Past Light and Cold was published in Lynx Eye, 6th Anniversary Issue, Vol. VII, No. 4, ScribbleFest Literary Group, November, 2000.

About 5,410 words

© 2000 G.D. Peters

PAST LIGHT AND COLD

by

G.D. PETERS

Turner Pitts drove past fields of fallen snow, miles of white linen, layered with patches of shadow and light, that stretched for miles. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth, its thin spiral of smoke doggedly pursuing the narrow space beneath one lens of his glasses, poking at his eye as if with single-minded determination, suffering him constantly to blink. He brooked this annoyance stoically, squinting to ward off the searing heat, and drove in silence, serenaded by the music of his thoughts: lost melodies from his youth that haunted him from beyond the walls of his memory.

He saw himself at eight and a half, moving slowly through a vast field of white and cold, a bright sun (which did little to warm the frigid air, but lit the morning sky with splendid radiance), highlighted snow crystals that danced within the white-on-white of his horizon. He pulled a heavy boot from three feet of snow and plunged it forward, and then the next.

As he drove past white fields, he watched through a streaked windshield and saw himself moving deliberately through piled drifts, resolute and determined, toward the ice-pond—over the short brace of hills behind the abandoned shack—which marked a half-way point between his home and Carl Bevins’ farmhouse, although it was on Bevins’ land. He saw himself stopping when he reached the top of the hill, staring down into the small hollow at the deserted rink, admiring the frozen plate nestled snugly at the foot of the crater, amidst a white sea of rolling hills which then constituted his universe. He remembered that he stood, momentarily, as if he were at the top of the world, his face turned toward the sun, and watched for several peaceful minutes as a gathering wind began pinching his cheeks with pinpricks. Slowly, then, he began to work his way down the gradual slope toward the edge of the pond. He tested the ice with a cautious foot, tapping with the bottom of his boot; then a cautious, uneasy step, his other boot rooted firmly to a snow-covered bank, and then, finally, both legs, and a few more steps, sliding his boots across the ice as if he were skating, until he was alone with himself at the center of the plate, looking down at a slate of dead, gray ice which only the week before had been liquid and alive and forbidding.

He knelt on one knee, and scraped with a mitten at the frozen crust, trying to wipe clean the window to the dead world imprisoned below. It was while he was in this position, head bent toward the ice, eyes fixed on its dull translucence, that the snowball exploded to his right, dusting his face with fresh powder. He turned to look as another frosty missile crashed at the top of his head, impacting at the point where his wool cap met with the flesh of his brow, knocking him to the ice.

“Got him!” a boy’s voice rang out. “Hey, Pop, come see, I got him good!”

Turner rose to his knees, holding a mitten to his injured forehead, and did not move. He watched as a man came over the rise.

“Who’s that down there?” Carl Bevins called, striding effortlessly through the snow, coming down toward where the young boy knelt upon the pond. Turner rose to his feet; he pulled the mitten from his face to inspect it for blood, and was relieved to find only the frayed blue wool, dotted with crystals of snow.

“I got you good,” Denny Bevins jumped and laughed along the slope, running with comic ineptitude through deep drifts, unable to keep pace with his father, who reached the plate and, without testing its strength, strode quickly to where Turner stood at its center.

“That the Pitts boy wrapped under all that?”

Turner nodded.

“You on my property, boy,” Carl Bevins said, and Turner wheeled and began walking off the ice, his head hung low, and throbbing from the blow.

“Hold a minute, son,” Carl said, “you ain’t need to run off, lemme take a look at you, here.” Turner faced about as the man approached and took one knee before him, lifting an ungloved hand to raise his wool hat. “Yep, you got a nice little tadpole there,” he said. “You hold a little snow to it, mebbe keep it from blowing up to a bullfrog.” He smiled at Turner and it made him laugh, momentarily easing the pounding in his head, and his discomfort about the tracks of tears now frozen to his cheeks; everything seemed all right. Carl Bevins scooped a handful of snow off the pond and shaped it into a wedge.

“Here, try this,” he said, handing it to the boy.

Turner accepted the makeshift compress, holding it to his forehead.

“Bound to sting a little,” Carl said.

“It’s okay,” he answered.

Turner inhaled a deep sip of smoke and pulled the Camel from his lips, holding it between his fingers as they wrapped loosely about the steering wheel of his Explorer. He exhaled a thin gray stream which he whistled through pursed lips, the smoke pearling and hanging in the space above his dash, rolling up his streaked windshield as he watched the road but saw, instead, the snowy fields beyond, the ice-pond as it was, the way he remembered it now.

