he didn’t have the money to spend on any more supplies. If only everyone could have seen that what they were in the middle of was simply life. But how do you see life in the middle of living it? So Sheila breast-fed Lonnie. Darrel escaped to work as often as possible. Gwen and Willie went back to Oklahoma. And the seasons changed.
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