Fallen mountains, p.3
Fallen Mountains, page 3
Transom looked at Chase. He flipped his safety back on. “Out of practice,” he said with a laugh. He spat to the side. “I’ll get the next one.”
Chase nodded, and they continued walking through the field. “What you been up to, all this time?”
Transom was breathing heavily, struggling in the snow. “Working, here and there. Business.” He smiled. “Getting old.”
Back in high school, Transom had been in phenomenal shape. He’d run from the Hardy farm to town and back, an eight-mile loop. The star of the high school baseball team, he pumped iron in the dingy high school weight room every day after school. In the ninth grade he and Chase had installed a metal pull-up bar in the barn, and the two of them would have contests to see who could hold himself up longer, arms bent, chin atop the bar. Also who could do the most pull-ups. For years Transom had won both contests. Chase had begun to lose interest, never winning, but then in their junior year, things changed. It wasn’t just that Chase got stronger, though that was part of it. It was that Transom, somehow, seemed to get weaker. In fact, by the time they graduated, Transom refused to even try: “Gotta save my arm for the game,” he would say, shaking his head.
Ahead of them, another rabbit shot out, frightened and crazed, darting left, then right. This time, Transom was ready: he pulled the gun up fast, nudged it deep into his shoulder, aimed, and fired, all in one swift, confident movement. They walked ahead and Transom picked up the rabbit, a heap of fur and blood in the snow. He held it out at arm’s length and grinned. The rabbit’s neck hung limply, body folded.
“Let’s go home and grill it up,” Transom said. “You got a knife?”
He knelt in the snow and Chase pulled from his pocket the knife Jack had given him for his eleventh birthday. The pang of that memory—the gift wrapped in the comics page, Jack tousling his hair and telling him that a man needed a good knife— assaulted Chase, and he could feel it again, the smack of grief, another blow. He held out the knife.
Transom gripped the rabbit by its legs and twisted the skin, pulling it off one leg, then the other.
Chase stood a few yards back, looking away.
“Hey. What if I bought the place?”
Chase turned and studied his friend’s face, unsure if this was another one of Transom’s jokes. “What?”
“The farm. I could buy it. You’d still live here, farm it like you always have. It’d still be the Hardy farm. Only difference would be the name on the deed.” He used the knife to remove the head and feet of the rabbit, tossed them aside. Steam rose from the warm body.
“Why?” The smell of the animal began to lift, and Chase stepped back.
“What do you mean, why? We’re family, aren’t we?” Transom said, cutting down the rabbit’s middle and pulling out the insides. He took his thumb and rubbed it in the rabbit’s cavity, then smeared a streak of blood under each of his eyes. He held up a hand and motioned for Chase to step closer.
“Naw, man. None of that for me.”
“Suit yourself.” He wiped the blood from his hands in the snow, two red streaks, and stood. “Here with you and Jack and Maggie, this was more home than anywhere else ever was. You know that. Besides, I’ve been missing this place. And I’ve sort of been itching to settle in somewhere for a bit, stay put.”
Chase could feel his throat tightening, the kindness of the offer crushing him in his grief-heavy state. He turned away and kicked at a clump of snow. “I really don’t know what to say.”
Transom brushed snow from his pants and gave Chase a shove. “Hey, don’t go getting soft on me. It’s not a handout or anything. It’s an investment. A business transaction.”
Chase nodded. Transom and his multitude of contradictions: pensive and generous one moment, hard and detached the next.
“You don’t have to answer right away,” Transom said. “But promise me you’ll think it over.”
“All right.”
They lumbered down the hill, half walking, half sliding through the snow, a layer of ice beneath the fresh stuff, their legs and feet gathering snow, heavy. From far away, the farmhouse, white in a world of white, looked warm and comforting, though not as comforting as it once had, Chase realized. He took another look. Candles. A long time ago, Maggie used to place candles in all the windows, the day after Thanksgiving. He would walk up from the barn after the evening milking, and every window would glow and send off a warmth that made him want to go inside.
By the time they got back to the house, Laney had left. Chase wondered what was going through her mind. Was she annoyed that he’d left with Transom without a word or note? Was she hopeful? He would never want to hurt Laney. In fact, the past few weeks—their closeness in the wake of Jack’s passing and then their night together—had made him start to wonder if maybe there was something more between them than friendship, if there could be a different type of future for the two of them. But he was also fairly certain he didn’t want to dive into anything, at least not now, with so many big decisions looming.
Transom announced he needed a nap and slumped into the couch, and Chase slid into his coat and slipped back outside. He hopped onto his four-wheeler and headed up the farm road to the far end of the property, the vehicle teetering back and forth in the ruts and snow. When he arrived, he quieted the engine and climbed off. He walked briskly through the woods, endless woods, it seemed, this part of the land connecting to a half million acres of the Allegheny National Forest. He made his way to Church Hollow, the place he loved most of the whole farm. Originally, this particular hollow had just been called The Hollow, but during his teenage years, Chase, not wanting to join Maggie at Grace Bible Fellowship, had begun telling her that The Hollow was his church. That place where he could think clearly, feel as close to his Maker as he ever did.
When Chase would make those refusals to attend church, which he did try to space out so that it was never two consecutive weeks, Jack would look at Maggie from across the kitchen table and communicate, without a single word, that she must back off, give him his space. At some point or other during his adolescence, The Hollow had become Church Hollow.
The name was appropriate. Tall boulders jutted up at the top and on the sides of the hill, so that if you stood at the bottom of the hollow and looked up, you could see the likeness to an old cathedral. Chase climbed onto his favorite rock and settled himself on top. Soon, the cold of the stone crept through his jeans and chilled him, and he liked it—that deep, unsettling feeling of cold. He pulled his hat down over his ears and looked out at the trees. American Elm, ulmus Americana. Black Ash, fraxinus nigra. Northern Red Oak, quercus rubra. He’d memorized the names as a kid.
