CHAPTER 4: The Last Quiet Day in Mission County



CHAPTER 4: The Last Quiet Day in Mission County

The first thrill of the day, for every man over 12 years old in the aluminum stands that faced the Mission County Stormers baseball field, was the blue panties of Melissa Carthage as she jumped up and down with the school spirit, her pom-poms a blur of blue and white against her blonde hair. It was a tonic to those men, the shot of whisky at a school function, the shot glass of percolated and distilled wickedness that lived in every county and translated itself to hoarse shouts as the M.C. Stormers took the field after a time out. The blue uniform matched Melissa’s panties and the cheering of royal blue under sky blue on that fall day was a rawness of working men, latent lust, Saturday relaxation, a hoarse, raw cheer enough to drown the opposing shouts of the orange-clad Welton Lynx. Welton had long been a rival of Mission County and all of the towns turned out for the games. Lester Carthage, Melissa’s dad, felt warm then, loving every man in Mission County for their school spirit, for the honorable American past-time game that lay before him. Had he known his daughter’s stir he’d have closed the Leaderville Lunchbox Diner and told all of them to get the hell home but instead, he realized that he’d have to leave the game early because customers would be coming in to celebrate the home team win.

A calm had set on the Stormers. Five innings could mean a lot of things. Five innings at a baseball game was a man at fifty; a man who hadn’t done right but could still change. The Stormers held a two-run lead on Wallace Cronlein’s rawhide smack to deep right but the Lynx had held defense for most of the game while the Stormer’s outfield was a sieve of holes. Cutter Richards, working the mound, drove in his characteristic determination across the plate until the Stormers took home plate again only to be hauled back repeatedly by the Lynx defense to the mound. Cutter drove the balls past the batters complaining all the while.

“Dammit, Coach, the outfield isn’t picking up grounds.”

“Get screwed, Richie,” one of the outfielders said during the timeout.

“All right men, get in there and play baseball like I taught you.”

Coach Reynolds had been coach at Mission County for 12 years. He was a tough coach, quiet and large with a buzz cut and a beer gut and no tolerance for smoking. There was a barroom rumor passing around about the time Coach Reynolds had kicked boys off of his team for smoking until he didn’t have enough boys to fill the roster. After that, the rule was not to get caught. According to the rumor it took all of the school board and the threat of his job, as well as a well-placed baseball to the back of the head by Jessie Licher, who was mad about having to do field drills but who claimed the ball slipped on a spin-pitch. The coach was knocked out. When he came to he said he didn’t remember kicking off all of the boys so it must not have happened. Jessie said his ball slipped. The school board accepted both answers. All of the players were reinstated and Jessie kept his head down the rest of the season. That was how things were done in Mission County, whether it was the baseball field or the town council in Leaderville.

Besides that incident, the Mission County Stormers didn’t change much from year to year. Won some games, lost others, never saw a state championship although players for the Stormers were known to flip off the orange beribboned bus from Welton County as it passed through Mission County on its way to the state playoffs. But mostly it was farm work, baseball, beer and cigarettes out at the Pumphouse or Number Nine or the Springs. Quiet adultery, small town politics, local economic desperation and a desire to stay out of the rest of the world marked Mission County in the Stormer yearbooks.

Baseball was to Mission County what football was to everyone else. Played both fall and spring, the sport was the centrality of men, the memories of days just like today, the smell of the field, the shade of the trees and the glitter of the backdrop foul fence. Cheerleaders were both new and uncommon but the girls had to be involved with sports so the school board took the initiative. To the men in the stands it was a nice addition. To the boys on the field it was old hat.

Today’s game fell a week before school was over. There was spring warmth in the air and the kids were wild. Tired teachers sat in the stands doing their civic duty on their Saturday. Next weekend would be graduation and then the welcome relief of summer break. For Cutter Richards, fourth generation, the girls were all just Saturday night parking memories. He had been dating Melissa for awhile but they broke up last Christmas after he got bored with her. He was a senior but no new girls moved into town that he could impress with that. He was young, 17, with a whiplash body and a set jaw, the last man from a tradition of Richards’ men, who could only look at Melissa with contempt and wind up his pitch. For Cutter Richards, cheerleaders and baseballs were both to be thrown away as hard and fast as possible.

Sid Richards saw the message in his son as he sat in the stands. He saw his boy with pride but not blindness. He saw the man his son might become and it made him sad. There hadn’t been anything on the surface that tuned Sid Richards into his son’s mood. Cutter’s grades were decent enough; not Harvard but certainly a state college. He was well liked, athletic and worked at home with the expected amount of butt-kicking that it took to get any work out of any boy his age. He drank beer with the boys out at the Pumphouse and he liked his car but Sid had never seen Cutter drunk or acting reckless with the car. Cutter was a model boy for the most part.

“It’s the kid’s temper,” Sid mused as the game went into the seventh inning. Sid knew he was right in that. Their was a hatred in the boy, an unmitigated anger that made him throw hard and sometimes wild; that made him look at Melissa like she was trash. There was some kind of deliberation that clouded his eyes at the dinner table.

