Dooley laughed. ‘No way.’
‘I hope you’ll sing again.’
‘I don’t know. That part of my life seems finished. I sing with the truck radio. That’s a pretty cool way to do it, all that great backup. Sometimes Lace and I sing together in the truck.’
‘Lace says she can’t sing, but she sounded fine this morning.’
Dooley grinned. ‘She’s a fun singer. Sort of a female Bob Dylan, she says.’ They stopped by the cattle gate and leaned on the fence, looking out to the tree line and the heifers.
‘So, Dad. Some pretty profound news.’
‘I’m a fan of profound news.’
Dooley grinned. ‘Pooh wants to be a preacher.’
He was what the Brits call gobsmacked. ‘Our Pooh?’
‘Our Pooh. He doesn’t know what denomination. He just knows he wants to go into the ministry, and wonders if you’d talk to him about it. I think he’s had what you say is a call.’
He crossed himself, happy. So out of what Jefferson described as the sundered nest had come a vet, an engineer, a crack pool player, and now possibly a servant of God. An amazement, all of it.
‘Then there’s Jessie. She’s in trouble, Dad. I don’t know all the details, but pharmaceuticals are involved and it’s not good. Pooh says she needs help, and Mom and Buck don’t know what to do. Pooh says Mom won’t call you because you’ve been the one who had to bail us all out.’
‘You know who did the bailouts.’ What timing. Father Brad and his famous mash-up for teen girls in a downward spiral—this year, snow camping, if they got any snow.
‘Let’s pray about it. You told me not long ago that it’s hard to remember to pray. How’s that going?’
‘Spotty. I usually remember to thank him, but mostly I forget to ask.’
‘Takes practice. A long obedience in the same direction, as Nietzsche said.’
They turned toward the house, walking along the fence line. Choo-Choo spotted them and came at a trot.
‘That’s a bull and a half.’
‘He’s th’ man,’ said Dooley. ‘Beautiful coloration. Comes from a recessive red gene carried by the black breed. One in four calves—red. Since red to red breeds true, that’s what we’re lookin’ for in th’ spring.’
‘How’s it going at the clinic?’
‘We’ve got a plumbing problem. Work starts tomorrow; things will be a mess for a few weeks. A prayer reminder for sure.’
‘Can we help?’
‘We’ve got it covered, thanks.’
We’ve got it covered. It felt good to say that, so he said it again. ‘We’ve got it covered.’
‘Well done.’
He liked hearing that, too.
• • •
He and Jack had gone up to Lace’s studio to move a chair down to the kitchen.
‘Look, Dad!’
Jack was always buzzed about the height of the attic studio and the size of things below. ‘There’s Mom with th’ ladies, they’re talkin’ to th’ cows.’
Choo-Choo was in the chill pen, ready for a heifer coming their way this evening. He could have sold a couple of straws, but Fred Lewis was a farmer who liked getting it done old school. ‘Nature’s way,’ said Fred, chewing a cud of tobacco. ‘That’s th’ best way.’
Lace and Kim and Irene were walking toward the house, he could hear the faint murmur of their conversation through the open window, and his wife’s laughter. There were no words for the love he felt for her, and for his son, a love so deep it was nearly painful.
When would he start believing all this was real? But if the current fiasco hadn’t made their life real, what would?
• • •
She ran into the kitchen. The room was instantly alive with her shining.
‘I’m going to paint the mural! I’m going to paint the mural!’
She saw the look on his face.
‘But right here at home! Up there! In Heaven!’
He couldn’t take this in.
‘The canvas comes eleven feet deep by as much width as we need, which is fourteen feet. We’ll close up the window with plywood and install the canvas around the wall. It will stop just two inches to the left of the door. It will work, it will work!’
She was all eyes and laughter and long legs and hands clapping.
