Chapter 3 - The Weight of the Lease
The truck was an eighty-two Ford with a rusted floorboard through which I could see the grey gravel of the driveway moving slowly as the engine idled.
The heater didn't work. It blew a thin, damp draft that smelled of wet dog fur and old fertilizer sacks.
I sat with my hands tucked under my thighs to keep them from shaking, watching the kitchen window through the misted windshield. Every ten minutes, the silhouette of Dr. Pritchett passed by the yellow glass—his round, bald head dipping down as he worked on Colton’s scalp.
I didn't feel afraid. That was the strange thing.
The fear had stayed behind in the bedroom, hanging in the air with the smell of the beer and the wet wallpaper. What I felt now was a cold, heavy clarity, like the water in the cistern after a hard frost.
My father had given Harlon two cows and thirty acres of bottomland to clear the debt from the dry year of twenty-four. That was what the wedding had been: a bill of sale written in church Latin and signed with a silver pen that Colton had borrowed from his uncle.
“She’s a sturdy girl,” Harlon had told my father at the reception while the music was still playing. “She’ll keep the house quiet.”
They had thought "quiet" meant "empty." They had thought three years of community college in the county seat had just given me big words to use when I was alone in the pantry.
The truck door opened with a loud, metallic clack.
It wasn't Harlon. It was Clara, Colton’s younger sister, who lived in the small cottage behind the cider mill.
She was sixteen, with the same round, yellow-skinned face as her mother, but her eyes were different—pushed back into her head, shadowed, like she spent her life looking for shelter before the clouds appeared.
She slid into the bench seat beside me, bringing a smell of cinnamon and wood smoke with her. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a cold biscuit wrapped in a piece of greaseproof paper.
"Mother says you're not to come inside till after five," Clara said. Her voice was flat, devoid of curiosity or pity.
"How is he?" I asked.
"Six stitches," she said, biting her lip. "Dr. Pritchett said he's got a concussion. He told Father that Colton must have hit the iron handle on the cedar chest pretty hard."
She looked down at her lap, her dirty fingernails picking at the frayed hem of her coat.
"Did you really hit him?" she asked softly.
"Yes."
Clara stayed quiet for a moment. Outside, a hawk dropped out of the grey sky, landing on the top rail of the pasture fence with a heavy, feathered thud.
"Mother told Harlon that if they let you stay, the whole ridge will be laughing at him by Sunday," Clara said. "She said you've got that town blood in you. The kind that rots from the inside out."
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"What did Harlon say?"
"He said town blood cleans up fast enough when the winter gets hard," Clara said. She turned her head, looking at me sideways through her greasy fringe. "He took your trunk out of the hallway. He put it in the smokehouse."