“Denny, come down here,” Carl Bevins said, his head turned back toward the hill. “This is Turner Pitts, from down along the creek, you know him.”

Denny came scrambling over the ice. “Didn’t I got you good?” he said, his thin lips parted in a broad smile which besieged his ragged face, revealing a gaping hole where both front teeth were missing. He held his tongue to the gap when not speaking, pushing its pink pulp outwards.

Turner rubbed his head and nodded.

“You didn’t mean to hit him in the head, there, did you Denny?” Carl said.

“No, sir.”

“You didn’t mean to hurt him, did you?”

“No, sir.”

A tractor-trailer rumbled past on the road beyond the farthest hill.

“Say you sorry, then,” Carl said.

“I’m sorry,” Denny obeyed. “Wanna make a snowman?”

Turner nodded, his mittened hand still holding the wedge of snow to his head.

“C’mon,” Denny said, and darted back across the ice toward the hill, where the two of them rolled snow the rest of that morning, and built a snowman on the western bank, to watch over the ice-pond while they were away.

As Turner drove, his thoughts returned to the present, to his daughter’s dance recital at Packer elementary two nights before (her hair in braids, and white lace angel’s wings at her shoulders), the small pile of bills stacked neatly at one corner of his desk, and, beneath them, the letter which had brought him back to the place where once he trudged contentedly through banks of fallen snow. He drove the battered highway, over its weathered asphalt and cracked white lines, across the miles and past the fields that once made up his universe, and felt the distance, the broken and restored and amended dreams, the years and miles, which now separated him from the place where once he woke on winter mornings to a frigid wind fighting through battered windows and loose floorboards, jogging him from sleep, beckoning him to a small ice-pond set peacefully amidst the snowy fields, out across rolling hills, beyond the abandoned shack in his own backyard.

In those days of his youth a quiet peace was served each evening at the dinner table, with pot roast and gravy, and a daily grace. His mother, Gloria, was a pretty woman, who managed life amicably, for Turner and his father, among these tranquil and sprawling fields. Estan Pitts was a deputy in the Quiller County Sheriff’s office, and as easy-going and likeable, for his part, as Gloria was mysterious and quiet. But something was missing between husband and wife, had always—Turner knew now—been missing, even from the first, and Turner had taken its place, though he would not learn the true nature of his role in their lives until much later on in his own. The arrival of the letter only served to remind him what had gone before, but it had always been there, out in the open, for him (or anyone else) to see, if he had known to look.

After dinner that night Turner’s father remained at the table, reading the paper while Turner helped his mother clear the dishes.

“What happened to your eye?” Estan asked when Turner emerged from the kitchen to take up the gravy pitcher. Whether because he was an officer of the law, or merely because he was a father, Estan had sighted the mouse on Turner’s forehead as soon as he had come through the door, although he waited until after dinner to question the boy about it.

“Me and Denny Bevins was playing in the snow over to the ice-pond...”

“Were playing,” Estan interrupted.

“Yes sir. And we was having a snowball fight...”

“Were having...”

“Yes sir. And I got hit.”

“I see,” his father said. “Is it all right?”

“Yes sir. Mr. Bevins put snow on it so it wouldn’t blow up to a bullfrog.”

His father looked up from the paper—the dishes in the kitchen stopped clinking, and the incessant hum of the water tap ceased in the pipes below the floorboards, halting abruptly with a rumble and a knock.

“Oh?” Estan said. “Carl Bevins there, too, was he?” He looked at Turner, his green eyes soft with inquiry.

“Yes, sir. He said I was on his property, but I was allowed to if I wanted.”

Estan regarded the boy closely, his soft eyes a cloudy mix of milky-green—deep, stirring pools in which compassion and want brewed fitfully together. “All right, then,” he finally said, creasing his paper as he turned the page and lowered his head once more. In the kitchen—and in the pipes below the floorboards—the water came running again, and the light clatter of dishes resumed as this moment approached, presented itself, and passed, all within the blink of a notion, leaving everything as it had been, to resume its rightful course.

