by JL Bryan
“Um,” Seth said. He took another burning sip, stalling for time, but his father kept looking at him and waiting for an answer. “I don’t know, Dad. So we can squeeze the last few pennies out of the people that are left?”
“No.” He puffed on the cigar, regarding Seth intently. “We could sell out to a national banking chain, if we wanted. Wash our hands of all this bad debt, all the headaches. But we don’t, and we won’t. Because if we did that, one-third of this town—that’s not an exaggeration—would lose their homes or businesses tomorrow. Most of them, within a few years. The people would leave, property values would hit rock bottom, the town would implode. There’d be nothing.
“There’s a lot of leverage in this town, backed by shrinking assets. The Merchants and Farmers Bank keeps the town alive on float, month to month, year to year. We rework credit terms all the time. We take what they can pay.” His dad puffed the cigar for a minute. “Now, tell me why.”
“Because we’re such generous, kindhearted people,” Seth said.
“No.” He flicked his cigar into a big, wrinkled ashtray made out of a rhinoceros foot. “Because we settled this town. My great-great-great-grandfather cut down the giant oak at the crossroads to make way for his farm and store. He left it there as a landmark. All that is forgotten now. You don’t even learn about it in school. No respect for your own history, no knowledge of it. These kids all think everybody came over on the Mayflower. And you remember why we moved you from Grayson Academy to Fallen Oaks High in ninth grade?”
“Because it used to be Barrett Hall,” Seth said. He remembered that talk very well, too, though it had been hot chocolate instead of whiskey. “The school we built for the town children, back in the ye olden days—”
“Back in 1873,” his father said. “The state didn’t take it over until 1941.”
“But nobody at school knows that,” Seth said. “I doubt Principal Harris even knows.”
“This town is our legacy,” his father said. “Whether the town remembers it or not. Whether they think of us as just the mean old loansharks up on the hill. We have a common history together, all the families, that nobody knows.”
“So now we keep the town as a wildlife preserve for drunk rednecks,” Seth said.
“We owe a lot to the families in this town,” his father said. “Their ancestors provided our first fortune, through hard work and diligence. And suffering. My grandfather, J. S. Barrett number one, extracted a lot of blood from a lot of stones. He had his own effective ways of collecting debts.”
“Sounds like a great guy,” Seth said.
“Don’t be sarcastic. We aren’t hunters and killers anymore. We are investors who look for opportunities in emerging technology and international cost disparities. But the world of global capital flow is full of con artists, bad information, and every kind of political intrigue. It takes brilliant minds to cope with the complexity, and with the personalities. You’ll face that across the world. And you’ll still have to carry this town on your back. And that’s why we need to talk.”
Here it comes, Seth thought. He drank more whiskey to steel himself.
“These two girls you’re seeing,” his dad said, and Seth knew the conversation was about to get a lot more uncomfortable. “Look at Ashleigh. Smart, ambitious, she knows how people work. She’s crazy about you. She would be a powerful ally at your side, a person who knows how to carry responsibility. And beautiful, on top of that. God doesn’t make many women like her. You’d be foolish to throw her away.”
Seth thought of Ashleigh, and immediately the pangs began in his heart, and gut, and pelvis. He thought of how her body felt in his hands, how her lips felt against his. He thought of his fingers inside her, while she made Cassie give him head, and he shuddered. He tried to push those feelings down, because if he let them rise, he would ache and burn to touch her, and he’d be calling her in an hour. He wanted to call her now.
“But she’s manipulative,” Seth said. “She’s all about controlling people and making them do what she wants. That’s her talent.”
His dad sighed, then drank, then smoked. “That’s just it, Seth. That’s what you need. Someone manipulative, because there are people to be manipulated. Someone who can be ruthless, because there are ruthless choices to make.”
“I don’t know,” Seth said. “I might meet someone else.”
“That’s true,” his dad said. “But that’s what you need to look for. Good human material. People who can go far with you. Someone like Ashleigh can be useful. And there won’t be many like Ashleigh. Believe me, I’ve met a lot of women. You shouldn’t be so careless with her.