At the end of the eighth inning, with the Stormers only leading by one run and all of the evidence of falling apart present at the top of the ninth inning, Sid Cutter walked out of the ball field and got into his truck. He drove three blocks up Main and took a left at Sturgis Street by the Mobile station. He pulled in front of the Sak-n-Go. Walking into the cool interior Sid walked to the beer cooler and got a case of beer, a couple bags of hard ice, and a pack of cigarettes. A kid Sid didn’t know was working the register so nothing was said as the kid rang up Sid’s purchase. Sid nodded at the kid, stuck the cigarettes in his chest pocket, took the beer and climbed back into his truck and headed back to the ballpark. As Sid got out of his truck the clank of work boots on steel stands met his ear. The boys had left the field and people were slowly moving off of the bleachers, back to their farms and businesses and quiet Saturday nights. Sid glanced at the scoreboard that was barely readable in the harsh afternoon sunlight; Home 6, Visitors 7, the V in Vsitors dark on one half because the scoreboard bulbs had burned out. Sid sat in the truck a few minutes, keeping his eye on his son’s car in the front row. He wished he could tap one of the beers but he didn’t want anyone to see him drinking on school property.

Cutter came out of the locker room then, his tall body throwing a pencil shadow on the grass as he walked. The look on his face told Sid what he needed to know about the outcome of the game even if the scoreboard was hard to read. As Cutter reached his car, not seeing his dad sitting in the truck, Sid honked his horn. Cutter turned his head slowly, thinking it was probably one of his buddies. He didn’t care. He opened the door of his car and tossed his bag into the front seat. A few feet away, Melissa Carthage was talking to a couple of her girlfriends, her pom-poms wrapped around her waist, the sweater with the v-neck clinging to the soft sheen on her chest as she turned to watch Cutter throw his stuff into the car. She smiled at him but he didn’t respond. She turned back and said something to the girls. They turned and walked away. Cutter looked mad as he slammed the door. Sid tapped his horn again and Cutter looked over his way. Sid waved him over. Cutter looked out toward the ball field again, rebellious at being summoned. Sid grinned at him through the window but the boy’s angry expression didn’t change. Sid rolled down his window when Cutter approached it.

“Hey kid, not bad pitching out there. Watched you through the seventh inning. Looked good.”

“We lost.”

“Nah, your outfield just wasn’t on those bounders.”

“Yeah, they weren’t much on anything,” Cutter said, as if the boys were still out on the field.

Sid knew the boy felt lousy. He knew it was the last high school game the kid would play. Sid remembered the feeling of loss, the joy of graduating but the fear that came after, the nothing you became after leaving high school especially if you stayed in your hometown. There was a part of Sid that wanted Cutter to stay, a part that wanted him to marry Melissa Carthage and stay in Mission County. The other part of him though, the part that remembered being as young as Cutter, wanted him to get away from Mission County. Sid wanted Cutter away from the doe-eyed daughters of neighbor men that he went to school with. While he hadn’t put away a lot of money, he had enough to help Cutter through his first four years of college if Vietnam didn’t take him first. After that, it would be up to him. If the kid could get a scholarship or two he’d make it all right. If Cutter did go to college he would be the first of a long line of Richards who went beyond high school. All of the Richards men were farmers, always had been. It was a good life in Sid’s mind but things were changing and Mission County wasn’t immune.

There was something mysterious to the change. Something Sid couldn’t quite put his finger on. A restlessness, a sense of an oblivion from the outside that was going to engulf Mission County and millions of other counties like it. Maybe it was the war, the hippies and free-love geeks from suburbia or just that the ways of life, the ways of farming and the ways of family, the holidays and the sins of the folks were being erased. Voices from the outside dictated their world. Decisions were not made by anyone that the men in Mission County could talk to. Sure, the bankers were still there but they weren’t talking from history they were talking from politics. The law was there like it always had been but there was something more pressing about it, something which made the lawmen more diligent, more prone to power. It was as if the worst thing a man could do is settle a dispute with another man face to face like a man used to. Sid’s hands gripped the wheel as he thought, his gray eyes beneath a farm cap staring past the crushed soda can on his dash and out into the baseball field. Maybe that was the charm to baseball, Sid thought. Maybe there were only a few directions a man could go and only a few men to stop him. Sid wasn’t sure but he felt for his boy who’d probably have to let the dream go. The boys wouldn’t be going to State where the scouts came to look. Cutter probably wouldn’t see a scholarship, though if he could make a college team he might pull himself up. He was good enough…”

“Dad! What’dya want.”

Sid’s head snapped back to where his boy was leaning on the mirror, soaking the heat up off of the deep blue surface of the truck door.

“Oh yeah, Let’s you and me take a ride.”