‘Kim wants me to capture everything I can of everything they saw today. She loves Choo-Choo and the girls and the chickens and the barn with its smashed roof, even my old Beemer and Jack’s swing. Everything. The mountains, the clouds, the beautiful clouds!’
She felt delirious, as she sometimes felt as a child when she was ill. ‘We have to let it dry and roll it up and ship it to Kim by December twentieth; Irene and her family are going to Kim for Christmas.’
They high-fived; he took her in his arms and rocked her, stunned. There were no words in him. There were words, but they weren’t coming out.
‘Can I do it? Can I paint a huge mural?’
‘You can do anything.’
‘By December twentieth? How many weeks?’
‘A little more than eleven weeks.’
She blinked. ‘Jack’s Name Day party on the twelfth. I just remembered.’
‘We’ll all pitch in. We can handle the party. Whatever it takes.’
She sat down at the kitchen table; breathless. There would be so many people in the house on Name Day weekend—Kenny and Julie and the kids, if they could come, which was doubtful, and Sammy, and Beth would probably still be here, she could help, and everybody from town, and the mural needing to be shipped by the twentieth. Her heart pounded.
‘Tell me again.’
‘What?’
‘That I can do it.’
‘You can do it. You can do anything. Whoa. Wait. We can do it, we can do anything.’
‘Philippians 4:13,’ she said. ‘Can you believe this is happening?’
It was one more thing he couldn’t believe. But he was happy for her, for the three of them, totally—he wanted to jump or shout or run or do something with all this, it was filling him up.
He pulled her to her feet and headed for the door. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Go where? Where’s Jack?’
‘Napping with Charley in the library. Race you to the barn.’
• • •
She was delivering sweet feed while Dooley and Jack rode the fence line.
‘I’m doing the mural,’ she said, holding a handful of grain across the hot wire. ‘At home.’ She was buzzing.
His eyes were the color of mahogany, his tongue sandpaper on her palm.
Five heifers lined up behind the big guy, waiting their turn. She dipped her hand again in the bucket, unable to say more.
• • •
He looked up from a quick read of the article ‘Grape and Raisin Toxicity in Dogs’ and watched his son gunning cars around the kitchen floor.
It would be good if Jack had someone to play with. There were no kids his age in the immediate neighborhood, and school was a year out given his birth date. He needed to take Jack fishing. Yesterday had been a clinic and hay day; they needed a clinic and fishing day.
‘Zoom, zoom!’ said Jack. ‘Look, Dad. It’s a race.’ Jack was putting his weight on a car in each hand and moving fast, following with his knees. A brother or sister would be great. But they didn’t have the time it would take to pull off another adoption. Besides, Jack’s adoption wasn’t even official yet; they were fostering. His leg was jiggling. He needed to stop messing up his mind with the future and concentrate on what was at hand.
He got up and put on a jacket and stepped out to the yard. Cool. Nice. But parched. The crickets were louder in the thin October air.
The plumbers and construction crew would hit at seven-thirty in the morning. He rolled his shoulders and sniffed the air
for what was predicted, and then heard the scream.
My God.
He’d seen plenty of blood, but this was Jack’s blood.
The wheels of the cars had moved faster than Jack’s knees could keep up and he’d gone down on his face. Charley was barking, Jack was screaming, sobbing, writhing in his arms.
‘Need to check your nose,’ he said. ‘Hold still.’
‘No! It hurts! No!’
‘What happened?’ Lace was breathless from racing downstairs.
He did a quick manipulation of the nose. Screaming.
‘Not broken,’ he said. ‘He fell on his face playing with his cars. Need warm water and a cloth.’ He held his son. ‘It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.’
He suspected the sight of his own blood had frightened Jack as much as the incident itself. They cleaned him up on the sofa in the library; treated a cut on his forehead with iodine and a Band-Aid. ‘Keep it moist for a couple of days,’ he told Lace. ‘He’ll get some bruising and swelling around the nose, but he’ll be fine.’ Their boy would be growing up with two people who had never been consoled by their biological parents, had never heard the words It’s okay. But he and Lace could do this; his heart was full of doing this.