“Now, this Jenny Morton,” his dad continued, and Seth looked down at the buffalo-hide rug. “She’s cute, all right. And she’s from a good family. Small, tragic family, but a good one. Her father’s probably the nicest, most honest, most hardworking man in this town. I’ll bet a thousand dollars she’s the same way.”
“She is!” Seth sat up, finally getting a chance to smile. “That’s what I’m saying. Jenny’s a good person. Ashleigh isn’t.”
“That’s the trouble,” his dad said. “You don’t need nice and honest. You need smart and manipulative. You need a thinker and a ball-breaker. Not a wife who’s just going to be a little pet in your bed. You can have pets on the side, if you need them--but watch for danger there, too. Jenny Morton. What are her plans? Is she going to college?”
“We haven’t talked about that stuff,” Seth said.
“Then she must not be very serious. Is she strong enough to be a Barrett?”
“We’re not even talking about that!” Seth said.
“There’s something else to consider,” he said. He was already refilling his own drink. “When we talk about the future of the family, we don’t just mean finances. There’s also the next generation of children.”
“I know,” Seth said. “So there’s a Jonathan S. Barrett the Fifth, and the Sixth…and one day, Jonathan S. Barretts underwriting farm credit on the moon. And it’s all up to me and my magical Barrett sperm.” The strong drink had loosened Seth up, and he kept talking, when he normally would have stayed quiet. “Why couldn’t Carter have been the Fourth? He was ahead of me. Then we’d be done with it. Why did you wait for me?”
His dad was quiet for a long time. They never discussed Seth’s older brother. “Your mother wanted to name our first son after her father,” his dad said. “Old Carter bailed us out of a lot of tight places here and there. So we had Carter Mayfield Barrett.” He smiled thinly at the name, and poured more whiskey in both their glasses.
“And all you had to sacrifice was your firstborn son, huh?” Seth asked.
“That’s not funny.”
“Who said it was?” Seth drank some of the freshly poured whiskey.
“I don’t appreciate your attitude. These things are important. They matter.”
“I believe you,” Seth replied.
“So now it’s just you,” his dad said, and he was slurring badly now. “That’s my point about breeding. We’ve had a lot of illness in this family, miscarriages, crib death. And bad luck. We don’t pass on well. You need to think about that. Because, to me, Jenny looks awful pale and skinny. That’s not a good type for having kids. You need a woman with strong, healthy breasts and hips. Like Ashleigh.”
“Dad, you’re grossing me out right now,” Seth said. “I’m not kidding.”
“You won’t get strong children out of a weak woman. That’s all I’m saying.” His dad puffed on the cigar. “You want to think like a horse breeder.”
“No, I don’t.”
“So that’s what we need to do,” his father said. “We need to keep hold of Ashleigh. And we need to let good little Jenny Morton go free, so she can find someone more suited to her.”
“Is that your final verdict, Your Honor?” Seth asked. Now, he finally did reach for one of the thick cigars. He struck a match, and coughed several times as he lit it. The smoke was thick and harsh, and S
eth hated smoking.
“That’s what will happen,” his father said.
Seth blew a long plume of smoke in the air.
“But what if I love her?” Seth asked.
“Ashleigh?” his father asked.
“No.”
J. S. Barrett III poured yet another drink, and filled Seth’s cup to the top, emptying out the decades-old bottle.
“Let me tell you something even more true than this tired old horseshit I’ve been repeating from my father and grandfather,” he told Seth. “If you really decide you’re in love with Jenny, then, for God’s sake, don’t damn her to a life in this family. Let her go find some happiness.”
His father sat back in his chair again, drinking deep, like the vintage whiskey was Kool-Aid.
“ Maybe we Barretts ought to go on and die out anyway,” he said. “We seem determined not to survive. Maybe that’s what God wants. Maybe we should let the locusts and the buzzards come and take all we’ve accumulated. What good did it ever do for any of us?”
“Is that our last toast?” Seth raised his glass and swigged. He was completely plastered now. He had to go to the bathroom, but wasn’t sure if he could walk.
