by Austin Boyd
“False hopes,” Preacher reiterated, pushing his wife into the backseat. “Face the facts, Culpeper. Angus is dead. That girl’s life on this farm is over. It’s time to move on.”
Pastor Culpeper shook his head. “The word that comes to mind is grace, Phillip. Wouldn’t hurt you to show a little. Like now.”
Preacher tarried at the rear door, shrugged, and then ducked into the car.
In the silence of the tense moments that followed, Laura Ann watched her surly uncle kick frozen clods with his dress shoes where he stood in the drive beyond the fence. The frozen red-brown mud, a palette of country color, reminded her of earlier times this very day. Red clay, the soil of a fresh-dug grave, steaming in the bitter afternoon air at Preacher’s church in Alma. The brown of Daddy’s simple casket, lowered into the ground he’d loved so much.
“Don’t mind them,” Auntie Rose pleaded, her eyes glistening. She reached out and laid a hand on Laura Ann’s forearm. “But I’m worried about you, sweetheart. Not for now — I mean, I know you have food and transportation for a while, but what about — “
“The bank?” Laura Ann interrupted.
Auntie Rose nodded. A solid band of grey streaked the middle of the part through Auntie’s brown hair, one of those odd hygiene items that sent Uncle Jack into a rage. If he saw it, he’d drag her from the porch, berating her for “skunk stripes.” Laura Ann reached up and adjusted Auntie’s hat, pulling it down a bit in the front to save her a repeat embarrassment. Auntie Rose’s lips pursed in her look of submissive resignation, a silent “thank you.”
“I have a backup.” Laura Ann pulled her aunt close, shielding her only blood relative against the bitter chill of Christmas Eve. “You’ll see,” she added in a whisper, lest Uncle Jack hear. “Pastor Culpeper’s right. God will provide.”
Auntie Rose released Laura Ann’s hands and took her in a tight hug. She held on as if she’d never let go, perhaps struggling to hang on to the only home she’d ever loved. Laura Ann gripped her tight, watching Uncle Jack from over Rose’s shoulder as her aunt clung to her, a prolonged hug that cried out, “Please, let me stay.”
The moment wouldn’t last. Preacher said something to Uncle Jack that she couldn’t hear. His countenance soured and he dropped a rock, then stormed through the fence gate, headed straight for Auntie Rose. As he approached, a quiet young man to Laura Ann’s left stepped forward, planting himself in Uncle Jack’s way.
“You’re not on duty, Ian,” Uncle Jack said.
Ian locked eyes with Uncle Jack. “Far as you’re concerned, I am. Don’t try something you’d regret, Mr. Harris.”
Laura Ann could see the pulse pounding in Ian’s neck, only a few feet away. Yet he seemed so calm, an impenetrable barrier between Auntie Rose and her thundering husband. How many years had she watched him stand up for underdogs in class or in town? Now her friend stood up for Auntie Rose. And for her.
Lowering his gaze, face red, Uncle Jack spun about, kicking at the air, then walked straight to his car. He lingered at the driver’s door, half-open, nearly yelling his next words. “It’s a sad day, Preacher, when a husband’s authority is undermined this way. Don’t you think?”
Laura Ann watched Preacher’s head bob up and down. Muffled by the closed door of the car, only one word stood out. “Sad.”
Jack took his seat in the car. Moments later, the horn blared—Jack’s first line of defense when he didn’t get his way.
“Let him go,” Laura Ann begged. “I’ll drive you home later.”
“You know Jack,” Auntie Rose replied with a sniffle, dabbing her nose with a crumpled napkin. She smiled a pasted-on “See? I’m happy!” resignation that Laura Ann often saw below a bloodied cheek or swollen eye.
“You don’t have to leave, Auntie Rose. This is your home too. Please. Stay a while.”
Rose shook her head. Her chin quivering, she pushed away. She squeezed the hands of the Culpepers, and Ian, the young lawman who’d taken a stand. The shake of her head as she left screamed stories of suffering, of betrayal and abuse.
The car door slammed behind her, and chunks of slag flew out from behind Uncle Jack’s wheels when he spun away. Pamela put an arm around Laura Ann as they watched the sedan make its way across the pasture and up a frozen hill in the darkness.