Lace held Jack in her lap, rocked him in her arms.
‘I hurt my face,’ he sobbed.
‘I know, I know. It will be better, I promise.’ She kissed his forehead. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Skype th’ grannies!’ he wailed.
‘We can’t Skype the grannies. It’s time for pajamas and prayers.’
‘Skype th’ grannies!’
‘Why do you want to Skype the grannies?’
‘To show them my face . . .’ Sobbing. ‘. . . where I fell and hurt myself. They would want to see.’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said. She stood and picked him up and he laid his head on her shoulder, his arms tight around her neck. ‘We’ll show them tomorrow.’
‘You promise?’
‘I promise,’ she said.
She would never leave Dooley and Jack; she could paint the mural. Everything was going to be all right, she thought as she left the room with Jack and Charley.
‘I’ll be right up,’ he told her.
He took off his jacket, hung it on the coatrack.
‘Man,’ he said.
A little brother or sister; it was a tape playing in his head. Another adoption would take another two years, so there was an incentive to hurry even before they got in a groove with Jack. It was a total rock and a hard place.
The prognosis over a year ago was that Lace would never have children. Her father had kicked her twice in the abdomen. First time, she was seven years old. Second time, she was ten and the menstrual blood began. Thank God he had never laid eyes on the man; he would have ended up in prison instead of vet school. The hard blows had caused infections due to rupture in the abdominal cavity, a problem that was almost constantly painful and couldn’t be detected by CAT scan or MRI imaging. Adhesive disease, they finally learned, though for years it had been treated as irritable bowel syndrome.
Bottom line, there was no way they could even think about another adoption. Not any time soon.
• • •
It began around midnight.
It would be a rain of long obedience in the same direction—straight down. At two A.M., the temperature had dropped three degrees. Tomorrow the high would be fifty-four, and soon, too soon for some, temperatures would descend into the thirties, then the teens and into the single digits. The time would come for snow on the roof, flame on the hearth, smoke up the chimney.
The rain fell steadily upon the big house and the small, the moss-grown shingles of the corncrib, the corrugated tin of the barn. It fell with a steady roar into the depths of the woods and thrashed the gray waters of the pond. It sent rivulets into the bolt-hole of the groundhog, the den of the fox, the burrow of the field hare.
Across miles of alluvial fields, each drop was a mallet pounding seed into its winter bed.
Everywhere, everything . . . rain.
7
MITFORD
MONDAY, OCTOBER 5
From the get-go, the Local was a small-town grocery store ahead of its time.’
Avis Packard spoke to the mirror on the back of his bedroom door. He stood up straight in his sock feet and sucked in his gut, although, he was proud to say, he didn’t have much to suck in. His Camel smoked in the ashtray by the bed. It was still dark out there and his sleep had been fitful.
He wadn’t lookin’ so good this morning. For all he knew, he hadn’t been lookin’ good for a long while, as he never examined hisself in a mirror.
He hiked up his britches, ran his fingers through his hair.
‘Sourcing local has always been of utmost importance to me. Thirty-five years ago, I was on a mission to find the freshest, best-tasting food available for my customers. And I found it right in our own backyard. In a manner of speakin’.’
No need to describe his twelve-mile descent into the fertile valley below Mitford, on the switchback washboard road that had delivered him there without a tailpipe.
He smacked his head to wake up his brain. The whole business of makin’ this speech had half ruined him at the store. He had stared at Father Tim a few days ago and could not remember th’ man’s name to save his life.
Father Tim looked worried. ‘Avis?’
‘Yo,’ he said, dumb as a gourd.
‘Are you in there, buddyroe?’
I need help, he wanted to say. But how would it look for a man to ask help for a speech about his own trade? Did Father Tim come to him for help on sermons? No. He would have to travel this road by hisself.