“You’re going to do as we say,” his father told him.
“Oh, is that what ‘we’ say?” Seth asked. “You and the ancestral spirits?”
“Yeah, that’s right, Seth.”
“How do you speak to them again? Séance? Drum circle?”
“The grandfathers are in me,” his father said. “By the time I’m dead, they’ll be in you. And I’ll be there with them.”
“Because of little chats like this,” Seth said, with a bitter note in his voice.
“Because of little chats like this,” his father agreed.
Seth drank. He snarled at his father, who did not respond. There was a dark, empty void opening inside him, a painful hollowness, and only one way to fill it. He imagined Ashleigh spread out naked on his bed, wearing only her jewelry, diamonds gleaming on her anklet. Her bare toes. Her thighs. The curly blond patch between her legs. Her navel—and in his mind, that was pierced, too, with another diamond. Her large breasts, her wide pink nipples. Her red fingernails. Her rich blond hair, spilling around her shoulders. Her inviting smile. Her haunting gray eyes.
Seth took the cell phone from his pocket.
“You want me to call Ashleigh?” he asked his father. “Will that end this talk? Will that send you back to Florida?”
“It will, if that’s what you want.”
“It’s what I want.” Seth dialed Ashleigh’s number, and under the eyes of his father and his dead ancestors, he invited her to his house.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jenny received the panicked phone call from Mrs. Janet McNare late in the afternoon, three days before Christmas. Her husband, Ellis McNare, had spent the last two days plowing up and clearing out the weedy, overgrown dirt roads crisscrossing his farm. Yesterday, the tractor had bogged down and quit, and Mr. McNare couldn’t get it started again. This morning, Jenny’s dad had gone out to the McNare farm to have a look and see if he could tinker it back to life.
Her dad had called Jenny from his cell phone and told her there was hope for the tractor, and not to expect him until after sunset. He’d been running to a scrap yard in Vernon Hill to look for parts.
Jenny had put together a thick venison chili, since someone had paid her dad for a plumbing-repair job with ten pounds of frozen deer meat. She browned the meat, then she combined the tomatoes, beans, peppers, cumin, vinegar and some garlic and hot sauce, and left it on a low boil all day.
Then she worked at the dining room table, which was now splattered everywhere with bits of dried clay, on top of the layers of paint streaks and grease stains left by her father. She had a new inspiration. She wanted to sculpt a mask, like the elaborate tribal masks she’d seen in a copy of National Geographic. But she wanted it to represent her, everything hidden inside that she could never let out. She would give it a white glaze, then illustrate it with acrylic paint.
She wanted to start with a cast of her own face, which meant driving to Apple Creek for plaster. Before leaving, she’d picked up the phone and thought about calling Seth. She’d gotten him on his cell phone two days after the party, but he was back to his slow, drugged self, barely able to string words together.
Jenny now knew that Ashleigh did have the power Seth claimed, a power like theirs. She also knew Ashleigh had control over her power and knew how to wield it to her advantage. While Jenny had spent her life trying to restrain and hold back, Ashleigh had played and practiced with her own power. Jenny could dampen Ashleigh’s influence on Seth temporarily, but only when she was touching Seth. But even then, Ashleigh could strike at Jenny through Seth. Jenny was still having erotic dreams about Ashleigh, which left her feeling dirty and disgusted in the morning.
Until she could figure out what to do, Jenny sculpted. First, she slathered her face in petroleum jelly. Then she closed her eyes and covered her own face with strips of paper dipped in the wet plaster. It was a difficult process to do alone—you were really supposed to have someone put it on for you. She worked entirely by sense of touch, layering on more and more of the strips until she had a good, thick mask. Then she waited for a long fifteen minutes, breathing through straws in her nostrils while lying on her back on the dining room floor. The plaster against her face gradually grew powdery and itchy. She carefully peeled it off, then left it to dry in a dish rack on the table.
Jenny checked and stirred the simmering chili, and added some peppers. She went outside to the shed to check Rocky’s food and water, and discovered a light rain had begun to fall. She was washing the plaster from her face, and thinking about running a bath, when the phone rang in the living room.
