Chapter 6 - The Parlor Door
The kitchen door of the farmhouse was never locked. In forty years, Harlon Briggs had never bought a padlock for a door that faced his own yard, because he believed no one on the ridge was foolish enough to steal from a man who kept four hound dogs tied to the corn crib.
The dogs didn't bark at me.
I had been the one feeding them the lard biscuits every morning at five while Colton was still in bed sleeping off his sour mash. They came out of their barrels with their tails low, sniffing my shoes, then lay back down in the straw with long, dry sighs.
I stepped into the kitchen.
The room was hot—hot enough to make my frozen face sting with a hundred tiny needles of pain.
Colton was sitting in the Windsor chair by the cookstove. His head was wrapped in white linen that had yellowed around the edges where the iodine had dried. The shotgun—an old double-barreled sixteen-gauge with a pitted stock—rested across his thighs, his right thumb hooked over the trigger guard.
He wasn't sleeping. His eyes were wide, red-rimmed, staring at the small iron door of the ash pit.
"You came back," he said.
His voice was thin, raspy, like a saw hitting a knot in dry oak.
"I came for my coat," I said.
"Your coat’s in the smokehouse," he said without looking at me. "Everything you own is in the smokehouse. And tomorrow it stays there when your old man comes to haul you off."
"Your head looks bad, Colton," I said softly.
He turned his neck slowly, his face tightening as the stitches pulled against his temple. The dark amber of his eyes was gone; in the orange glow from the draft holes, they looked like two burnt holes in a piece of paper.
"You shouldn't have hit me, Sarah," he said. "A woman doesn't do that. It ain't natural."
"It's as natural as a dog biting a boot," I said.
I moved two steps toward the parlor door.
He didn't raise the gun, but his thumb tightened on the trigger guard. "Stay out of the parlor. My mother’s sleeping in the front room."
"She isn't sleeping," I said, pointing toward the ceiling.
Above us, the light, rhythmic creak-creak of the floorboards had started again. Darla was awake. She was probably sitting in her rocking chair by the window, waiting for the light to break so she could come down and start the bacon.
"Get out," Colton said.
I didn't get out.
I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out the piece of shattered glass, and laid it gently on the corner of the cookstove, right next to his tin cup of cold coffee.
May you like
"That's from the bedroom," I said. "I thought you might want to keep it to remind yourself how soft cedar chests are."
Before he could move his thumb to the hammer, I pushed the parlor door open and went inside.