“I can’t Dad. I’m going to Freddy’s”

“C’mon,” Sid said softly. “Can’t you let that go? I got us some beer. Hell, I know you drink it anyway so what could be safer than drinking a few with your old man. Give us a chance to talk.”

“Da…” Cutter stopped, noticing something in the old man’s eyes beside the dust of the fields he tore up day after day. It was Saturday and he could always catch Freddy and the boys later. “Yeah, all right, Dad. I’ll go. What’s Mom gonna say about you giving me beer.”

“She knows just like I do that it won’t be your first one.” He smiled and patted his boy on the arm. “I married her, I’ll deal with her. You just get in the truck. We’ll just go have a few and get on home—won’t be keeping you from any hot date tonight thataway.”

“Yeah, Dad, whatever,” Cutter said his frown into a split grin for a second as father and son backtracked over 17 years of life together. Cutter walked around to the front of the truck and opened the door. The door creaked as he opened it. He climbed up into the seat. Sid remembered a time when he had to lift the boy into it. They pulled out of the school yard with beer under the two bags of ice between them.

“You aren’t supposed to have beer on school grounds, Dad. It’s supposed to be a safe school zone or something like that. ” Sid could hear the levity in his son’s voice.

“It’s my taxes that put that school there and paying taxes causes blindness in old men like me.”

“I thought it was something else that you did when you were by yourself that caused blindness,” Cutter jibed.

“Nah, that’s only if you got a picture of Missy Carthage on your wall and your mamma isn’t home to hear you.” Cutter blushed beneath his stubble and looked out the window, feeling his dad’s hand rocking him on his shoulder, laughing and feeling safe as they turned west onto County road 85, leaving the school and its empty ballpark in silence for at least the rest of the weekend.

They drove out of town about eight miles, Cutter’s hand on a cold beer beneath the ice. They drove past their own farmstead. Rex, the collie, yelping loudly, spun in the yard before chasing them down the road. The late afternoon sunshine bleached the yard, causing the red tractor implements and neat lawn to be more colorful than they were. Cutter felt a childish joy to home, remembering every inch of the yard where he grew up, the garage with its deep oil pit where one of the neighbor’s horses had gotten stuck when Cutter was just a kid. As they drove past the house, Cutter could see the back of the small stucco home and the back yard where he first picked up a baseball and glove.

Once they passed the yard and were on the dirt road toward the lower end of the birthing field, Cutter tapped a beer and handed it to his Dad.

“What? ‘fraid your mother would see that in your hand?”

“Yeah,” Cutter said. “So were you.”

Their laughter as men came easy as the sun pushed through their back window. When they came to the gate Cutter put his beer up on the dash and got out and opened the gate. He liked to open the tight three-strand barb-wired gates. He liked the feel of their resistance against his body as he hooked a shoulder to the post and drew the corner toward him, levering the post under the loop that held it. He did it with an ease that Sid envied. For a moment, as the boy folded the gate back, Sid wished for nothing more than afternoons like this, afternoons when he and his boy could spend the evenings in the big field, surrounded in pink and mulberry colors, lilac and bronze slicing the sky, the light heat-white gold of tall grasses that filled the birthing field. He wished every day could be filled with the bright-colored rooster pheasants that shot out, 12 strokes of a wingbeat before becoming a mere speck in the sky. Sid loved the feel the clumped buffalo grass beneath his feet. Evenings were Sid’s favorite time of day. As Cutter climbed back into the cab and they drove through the opened gate, a cooling breeze had kicked up. They drove through the field in silence, each lost to what he was remembering, the beers cold in their hands. Sid headed toward a small clump of Russian Olive trees that grew on one end of the pasture; the only shelter from the sun. He pulled the truck up near the trees and killed the engine. A slow engine ticking interspersed with the beginning activity of grasshoppers, the sound of a hawk sounded somewhere off over one of the clover fields. Sid dropped the tailgate of the truck then as Cutter brought the beer out of the cab and put it between them. They sat on the tailgate, the sun moving on their left toward its nightly rest, a twilight that would take hours to occur in July. They drank their beer in solitude until they saw Rex bounding from the yard, growing bigger from the house in the distance until he nearly collided with the tailgate of the truck, his tongue lolling like a love song during a break up. He ran in circles until Cutter tapped him on the neck. Only then did he lie down, a low whine in his voice as he looked toward the house. The two men sat and drank.

“Want to talk about anything,” Sid asked.

“Not much to talk about, Dad. Things are O.K.”

“But you’re angry anyway.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Saw it in your pitching this afternoon. See it all the time, Son. Something got you moving. I’m just wondering what it might be?”

“Isn’t anything Dad. Just being here.”

“Wanting to get away are you?”

“Who wouldn’t? I mean, I love this place but it’s yours.”

“Be yours someday?”

“Yeah, I guess it could be. But you know I never took to it that well. Mom’s always on me to do something better. I don’t get the deal-making you are always doing. I wouldn’t know a good deal from a bad one. Hell, I’m not even sure what you own.”

“You could learn it?”

