By Naomi Niles
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer's imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Naomi Niles
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Chapter One
Curtis Savery
I woke up early that morning after a night of bad dreams.
It happened at least once a week. I could see Christine’s face as if we were still married. In this dream, I had been standing on the prow of a ship watching her slip away into dark waters. There were no lifeboats, and my arms weren’t long enough to reach her. I grabbed a rope and threw it over the railing, but it turned into snakes in my hands, writhing and coiling around her.
“Christine!” I had yelled. But Christine did not answer.
I awoke with my stomach in knots, my insides twisted with dread. It took me a moment to realize where I was: back in my own bedroom in Sulphur Springs, warm sunlight pouring in through the windows. There was an empty space on the bed beside me.
As I had learned to do in situations like this, I drew a deep breath and focused on my immediate surroundings. A stone ashtray on the night stand. A small shaded desk lamp. A green batik blanket hanging on one wall. A stuffed elk’s head hanging on the other. A jar of kumquats. A stack of dusty old Merle Haggard CDs, a gift from my dad.
Somehow, I felt reassured by the presence of all these things. Their solidity. Their reality. The dread in my stomach wasn’t real; it was all in my head. Doom wasn’t waiting around the next corner. I didn’t have to prepare for the worst.
The worst had already happened.
Slowly, I rose from the bed and stretched. Even though I had slept all night, I still felt tired. Dad had always instilled in me and my brothers the importance of waking up early and putting in a hard day’s work, but I couldn’t deny there were days when I just wanted to burrow down into the covers and sleep for a week.
I slid easily into a pair of dark jeans and a brown button-down with a paisley pattern. My leather boots took a little longer to put on—either they had shrunk in the year since I had bought them, or I had outgrown them. After a minute’s coaxing, I managed to get them on my heels. As much as I would have preferred tennis shoes, it wasn’t safe to go riding in them at this time of year. Summer was rapidly approaching, and there were snakes everywhere. Small snakes, big snakes, snakes the size of your arm that would kill you as soon as look at you.
I strode to the mirror in the bathroom, doused my neck with cologne, and lightly trimmed my beard. This done, I took a step back and studied my face in the gray light. I looked and felt so much older than my thirty-one years. I was tall, nearly six and a half feet tall, with a lean body and large, calloused hands. On one arm, I had a tattoo of a mermaid, on the other a tattoo of a bucking bronco. A hot feeling of shame flowered in my breast as I looked at them. Christine and I had gotten matching tattoos on a dare one night when we were both drunk and eating hash browns at Waffle House. My rage on waking up the next morning to find both arms covered in tattoos had become the stuff of Savery legend.
As I reached for my hat, my golden retriever came bounding into the room looking excited.
“Mornin’, Jake,” I said as I patted him down. I had named him after a dog in an old country song by the band Pirates of the Mississippi. “You ready to go see Mama?”
Jake barked in excitement, leaving no doubt in my mind that he had understood me. Dogs are funny that way. Every time Jake went over to my mama’s house, which was pretty much every day, she fed him eggs and sausage and bacon and biscuits with gravy and every other food that was fit for canine consumption. “You know, Mama,” I had once told her, “there are people in this world who don’t eat as good as Jake does at breakfast.”
“Well, I want our dogs to have the best,” Mama told me as Jake devoured an enormous pork steak.
A dust-covered ’94 Ford pickup truck sat at the side of the house under a shady awning. I unlocked the driver’s side door and opened the passenger door so that Jake could climb in. I started up the ignition, and together me and the dog drove down the long dirt and gravel path to the rusted red gate at the end of the drive. Once we were on the road, I fired up the CD player and put in an old album of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings songs. Christine had teased me for being so “retro,” as she put it, in my musical tastes. She loved some of the newer country acts like Luke Bryant and Lady Antebellum, but me, I just couldn’t get into them. “Gimme ol’ Johnny and Hank and Waylon any day of the week,” I had told her.
I disliked visiting Mama’s house on the mornings after my bad dreams because she could always tell when I had had a troubled night’s sleep. Sure enough, the moment I came through the door that morning with Jake in tow, she looked straight at me with those creased eyes, pointed the wooden spoon that had been the deliverer of many a paddling when we were kids, and said, “You don’t look too good. You sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” I said, coming over and giving her a hug, but she shook her head, unconvinced.
“No, there’s somethin’ wrong; I can tell. Why are there bags under your eyes? Why are your eyes red?”
“I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night. I was up late worrying about things I don’t have any control over.”
“Have you thought about seeing a therapist?”
I laughed. “With the money I make? That’ll be the day.”
But Mama wasn’t having it. “You think I’m joking,” she said with one hand on her hip. “Your aunt Audrey started seeing a grief counselor a couple years ago after Preston died, and it helped her enormously.”