The young boy had an inkling that something had transpired there in the dining room, in his presence, but he was nowhere near to deciphering its meaning. Later—much later—he would remember that moment, even as he did now, and would realize what was (and, correspondingly, was not) happening between his parents. But at eight and a half he had not even the whisper of a clue, he simply listened as the sounds of survival and discontent steamed and bubbled beneath the heavy double-boiler, and rooted in the hard, frozen soil below the bushes, buried in the iron ground, far beneath the snow outside their little house. In bed that night he woke from a deep sleep to raised strains and hushed whispers emanating from the living room, where Estan and Gloria were quietly arguing. He rolled toward the door, reached out his ear to hear their words, but was unable, with any clarity, to discern them. His parents had argued this way before; he had never been able to decipher their whispers, and always had drifted quickly back to sleep. In the morning he would see them sitting together at the breakfast table, quietly sipping coffee and reading newspapers and magazines, and would not even remember that they had awakened him during the night. But later he would remember, years later, when everything had passed, and needed to be relearned.

On Sundays they drove the fifteen miles into town to attend Pastor Truesbeck’s service at the Community Methodist Church, and Turner abided the interminable proceedings, awaiting his sole reward, the brief intermission during which the ushers pushed baskets—attached to broomstick-like poles—down the aisle as he dropped a pastel-colored envelope in with the rest. Each week the offering was a different color: light blue, or green, or pink, or white, with two compartments, separated by a perforation, and later to be divided between local and regional congregations. Afterwards, they walked through town, stopping to browse at storefronts along Roosevelt Avenue. In the candy store, his father bought the Sunday paper, and treated Turner to an ice cream soda or double-scoop cone while Gloria leafed through magazines from the rack along the wall, selecting one which Turner knew she would be poring over during the silent drive home. Mr. Raskovich handed his father’s offering over the counter, his friendly face uplifted in a perpetual smile. They continued down Roosevelt Avenue, passing friends and neighbors, stopping now and again to say hello. On this particular Sunday, a bit farther along, in front of the high school, they met Carl and Beatrice Bevins, coming toward them with Denny and his sister Margaret. Turner stopped, anticipating a like exchange of pleasantries with their closest of neighbors, but it was not forthcoming. Estan and Gloria kept walking, and so did the Bevinses, although Denny reached out to punch Turner on the arm.

“Hey, Turner,” he said.

“Hey,” Turner called, laughing, but his parents moved quickly past and Turner followed, watching quietly as his parents exchanged only sidelong nods and courteous glances with their counterparts. Turner did not understand why they seemed so dispassionate toward each other. He and Denny had become fast friends, and Carl Bevins had gone out of his way to make Turner welcome on his land, even, at times, looking after him. He looked up as the Bevinses passed, watching as Carl smiled, almost imperceptibly, at Gloria, and then at him. For his part, Turner smiled back, then felt the tug at his sleeve as Estan pulled him quietly along, and the two families passed one another, moving in opposite directions.

Turner negotiated the exit ramp and brought his car to a stop at the blinking light. He turned right and pulled into the station at the corner for a fill-up. Dave Markley appeared at the entrance of the big, double-bay garage, wiping his hands with an oil rag as he slowly came toward the car, still hobbled by the bum hip he broke as a youth, and limping noticeably. He wore coveralls with greasy work boots, and a quilted orange hunter’s vest. On his head was a ragged Cornhuskers cap, with grease smudges on the brim and crown where he constantly adjusted its fit. He stood at Turner’s window, smiling.

“Morning.”

“Morning,” Turner said.

“Fill’er up?”

“Yes, sir,” Turner said, and waited for Dave to step toward the pump before letting himself out the driver’s side to stretch his legs.

“Illinois plates,” Dave remarked, as he reset the pump and inserted the nozzle. “Anywhere near She-coggy?”

“Yes, sir,” Turner said, “right in the heart of her.”

“I got me in-laws in she-coggy,” Dave said.

Turner pulled a cigarette from his pack, pausing to look up before lighting it. “Okay to smoke over this side, Dave?”

“Oh yes. You too far to be a nuisance from over there.” He looked down at his outfit. “Say, I ain’t got my name on this vest, how you knowed my name?”

“I’m Turner Pitts,” Turner said. “We went to school together.”

Dave let go the nozzle and stood bolt upright, hobbling up to eyeball Turner over the hood. “Turner Pitts?” he said. “That you?”

“Yes, sir,” Turner said, smiling. “Haven’t been back for some time.”

“No, sir. Not since, what...the accident?”

Turner nodded. “That’s right,” he said, lighting his Camel with the Zippo he wore in his pocket like a talisman.