Ian turned to face them as a sense of calm returned. “I’m sorry it came to this, Laura Ann. You didn’t deserve that. Especially not today.”
“I’m not sorry,” she replied. “You saw my life for what it is. All of you did. But thanks for stepping in.”
She caught Ian’s eye, and he nodded, with the hint of a smile. “Call me if you need anything. Promise?” His eyes spoke words of comfort he’d left unsaid.
“I will,” she replied.
Ian’s smile faded with his next words. “Now that your dad’s not here to stand up for her, I’m afraid Rose won’t have a day of peace.”
Laura Ann folded her arms against the chill and turned to watch the last glimmer of red lights heading over the ridge. “No.” She shook her head. “She won’t. And neither will I.”
DECEMBER 25
Cows’ breath fogged the air inside the barn where the big creatures pushed their heads into feed stalls, maneuvering for first position to reach Laura Ann and a fresh flake of hay. Oblivious to her pain, two-dozen Black Angus woke to a new day like they did every winter morn, pushing and shoving for their five a.m. feed. Warm breath spewed damp clouds in the bitter cold predawn air of Christmas Day.
Laura Ann took her time as she tore at the hay from her perch above the cattle in the loft, holding each section of the bale to her face before she dropped it to hungry beasts. She breathed in memories of summer. Clover, dried in crisp pale-green shamrocks, flecked the bale with its sweet flesh, a cow dessert. Straws of timothy—cow salad — held the bales together with their pithy shoots, miniature stalks the grass equivalent of sugar cane. Every bale carried Daddy’s touch. From the first fertilizer and lime application early in the season, to the roaring slice and crush of the mower-conditioner in June, Daddy crisscrossed that pasture time and again, year after year, to prepare the meal she would serve each morning all winter long. Love, laid up in long grassy bales, fed Angus beef stock, their second-best source of income after the tobacco.
Every bale carried her touch too. She and Daddy put up hay the “old way,” square bales plopped one by one from the back of an old red McCormick baler, forty-pound bundles of hay thrown by Daddy up to her on the wagon, then stacked in the barn by Laura Ann. Each summer she pitched as many as ten thousand bales with Daddy, laboring in barns hot as ovens, sweat drenching her shirt and layered in the prickly grime of hay dust. Hay elevators creaked over rusty rails, bearing bales from wagon to Laura Ann, where she stacked for hours, a girl piling up forty-pound blocks. Those were summers filled with flies, barn snakes, mice, aching shoulders, blistered hands — and Daddy, encouraging her with the daily reminder that “hard work is the essence of the good life.”
Laura Ann held another flake of summer above jostling black heads, its color stopping her: the dry crumbling remains of a pasture flower. Red pain. In it she saw Daddy, pitching a bale to her in August, his last day throwing hay. The bale missed the wagon and he fell, knees buried in fresh-cut grass, bent over in a horrible cough.
Laura Ann dropped the hay, tumbling into the face of a heifer that pressed against bovine sisters for a meal. She stared at her hands, the red of Daddy’s blood on her fingers a vivid memory. Like the crimson that splattered his hands and mouth that day in the hay pasture when they first met his disease. It started that afternoon, in the dog days of summer. Daddy’s end.
Minutes later, she shoveled more feed to swollen mothers who would drop calves within weeks. Corn, more of Daddy’s labor, nurtured new life in a circle she’d been part of for twenty years. She shoveled from bins that stood brimful with brilliant yellow cobs, laden by a father who wheezed through every load they’d gathered this past September. Nights were shorter t
hen, with no strength for talk, unlike the years of her past with a vigorous daddy who loved their evenings together after a full day in the field and wood shop. Nights spent reading stories to each other from dozens of books, their favorite escape.
A cat nudged her leg, drawing her back from the memory. Black purring nuzzled against her ankle. Laura Ann shoveled cobs to another waiting mouth, then took the barn cat in her arms, one of a dozen pets she’d never named. Arched in a bony inverted “U,” the cat purred as she stroked black fur, her hand raising crackles of static as she rubbed from head to tail. The barn cat pushed its head between her arm and side, seeking some warmth in the folds of a dusty brown barn coat, layered in hay dust from a thousand cold mornings in the loft.