“Could I, Dad? I mean I’m good at some stuff like baseball and I do all right in school. Yeah, I can do chores but I don’t do any of this stuff like you do.”

“I’ve been doing it for forty years.”

“That’s my point.” Agitated, Cutter jumped off of the tailgate and walked to one of the Russian Olive trees, his lanky body momentarily caught in the shadow of a tree and a father’s love as Sid watched him. There was nothing wrong with his boy. His thoughts were the same that every man his age and circumstance had to deal with. There comes an age where forty years spans like a prison sentence, when the land owns your soul and gives little back in the way of fame. Hell, you are lucky if you can make a living much less fame. It was the same anger that Sid had when he took over the place from his father. He smiled, seeing the generations all at once and imagining them here, drinking beer beneath the Russian Olive trees.

“Nobody’s gonna force you take anything you don’t want, Son. Not here anyway. The rest of that stuff you can learn.”

“Can I? What if I lose it all?”

“Then you do. Besides, I’m going to take care of me and your mother. It’s all we’ve got. I’m not just handing the place over to you.”

The evening had deepened to a watermelon pink in the sky, crisscrossed with seed of white airplane trails and black birds that dotted the sky flying from tree to tree.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“You’ll have to make your own way.”

“I’m not starting out too good, Dad.”

“So that’s not all you are angry about.”

“No,”

“I didn’t think so.”

Sid reached into the beer stash drawing out two more beers. He had a feeling, a premonition like the one he’d been carrying about the outside forces coming to Mission County that there was something more.

“School?”

“No,” Cutter said, gripping a limb as he faced his Dad. “I’m doing all right and besides that I’m out of that hellhole in a week.”

“Girls?”

Cutter turned again, looking out on the horizon as the pink settled to a deeper evening sky. “Always.”

Sid laughed at that even if the occasion didn’t count for it. Wasn’t much that would rattle a boy’s mind except the law, his future, or a woman.”

“You find that funny?”

“Well hell, Son, sort of. I mean that’s natural.”

“That’s the problem.”

Sid tapped his beer. He watched the arms of his boy scrunch the can into an accordion blob and curve-ball it into the truck, landing neatly in an empty bucket in the back of the truck. It dawned on Sid then, a clarity of an old problem with no graceful way to approach it. Cutter’s back was turned to him, still looking out over the horizon.

“Son?” Cutter turned, his blue eyes meeting his father’s gray eyes. “Melissa pregnant?” Sid didn’t wait for the answer. He gently tossed the unopened beer underhanded to Cutter. Cutter’s hands fumbled with the beer almost dropping it. Cutter straightened it out and pulled the tab on it. The white foam poured over his hand, a harsh white against the deepening pink sky, a blend with the tall wheat grass honey that touched the bottom of the can.

“Shit.”

“I thought so.” Sid didn’t say it in judgment, just looked at his son, his head down, a shock of charcoal streaked blonde hair falling down on his forehead, looking at the overflowing beer, a statue in the dying sunlight, a boy whose world came to a close after a confession and minutes in a car or beneath a tree, a man who felt himself dead at 17.

“I thought so, “Sid murmured to himself but there was no rage in his voice. “How long?”

“First month I think. Since prom. Goddamn prom, “Cutter yelled, flinging the beer into a pocket of sagebrush. “Damn well knew better too. I knew not to do what she wanted, her telling me it’d be all right.” His voice cracked under the emotional strain of his confession. “All the time hearing it’s the guy’s fault, he’s always all over her ‘cause she wears some fucking flowers and perfume. It ain’t always that way though. Sometimes they don’t get the idea, climbing all over a fella’, giggling with their smiles all glossy, and legs all through those skirts. Back of the car and them all over you. Ain’t always the guys’ fault you know.” He paced beneath the tree, aggravated because he threw the beer, angry because he knew better, angry at himself and her, angry because he just saw his future dwindle to the size of a pinprick in a broken condom.

“It’s your fault too, Son, don’t matter what she done or didn’t do. Stand on what you did and deal. Been drinking too?”

“Yeah,” his voice cracked as he hung his head, shielding his eyes with his hand not wanting the old man seeing him break.

Sid set down his beer on the tailgate and walked to his boy. The minute his hand touched Cutter’s shoulder the boy recoiled, muscles tensed, his face turned away but not quick enough. Sid’s strong arms wrapped around the boy as the boy tried to pull his fear and wrath in.

“Let me go, damnit.”

“Fight or give, Son, that’s your choice.” Cutter cracked then, locked tight in his father’s arms, years and generations of silent men reproved because Sid could touch his son, could try to protect him from himself. The two men held each other in the evening light, one young and scared, the other older and scared, both fighting anger of their own but sowing a memory in ground; a field that a father and son rarely sewed together.

