Cold Quiet Country Read Free Page A

first moment I knew she had a pathway into me, if she wanted it. I didn’t want to be her deliverer. Didn’t even know she needed delivering. I saw her thoughtfulness and mistook it for empathy. In hindsight, she was edgy like a cat watching a caged bird. Her eyes flared and then narrowed. She was aware of biology and what it clamors for between men and women, and more so. Was eager to experiment with me. Perform.
    That should have been my warning.
    “Burt’s in the barn,” she said.
    “Burt one of your brothers?”
    “My father.”
    On the short walk to the barn I puzzled over her calling her father by his Christian name.
    I found Burt Haudesert hammering steel around an anvil. He was dressed in a green flannel shirt and corduroys. Everything was one shade of green or another save his boots; the dust covering them caught a splash of sunlight that left them almost gold. I came alongside and he explained what he was doing without me asking: re-fabricating a busted hay wagon support that he’d asked Carl somebody to weld back together—Carl being a person who could weld but couldn’t shape.
    “I’m Gale G’Wain, and I’m looking for work.”
    “I’m Burt Haudesert, and I got work all around me.” He studied my eyes, my clothes, my hands. “An unplanned labor shortage on account of Cal bein’ so goddamn dense. There’s tree stumps in that pasture with a higher IQ.”
    “Yes sir,” I said, and stepped away.
    “Stoned as a rock star, he gets up on that crossbeam and tries to walk it with a shovel for balance. Busted half the bones in his body.”
    “That’s something else, sir.”
    “You go inside the house, and if you ask Gwen real nice, she won’t bite your head off,” he said. “She’ll scare you up something to eat.”
    I shook his hand and he winked at me and laughed. He read me right; I was grateful. But the feeling I got at his mention of Gwen should have sounded alarm bells in my head. His ease-making euphemisms about his baby girl. The tropes he put into play with a stranger. And if not that, if not him, the feeling I got as my mind followed through on those lascivious wanderings, as if Burt Haudesert had just granted permission to strip his daughter naked and enjoy her any vulgar way I wanted to—assured that she wouldn’t bite my head off.
    That should have been enough, but it wasn’t.
    I hadn’t eaten anything but bitter, half-grown apples, two-inch carrots, and tiny shoots of corn ears since Mister Sharps cut me loose from the Youth Home, saying I was a precocious young man and the world would reward a boy of my bent. It was that time of year when summer isn’t sure if it wants to come out and play but spring is sure it doesn’t want to leave. Crops were growing slow and all the talk in the barbershops and seed stores was on the drought. How the almanac said it was this year for sure, and the best thing to do with seeds was to save them or grind them into flour, but don’t plant them, because anything that grows will bake dry before it gets six inches off the ground. Farmers can be a superstitious lot but their bellies force them to be pragmatists, so they spend their idle minutes framing every sort of omen in every shade of light, casting gloomy predictions of their own demise, and when the luxury of idle time disappears, they set about breaking their backs to ensure no axis of foul weather or nutrient deterioration or market glut or bad health will prevent them from feeding their babies and living as free men.
    Burt Haudesert struck me as being like the men in the barber shops and seed stores. He stood in the barn hammering steel, and I got that he was as much a part of the earth as a cornstalk.
    Just as stiff-backed and silly.
    The front door opened before my foot hit the steps. Gwen stood with her arms folded below her bosom, plumping it. She had one leg forward, her ankle to the curve of her calf showing a lot of shape. Girls are spindles until they become women and there’s