by Brad Smith
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Acknowledgments
Copyright
For Gibby and Hawk
1
It was fall when they let him out. The first frost was a week gone, and the air was at once sharp and clean with the passing of summer and cool and gray with the promise of the season to come. The soybeans in Holden County were mostly harvested, a poor crop due to the long, wet spring and the short, dry summer, and the farmers were trying to get the corn off before the November rains. It was either that or wait until freeze-up, run the combines in the ice and the snow.
Ray Dokes shed his orange prison overalls like a copperhead sheds its skin, walked out of the detention center in Niagara into sunlight, the day cold and clear, the sky bluer outside the fence than within, the air cleaner, somehow worthier even of breath. He stood on the steps outside, the sun on his face and this new morning before him.
He lit a cigarette and found the blue Ford pickup across the lot.
Pete Culpepper was behind the wheel of the truck, smoking a Marlboro nonfilter and listening to the country music station out of Toronto. Or at least what was passed off as country these days—pop singers looking more like lap dancers and fashion models than real country. If old Hank hadn’t died in the back of that limo, he’d have shot himself after a hard look and a short listen to this bunch.
Pete pushed back his Stetson with his thumb and nodded at Ray—who tossed his bag in the back and climbed in—as if maybe Ray had been gone a couple days instead of a couple years; then Pete popped the truck into low gear and started off. Ray reached over and turned the radio off and rolled down the window, hung his right arm out over the door of the truck, flicked the ash from his smoke.
“How are you, Pete?”
“I’m all right. What about you?”
“Never better.”
They took Route 20 west, through familiar ground, farm country interrupted by small towns and hamlets, the odd strip mall marring the landscape, speaking to what some would refer to as progress. There were new houses, gas stations, co-ops. Seems there’d been some prosperity after all, although you’d never know it reading the papers inside.
They entered Holden County outside of Middleburg. Ray glanced over to see the old Texan watching him instead of the road.
“You feel like the prodigal?”
“Not one bit,” Ray said.
“Good thing,” Pete said. “I wasn’t fixin’ to kill no calf anyhow.”
They drove through the hamlet of Cook’s Station. Ray watched as Pete double-clutched and punched the truck into second gear, checking his West Coast mirrors as he did. Pete liked to drive the pickup as if it was an eighteen-wheeler.
“You got some gray in your hair,” Pete said.
“So have you.”
“I’m supposed to. I’m old. What’re you—forty?”
“Not yet, Pete. But I’m getting there.”
They took the turnoff at the town line, headed north on the paved road. Ray turned and had a good look as they passed Homer Parr’s place. There was a blue sedan in the driveway, and the grass needed cutting. The flag was up on the mailbox.
“She’s still there,” Pete said as they passed.
Ray nodded at the information. He wasn’t going to ask about her, but he was glad to have heard just the same.
They topped the crest of the road a mile short of their destination. From that height Ray could see a series of subdivisions, like a nasty urban rash, scattered across the landscape to the west.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“That’s Guelph,” Pete told him.
“Goddamn.”
“Yup. Civilization crowdin’ me.”
Ray looked at the rows of houses in the distance, their roof lines identical right down to the color of the shingles, stretched across the horizon like dominoes.
“What else have I missed?”
Pete reached over and turned the radio back on, punched a button, and got Lightfoot lamenting on some early morning precipitation. A lucky break—another of those pretty boys, and Ray might have pressed him for an answer.
* * *
It was noon when they reached Pete’s farm. The field in front of the barn was cut, the hay lying in thin windrows, as sparse as a spinster’s prospects.
“You baling hay this time of year?” Ray asked.
“Third cut,” Pete said. “First two were so bad I had no choice.”
“This one don’t look like a world beater.”
The house sat back a good two hundred yards from the road. Left and to the rear was a machinery shed of steel siding fading red to gray under a ribbed galvanized roof. The main barn was across the yard to the right; the building was large and hip-roofed, in decent repair although its walls and roof aspired to no color at all save that of pine planking and cedar shingles weathered by decades of just plain being there. There was a split-rail corral off the east end of the barn. The corral was empty, although Ray, when he got out of the truck, knew there were horses on the premises. He couldn’t hear them, but he could smell them and somehow he could feel them.
The smokehouse was still standing, although the door was gone completely and it had been a lot of years since anyone had cured a ham inside. The building was constructed of red brick, and when Ray looked closely he could still make out the faint outline on the wall—a roughly painted figure of a right-handed batter with a rectangle alongside that represented the strike zone. Pete Culpepper had painted the wall when Ray was fourteen, after Ray had broken most of the boards out of the end of the barn. Now Ray looked at the faded batter and thought about the countless balls he’d fired at the wall. Fastballs inside and breaking stuff away, the balls growing soft as pulp from the constant pounding on the brick.