September had transitioned from the gathering colors of fall and bounty of yellow corn, to the beige of hospital corridors, pale blue of doctors’ scrubs, and the white of paper. Sheaves of paper. Documents to sign, authorizations to treat sickness that might recur, waivers, addresses, and always — promises to pay. “No insurance?” a voice asked nearly every day, incredulous. Day by day, she bore the epitome of hospital shame: a patient without health insurance. Too poor to buy a policy, unqualified for Medicaid because they owned a farm. Day by day, Daddy fought the disease while she battled the healthcare bureaucracy.
Laura Ann set the cat down and walked along the feed trough, scratching heads. Dusty and spattered in dried mud, the Angus acknowledged her with a brief look up or the wink of a wet eye, and then crunched away on the next cob or flake of dry grass. She dove her fingers into warm thick hair between black ears, scratching hard, working her fingertips down long faces toward wet dripping noses.
“Merry Christmas,” she wished each cow as she made her way along the two dozen pregnant mothers, the last of Daddy’s once proud herd. The fog of bovine breath enveloped her in a cow cloud as she ran her hands over massive black foreheads with hair dense as carpet, this her ritual morning goodbye.
Laura Ann knelt in the living room at the base of their meager Yule tree. Despite the water in the feed bucket that held the tree, fragrant needles cascaded to the floor at her touch. Death found its way into every facet of Christmas.
Three packages waited under the tinsel and lights, wrapped in paper she’d horded each year and stored for future gift opportunities. Three packages — but only one she’d wrapped herself. Laura Ann’s hand lingered at the first parcel. Pamela’s handwriting adorned two of the gifts, part of her helping way. Weeks before his slide into the end, with Pamela’s help, Daddy took the time to make sure his daughter had something waiting under the tree.
Laura Ann took the first gift, a thick heavy one. A perfect bow, creased paper folds, and neat tape cuts were Pamela’s signature wrapping. No doubt she’d prepared the gift while sitting with Daddy through long painful days while Laura Ann worked the farm.
She released the bow and folded it with the ribbon in a pile, her annual rite of thrift. Dissecting the tape joint like a surgeon, she disassembled the paper, determined to save it for yet another year. This wrapping was holy, the dressing on her last gift from him.
The heft of the gift, and the embossing she felt below the paper, left no doubt as to the contents. She slipped the wrapping free to expose this year’s dream, a leather-bound copy of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Her lifelong favorite, three precious books bound in one.
Tears welled as she opened the book to the flyleaf, fingers running down the sharp edge of leather that defined the binding. She’d longed for this book, a sacrifice too dear in their rough months making medical payments and sustaining life. Daddy’s scrawl adorned the first page and Laura Ann choked, closing the cover for a moment to seal him in her treasured gift.
He called to her, reminiscences of strong hands holding her through long cries about clueless boys or the pain inflicted by petty girls. His memory beckoned her to open and read. She lifted the cover of the trilogy a second time, anxious for Daddy’s resurrection on the page. Shaky letters penned by an unsteady hand adorned the leaf.
Dear Laura Ann,
Every word of this book took us on adventures to strange new places when we read together. I will always treasure the gift that God gave me in you, my best friend.
Keep reading, Peppermint.
Laura Ann drew the book to her, closing it slowly as she inhaled the perfume of ink and leather binding. She held Daddy’s favorite escape from farming — and her imagination quest — bound up in one volume. Within these pages lived their nightly travels together, experiences in distant lands, in wonder at the fantastic exploits of hobbits, warlords, dwarves, and elves.
The second package beckoned her. Wrapped in the colored newsprint of a Wheeling News Register Sunday comics, and bound with baling twine, this would have been one that Daddy wrapped — his annual joke about her “ridiculous thrift with wrapping paper.” She straightened up and pulled the second parcel into her lap, tugging at coarse hemp wrapped about it, then curling the baling twine into a ball.
A second leather-bound book fell open, this one a journal filled with blank lined pages. An envelope dropped on the floor with her name penned on the front in Daddy’s hand. It was a steady cursive, handwriting like the kind he’d used before the bedridden phase of his sickness. Laura Ann picked up the envelope and pulled out a simple card. The words stole her heart.
Write me letters, Laura Ann, and save them for my grandchildren.
I love you.
