'I don’t know. I got my place in town and you know things with me and Harold Pennefield are getting sort of serious.'
'So I heard. You could do way worse than marrying a mechanic. As least you’ll always have something to drive.'
'Yeah. I hate he smells like gasoline and always has those black curves under his fingernails. But he’s regular in church of a Sunday and lets me pick out which movie to see. He took me up to that fancy inn over in Glendale Springs, you know the one.'
'The Inn at Glendale Springs, they call it. A rich couple from Florida bought the place and fixed it up. Reckon they couldn’t come up with a good name.'
'That meal was over thirty bucks, but Harold didn’t bat an eye. He even ordered me seconds on wine that was four dollars a glass. I didn’t tell him the wine tasted like brake fluid.'
'You better learn to cook so he doesn’t have to spend so much money on you.'
Marlene cocked her hip a little, not flirting, exactly, but just letting Roby know she could if she wanted. 'He says I’m worth spoiling.'
Roby nodded at the pie. 'Well, you best get that in there before it spoils.'
'Give me another minute. Sarah’s going on about what to do with Daddy’s war medals. Daddy couldn’t give them away while he was alive, and all of a sudden they’re something to fight over. Like Buck and that damned tractor. I say sell everything and split the money all around. With Momma getting the biggest chunk, of course.'
A fly landed on the pie. Marlene didn’t notice.
Flies were the worst thing that God had ever put on this earth. They laid eggs in your food and, if you didn’t die where somebody could find you easy, they laid eggs in your nose and eyes and mouth.
Roby waved the fly away, then watched as it cut a lazy arc in the air before settling on a whole hog hunk of Clemens sausage.
'You don’t mean to sell the land?' he asked.
'No, nothing like that. Momma needs a place and she’s liable to live for another ten years at this rate. Anna Beth is set on staying here, too, and ain’t any men lining up to woo her away from the nest. Sarah’s got her own problems, but at least she has Buck to take care of her.'
Roby didn’t see the attraction that Buck had for Sarah. She was a little bookish for these parts, not much good with her hands. She could play a banjo, but that was about it for useful skills. She had fancy ideas and talked about going to a big-city college, but she was three years gone from high school and the longer you put off things like that, the harder it was to make happen, especially if you were married. Still, no kids yet, so you could never say never.
Roby himself had once thought about joining the Air Force, even though his eyes weren’t great so he’d never make jet pilot. But maybe he could have worked on an aircraft carrier or something, seen the world beyond Barkersville. Maybe he would have found somebody, got married.
And if he’d gotten away from these parts, he wouldn’t have driven out in that backroads part of PickettCounty under the dead moon, drunk as the devil, his foot heavy on the pedal. That night had touched him and shaped him and tied him to these mountains like a Billy goat on a chain.
'Reckon your momma will ever marry again?' he asked.
Marlene smiled this time, though the grief cut shadows beneath her eyes. 'No, she was a one-woman man. Some are like that. I can see things with Harold maybe giving out one day, especially if he never opens his own garage. Me, I might get impressed with a traveling salesman or a long-haul truck driver or something. My generation ain’t as stable and reliable as Momma’s.'
Roby nodded. He was between those generations, and he was only half-stable. He was reliable on the job, though. He had to be. There was job and there was duty, and he put his heart into it. On the night that changed his life forever, he hadn’t asked the consequences of failure. He took the job. It was the lesser of three evils, or so it had seemed at the time.
'Think she’ll want some coffee with that?'
'All we got is Maxwell House instant. It’s rough enough stuff in the morning. This late, you’re better off with tea.'
'Well, I guess she’s sleeping restless as it is. Maybe a glass of milk.'
'Lordy, as long as you don’t use the denture glass. I don’t know what she was thinking.'
'The grief-struck mind takes an odd turn once in a while. You ever heard of ‘gallows humor’?'
'No, but I’m sure going to hang Buck if he don’t shut up about that tractor. He could at least wait until the other vultures got their fill.'
'It’s a damned good tractor.'
'A real man deserves that tractor, not somebody like Buck. I want to see a real man on that thing.'
'I got to wrap up this sausage. The flies are going to carry it off.'
'Are you a real man, Roby?' She moved closer, lowering her voice.
Roby looked at the Frigidaire. On it was a Polaroid of Jacob and the girls, taken maybe a decade before. A young Marlene was barefoot, in a calico dress, with pig tails and uneven teeth. Jacob was smiling like somebody had a pitchfork in his back.
'Marlene, your momma’s probably starving by now.'
She cocked her hip again. 'It’s some damned good pie.'
'You had some?'
She grinned, her teeth still uneven, and leaned back her head. She looked at him through half-lidded eyes. 'Harold says it’s the best in town.'
Roby felt his throat tighten. Here was Jacob barely cold, and his daughter was acting like a floozy on his grave. Harold was going to have his hands full with this one, but probably only for a few years. She had the itch. He could see Marlene talking her momma into selling the place off, then jumping a bus for Raleigh or Wilmington or even Pigeon Forge. She looked like the Pigeon Forge type, with her styled hair and shirts that were always a little too tight.
'Ought to get that pie to her,' he said, working to keep his voice level. 'I’ll fetch along the milk.'
Marlene pouted a little, as if she’d used her best bait and hadn’t got so much as a nibble. She gave a little extra shake of her rear as she left, but Roby forced himself not to watch. It wasn’t his place. She had given her heart to Harold, at least for the time being.
Biscuits. A time like this, a good scratch biscuit eased the troubled soul.
He took one out of the Tupperware container and ate it dry, without the butter that sat on a porcelain dish, its yellow edges soft in the heat of the kitchen.
III
By the time Roby entered the sitting room, the widow had eaten half the piece of pie. She chewed with a crooked yank of her jaws, as if she had an aching tooth on one side. Her gaze was fixed across the room where Alfred and Buck were studying over one of Jacob’s rifles. It was a war relic, brought home from Japan by Jacob’s father.
'What caliber is it?' Buck asked.
'Japs don’t use calibers. Why do you think they lost? Besides being yellow Commie slants and all that.'
'Well, it had to have had a bullet.'
'Daddy showed me one, once. Long as your little finger.'
'I remember that,' Sarah said. 'Maybe the bullet’s in that old cigar box with his medals.'
The widow cleared her throat. A tarry crumb stuck to her lower lip. 'He threw that stuff out. Figured they’d be grandkids running around here before long.'
She shot a stare at Buck, as if his worthless seed had refused to take root in Ridgehorn soil, as if he were personally responsible for Jacob’s dying without ever meeting a third-generation descendant.
Alfred lifted the barrel of the gun, pressed the thick wooden stock to his shoulder, and sighted to a spot