“I don’t need to see no ‘grief counselor,’” I said, practically spitting out the words in contempt. Seeing Jake sniffing around the food bowl, I added, “Why don’t you feed Jake? And then, if there’s anything left over, you can feed me, too.”
“Alright, but don’t think you can distract me that easily,” Mama said as she walked over to the fridge. “I’ve known you for too many years now.”
“Then you ought to know by now how stubborn I am,” I said, taking a seat at the dining-room table and smiling in spite of myself.
“I do,” she said, pulling out a Tupperware container filled with leftover meats and stewed vegetables. “You and your brothers are about as stubborn as they come. I expect you get it from your father.”
I laughed. “Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep at night.”
Mama scowled at me but said nothing. There was a shuffling noise from the hallway, and my dad, a portly, balding man in his late fifties wearing leather boots and a broad-brimmed white Stetson, walked into the room.
“Speaking of brothers,” I said, “you heard from Zach lately?” Zach was the second oldest Savery boy. Growing up, I had always resented him a little for taking away my “only child” status. We had only grown close in our teen years, shortly before Zach enlisted in the Navy.
“Actually, I just heard from him last night,” Dad said as he opened the Dallas Morning News. “He’ll be home on leave in a couple of weeks.”
“Four weeks is what he told me,” said Mama, beginning to warm up the meats in a skillet. “I do wish that boy would get married.”
“It’s hard when you’re a Navy SEAL,” I said, reaching for an orange from the fruit tray. “From what he’s told me, it sounds like they’re too busy to even really think about dating.”
“All the same,” said Mama, “if he came home with a wife, or a girlfriend, I couldn’t say I’d be too upset. He’s about the age you were when you married.”
“He’s gettin’ there,” I said quietly. I didn’t want to say what I was really thinking, which was that I suspected the way mine and Christine’s relationship had ended had put Zach off of dating.
“Just give him some time, Jean,” Dad said. “Things aren’t like they were when we were young. Kids don’t get married fresh out of high school. Just the other day they were saying, for the first time in American history there are more women having their first babies in their thirties than in their twenties.”
Mama shook her head, the way she always did when faced with fresh evidence of the world’s decline. “I don’t know what’s to become of this country. Seems like young people care more about their pets than they do about their kids—if they even have kids.”
“It’s hard to raise a family,” Dad said. “Especially in this economy.”
I gripped my orange juice glass thoughtfully. “That’s one of the big reasons Christine and I waited to have a baby. We got married just a couple years into the recession when you were lucky to find even a decent place to rent. We said, ‘No way are we raising a kid in this economy.’ I think we both wanted one. We talked about having one after the downturn ended; we just… waited too long.”
As I finished talking, I could see both my parents looking at me with pity in their eyes. I felt myself growing red behind the ears; I had said too much.
Dad, perhaps feeling the conversation had grown uncomfortably serious, said, “What have you got going on today?”
“I’ve actually got the rest of the day off,” I said, slapping the table lightly and taking a deep breath. “First day in a long time I haven’t had to do any trail riding. I think I might drive over to Waco with Jake and visit the cattle market, maybe eat lunch in the square, look up a few friends while I’m there.”
“How would you like to help me with the fence?”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked, not wanting to commit myself.
“Hogs have been digging it up,” he said. “Every morning I go out there, there’s another hole in the dirt under the fence, and a couple more hogs escaped.”
“You sure they’re not being stolen? The Porters installed a surveillance system in their back pasture after some of their lambs went missing last spring. They thought it was coyotes. Turns out, it was some local boys sneaking back there late at night and making off with their lambs strapped around their backs.”
“If it was thieves, I reckon they would just climb over the fence,” Dad said. “You ought to see the holes they’ve dug. Those are definitely hog prints.”
I tapped my hands lightly on the tabletop, thinking. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do,” I said, not very hopefully. “But you know, we’ve been trying for ages to fix that fence so nobody can get out, and they always find a way. If you wanted to wall ‘em in, you’d have to build a concrete wall.”
“We don’t have the money for that,” Dad said. “Best we can do right now is plug in the gaps in the fence and hope they don’t dig too far down. That won’t solve the problem forever, but it oughtta keep ‘em busy for a while.”
“We’ll take a look at it when we get out there,” I said as my brother Darren staggered sleepily through the front door. “You awake, Darren? Or were you up all night with some big-titted German broad?”
“Shut up!” said Darren, slugging me playfully on the shoulder. I winced; although Darren was the shortest of my brothers, he could throw a punch like no other. “I ain’t slept with anybody in God knows how long.”
“Now boys,” said Mama, walking over to the table carrying delicious-looking plates full of ham and eggs, “that’s no way to talk over breakfast.”
“Mamma, what difference does it make what time of day it is?” Darren asked.
“It’s my house, and them’s the rules,” she said in a firm voice. “You can go outside if you wanna talk like that.”