Cutter pulled himself together and gently pushed himself away from his father. Tears and love were strong in his eyes as Sid walked back to the truck and got them two beers. He handed a beer to his son. The boy ran the back of his hand across his eyes and turned toward an Elm tree that lined the dirt road, that bordered the property, a tree he had seen a million times growing up, a tree that now didn’t seem like it was seen from the eyes of a boy but from the eyes of an old man whose life was over. The two men drank their beer in silence as the evening pink deepened to a light charcoal and the stars began emerging one by one.

The men drank in silence. Sid was torn between a father’s anger and a humor. He had a pride in his boy for what he had done but anger for his inability to follow up, to take care of a life. Sid understood what his son had said about the girls. He knew the social curtain they often hid behind, the chastity shadows that they wore like wide belts around their teenage waists but he knew how they could be. Sid too remembered the gentle kissing, the late night murmurings, the apple of the forbidden on their colored lips, the spots of color that rose in heat on a woman’s face and on her chest.

He knew the lie as well as Cutter did, he knew that the game carried on into marriage before the forbidden became sanctioned and lost its luster thereafter in a woman’s eyes.

“We’ll work it out, Son,” Was all Sid said, a harkening to the full moon that rose in the April night where two men drank beer in silence, one with fear and one with hope but no answers, both men considering their roles in a world of late nights created by prom dreams, nights created by women whose mere passions were Delilah scissors and men wandered the earth in their foolishness with their locks and strengths gone. “Best we don’t say anything to your mom about it.”

“Jesus, Dad, how we gonna stop her from knowing?”

“We can’t. It’s just how. And tonight is not the night for her to know.” He tossed his son another beer. “Finish this and then we’d better be getting back.” Sid heard the hollowness in his own voice as the moon spread out over the pasture, light ruffled by bending grasses that responded to a cool spring breeze. A goose-pimple breeze arose as soon as the sun went down, a breeze like a woman’s breath on prom night in a million small towns in America.

Neither man wanted to go home. They both drank in silence, felt the hum in their ears of a man’s balance, the stroke of prairie nature that wooed both of them. They didn’t need doors or windows to feel their strength. The moon on the open prairie was as much of a room as they would ever need and to trade it was a sin that they would live day by day, Sid by choice when he married Cutter’s mother, Cutter by force when he had Melissa. Neither man knew for sure if the two could not go together.

***

Hannah Richards never found out. On the same Saturday that Sid and Cutter played baseball and drank beer out in the pasture, Hanna Richards looked at her life before the kitchen sink. She found nothing that wasn’t raw, nothing in her life that did not pulsate with the colors of a prairie spring. She found nothing to hold on to. She knew of no one to talk to except the women in the coffee klatch that she attended. Women who stared at the same hopelessness Hannah herself looked at every day. She cleaned and wiped and straightened and dusted and mopped but she could not clean her own sorrow even a little bit. When she was running a cleaning cloth over the upholstery of the leather wingback chair near the fire that she had bought for Sid two Christmases ago her eye caught the long pole pillar that ran along the center of their living room in western style log. It was a thick pole, soft from sanding, a lodge pole with either end embedded into the brick walls. From it hung the star-blades of electric fans that spun slowly in the room to stir the air and dust. It was Hanna’s creation when she insisted that Sid take the fake ceiling down and give her the natural peaked look of the roof. She loved the way the lodge pole spanned the room and the way the roof peaked above it; long afternoon shadows becoming lost in the expansive peak. She saw it then, that Saturday, as Sid was learning things about his son, at the very time he was buying beer during the eighth inning, as a final creation. She saw the blades spinning lazily on the beam and saw her world clearly in that spring. She saw that the amber bottle of liquor on the bar next to the picture window had failed her. She remembered the days of emptiness as her son grew up and didn’t need her any more. There were only days between soap operas and loneliness. She wanted a drink now and in her tears she took the entire cut glass decanter and placed the stopper neatly on the television. She drank from the decanter itself, warm and bitter with a slight spring chill. It didn’t come to her until she polished the wingback chair and saw the fans on the lodge pole that she realized how life could so easily go around. It was in that afternoon that Hannah Richards moved the freshly polished leather chair under the lodge pole, drank more from the decanter, took a tie from her husband’s closet, a tie he had only worn to funerals. She tied one end to the lodge pole in a sloppy double knot when a new soap opera flashed onto the silent TV and placed the other end around her neck, being thankful that he always took off his ties over his head instead of undoing them and putting them on the eight-tiered tie hook she had bought him for his closet. She took off her shoes, stood on the polished chair, smiling at her immaculate house, as sterile and silent as her life in the country had been. She put the loop of the tie around her neck and drew from the decanter. Beautiful dark-haired men and winsome blondes spoke their intimacies on an orange-colored television screen. She smiled once, looking at the picture of her Cutter on the flattop of the redwood stereo case that they never played. She smiled, lifted the decanter for one more swig and as it burned down her throat, drying up her tears, Hannah Devshon Richards kicked the back of the leather chair, momentarily feeling the pain on her toe as the loop tightened around her neck and the empty decanter fell to the floor, crashing on the hardwood surfaces as her body spun slowly like the fans she wished to be. She didn’t hear the truck laden with beer and the hopes of men as it drove in to the field behind the house nor the crazy barking of Rex in the front yard who witnessed it all from the picture window that faced the North. Her vision blurred while some silent woman told about her pregnancy to some angry man on the silent television that had kept Hanna Richards company for more years than she could count now.

