When he sat in the truck, he said, “This ain’t the right night. Snow.”
“Uh-huh. All over.”
He pulled from the graveyard, started back the way they’d come. Their path was rankled by ice clods and cracked branches. The snow had stopped and half the sky was the color of a spring pool and as clear. Ree looked to the stars shining so brightly, so plain and brilliant, and wondered what they meant, and if they meant the same thing as rocks in springwater.
“Can you push if we get stuck?”
“Not enough to help.”
“You could drive, though, if I pushed.”
“I’ve never had a car, man.”
“I don’t much feel like pushin’, anyhow.”
They reached the main route in the valley, drove closely behind a snowplow. The snowplow displayed bright yellow lights and the plow bellowed a dragon’s roar scraping the road. A white fury was tossed up by the plow and made a hectic cloud of spindrift snow that broke low to ground and spewed. Teardrop turned the wipers on, then began to fall back from the snowplow. His eyes kept lolling shut, bursting open, lolling. When his eyes lolled, the truck hogged the center of the road. The snowplow was getting farther and farther ahead, and his eyes were about closed when flashing lights whirled over the truck from behind. Teardrop glanced in the rearview mirror but did not stop. A siren squawked briefly and he pulled over, rolled his window down, turned the wipers off.
Ree craned about to look out the back window. The flashing lights were dizzying and the headlights behind shined fiercely into the truck. She shielded her eyes and squinted. It was Baskin in a green deputy’s coat and official smokey hat. He approached on Teardrop’s side but halted at a distance of several feet and said, “Turn the engine off.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Turn it off’n get out with your hands where I can see ’em.”
Teardrop kept his head straight but angled his eyes to watch Baskin in the side mirror. His right hand eased toward the rifle. He said, “Nope. Tonight I ain’t doin’ a fuckin’ thing you say.”
Ree watched Teardrop’s hand close around the rifle and she felt somehow instantly all sweaty on her insides, and her sweaty insides jumped into her throat. She saw Baskin drop a hand to his holster and step nearer the rear of the truck. Ree looked at the sawed-off shotgun on the seat between her uncle and herself and quaked.
In the brightness of lights and swirling colors, Baskin was mostly a shadow wearing a wide-brimmed hat. He said, “Get out, Teardrop. Get out now!”
Teardrop said, “Who’d you tell about Jessup, huh? You fuckin’ prick. Who?”
For several seconds Baskin stood silently, his posture beginning to ebb, then inhaled hugely and drew his pistol from the holster.
Ree slid her fingers toward the shotgun, thinking, This was how sudden things happened that haunted forever.
“I’ve given you… that’s a lawful goddam order. I’ve given you a lawful goddam order.”
Sounds like singed laughter burst from Teardrop, and he jerked the rifle onto his lap, curled his trigger finger. He seemed to have caught Baskin’s eye in the rearview mirror. He looked intently into the mirror, flicked a fingernail repeatedly against the folded wire stock on the rifle, flick, flick, flick, then said, “Is this goin’ to be our time?”
Teardrop lifted his foot from the brake and calmly rolled onto the scraped road and began to drive away toward home. Ree watched Baskin, and he stood alone there in the road behind with his pistol hand dangled to his side, then he crouched to a knee on the thinned snow in the gusting wind, facedown, and his hat popped off his head, but he caught it before it blew away.
33
THE BOYS had never known Mom when her parts were gathered and she’d stood complete with sparking dark eyes and a fast laugh. Mom only seldom walked farther than the kitchen and never danced during their days. Come morning, Ree saddled her hangover and rode that mood into the forlorn chores of a jittery day, and for over an hour she crouched at the big hall closet, pulling out dusty, tattered boxes of forgotten family flotsam, throwing everything away, until she came across a yellow envelope that held pictures. She spread the pictures on the floor and the boys bent over the snapshots, raising each for closer viewing, then dropping one old vision of Mom for the next. Mom in black-and-white, wearing a striped skirt that twirled aloft as she swung in the arms of Dad, sat on his lap beside a table overflowing with beer bottles and mashed smokes, did a tippy-toe spin on the kitchen floor with a full shot glass raised above her head. Mom in color, wearing a crown of twisted flowers at one of Uncle Jack’s weddings, standing on the porch preened to go out for the night looking gorgeous in a red dress, a blue dress, a green dress, a slick black coat shiny as Sunday shoes. Her lips were ever painted bright and smiling.
Ree said, “She used to be so different from now.”
Harold said, “Pretty. She was so pretty.”
“She’s still pretty.”
“Not like then.”
“And these fellas with her are all Dad.”
Sonny said, “They are? That’s him? Dad had hair like that?”
“Yup. It mostly fell out when he was away. You wouldn’t remember.”
“Nope. I don’t remember him with much hair.”
Her sad slumping task for the day was to begin sorting the house, go through closets and crawl spaces, haul forgotten boxes and bags into the light and decide what old stuff was to be kept and what would be burned in the yard as trash. Bromonts had been in the house for most of a century and some of the old boxes in out-of-the-way nooks had collapsed into fairly tidy heaps of so much rot. Many of the papers became powder in her fingers as she unfolded them for reading. There was a purple velvet jewelry box mice had chewed ragged, and she opened it to find a collection of marbles and a thimble and a Valentine’s card received by Aunt Bernadette during third grade with words of love written large in crayon. She found heelless shoes still wrinkled from the feet of relatives who were dead before she could’ve known them. A large darkened knife with a bent blade. A delicate white bowl holding faded paper shotgun shells and a handful of keys to locks she couldn’t imagine. Straw sun hats with brims torn away from the crowns.
“Carry this to the trash barrel’n start us a fire. Then come back—there’s more.”
Under the stairs she found several battered tools, ax blades, saw blades, awls and hammer shafts, cobwebbed jars of ancient four-sided nails with square heads, metal washers, bent drill bits. Schoolbooks with Mom’s name printed in pencil inside the covers. A porcelain thunder mug cracked around the rim and base. A rusted lunch box lid that said Howdy Doody! and had the name Jack slapped on small with red fingernail polish.
Mom sat in her rocker, and Ree asked, “How much of what you got still fits?”
“These shoes do.”
“I mean in your closet.”
“Some in there never did.”
Mom’s closet was a jumbo mess of her own clothes, plus relics from Mamaw and Bernadette. Mom and Mamaw had both been of a mind to save anything and everything that might possibly be worn by somebody in the family someday or maybe have some other unknown future use. Mamaw had run to sloppy fat for her last many years, Bernadette was made short and scant, Mom long and lean. Not much that fit one ever would fit another, but the closet became stuffed with maybe-someday clothes and stayed that way. Most of the white things had long since yellowed on their hangers. Dust built yokes of grime on the shoulders of dresses and blouses.