The old pump was still there too, atop the drilled well. The pump was coincidentally located sixty feet from the smokehouse. Ray had built a pitching mound alongside, and it was mostly gone now, worn away by the years. The pump had a broken hockey stick for a handle, and the water, when pumped, fell into an ancient clawfoot bathtub.
The house itself was a fieldstone story and a half built in the late 1800s and in need of some cosmetic attention. The wooden sashes of the windows were cracked, the paint flaking away to nothing, and the porch roof had a dip in it that resembled a swayback horse. There were a couple of ladder-back chairs on the porch and a red refrigerator, which Ray had last seen in the kitchen. Pete’s Walker hound was stretched out between the fridge and the chairs, and he raised his head and blinked sleepily as they approached.
They went into the house, the old hound at their heels. In the kitchen Ray leaned down to rub the dog’s ears, the animal groaning with pleasure at the attention; then he headed to the rear staircase—there were two in the house—and carried his bag upstairs to
his room.
The bed was made, and the room had been cleaned—at least as much as a crusty old man with little interest in housecleaning could manage. Ray tossed his bag on the bed and looked out the window. There was a bush lot at the back of the farm, and between the house and the bush the fields were planted with corn. The hardwoods in the bush were just beginning to turn color, a flash of red or yellow dispersed indiscriminately among the green.
Ray’s ball glove and Detroit Tigers’ cap were on a shelf where he’d left them. He set the cap on his head and went back downstairs.
“You wanna beer?” Pete asked when Ray walked into the kitchen. He’d already opened two bottles of Old Vienna. “All I got is this Canadian stuff.”
“Imagine that, us being in Canada and all.”
Pete sat across the table, flopped his hat in the chair beside, and took a long drink of beer. Ray sipped at his and adjusted the ball cap on his head. Cold beer was one of the things he’d dreamed about these past two years, that and firm breasts, smooth buttocks, thick steaks, clam chowder, Scotch on the rocks. The beer in his hand was all right, but just all right. Like everything else as you got older, the getting never seemed to measure up to the anticipating.
“So how was it?” Pete asked, like Ray knew he would.
“Jail?” Ray asked, and he considered the question. “Well, it was like jail. It was exactly like jail.”
“Anybody give you a hard time in there?”
“Not like they gave me out here.”
Pete drank his beer, half gone already, looked at the younger man across the table, the table they’d sat at a thousand times before. A thousand beers like these, a thousand silences like this, a million words in between.
“Where’d you get the scar?” he asked.
“Defending my honor,” Ray told him, and he looked out the window and saw the years settle on the farm like darkness settles on a long and honest day.
2
Etta stopped on her way out of town and bought the largest take-out coffee that Tim Horton’s would sell her without a prescription. Even with the caffeine kick, her eyes were heavy as she drove. It had been a slow night at the hospital, and she found that the shifts when she sat around doing nothing were more wearying than the hectic nights when there were babies to birth, drunks to stitch, crazies to inject.
She drank the coffee and concentrated on the meandering center line. It wasn’t as if she could go home and flop into bed like a normal person. But then, Etta had long ago abandoned any hope of living a normal life. In truth, it wasn’t something she aspired to or desired.
It was a cold fall morning—she’d seen her breath in the air as she walked across the hospital parking lot—and she drove with the odd combination of the heater on to keep her warm, and the window down to keep her awake. It was cold enough that the chimneys of the farmhouses on her road trailed wood smoke in the early morning air. Cold enough that the sheep on the McKellar place were bunched together in the lee of the pine grove of the pasture field.
And too cold for her father to be sitting on the side porch in his underwear. But that’s where she found him.
He didn’t seem to notice the chattering of his own teeth as she led him into the kitchen and sat him down. He was cranky and looking for a fight, glaring across the room as Etta took her coat off and hung it on the hook inside the door.
“Where the hell you been all night?”
Etta looked down at her scrubs. “Ballroom dancing,” she told him. “Want some breakfast?”
She went up to his room and brought down pants and a shirt and socks and forced him into them, and then she made coffee and gave him a cup while she scrambled eggs and fried some leftover ham from the night before.
“Did Jim do the milking?” he asked while she cooked.
She glanced over; he was sipping the coffee with an unsteady hand, watching out the window toward the barn. Jim had been their hired hand when Etta was growing up. He’d been dead now maybe ten years.
“Yeah, Jim did the milking,” she told him, setting his breakfast in front of him.
She showered and changed while he ate. Then she went into his room and jotted down the names of the various prescriptions there. He was seeing a new doctor later that morning and she wanted to be sure of everything he’d been taking.
