Before her death, the old woman had executed a new will that left Leah a substantial cash bequest. The woman’s children, whom Leah had never spoken with, despite having tried to contact the woman’s oldest son once, alleged that Leah obtained the change in their mother’s will through undue influence. Furthermore, the Estate alleged that Leah had withdrawn money from the old woman’s bank account and spent the money on herself. Leah admitted that she had withdrawn the money, but had done so for the old woman, but Leah had given her cash and no receipts to prove it. In the end, Leah spent a substantial amount on an attorney who recommended, in light of the circumstances, settling the matter. The suit was something that caused the board of directors of the nonprofit some concern. It wasn’t that they believed that she’d done anything untoward, quite the contrary, all believed her to be of the highest professional and moral caliber, but that the appearance of impropriety was something that the nonprofit wanted to avoid. In the end, the board stood with her, the matter was settled with an agreement that contained Confidentiality and Non-Admission clauses and all was quickly put behind them. Leah emptied her retirement account.
Overeager children, noses pressed to panes, watched as the first flakes of snow fell on Crow Station, Kentucky. Windows fogged with excited wintergreen breath. A salting like sequins glittered in the light from flickering streetlamps that lined the empty streets. Brother hugged sister, cousin clutched cousin, dogs bayed and cats darted beneath guest-bed dust ruffles. Teeth chattered in heads and down on the already workweek-weary masses, snow snowed. On the television the attractive newspeople smiled. Eager meteorologists capered before swirling images in bright colors, gesticulating at shapes that they could not themselves see, intoning, all shirtsleeves and perspiration, Three inches, five inches, eight inches to accumulate. The temperature keeps dropping, no bottom in sight. Their eyes flickered with joy.
Everything would be closed come morning. Schools closed and warehouses emptied and stores shuttered. Only the faint glow emitted by the tanning parlors that lined Fourth Street remained — bronzed attendants sitting idly behind the counter, listening to the crackling radio, flipping through months-old magazines. The storm shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone as bunions and hunting accidents across Harrod County had felt this coming for months.
In the grocery store, people filled carts with marshmallows, Vienna sausages, hair barrettes, beets, taco shells, T-bones, anti-bacterial wipes, baby lotion, spice drops, weightlifting magazines, garlic salt, condoms, and processed cheeses of every sort. All fled the shelves clasped in eager hands desperate to provide for their family at nearly any cost. Gloved knuckles clutched extra-large store-brand bottles of ginger ale. Faces formed fists and eyes were squinted against the profane selfishness of everyone else. Near the deli, the voices of overwhelmed babies rang, swamping the Feel Good Hits of the Seventies, Eighties, Nineties and Today! sputtering from aged cloth-covered speakers. Godly fathers raised their voices at elderly women, their faces red from bellowing. Spittle rained. As they reached for the movie-butter flavored popcorn on the top shelf, the scapulae of women, thin from smoking, moved like the mandibles of great wasps. Children yanked each other’s ducktails and tore open the packages of cheap plastic toys so they could put them in their mouths. Leah Shepherd wandered around the deli and checked her cell phone to see if there was a message. There wasn’t. A hum of desperation flocked up from the throats of the now sweating throng. Outside, cars sat motionless against one another and honked half-heartedly. By nine, the night was deep and the waning crescent moon’s face was lost behind the charged quilt overhead. A pitiful sliver of silver.
The next morning, there was a thick coat of white on everything like a caul of fat. The air was crisp with silence. Children slept in. Parents slept in. Cats, stupefied, stood on hind legs to peer out windows at the alien world. When families finally rose, they ate scrambled eggs and bacon, drank chocolate milk, and the young ran out to ruin the pristine blankness, only to return a little later, panting and red-cheeked, bored already.
On the second day after the snowstorm, a blue VW was found on the side of a country road covered in snow. The town towed the car and no one ever cared to claim it.
“Leah! Leeeeaaaaah!”