Mission County had gone silent at the news. A pallor had hung over the communities, a fear of the first tangible changes that were coming. Suicide was not an option in Mission County. Never had been. Of pioneer stock and knowing of pain, people in Mission County fought to live on land that did not shelter them in any gentle way. They fought the seasons of drought and kept tears that reflected wheat fields in September slashed and ruinous from hail to themselves and thought of only how to talk to the banker for another year. Winter brought Mission County to its collective knees; in worship of its power that claimed at least one life a year from some child who wandered outside to make a snow angel, some lovers who thought to drive away and start their life elsewhere, or some farmer who heard the bleating of a freezing newborn calf and went to look, getting lost in the flash-whiteouts that sprung up without warning, finding himself lost in a field with his house and barns a stone’s throw away but him plodding, head bent down against the wind the wrong direction to fall in a drift and sleep or run in fear and panic until his heart burst and he made the final sleep in a snow bank.

Parents lost children to railroad crossings where alcohol and blaring radios and laughter and kisses hid the danger of the onrushing trains. Children lost parents to drink or an unspoken divorce, moments where fathers simply vanish from the county and the stories that the kids told about why their Daddy can’t make it to a parent-teacher conference were quietly accepted. War was an honor and a family who lost a brother or uncle or child to war was held in respect, a special reverence during the American Legion march at the Mission County Fair parade.

But suicide. No. Suicide was a blatant disregard for the gifts of a quiet unassuming life. It reminded everyone of their own mortality. Most of all, Hannah Richard’s taking of her own life struck to the root of many of the marriages, heralding the frustration and loneliness of farm wives who spent long days faced with an empty house while the kids were at school and the husband in town or in the field. It made each husband look at his own wife in a different light. From that color he would make a silent mouthed promise to watch her closer, to buy her flowers and take her out to dinner more often, to not laugh when some girlish dream is uttered or a whimsical wish for a new dress or a desire to go somewhere on a post-harvest vacation was demanded.

Hanna Richards had defied Mission County. She left it as clearly as if she had packed her belongings and walked out of the farmhouse. She left her family in a moment just as if she had climbed into a car with a lover from another town that had come to take her away. She had done what many women only dreamed of as their minds and bodies were driven like blizzard snows to the needs of their families, the relentless harshness of the land, and the world of men that they could not be part of.

She was not punished for it though. The people showed up at her funeral with respect intact, the women in dark dresses and shaded pearls, plastic galoshes slipped over sensible black lace-up shoes and gossamer thin scarves that fluttered in the breeze as they stood staunchly by the new grave. The clouds scudded across a blue sky, the world diamond and green and warming, the first small dandelions beginning their upward push while the wheat fields in the distance from the cemetery still lay in winter brown with patches of green.

Husbands accompanied their wives. They took off their hats, issuing their own respect, eyes trained on Sidney and Cutter Richards while five members of the Mission County Volunteer Fire department, as well as Sid himself, carried the mahogany casket to the side of the grave and set it down. The preacher, a Presbyterian minister with a quiet voice and a son on the Stormers baseball team began his benediction. The valley he described turned eyes away from the casket to the fields of wheat and cattle beyond, to their valley in brown wetness and then back to the grave, eyes damp but not betraying. Hannah Richards passed through the valley of death to a place where none could hurt her and she would fear no evil.

Cutter Richards stood next to his father. His hair waved in the breeze as he looked solemnly down, years falling away from him revealing the child he once was, his dark suit and narrow tie looking like they did not belong on the boy who was whizzing fast pitches last Saturday. He had spent his tears the night he and his father found her, clutching his stomach as he knelt behind the house, a pool of warm beer lying in the new grass, hooked by a slender spider strand from his lower lip. Rex continued his panicked barking and his father spoke on the telephone, his voice cracked but clear and Rex still barking and barking and Cutter’s stomach giving back his own fears, a life gone and a life coming.

