“My lands. That boy. He shouldn’t be making fun of the Lord’s Word like that. You hear me, the Lord will take care of what we need. Sometimes he settles up for us and we don’t even need to be there for it. All we need to do is pray about it.”
Pepper climbed off the fence and stood behind her grandmother’s shoulder, watching the pail fill as her gnarled hands stripped the milk from the cow’s teat.
“Can I do that?”
“Sure. Trade places with me.”
A moment later, Pepper was on the seat, her forehead against the cow’s stomach. She gripped a teat in each hand and squeezed. Nothing came out. “What am I doing wrong?”
“You have to start by squeezing and stripping with your index finger, then the middle and on down to your little finger at the same time you pull.” She reached out. “Like this.”
Again, a thick stream shot into the foaming bucket. “Now you try.”
Pepper squeezed again. “That ain’t much.”
“You’ll get better with practice.”
“How long have you been milking?”
“Oh, sixty some-odd years, I reckon.”
Pepper concentrated on her job. The barn was silent for a long moment. “So, do you think what Top’s doing is bad?”
“Top’s doing what he has to do. He’ll get done with it pretty soon. You can’t stay mad forever, or it’ll burn you up from the inside out. Parkers ain’t like that, and neither were my folks. Good blood will win out. Besides, Parkers are tough.”
Pepper stopped. “I don’t think I am.”
“What do you mean, Hon?”
The teenager kept her head against the cow’s side. “I’m more and more afraid. I used to feel safe here, but it seems like there’s always killings or people being hurt. I don’t like living here anymore.”
Miss Becky reached out in reassurance. The youngster stiffened, and Miss Becky realized her hand was resting on the burn scar on Pepper’s shoulder.
She let go and smoothed her apron, as if to wipe off something unclean. “Hon, we all get scared from time to time, and these are hard times for us all. It’ll get better.”
“No it won’t. People still cause problems over and over again, and then holler for help when it gets to be too much. Now it takes both Grandpa and Uncle Cody to keep the law.”
The distant crack of a light rifle caused them to look up. Hootie raised his head, listened for a moment, and then rested it on his paws, uninterested.
“I wish I lived somewhere else.”
“It’d be the same in town, hon.”
Pepper shook her head. “I don’t mean in Chisum. There’s a whole world out there and all we know is cow shit and dirt roads.”
Miss Becky ignored her anger. “This is where we live.”
Frustrated that her grandmother wasn’t interested in the world outside of northeast Texas, Pepper went back to her milking. “Someday I’m going to live in California. They have beaches there, and the weather is nice all the time.” She thought of the Beach Boys and the music coming out of Los Angeles. “I was watching the news the other night and kids are running out there like ants. The guy on the radio said this year was the Summer of Love.” She stopped talking, startled at how it sounded in front of Miss Becky.
“We have love in this family, and it ain’t just during the summertime.”
“They mean to love everyone, and to make love and not war.”
“I know what they mean, child. They’re talking about lust, and that ain’t the same. Decent folks have families, and love them and their neighbors, but they don’t go crawling under the covers with whoever’s closest.”
Miss Becky pondered the pasture beyond the barn, and the slope down to the gate. Fifty yards away, a wide red oak held Top’s tree house. An unpainted chicken house sat an equal distance in the other direction, and straight ahead was their little farmhouse, surrounded by white sycamores and fragrant mimosa trees. In the distance, the top of the Lamar Lake dam was barely visible over the treetops to the south of their hill. She sighed, knowing that little patch of land would never be enough to hold her headstrong granddaughter.
“Hon, you need to know that these county roads nor no others will lead to golden cities. Roads only lead to the next place to live and work. That’s what life is and it ain’t nothin’ else.” She paused to study the cow’s flank. “When you graduate from high school and go to college or get married, maybe you can move out to California. You could stay with Bill and Ethyl, that’s grandpa’s brother’s daughter and her husband. They have a farm in Pixley. That tee vee show you like, ‘Petticoat Junction’ is about Pixley. Then you’d have the best of both worlds.”
“I don’t want to farm. That’s the point of going to California, to get away from all this.” Tears filled her eyes and dripped onto the hay. “I wish I could go to sleep tonight and wake up in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or maybe Hollywood. That’s where the action is.” Frustrated with both the conversation and milking, Pepper stood. “My wrists are tired.”
“Okay, hon. You got a right smart in there. I’ll finish up.”
Once again solid streams shot into the bucket, raising thick foam. Pepper sat cross-legged on a bale of alfalfa beside Hootie and rubbed his ears. “I love you, Grandma.”
Startled, Miss Becky stopped. “Why, I love you too, hon.”
Pepper wiped away the dried tears on her cheeks and frowned at a quick series of distant shots. “But I’d love living in California, too.”
Chapter Thirty-seven
I’d seen where the last of the wild dogs were using the little branch out back of the Ordway place to get to the trash barrels behind the school house. The dogs hung around there, knocking the barrels over and eating the scraps us kids threw away. They’d killed a small house dog across the road from the gym only the day before when Miss Dovey let her little Chihuahua mix out to pee.