Dave went back to the nozzle and resumed pumping gas, looking up at each moment, trying to glimpse the man through streaked windows and thirty-years. He saw Turner watching, and lowered his gaze.

“Say, Turner, you been to she-coggy this whole time, have you?” Dave called over the roof, not looking up.

“Near to thirty years, now,” Turner called back, and Dave nodded his head, letting that settle for the moment, as Turner walked toward the telephone pole by the highway, looking out over the landscape, thinking about the past. They both were in grade school when Dave’s horse threw a shoe on a morning ride. He slipped going up an embankment and came down hard on the boy, breaking the hip in two places. Turner remembered that he spent at least a year—maybe more—in a wheelchair, before finally being able to walk with the aid of crutches. Now he just lugged that leg along like a convict dragging his jailer beside him. But as a boy, the accident never soured Dave Markley’s outlook in the least, and Turner was heartened to find that, by all outward appearances, it still had not.

“Town changed a lot?” he asked when he returned to the car.

“No, not much I don’t think. It’s hard to tell when you’re setting in the middle of it, I guess.”

Turner’s mind replayed that assessment as he detoured down Roosevelt Avenue, toward the center of town. It wasn’t necessary for him to pass through in order to get to the house, but he wanted to see it again, how much it had changed, or how much he had. In any event, he was too close to the store not to stop and see Denny. He parked on one of the diagonal, lined spots in front of Denny’s Hard Wear and Soft Leather, located at the middle of a line of storefronts on the avenue. The day was clear and cold, but the absence of any wind lent a serenity to the street that felt comforting. As he entered the store the little bell jingled at the top of the door, announcing his arrival, and Denny Bevins looked up briefly from where he stood behind the register, offering a cursory greeting with the wave of his arm.

“Morning,” he said, not paying attention, but did a quick double-take, suddenly recognizing his visitor, and moved quickly from behind the counter, rushing toward Turner with his arm extended. “Turner, hello!” he said, shaking hands as he wrapped his other arm about the man in a tight embrace.

“Hello, Denny,” Turner said, “it’s good to see you.”

“It’s been a while,” Denny said.

“Yes, too long.” Turner took in Denny’s thin face, enhanced, since last they met, by the addition of a thin, dark beard, and glasses.

“You going to the house?” Denny asked.

“Yes. I guess I’ll see what needs to be done,” Turner said.

“I hope you’re going to stay with us, like I asked,” Denny said.

“Thank-you, Denny, your letter was very kind,” Turner said. “I think I might like to stay at the house, though.”

Denny nodded softly. “I understand,” he said. “Still, if you get your fill we’d love to have you to our place. I understand, you know...the circumstances,” he said. “But you’re still my brother.”

Turner nodded, smiling, and raised his hand to Denny’s shoulder. “Yes, I am,” he said. “And you, mine.” He hitched his shoulders, shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers. “Thank-you, Denny.”

“He was a good man, your father,” Denny said.

“Yes, he was,” Turner said, looking at the neat stacks of folded cotton slacks and denim shirts. “He was every bit of that.”

“You know,” Denny said, “even after…you know, the accident, after you moved off, and then when you went off to college and he came back to the house—he never said a thing.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Turner said, looking at his own shoes. “Doesn’t surprise me one bit.”

“I don’t know how he did it?” Denny said, shaking his head somberly.

“He lived with it,” Turner said. “You know, it was his life; he just lived with it.”

As Turner drove he watched the cracked asphalt and white lines streaking past his smudged windshield, line after painted line, rolling beneath his wheels like the fingers of time’s hands, ticking off the days of his life.

He found the turn-off, a dirt road now caked with a pallet of tire-packed snow, and slowly made the turn, driving the mile and a half in silence, taking in the sun as it gleamed over snowy flats to either side. When he reached the driveway he slowed the car to a halt, idling at the crossroads as he took in the surrounding countryside. The house seemed smaller than when he’d last seen it, seemed to grow littler each time he came, as if time was withering its wood and leeching its life the way a constant sun sucks sweet juice from a plump grape, leaving a shrunken raisin in its stead; it came as no surprise to Turner—he had grown to expect it—but unsettled him nonetheless.

