Zion Read Free Page A

the parable in Luke chapter 12 cautioned the faithful against building bigger and bigger barns. He worked hard but never had dreams beyond Zion.
    Tom harbored few regrets until recently when he was forced to begin removing his cattle and hogs from the land. People believed Fitz-Blackwell had paid bribes to pass the ordinance that banned the livestock from the woods, the unfenced open range owned by big landholders and timber companies throughout Baxter Parish, and this corruption made the loss of range rights all the more grievous. The stock ban was not what enraged Tom the most. It was the utter waste of killing the oaks and other hardwoods, poisoning them with dimethylamine salt and other chemical herbicides. Some large trees were killed by ringing them through the bark with a gas-powered “beaver machine.” The timber companies would employ any means necessary to kill hardwood trees, even cutting them down with chainsaws just so they’d die in the forest and make room for young pines. To Tom’s way of thinking, killing a hundred-year-old live oak tree and letting it rot in the forest was a form of fratricide and poor stewardship of God’s resources, a testament to man’s greed.

    A few days after the marshal’s visit, Tom drove to the feed store in Milltown to buy a sack of grain for his horse. It was half past four o’clock, and he was dog-tired from stacking green bricks most of the day in the kiln when he wasn’t driving the Gravely tractor that pulled the brick cart on a narrow railroad track through the place. The Gravely and cart hauled bricks to and from the kiln, and then Tom and a black laborer stacked pallets of fired bricks onto larger pallets that were loaded by a diesel forklift.
    Beam’s Feed and Farm fronted the railroad tracks on Main Street. Tom parked down from the store entrance. As he got out of his Ford pickup truck, he heard a catcall. Tom saw Sloan Parnell, a well-connected timber company hack, sitting on the tailgate of a brand new International Scout, a red four-wheel drive vehicle with a white top and a short box for a bed. He was smoking a little cigar, talking to a tall black-haired woman with a blouse that showed plenty of cleavage. Tom recognized her as Charity LeBlanc, a local preacher’s daughter, nothing more than a child in a woman’s body. She often ran with upper crust men.
    He looked at Sloan and made eye contact with him. He headed toward the store entrance, offering no gesture of friendship or acknowledgement. Several months earlier, while making his rounds checking on his hogs not far from Parnell family land, Tom almost had to draw his rifle on Sloan after he made a verbal threat, claiming he had a loaded pistol in his truck and calling Tom a criminal trespasser. He still wondered how he had avoided bloodshed, but Sloan finally backed off before he had to pull out the Savage deer rifle from the saddle scabbard.
    Tom’s father was a pious Methodist layman, but his father’s two brothers were lapsed, backslid and wayward, often bad to drink. Some nights during Tom’s childhood in the 1930s, his two uncles would come to the house in Zion and want to fight his father, and he would have to oblige them to protect the family. Occasionally, his father got bloodied fighting the pair of drunkards, and they’d come back the next day when they were sober with a new shirt or other items to replace what they’d destroyed the night before. As a result, Tom never drank, not even while in the navy, and he was always one to avoid violence whenever he could despite the region’s notoriety for hotheadedness and blood feuds.
    “I’m a Fitz-Blackwell man now,” Sloan hollered to Tom. He stood up from the tailgate and made a flanking jog toward the feed store entryway.
    Tom knew he’d have to pass Sloan to buy the sack of grain. “Is that so?” he said and kept walking.
    “Damn straight it is, and I’ve got a thousand-dollar reward out on the arsonist that burned the pines over on