***
After breakfast, Dad led Jake, Darren, and I out to the back pasture to examine the holes in the fence. The hogs crowded around us as we walked into the pasture; Darren swung at them with his boot, and they scattered in all directions.
Dad stooped down slowly and gestured to a freshly dug hole. “You see what the problem is,” he said. “No matter how low we build the fence, the pigs are just gonna dig deeper. They don’t want to be here, and given enough time, they’ll always find a way out.”
“Looks like they’ve already found several,” I said, turning to survey the pasture. “They’ve got holes dug all up and down this yard. If we plug one, they’re just gonna find themselves another.”
“You oughtta keep ‘em in a pen,” said Darren.
“That was your mother’s suggestion,” Dad said in a grumpy voice. “I don’t like to keep ‘em holed up, not when they’ve got this whole big pasture to roam around in.”
“Dad, you’re a great man but a terrible farmer,” I said. “Every other farmer we know keeps their pigs penned. You won’t do it because you feel bad for the pigs.”
It was a running joke in the Savery family that Dad just wasn’t cut out for the farmer’s life. He developed oddly sentimental attachments to certain pigs and cows, and when the time came to butcher them, he would always find excuses to put it off. For a while, our livelihood had been threatened by the fact that he kept forming bonds with his own animals. Eventually, Mama had intervened and hired a farmhand to manage the livestock.
“Honestly, Dad,” said Darren. “Sometimes I wonder if you even know what happens to pigs.”
“I know what’ll happen to ‘em if they keep running loose,” Dad replied, his voice a low growl. “They’ll be eaten by wolves and coyotes and stolen by the neighbors’ boys. It’s no safer for ‘em out there than it is in the pasture. They’re marked for death either way, but it would be nice not to lose our investment. I paid good money for them hogs last Christmas, and I’m not gonna stand here and see it go to waste.”
He looked visibly annoyed. I wondered if Darren’s crack about not knowing how to farm had gotten to him. If Darren was Baloo the Bear, idly drifting through life cutting up and clowning around, Dad was Bagheera: practical, sober, industrious. They had never gotten along and probably never would.
“You’re awful quiet,” said Darren. He turned to face me. “You got any ideas?”
I shook my head. “Short of building a concrete wall, no. We can’t keep the pigs in if they don’t want to stay in. Remember how the dogs used to get out?”
“Yeah, but the dogs would always come back.” Dad lit a cigarette and waved the smoke out of his face. “Them pigs won’t.”
“They’re smart pigs,” said Darren. “I read somewhere that pigs are smarter than dogs.”
“That explains why they keep running away,” I said. “What about Charlotte?” Charlotte was the family border collie.
“She guards the fence as best she can,” said Dad, sitting down on a low fence post. “But there’s only so much she can do. I can’t expect her to stay awake twenty-four hours a day guarding them holes to make sure the hogs don’t get loose. She’s a good dog. She works hard. But like I said, she can only do so much.”
“And she’s getting old,” said Darren. “We must’ve had her for about seventeen years now. It’s about time we started training a new farm dog.”
“She’s still got a few more years,” said Dad, who didn’t like being reminded how fast time was passing. “Old dog don’t run as fast as she used to, but she’s a good dog.”
Darren and Dad went on arguing, and I drifted in and out of the conversation. It was bad enough having to listen to them yammering about dogs and wild hogs on normal days, but it was especially hard on days like today. I felt like I had spent the night being shoved face down into cold water, remembering every terrible thing that had ever happened to me.
“You alright, man?” Darren asked me during a lull in the post-digging. “You ain’t said more than a few words all morning.”
“I’ll be alright in a day or two,” I said, conveying with my tone that I wasn’t interested in talking about it.
“Don’t be like that,” said Darren. “I can tell when you’re holding out on me.”
I wiped the sweat from my brow. “It’s just—tomorrow’s the first anniversary.”
Darren nodded in understanding. “You gonna be okay?”
“Yeah. I think I just need a day to myself.”
“Whatever you think is best. I know working sometimes helps me to get my mind off things, keeps me from feeling lonely.”
“When have you ever worked, Darren?” I asked with a wry smile.
Darren laughed and punched me hard on my mermaid bicep. “Hey now! At least I was kind enough to ask!”
I’ll be fine, I told myself as I drove home that night after a late supper of au gratin potatoes and pork chops. They said the first anniversary was supposed to be the hardest, that it would slowly start getting better once I had cleared that hurdle. Sometimes that was hard to imagine. The last year had felt like ten years; every day had dragged by, and I was beginning to wonder if I would be grieving her for the rest of my life.
As soon as I reached home, I called my friend Elizabeth Philips Davies. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey.” Then, without waiting, I added in a low voice, “You wanna come over?”
There was a slight pause on the other end. “Come over and do what?”
“Don’t make me spell it out,” I said, a hot feeling of shame creeping up my neck and shoulders. “I just don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“On my way,” said Liz. She hung up the phone.