He parked beside the house and stood a moment, his face turned toward the sun, and felt the hills calling to him the way they had when he was a boy at the furthest edge of his youth. He looked back over his shoulder, the house seemed in order; he would not be surprised to learn that Denny and Lynn had come to close it down when they’d heard the news of Estan’s passing. He contented himself that, for now, the house would wait, and stepped off the packed drive onto a milk-white drift which, day after winter’s day, the unflagging sun had soothed, as with the gentle strokes of a master’s brush, refining the top layer to a crystal-thin glaze, which Turner now collapsed with measured steps. He heard the penetration of his boots and felt each sudden crunch yielding to a fluff of virgin down, which graciously accepted his stride the way a mother suffers swollen teats to her swarming brood. He was fourteen again, lifting gangly legs through welts of snow on a Saturday morning, leaning into the wind as he worked his way toward Carl Bevins’ barn, out beyond the pond. He watched as the image of his youth stood silently with the wind, listening to the gentle clatter of Carl’s tinkering as he tooled the old tractor inside, and then pulled the heavy wood door open on its rusty hinge, standing in the doorway as wind flew past him like a flock of pigeons swarming to the rafters. Carl stood at the center of the drafty barn, bent over the front fender of his tractor, working with a wrench beneath its scalloped hood. He looked up when the door came open, squinting his eyes against a bright wedge of sunlight that bathed him in brilliance even as it cast his visitor as a black silhouette against the morning light.

“That you, Turner?” he said.

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered softly, his hands in the pockets of his lumber jacket.

“C’mon in, son,” Carl said as another gust of wind blew past the boy, knocking Carl’s oil-rag from the fender. “Pull that door shut behind you,” he said. “Your folks know you come?” He rested his Channel-Locks on the engine block a moment.

“I told them I was going to the pond,” Turner said, pulling the creaking door shut as he stepped from caked snow onto the packed dirt inside the old barn.

“You figure it’s best you don’t say anything?” Carl asked, dropping his head once more to his work as he tapped lightly at a stubborn spark-plug with the wrench-head.

“I guess,” Turner said, “maybe.” He leaned across the engine, opposite from Carl, resting his elbows on the side casing. “They been arguing again,” he said, and Carl nodded quietly as he continued with his work.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Turner asked.

“What’s true?” Carl said, adjusting his Channel-Locks to the head of the plug for a tighter grip.

“That you are my father.”

Carl caught an edge with the wrench and began to work the plug free. He twirled the wrench in fluid circles with one hand, unscrewing the loosened part, and raised his head to face the boy squarely.

“Yes,” he said.

He worked the plug free and removed it from its socket, holding it between them like a dentist exhibiting an extracted tooth to his shocked patient.

“It’s true,” he said, still holding the boy’s eyes.

Turner looked at the man as a hard wind battered the side of the barn and passed, leaving them, momentarily, in a cove of silence.

“It ain’t right what we done,” Carl said, still watching the boy. “It ain’t none of it right. But there’s some things you do even knowing it ain’t right, and you can’t help it anymore than you can change the direction of the wind or keep the sun from rising every day. I don’t expect you to respect what I done, but I hope you don’t hate me for it, neither. And your Ma, she’s the best woman I ever known. It ain’t right what we done, it’s a wrong on your Pa and it’s a wrong on you; but we never meant to hurt nobody. And now we gone and hurt everyone.”

Turner stepped out of the bright sun and pulled a cigarette from his pocket, Carl Bevins’ ancient words echoing through the canyon of his memory. He leaned against the rusty, broken tractor, long now abandoned to the constant shade of this weathered graveyard in the lee of the barn. He pulled the Zippo from his pocket, lighting a Camel and exhaling into the cold, gray air. The barn was still standing, after all these years, but looked like a shrunken skeleton, ready to fall at any moment, held up as if by the terms of some contract with the soil and the snow, solely to maintain this dismal burial ground in perpetuity. He resisted the temptation to lift the tractor’s rusted hood and inspect its plugs, and contented himself, rather, simply to stand in the dark clearing and remember the events of his youth.

He returned home that morning with a maelstrom of thoughts tumbling through his mind, and stood outside his house, listening as his parents continued to wage a battle begun more than fourteen years past.

“You think everyone in this goddamned town don’t know about it,” Estan shouted. “You think there’s a skunk hiding up a tree in this whole goddamned county don’t know my well’s been dried up all this whole time!”

Turner leaned against the wood wall at the side of the house, inspecting the concrete foundation at ground level and, above it, the gray paint on the old, slatted boards, cracked and bubbling with winter and age. His face was less than a foot from the kitchen shutter, but he felt no desire to inch forward to see his mother’s tear-streaked face, buried in her hands as she sat crying on a bar-stool at the kitchen counter.