At first, Mrs. McNare didn’t make much sense at all.
“What’s wrong?” Jenny asked. “Mrs. McNare, slow down.”
“Jenny, it’s your father,” she said. “They were working on the tractor engine, and we don’t know—some of the earth slipped away. Jenny, the tractor fell over, your father is trapped—”
“Call 911!” Jenny screamed.
“We did, honey. They’re coming, but your father, he’s…it’s awful, Jenny. You’d better get here in the next few minutes. You may not get another chance.” Mrs. McNare broke down into sobs, and Jenny slammed down the phone.
She ran in a wide, frantic loop around the house, grabbing the jacket with the gloves stuffed in the pocket, the car keys, her shoes. She ran to the front door, opened it, ran down the steps, opened the door to the Lincoln, then turned around, ran back up the steps, into the living room, and picked up the phone. She dialed Seth’s cell phone.
He didn’t answer on the first try. Or the second.
The third time, he finally picked up the phone.
“Hel-lo?” Seth sounded heavily sedated.
“Who is that?” Ashleigh’s voice asked in the background.
“Seth, it’s Jenny. Where are you right now?”
“It’s Jenny,” Seth told Ashleigh.
“Hang up!” Ashleigh ordered.
“Seth, tell me where you are!” Jenny screamed.
“Huh?” Seth said. “Oh, hey, yeah, we’re just chilling over at Ashleigh’s—”
“Give me that!” Ashleigh shouted, and the phone disconnected.
Jenny was out the door again. She started the Lincoln, kicked up spatters of mud as she raced backward out of the driveway, then squealed as she straightened out on the paved road, leaving smoldering rubber tracks behind her. Jenny stomped the accelerator, swerving wildly to pass a slow pick-up truck, running through stop signs. When she crossed through town, she ran the red light, causing a truck to swerve aside and honk.
The sky darkened and the rain picked up. Hail stones pelted the Lincoln’s roof, hood and windshield. Jenny accelerated into the storm, hoping the tires could handle the running mud and the slick road.
She flew across town, to the west s
ide subdivision where the Goodlings lived. Jenny jumped the curb on her way to Ashleigh’s driveway, then squealed to a stop, turning the car slantwise. She barely avoided the rear bumper of Mrs. Goodling’s Chrysler Suburban.
Jenny jumped from the car, leaving the door open. Rain and hail pelted her as she ran up the cobblestone walk to the tall peach-and-yellow house with the big picture windows. Electric candles glowed in every window. In the front yard was an entire lighted Nativity scene, complete with life-size glowing plastic wise men and shepherds, and even electric sheep.
She dropped her jacket on the front porch and pushed open the front door without knocking. Her shoes squished out water with every step across the foyer.
“Who’s that?” Dr. Goodling emerged from the kitchen, trailed by Mrs. Goodling in a cooking apron that showed a cartoon Jesus holding a cartoon Fallen Oak Baptist Church in his hands and smiling down on it. The apron also had the Fallen Oak Baptist logo and web address. They were part of a limited series made for a fundraiser bake sale three years ago, available for a suggested donation of only $40.
“Where is Seth?” Jenny snapped.
“I imagined he’s up in the media room with the other kids,” Dr. Goodling said. “Now, you don’t just come barging into my house, dripping water everywhere—”
Jenny stripped off her sweatshirt and left it like a wet towel on the foyer floor. She ran upstairs in only her small tank top, with a maximum amount of skin exposed.
“What on Earth?” Mrs. Goodling gasped. “Who is that?”
“I think it’s the druggie girl from the Barrett party,” Dr. Goodling said.
Jenny ran along the upstairs hall, pushing open doors to every room until she found the one where Seth, Ashleigh, Cassie and Neesha watched a movie on a big screen in a darkened room. Cassie and Neesha swung in the hanging chairs, while Seth lay on the couch with his head in Ashleigh’s lap. Ashleigh’s jeans were down to her knees, so that his head rested on her panties, pulling Ashleigh-energy from her bare thighs.