Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories Read Free Page A

read 2:18, too late for a chat, or any kind of good news. He lifted the phone and heard Darnell Coe’s voice. I got trouble with a calf that ain’t of a mind to get born, Darnell told him.
    Carson sat up on the mattress, settled his bare feet on the floor. Moments passed before he realized he was waiting for another body to do the same thing, leave the bed and fix him a thermos of coffee. Almost four months and it still happened, not just when he awoke but other times too. He’d read something and lower the newspaper, about to speak to an empty chair, or at the grocery store, reach into a shirt pocket for a neatly printed list that wasn’t there.
    He dressed and went out to the truck. All that would be needed lay in the pickup’s lockbox or, just as likely, on Darnell’s gun rack. At the edge of town, he stopped at Dobbins’ Handy-Mart, the only store open. Music harsh as the fluorescent lights came from a counter radio. Carson filled the largest Styrofoam cup with coffee and paid Lloyd Dobbin’s grandson. The road to Flag Pond was twenty miles of switchbacks and curves that ended just short of the Tennessee line. A voice on the radio said no rain until midday, so at least he’d not be contending with a slick road.
    Carson had closed his office two years ago, referred his clients to Bobby Starnes, a new doc just out of vet school. Bobby had grown up in Madison County, and that helped a lot, but the older farmers, some Carson had known since childhood, kept calling him. Because they know you won’t expect them to pay up front, or at all, Doris had claimed, which was true in some cases, but for others, like Darnell Coe, it wasn’t. We’ve been hitched to the same wagon this long, we’ll pull it the rest of the way together, Darnell had said, reminding Carson that in the 1950s and half a world away they’d made a vow to do so.
    As the town’s last streetlight slid off the rearview mirror, Carson turned the radio off. It was something he often did on late-night calls, making driving the good part, because what usually awaited him in a barn or pasture would not be good, a cow dying of milk fever or a horse with a gangrenous leg—things easily cured if a man hadn’t wagered a vet fee against a roll of barbed wire or a salt lick. There had been times when Carson had told men to their faces they were stupid to wait so long. But even a smart farmer did stupid things when he’d been poor too long. He’d figure after a drought had withered his cornstalks, or maybe a hailstorm had beaten the life out of his tobacco allotment, that he was owed a bit of good luck, so he’d skimp on a calcium shot or pour turpentine on an infected limb. Waiting it out until he’d waited too late, then calling Carson when a rifle was the only remedy.
    So driving had to be the good part, and it was. Carson had always been comfortable with solitude. As a boy, he’d loved to roam the woods, loved how quiet the woods could be. If deep enough in them, he wouldn’t even hear the wind. But the best was afternoons in the barn. He’d climb up in the loft and lean back against a hay bale, then watch the sunlight begin to lean through the loft window, brightening the spilled straw. When the light was at its apex, the loft shimmered as though coated with a golden foil. Dust motes speckled the air like midges. The only sound would be underneath, a calf restless in a stall, a horse eating from a feed bag. Carson had always felt an aloneness in those moments, but never in a sad way.
    Through the years, the same feeling had come back to him on late nights as he drove out of town. Doris would be back in bed and the children asleep as he left the house. Night would gather around him, the only light his truck’s twin beams probing the road ahead. He would pass darkened farmhouses and barns as he made his way toward the glow of lamp or porch light. On the way back was the better time, though. He’d savor the solitude, knowing that later when he opened