Dad
CHAPTER 3
Cold gripped the motor of the old pickup, icy tendrils wrapped around cylinders that screamed their complaint when she engaged the ignition. After feeding the cows, she’d planned to take a ride around her land. Not now. Laura Ann kept her eyes focused on a truck parked on the ridge above the farm and the trespasser who stood beside it. Poachers. Her ears pricked for the telltale moment when she needed to pump the accelerator and urge the old truck to life.
“Please start!”
As the first cough of an engaging motor gave her hope, she saw a man move back toward the vehicle. In the rising sun she could see better now. A blue pickup.
Uncle Jack?
Before her engine warmed to a semblance of reliability, the trespasser was on the move. He’d heard her truck start, no doubt, and had the advantage. She determined to catch him.
Laura Ann jammed the truck into first gear and broke the tires free of their frozen grip in red clay. As she sped up the hill, the mysterious pickup pulled out of sight. A blue truck, for certain. If it was Uncle Jack, he’d never wait on her, and if confronted, he’d never admit to visiting the farm on Christmas morning. That was his way. Once she heard him refer to his little lapses in honesty as “white lies.” “Don’t hurt nobody,” he’d said.
She bounced up the farm road toward the top of the pasture, frozen ruts jarring the ride as tires dropped into steel-like gullies, then jerked back out again. Minutes after the trespasser pulled away, she passed the spot where melted snow showed in a perfect rectangle beneath the missing warmth. Five minutes further down the road, she’d driven the length of The Jug, their unique farm locale in the midst of a creek-bound island. But no sign of the intruder, and no proof it was her uncle.
Laura Ann gave up the chase at the low water crossing, the creek’s unique geography where it doubled back on itself. Crushed white ice in frozen potholes proved the passage of the visitor. Undisturbed snow meant that no one pulled off the farm road into the wood to avoid her. The more she thought on it, she was sure. It was Uncle Jack’s gaudy Ford, the only showroom-new electric-blue vehicle in a county full of dented red or white pickups.
Laura Ann stopped when she reached the creek and turned off the ignition. Frigid greenish-grey water tumbled along the Middle Island Creek, flowing around her farm, the creek’s largest island. She walked out on the low water bridge where the creek turned hard to her right. Three miles downstream, it would pass the farmhouse. Four miles farther, after its loop about their unique hilly island known as “The
Jug,” the stream would return to a place only twenty yards to her left, but thirteen feet lower in elevation. Laura Ann moved to the downstream edge of the bridge and sat on mud-stained ancient concrete, watching icy water wind its way to the tiny hamlet of Middlebourne, two miles away.
How many times had she floated this loop of the creek? A hundred? She’d toss hay for a day in the summer, or work with Daddy in the shop, then pull the canoe into the stream. Pick any spot on the farm to start, go downstream, and eventually she had only to portage the low water crossing and jump to the upstream portion and float back to her point of origin. An endless circle of solo canoeing, the ultimate solitude.
Here sat once-proud milldams over two hundred years ago. Generations of water wheels churned in this perfect place for waterpower, each destroyed by flood and rebuilt by sturdy folk. Daddy’s people. The McGehees, and the Greggs who came before them to build those mills, were the stuff of lore, hidden in time. All of them — along with their industrious handiwork — had long since departed. Now, muddy brown logs jammed themselves into disheveled piles above the deep hole to her left, a churning hairpin turn in the creek that gathered flood trash when waters raged over the concrete crossing. Like matchsticks piled up by a wet hand, they endured wintry cold, waiting on spring and the next flood. Every curve in the Middle Island had its share of logjams, a sight so commonplace that it never turned a head.
Seated on the concrete dam, Laura Ann pulled her legs up close, wrapping her arms about her shins. The trespasser forgotten, she buried her face into her knees, desperate to shut out the world, determined to bottle up her pain. Daddy’s passing only added to her guilt, a discomfort so deep and so sharp that it would not pass.
Words bubbled up in the cauldron she’d sealed inside. Daddy’s words about “letters to my grandchildren.” Preacher Armstrong’s words, Sunday after Sunday — and again last night — stern warnings that screamed “don’t mess with God’s design!” And Pastor Culpeper, in his caring way, reminding her at the funeral that “the Lord will provide.” But here she sat, huddled against the cold, pinned in a desperate corner of her own making, her secret far too terrible to share.