He wished he had somebody to turn to, but not a wife, no. He had never wanted a wife, that was as foreign an idea as walkin’ on th’ moon. He didn’t understand a thing about women. Nothin’. One time he read what the teacher said on his report card. Has difficulty with relationships. Mostly nobody in his family paid attention to what th’ teachers said.
A few years ago, people tried to fix him up with Shirlene Hatfield, who ran the spray-tan booth at A Cut Above. He’d only seen her on the street, but she scared him half to death in those funny clothes and he heard she wadn’t too hot on gettin’ fixed up with him either. He sent a six-pack of home-brewed ginger beer when she married Omer Cunningham.
Another thing. What if he passed out cold while givin’ this talk and hit his head an’ lapsed into a coma in a strange city? Just sayin’.
Travel was not his long suit, an’ speakin’ of—he had no idea what to wear for this shindig. Should it be a suit or jacket and tie? The people in today’s small-grocery business were different, as he could plainly see in th’ trade journals. Some had tattoos, one or two had piercings, and a good many had facial hair. They didn’t look like moms and pops looked back in the day.
He opened the drawer of the bedside table and took out his comb and scraped it through his hair. This action occasioned a minor coughing fit, which he enjoyed. He turned his head to the left, to the right. He had not noticed before that his hair was longer on one side than the other; he could not see his right ear.
He ran a neat part along the center of his scalp, and combed his hair to either side. No.
Most of his farmers in the Valley worked town jobs in Morganton or Elizabethton, and had started out with a pig here and a few apple or nut trees there. But with the longtime ag training and instruction of yours truly, fourteen families now supplied the Local with Silver Queen corn, Big Boy tomatoes the size of dinner plates, Alberta peaches, wild persimmons, figs, walnuts, pecans, nine apple varieties, free-range chickens, grass-fed beef, and acorn-fed pork.
Boy howdy, they raised some awesome hogs in the Valley. If he was to take a couple of those big boys down to Charlotte and let ’em loose in the crowd, that’d be all
the entertainment you’d want for an evenin’.
He trooped to the kitchen sink and ran water over his comb and took it back to the bedroom mirror and went at it again, this time with no part, just slicked straight back. He blinked and said a really bad word.
There was that sound again at the back door. Like somebody knockin’ on th’ screen. He went to the kitchen and turned on the yard light and opened the door and peered out. Must have been the wind, which was up pretty good since last night. One time he’d seen a wild boar in the yard, another time it was a black bear and her cub.
Ho! There was a little dog over in the bushes. It was pokin’ its head out an’ lookin’ toward the house. Then it backed into the bushes and disappeared.
He switched off the light and went again to the mirror and grinned at hisself to see how that would go over with the audience. His teeth did not look like th’ teeth on TV. TV teeth could blind a person, and no, he would not be settin’ in a dentist chair to have his choppers bleached for five hundred bucks. People at th’ convention would have to take him in the raw. What you see is what you get.
His life in the grocery business had been a good journey, even with that mighty battle he’d fought with Raleigh to sell homegrown Valley provender without callin’ in troops and hound-dog regulators.
Th’ Valley was like his baby, you might say, situated on a rich, dark, peaty soil you could eat with a spoon. He’d used all the farm trainin’ he’d learned from his daddy, who’d been a county ag agent in Tennessee. His daddy had a green thumb like you wouldn’t believe, and together they’d hauled home many an award from the county fair. Some of those awards were displayed right now over the fireplace he never used.
He checked the clock. Still dark. He had two pickup loads of apples comin’ in at daylight—your Golden Delicious and your Red Delicious and your Rome Beauty and your Winesaps. It was pie time, cobbler time, juice and cider time; people were crazy about th’ apples comin’ in, hisself included, an’ next would be th’ pumpkins. What got him goin’ was a truckload of fresh produce. Not women, not parties. He had never been to a party, much less thrown one; he’d been raised to work. Work, that was th’ ticket.