She was hoping for some answers today. Or rather, she was hoping for some different answers today. She still wasn’t convinced of his specific ailment. She was confused by the fact that he had good days and bad. On the bad days he was a virtual child; on the good he appeared to be as healthy mentally as he’d ever been, although she reminded herself that that was a qualified statement if ever there was one. She clung to the hope that he—with his short-term memory loss and frequent returns to normal behavior—was suffering from some form of dementia other than Alzheimer’s. His chronic alcohol abuse could also point to this, she’d discovered, and as such might mean that his condition was treatable.
Now she sat on his bed and looked out the dormer window to the outbuildings and the fields beyond. The farm had fallen into great disrepair in recent years. There were leaky roofs and sunken foundations, fallen fences and rusted equipment. Homer had never been any great shakes as a farmer in his salad days, and now that his mind was beginning to slide into oblivion it only seemed natural that the farm was following suit.
Etta had moved home three years earlier, and she’d been pretending to be a farmer ever since. Without the proper equipment, though, she’d been forced to hire most work out, and the numbers weren’t really supporting the effort. She’d recently taken a job as a nurse’s aide at the hospital, three shifts a week, twelve hours each, and the unusual hours had required some adjustment to her inner clock.
What she hadn’t anticipated, moving back, was the strange and strong attachment she’d developed for the farm itself. Growing up, she’d rarely considered the land as anything but acreage. In spite of the fact that her family had been here for more than a hundred years, it had never occurred to her that that might account for anything. Hell, everybody had to be somewhere. She had, in fits and starts, begun the long and painstaking task of bringing the place back from the brink. So far, her efforts had manifested themselves in small ways, painting and caulking, cutting grass and raking leaves. Her meager funds and her schedule, at work and with her father, left her with few resources, fiscal and physical, to accomplish much more at this time. Still, the deterioration of the place weighed heavily on her mind.
She suspected that she was equating the farm’s state with her father’s. If she could restore the place to its—if not magnificent then competent—past, then perhaps the same could be available for her father. It was an absurd notion, she knew, but still she couldn’t shake it.
His doctor’s appointment was at nine—just enough time to get him showered and dressed, if he was cooperative. When she went downstairs he was sitting stock-still in his chair, and—except for the rivulet of egg yolk on his whiskered chin—his breakfast was gone. She washed the dishes quickly and left them in the drainer to dry.
“Time to get you in the shower, Dad.”
“I just had a bath.”
“That was yesterday.”
“Liar.”
“I’m not a liar,” she told him. “You have an appointment with Doctor Nichols. You have to shower and shave,” she added, throwing the shave in as a bargaining point.
“No.”
“You have to shower and shave.”
“I’ll shower, but I’m not gonna shave.”
“Okay,” she said quickly. She turned and started to lead the way to the bathroom, hoping to get him moving while the thought was still fresh in his brain.
“But first I want my breakfast.”
* * *
It was a long morning at the medical center. First they had to fill out forms, and then they had to wait, and then there were the standard tests for Homer to undergo—tests that he’d been through before but that the new doctor wanted to
administer firsthand. So Homer did the thirty questions again, and he did the memory tests, and he had his heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, ears, eyes, and throat prodded and poked and listened to and studied. Etta was in the examining room for some of it and exiled to the waiting room for the rest. Of course, when all was said and done, more was said than done, and they were sent home with the assurance that they’d hear back from the doctor in a few days.
Homer was tired from all this examining, and when they got back to the farm he lay down on the couch and was asleep in a heartbeat. Etta thought briefly of napping herself, but she found that she wasn’t in the least tired. She changed her clothes and retrieved a Swede saw from the shed and then walked down to the orchard.
She’d mounted a campaign the past couple of years to bring the apple trees back from the brink and she had, this fall, experienced at least enough success to convince herself to carry on. There were branches that were weak sisters, though, and now she went to work culling them, using a Swede saw, which she’d bought at Lee’s Hardware a year ago, and her grandfather’s ancient hatchet, quite possibly purchased at the same store a few decades earlier.
The work quickly warmed her in spite of the cold autumn breeze. She made a pile of the limbs in the corner of the orchard along the fencerow. A friend of Homer’s would pick them up later—he used apple chips in his smoker, and one day soon Etta would be repaid with a cured salmon or two.
She lost herself in the menial labor, humming tunelessly as she trimmed and toted and stacked. It was midafternoon when she finished up. Kneeling to place the last of the dead wood on the pile she realized that she was tired at last—it seemed that fatigue had crept up on her.
When she straightened and turned toward the house, Sonny Stanton was standing there, directly in her path.
“Jesus!” she exclaimed.
Sonny smiled at her but he didn’t speak. He had his long hair tied back and was wearing jeans and a leather coat. He had on ugly aviator sunglasses, and she couldn’t see his eyes. His cane was in his hand.
Etta’s heart was pounding. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”