By the time Darryl Wesley arrived with the ambulance there were four other pickups in the yard. Cutter had wiped his mouth and rubbed his eyes, tasting salt and new earth while the men, voices low and shaking gave commands, their panic just below the surface in the lamp-lit living room. He watched them roll out the fold-down gurney, a white lump riding on top and hurriedly put it in the back of the ambulance. Cutter moved toward the gurney but Sid caught him, Sid’s fingers dug into his shoulder, his mouth a solid line, his eyes slate and fleckless, nodding a no, fingers bracing down to a point of pain to make sure his son knew not to disobey, his reaching for the boy who flung himself away. Cutter stopped at the doorway, seeing the tipped chair. Someone had quickly cut the tie down but the polished place above the chair told cutter what he already knew. Cutter darted upstairs to brush his teeth and wash up hoping his mother wouldn’t know he’d been drinking. He dropped his toothbrush in the sink as he heard his father’s roar, muffled words through the floorboards but making Cutter race to the bottom of the stairs and into the family room. Sid’s eyes locked and his hands making fists, a tableau of some worship, a site of an angel that stupefied Sid, the sharp smell of whisky that lay spread with broken glass that caught the light from the switch, the quick, ghostly vision of Hannah Richards spinning slow, head canted, a pasted smile on her mouth, spinning slowly as if in a stardust dance and some long ago high school prom. Cutter’s mind shut down then. His own emotional fastball struck him in the forehead and he tripped and scrambled, knocking over another chair in the kitchen as he ran into the night and fell to the ground to heave his own fear amidst the sweat-warm excitement of Rex who had tried to tell them before.

Melissa Carthage stood further back and across from the casket, dabbing her eyes while the minister spoke. Her hair was tied back in a neat braid down the middle of her back. Her gray suit, the one she bought for graduation, accentuated her porcelain skin and lithe body. She looked at Cutter but he did not meet her eye. She was flanked by her father who had closed the Lunchbox Diner that day in memory of Hannah Richards. Her mother, an older version of Melissa herself, a blonde worried woman whose parties were listed in community news event of the year, stood stoic with her fingers sliding listlessly on Melissa’s shoulder. A handkerchief resided in her hand and her head was uncovered. She neither wept nor did her hair move as her eyes looked past the casket to fields beyond,. She too had thought of Hannah’s final travel knowing that for herself, once Melissa graduated and settled down with a man, Rebecca Carthage was leaving Mission County whether her husband came with her or not. He had grown up in Mission County and had once played with the Stormers baseball team the same year that Sid Richards, Will Edgers and Bill Hogan made history with their infield play. It would be either her or them but she was not staying. She tossed her head once, as if to shake off, as the box was being lowered, the fear of never leaving and being put in Mission County ground.

Linda Edgers stood back from the mourners, her arms stretching behind her four children, her arms laying on childish shoulders. Her blue eyes were damp and mournful, delicate under eye color and a reddish tinge to her lips. Her two-tone black and white dress, with a fake mink stole and a small hat pinned to her hair with a light-catching veil seemed out of place. She watched her husband and the other men move the casket. She sought for some affection for him in his solid gray suit but could find nothing in her heart, her feelings as quiet as Hannah’s pain now.

Timothy Michael knew a failure to be on his best behavior at this funeral would bring punishment. A spanking was inevitably around the corner for one of the Edgers children. He knew it the minute he saw his mother wake up that morning, the warning tone in her voice sharp, though dulled by sorrow and some dream he could not define. He stood like a little gentleman, the tie around his neck itchy, the collar too big on the little gray suit. He moved his feet during the service and felt his mother’s fingers pinch his shoulder. Desii hummed quietly to herself, looking out through her thick glasses at a world no one else could see. Melinda and Trina stood quiet, like little ladies, not sure of what was going on but knowing it was important to behave and there was no movement from them.

Timothy Michael looked straight ahead as they lowered the casket. He fought and lost to the urge to quickly turn his head up to look at his mother. He saw her fear then, as clearly as he saw the baseballs he threw into the air that came back down to him. He had always liked his mother’s blue eyes. In those eyes he saw some depth of his mother’s own sorrow. He saw her eyes follow the casket down the hole, eyes still moving even as the casket settled past eye level to all except those who stood at the end of the grave. What he saw in his mother’s eyes was the same look he had seen in her before. He couldn’t put in Dick and Jane words; a dream to be away, to be somewhere different. He didn’t know that she had tried to be Hannah Richards once. Timothy Michael didn’t know that she had tried to start the family car in a leaky garage and was left to weep at her failure. In the moment that he looked at his mother he understood something he didn’t want to know, something that would hold him in his future years, on days he would be alone. Of all of them, only Timothy Michael knew. He shifted his eyes to his father whose own brown eyes looked back at his son. That look between them told Timothy Michael that his daddy knew too. The Edgers man and the Edger’s boy both knew that Mommy wouldn’t mind changing places with that person in the box.

Timothy Michael didn’t move anything but his head, carefully looking around. His eyes rested on a blonde girl across the grave, a girl he knew was in high school. Her eyes met his and she smiled at him, her head softly tilted. She was much older, someone who could have been a babysitter that didn’t make him sit in a dark hallway. She was someone who would have played with him. He looked at the girl and gave her a slight bucktoothed smile, and as a tear trembled down one of her soft cheeks she smiled back. She had smiled at him. In a moment he felt a rush throughout his body, a wonderment and a gentleness, a smile, cut from the cloth of tragedy yet made into a gift to a little boy who had learned too much from his parent’s eyes the morning folks in Morning Slope lay Hannah Richards to rest. That same smile would come to him at turning moments in his world as he grew older. Timothy Michael settled down then and carried that smile throughout the day. He smiled at everyone even during the community women’s luncheon. When they got home his mother didn’t raise her voice to him once that day. She did send him and his sisters to bed alone without a story. There was no story and no rage. He was okay with that balance.