I knew Grandpa would get my butt if he heard I was shooting up around the school or gym, so I decided to wait for them not far behind the Ordway barn. I left my bike parked beside one of the bur oak trees in the front yard, and climbed through the gate. I didn’t figure Mr. Tony or Miss Samantha would care, since they’d been over to the house and were friends.
Tall summer grass dried upright in the pasture, and polk salad grew higher than my head against the prairie style barn. I’d always liked that barn with its drive-through center hall, horse stalls, and tack rooms under wide gambrel roofs. The tall, cathedral-like interior was held up with rough-cut timbers that supported the open beams. A hay loft covered the front quarter of the building.
The doors were partially open, so I avoided the tall weeds, intending to walk the length of the open hallway to the other end. Light shining through the cracks in the walls lit Mr. Tony’s car he’d backed into the wide hall. There was plenty of room on each side between the car and the stalls. Dust motes filled the bright slabs of vertical beams, and the long unused barn smelled of dirt, instead of hay and manure.
I thought about going on through before I realized I could crack open one of the back doors and use the whole building as a blind. The shallow draw down the slope wasn’t a hundred yards away, and I knew I could hit anything at that range.
Only a couple of minutes later, two wild dogs loped into the open. I’d seen them before and figured they were the last of the pack that hurt Hootie. A lump formed in my throat as I shouldered the rifle, clicked the safety off, and lined up on the largest of the two shaggy mutts. My finger tightened on the trigger and two shots rang out, surprising me. A second later I lowered the rifle and saw the Wilson brothers walk out of the woods.
They stood beside the bodies for a moment, then reloaded their rifles and disappeared. I clicked the safety back on, wiped my leaking eyes, and dang near had a heart attack when I turned into Mr. Tony standing only a couple of feet away.
“Oh!” I was so startled that
the barrel of the .22 swung toward him.
He casually reached out and caught it with one hand. “Hello, Top.”
I quickly lowered the rifle. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tony. I didn’t intend to shoot you.”
He nodded. “Who was that outside?”
“The Wilson boys.”
“What were they shooting at?”
“Dogs, wild dogs.”
“You people sure do shoot a lot.”
“They finished off that pack that almost killed Hootie. Those were the last two, I believe.”
He leaned past me to look through the rear doors. When he did, I noticed a bulge in the pocket of his khakis. It sure looked like a gun to me. He noticed where I was looking. “Yep, I saw someone coming in the barn and came down to check it out. I didn’t know it was you.”
“I left my bike beside a tree in front of the house.”
“I didn’t see it. I came out the back. Do people here usually wander on other people’s property without permission?”
His eyes hardened, and I couldn’t figure out if he was mad or not. “Nossir, but since Grandpa knows nearly everybody, I didn’t think anyone would care…” I drifted off, because I knew it wasn’t right the minute I decided to shoot from the barn. Most folks in Center Springs don’t mind if you hunt in the fields and woods, but going into another man’s barn was wrong.
Mr. Tony scratched his neck. “Well, I won’t say anything to your grandpa, but it might not be smart to come around here without permission. I thought you were a burglar and you might have gotten hurt.”
I couldn’t meet his eyes, so I looked down at the soft, sandy floor. “I won’t do it again, Mr. Tony.
“All right.” He slowly scanned the wide hall between the stalls, and the open trusses overhead. “This is only the second time I’ve been in here.”
“Uncle Cody says this was one of the fanciest barns in the county at one time. Not too many of them have built-in corn cribs and tack rooms.”
“What’s that?”
“This.” I led him back to the front double doors and the small room to the left. The wooden floor in there was about a foot higher than the rest of the barn. It reminded me of a cage with wooden bars going sideways instead of up and down. Through the dusty horizontal slats you could see wooden boxes and barrels stacked around the edges. I opened the door.
Mr. Tony leaned in and poked at some dried up horse harnesses and bridles hanging from nails. He pointed at the outside wall. “What’s that door? It looks too small for adults.”
I almost laughed at the city guy. “It’s there so you can reach inside without going around.”
He grinned. “I guess I don’t know much about your world, Top.”
“You want to see something cool?”
“Sure.”
I went inside and jumped on a small trap door set in the floor. “You know what that is?”
“No, what?”
“A tunnel that comes all the way out here from the house.”
“How do you know that?”
“Me and Pepper were crawling around under there a while back and we found it.”
Mr. Tony shook his head. “And why were you kids under a house?”
I decided to confide in him, because after all, we’d already told Uncle Cody. “We were looking for a way into the house through that hole in your kitchen floor. When we told Uncle Cody, he thought it was pretty funny, because he’d done the same thing with old houses when he was a kid. He told us about a trap door under the staircase that led to the tunnel that comes out right here.”
“Why would anyone want a tunnel from a house to the barn?” He thought for a minute. “Oh, the weather. The farmer could get to his livestock when it was snowing or freezing.”
“Nossir, moonshiners made it.”
His frown told me he wasn’t following. “Back during Prohibition, the Ordways started running short of money, so they built a still in here. They drove cars through, loaded them with whiskey, and drove out pretty as you please.”