“It ain’t enough you done it to me once’t already,” Estan went on. “It ain’t enough this whole damn county knows, even before I did, what’s done and gone; now you doing it to me again? And I’m supposed to hold my head and walk through town and wear this badge and uphold the peace, is that it? I can’t keep my own wife in my own house, and I’m supposed to uphold the peace?” This last statement was punctuated with two loud bangs, as if Estan had slapped his open hand hard upon the counter-top. “In a pig’s eye!” he shouted. “In a goddamned pig’s eye!”

Turner froze when the front door slammed shut, and stood doe-eyed and panicked as Estan rounded the front corner, pulling on his County parka as he came toward the Sheriff’s cruiser, parked just beside Turner on the drive. Estan froze, too, when he spied the boy.

“Turner,” he said, realizing his son had been listening.

“I...I...” but nothing else would come out of his mouth.

Estan stood tall against the snow and hung his head, and in that brief moment Turner spun and ran, rounding the back corner of the house and plummeting over the hill toward the small patch of woods beyond the creek. He did not want to run from his father, had not meant to run; but he did not want to face him, either, after having spent his morning in Carl Bevins’ barn. He brushed away snow from the fallen oak in the clearing, and sat amidst the silence of the trees, listening as the wind howled through their naked tops. Then he heard the cruiser’s engine turning over, and the crackling of snow as Estan backed the car and aimed it toward the highway, and was gone. A barn owl lighted on the branch nearest overhead, perhaps startled from it’s hollowed tree by Turner’s intrusion, it’s heart-shaped face calling out a question that Turner was unable to answer, both on that cold December morning and, as he stood today beside Carl Bevins’ shrunken barn, even still.

In February of that year, on a blustery and windblown night, he was sitting with Estan in the living room, watching television, when the telephone rang and Estan rose to answer it.

“Hello,” he remembers his father saying. He watched as Hop Sing threw a fit over finding a strange woman in his Ponderosa kitchen.

“What kind of accident?” Estan said into the receiver. Ben Cartwright soothed Hop Sing’s ruffled feathers a bit.

“Canyon Cross?” Estan said, and Little Joe stifled a laugh, sharing furtive glances with Hoss and Adam.

“I’ll be twenty minutes,” Estan said, and hung up the phone and walked to the hall closet. There was a commercial break, and when Turner did not hear anything from Estan he looked back toward the hallway. Estan was regarding him.

“I have to go out now,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

“Okay,” Turner said, and as his father was a Deputy Sheriff this did not seem unordinary. He watched Estan climb into his County parka. Estan said “your mother’s been hurt,” and Turner swung around fully to face him over the back cushion of the sofa.

“Is she all right?” Turner asked.

“I don’t think so,” Estan said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Estan did not return that night. Turner sat up watching television and waiting for him past midnight, and woke on the sofa at seven a.m. He saw the time and hurriedly readied for school; if he missed the bus which stopped on the highway at the end of the drive, he would have to call his father at work. He ran to his room for his books, snatched his coat from the back of his chair, and was running for the door when Estan came through it with a downcast face. Turner stopped.

“I’m late,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” Estan said, “you don’t need to take the bus today.”

Turner pushed the edge of his cigarette into the snow behind the tractor, held it a moment and then extracted it, tweezing the deadened ash from its tip between his fingers before dropping the spent filter into his pocket. He got back into his car and drove from the Bevins’ deserted barn.

He remembered the look on Estan’s face as he sat the boy on the desk chair in the hallway, and knelt before him. His soft, green eyes were glassy, and tears began rolling to his cheeks before his trembling mouth could form the right words.

“Turner,” he said, and gripped the boy’s wrists in his big hands. “Turner...”

Gloria had died that night, in a plunge off Canyon Cross, in the passenger seat of Carl Bevins’ pickup truck. In town, even still, everyone referred to the event as the accident.

Turner’s unborn sibling perished that night, as well.

They moved to Illinois shortly after the burials, and lived with Estan’s mother on the outskirts of Chicago. Estan moved back to the house when Turner went off to college. He was never the same after the accident, though he remained devoted to Turner, as he had been from the beginning. But he suffered the remainder of his life with a deep dose of melancholy that never healed, and he never spoke a word of it to anyone, at any time. It was simply his life, and he lived with it.

Turner drove quietly toward Settler’s Funeral Home, smoking another Camel as he watched the white lines passing beneath his wheels.

THE END