May came to a stack of cleaned dishes and saucepans from which the Richards men had dined over the past two weeks. Cutter’s graduation was around the corner but neither man thought much beyond the empty house. Sid had given Cutter the opportunity to move into town awhile but Cutter said he wanted to stay.

“You doin’ O.K., Dad,” Cutter asked one night as his father sat in front of the flickering television in the kitchen. Neither one of the men had used the living room since Hannah had. It stood dark and bleak, a pause for sorrow as the sun came into the side window.

“Best as I’m gonna do for awhile, Son.” He said, reaching for a beer and tossing one to Cutter. Cutter tossed it in his hand a moment, a look of pain on his face as the cold beer lay in his palm. He smiled at Sid and put it back in the refrigerator while Sid cussed himself for being so damn insensitive. He drew from his beer, a gulp that masked his watering eyes. “Say, Son, is this too much? Us being without her and all. You want to move to town. I mean, I’d understand?” he said as if wanting to make up for it. “I’d understand that. I could work the place during the day and we wouldn’t have to stay here. Might be good for you to be around some other stuff; your friends, the movies and town. Leaderville’d have a lot more action going on. You know; things to keep your mind off of…his voice trailed off, “Off of all of this.”

Cutter thought for a moment, seeing his dad’s watery eyes beneath the overhead lamp, seeing the strength of a man who had fought everything except this, a man whose world hung loosely around baseball and a warm dinner, a man who somewhere saw a bride with bright eyes and hope and never asked for more. A man who slipped out to the garage during days of wrath, who passed smiles over cold milk when love was in the room, a man who faced the world when feelings were ambivalent, when both his and Hannah’s eyes turned to their growing son. Cutter knew that for his dad to fight this he’d have to do it too. He would have to stay in this house and whisper to the ghosts, heal the memories of what love was in the house before he, Cutter was born, to farm and weep silently in the dust as the tractor of days moved back and forth and came home to these rooms. Cutter knew Sid needed to stay here because it was his home and life was changing in Mission County and he needed something to hold him solid. Cutter knew this under the eye of the 60 watt lamp over their heads as they sat around the small kitchen table, polished in mahogany luster by a woman who was no longer with them. It was Cutter who entered the adult world of sacrificing his own needs, seeing his father, for just a split second, as the child he must have been once.

“Hell, Dad,” Cutter said, reaching into the refrigerator for the beer he had put back. “My friends all live out here. Nothing in Leaderville for me except cops and some cute Mexican women that’ll get me in trouble. I got enough of that as it is. We can stay here. We can make it.” His voice took on a huskier impassioned tone. “We can stay here where Mom was, try to figure out where to go from here, figure out what happened and I can hang out here or the Pumphouse and graduate in a couple of weeks.”

“You kids are going to kill yourselves partying out at that pump house.”

And you, Dad, can plow and plant that lousy-assed field of rocks,” Cutter said pointing toward the east, “Without having to drive from town. We’ll be all right.” Cutter snapped the beer, his own eyes feeling the loss of the woman who used to eye him from across the table because she couldn’t sleep until he came in.

Sid smiled. “You know to stay out of that beer when I’m not here. And, that lousy-ass field of rocks is your legacy so don’t knock it.“

“Yes Sir, I know both of those things. So we’ll stay here?” He belched as he finished the beer. “Can I have another beer?”

“Hell no you can’t. Get to bed. Only, before you do, tell me how you got so smart?” Sid grabbed his son and wrestled him to the floor without getting out of his chair.

Cutter grew serious. “If’n I was that smart, I wouldn’t be worrying about fatherhood like I am now would I?”

“His reminder sobered the moods of both men as Sid let his son up. “We’ll deal with that one, son. We’ll figure something out.”

“No Dad -- I’ll figure it out.”

Sid heard the warning in Cutter’s voice and was again surprised. “You are growing up, boy,” Sid said, his pride lined on the inside of a ram-strong forearm that lifted up his boy.”

“See a lot of options, Dad?”

“Have a good night Son,” Sid said as he heard his boy thunder up the stairs. The same stairs Hannah used to tell him to step lightly on so as not to raise dust and him running up the stairs just then being thankful that at least his mother would not have to know about the grandchild she hadn’t expected.

“Step lightly, Son. Always, step lightly.” Sid drank his beer, the TV screen becoming a small, blue orb as his eyes blurred, the beer bitter on his tongue, the table beneath his arm, below where his work sleeve rolled up, shiny and bright and cool. The touch of the woman now gone, her shine was something he only saw in his loneliness but never understood as she picked up his beer and slid a coaster beneath it as she had always been on him to do. Sid could hear her voice, sense his own quiet tears, understanding just how small, sad, and perfect the world was when table rings meant the world.

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