“An old tunnel sounds dangerous to me, after all this time.”
“We peeked in with a flashlight. Whoever built it did a great job. It ain’t a dirt tunnel ner-nothin’. The whole thing is lined with solid cedar planks and the supports look like bodark.”
There was that frown again.
“Bodark is a tough tree that grows around here and the wood don’t hardly rot. Most of the fenceposts are made out of it”
“So it’s solid?”
“As a dollar.”
“That’s good to know. I might take a peek at it one of these days.”
“Can me and Pepper go with you? I’d-a gone the first time, but she’s deathly afraid of spiders, so we had to back out.”
“Sure.” He ruffled my hair.
Adults were always doing that, and messing up my Boy’s Regular haircut. I rubbed it back into place. “I guess I need to go now. I’m sorry I bothered you. I only wanted to finish my job.”
“Is your vendetta over?”
“My what?”
“Vendetta. Your blood feud with the dogs.”
“Yessir. I reckon I’m done.”
He studied me for a long moment. “I think you did what you needed to do. Now, why don’t you go back to being a kid again?”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“Try. That time will be gone pretty soon, and you’ll wish for childhood some day.”
“I’d rather be grown up.”
He sighed. “C’mon, kiddo. I’m out of cigarettes. Walk with me to the store and I’ll buy you a Coke.”
“I’d rather have a Dr Pepper.”
He sighed again. “I’ll never understand your lingo.”
Chapter Thirty-eight
I finally convinced Pepper to join me on an archaeological dig late in the day on the last Saturday of the month. The weather still didn’t seem like October. A couple of cool fronts pushed the heat away for a while, but it came back again. A stronger cold front was supposed to be on the way, but it wouldn’t be soon enough for me.
“That sounds about like something you’d want to do,” Pepper complained when I told her my idea while we were sitting in the lawn chairs under the mimosa tree. The humidity wrapped us in a great, sweaty weight.
“You’re starting to remind me of Lucy.”
“Huh?”
I reached over and rubbed Hootie’s ears. “Lucy, from the Peanuts comic strip. You’re getting more and more crabby every day.”
“That’s because I’m getting older. They say hormones change you.”
“What’s hormones?”
“When you change, you know, like growing these boobies.”
My face flushed. I never liked her to talk like that, even when we were alone and the adults weren’t around. “Well, you need to quit complaining so much, and I imagine Miss Becky is getting close to finding a new soap to wash your mouth out.”
“I’m getting too old for that, besides, she’s too busy making preserves and butter to give away.”
“You ain’t too big for a whuppin’ across them new tight Levis of yours. And where did you get that shirt?”
She tugged at the tail. “This is called a peasant shirt. All the cool kids in the city are wearing clothes like this now.”
“Well, just because you dress like one of them hippies, it don’t mean you are one.”
“They have good ideas that’ll change this world for the better.”
“They’re nothin’ but a bunch of long-hairs havin’ sit-ins all day and listening to music and smoking that pot.”
Pepper saw Mr. John pass on the highway at the bottom of the hill. She jumped up from her chair and ran across the yard, waving her hand. “Mr. John!”
He saw her, tapped his brakes, and pulled into our gravel drive
below the house. He stopped in the yard and Pepper leaned in his open passenger window. “Mr. John, will you take us with you to Miss Rachel’s?”
He raised an eyebrow and gave us a wide smile. “What for?”
“We want to meet her, and her kids.”
He tilted his hat back. “Mr. Ned or Miss Becky say it was okay?”
“Sure.”
I shot Pepper a look. Instead of outright lying, I tried a different tact. “We’d like to go with you. Grandpa said there may be Indian artifacts in that draw a ways behind her house. I’d like to see if I can find any.”
“Artifacts?”
I wasn’t sure Mr. John knew what the word meant. I’d only gotten a good grip on it in the last few days myself. “Yessir. Artifacts are stuff left over…”
He finished the thought for me. “…from a long time ago. I know what they are. They’s artifacts all around this country, if you look hard enough. There’s one right over there, across the road.”
I was startled. “How can you see anything from here? All I can see is trees.”
“Yep, and that one old tree right there that grows up about four feet and then bends to the southwest before it straightens up? That’s an Indian sign.”
“Bullsh…” Pepper barely caught herself, remembering who she was talking to. “What do you mean?”
“Miss Pepper, my great-granddaddy told me they’d bend small trees toward good water, like Center Springs down there, so’s others could find it easy. When the trees grew, they kept that shape, and will always point toward water. They’s trees like that all over this county.”
I couldn’t believe we lived next to an Indian signpost all that time and didn’t know it. “You sure?”
“Sure as shootin’! Now, what makes you think they’s artifacts behind Rachel’s house?”
“We heard some men found a few while they were digging up fill dirt back there.”
Mr. John grinned wide. “I kinda believe you, Mr. Top, but Miss Pepper, you want to go and be nosy. Ain’t that it?”
I felt embarrassed, but Pepper whooped. “We can’t put anything over on you, can we?”
Vengeance is Mine Page 19