TWO
AND SO ON A FRIDAY AT THE FIRST YAWN OF summer, the sun weeps pale light on unstill children. The streets and avenues and cul de sacs and lanes swell with shouts.
Summer comes to Kentucky as a shock, as though it was impossible for the land to ever be green and full again. Magnolias with swollen white petals sway in warm breezes, record-high humid air fills lungs like warm water and the invisible mechanism that animates everything slows as summer’s heavy thumb rests on its ancient belts.
Growing grass grows. Crying children cry. Dying butterflies die. Noon news warns of overheated elderly falling like flies, dehydrated bodies tumbling from lawn chairs to baking brick. Those without air conditioning wipe their necks with rags to keep beads of sweat from ruining their good clothes.
Bored children pile into the back-backs of station wagons, wearing only cut-off shorts and blue Wildcat t-shirts, and are toted out to the swimming pool, a cement bowl filled with chlorinated water and urine. They dive in head first, splash in and out, shiver with raised gooseflesh as they race to the snack bar when the lifeguard blows a rest break. One boy falls and skins his knees and cries for his mother as a young woman watches with her heart aching to see the boy’s strange face. Wet lips consume frozen candy bars and cokes. The pool is a blue eye in the midst of yellow-green yards and fields that stretch out as far as anyone can tell.
Without the bonds of school, they pour out of doors, unable to be constrained. The classroom is a coffin and the bedroom is a coffin and even their own bodies are coffins and they must escape. They climb fences and cross cow pastures in cawing gaggles, boys and girls panting, and in strings they follow the stream’s muddy edges and climb embankments, passing green glass bottles half-entombed in dried mud, old newspapers with ruined words that may have once described some terrible tragedy, ripped clothes left to the rain in the tangle of a tree’s old roots, and abandoned cars with trees growing through them. They follow thin tributaries off into dark bowers of bent branches and debris left by last summer’s young. Boys look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of girls who look at the bare legs of boys who look at the bare legs of boys and so forth in the warm shade of dark green leaves. A shoe and a pair of underpants caught on a rock in the water as the current improvises eddies.
Still deeper, still darker, where the air is cooler, wandering farther each summer than they had the previous, unsure whom they might meet there sitting on a low branch, waiting — the ghost of some long-lost classmate, rumored to haunt the third floor girls’ bathroom, foolish fire, undine and goblin, some creature that their parents warned came for bad children with glistening throat and fur matted with gore. They are too old for such things and they laugh, but they listen.
Beyond these pastures, beyond the streams and lakes, they find the remains of the Old Country Club. The Old Country Club never changes, only the children lazing in its shadows. It had been abandoned decades before even their grandparents were born, after a fire raged through a formal dance. The memory passed down of orange flames licking rafters, of embers of tulle held aloft on updrafts, of the dining hall ablaze as the young men and women pressed against the glass. The stories all agreed: Arson for sure. Lovestruck, a handsome young man with nice teeth had been put to trial and then to death and then interred somewhere forgotten. The coarse ghosts of the structure remained. Their parents and grandparents had done just as they had — clamored across rock walls and expanses of clover and knotty weeds and they thought they were the only ones who knew the Old Country Club’s secrets. The youth cluster along the edge of the empty pool, gazing down into the decades of ruin and wrack. They read the collected graffiti of the county writ on the walls in red and green spray paint, find sun-bleached beer cans and exhausted condoms. Into each other’s ears they whisper, lips tickling lobes. Wintergreen breath against helix and antihelix. A hand on a bare thigh. A bare neck stretched to the warmth of the sunlight. The first blush of sweat on a shoulder or stomach. Mouths on mouths around the side of the building as a boombox distant plays or behind half-crumbled slave walls, in the taller grass, with pants pulled down and arms unsure where to go, two find a moment to press into each other and in the process, lose a sock. The sun above them refuses to move. If they don’t run and scream, moss and lichens will cover them and they will be pulled down into the mud, sinking away forever but the mud would be cool on the baked skin, so perhaps that fate is not so terrible.