Chase rubbed his thumb along a rough, green patch of lichen and peeled a small piece of it off. He looked up at the gray winter sky, the thin clouds shifting quickly, almost imperceptibly, above. He exhaled, watching the white air dissipate, and as he thought about Transom’s offer, as he tried to make sense of things and come to a good decision, his grief took hold of him again. Not just because the farm itself was so closely linked with his grandfather, but because Jack was the person he’d always gone to for advice. Jack had a way of guiding you without flat-out telling you what to do or say. He never made you feel judged, either. But now, as Chase was facing the most difficult decision of his life, Jack wasn’t around. More than anything, Chase wished he could have a few minutes—rumbling in the truck over a farm lane or sitting on the front porch after a long day of work or eating one of Jack’s slow cooker stews—to seek his grandfather’s guidance.
The wind picked up and Chase leaned back on the cold rock. The treetops, tall and sparse this time of year, swayed and moaned. A squirrel scuttled up a nearby white pine, clucking, eyeing him warily. It whisked its fluffy tail back and forth. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, selling Transom the farm. On paper, it wouldn’t be the Hardy farm anymore, but people would mostly still think of it as such, and after all, Transom was practically family. Though they weren’t related, Transom had lived there full-time for two years, and he’d spent dozens of afternoons and weekends there, all through their childhood. Chase thought of him as a brother, and he knew Transom felt the same.
The year they turned sixteen, both of them suffered terrible losses—Chase’s parents were killed in a car accident, and Transom’s parents split. The boys had always been friends, two kids whose circumstances had tossed them together before they were old enough to know or care otherwise. Chase and his parents lived a quarter mile down the road and because his mom worked in town, he’d spent much of his time at the farm since infancy, and for extra income, Maggie watched Transom four days a week. Chase and Transom had learned to crawl and walk together; they’d taken the training wheels off their bikes the same day and taught each other to ride. They’d spent countless afternoons shooting pigeons off the rafters in the barn, catching bullfrogs in the summer dark. In their suffering, however, the boys grew closer than ever. A few months after Chase’s parents died, Transom showed up at the front door of the farmhouse one Saturday, with two huge duffel bags slung over his shoulder, his cleats and baseball bat at his feet. He just stood there, forlorn and speechless, and Maggie pulled him inside and told him to take his things to the guest room. It was the week after his mother had attempted suicide—Transom didn’t need to explain himself; they understood why he was there. Maggie called Transom’s father, JT, and told him Transom was welcome to stay as long as he needed to, and he’d simply never left. For months, JT had called. For months, he’d come to the farm in his Lincoln, trying to get Transom to talk to him, leaving envelopes of cash. A year later, when JT announced he was selling his factory and leaving Fallen Mountains, he hadn’t even protested when Transom said he wasn’t moving somewhere else to finish his senior year of high school.
It could be a good thing, Transom staying now, and Chase liked the idea of it. He stooped, snapping the end of a thin pine branch off and holding it to his nose. He loved that smell, so gracious and clean. He reached his fists toward the sky, stretching off the cold, breathing in the forest. The squirrel climbed higher up the tree. Chase scooted down the rock and headed home. As he made his way back toward the house, he made up his mind, and like Jack had taught him, he would stick to his decision. No second-guessing himself. He would sell the farm to Transom.
AFTER
As soon as he finished his interview with Teresa, Red climbed into the driver’s seat of the Fallen Mountains police car, a white GMC Jimmy that, a long time ago, had been the nicest vehicle in town, if you didn’t count JT Shultz’s small fleet of Lincolns. In fact, JT Shultz had been the one to purchase the Jimmy, donating it to the town, “for the purpose of law and order” at one of his big company events out at the factory. Back then, Red had loved driving around in the thing, exploring the winding back roads of the Allegheny National Forest, learning all the names of those roads, the names of the farms, too. Stopping by school to pick up his son, Junior, the look of pride on Junior’s face at the sight of him standing outside the schoolyard, leaning against the Jimmy in his tan sheriff uniform.
Now, though, with JT Shultz long gone and no one in any position to purchase a new vehicle, the Jimmy required a ritual to start: pump the gas pedal three times, turn the ignition, hold it, wait. Most of the time, if he did it just right, the Jimmy would grumble to life. The air-conditioning had been broken since the summer before. Red wasn’t going to pay to have it fixed, nor had he been able to convince anyone else to. (“I don’t got air-conditioning in my truck,” the township supervisor had said with a shrug, “and you don’t hear me complaining about it.”) Last month, when Red had been cleaning the Jimmy, he’d removed the floor mat on the passenger side, and he’d peered in and seen pavement through a hole that had finally rusted all the way through. He couldn’t imagine it would pass inspection come October, but hopefully, that would be someone else’s problem, not his.
It was hot, even at suppertime; the Jimmy was a rectangle of stifling warmth. As long as he was driving over forty, enough air would whip through the open windows that he could keep it tolerable, but through town, it was bad. He drove out 28 and pulled into the lane of the Hardy farm, wider now and rutted worse than he could ever remember, all the traffic coming through with the oil company. The Jimmy teetered back and forth, bottoming out twice. Red wondered whether the road would bust through the hole on the passenger-side floor—maybe that would get the township supervisor’s attention.
He parked beside Chase’s truck, climbed out, and crossed the yard to the house. He knocked on the door, and when no one answered, he peered through the white lace curtains of the front windows. The living room. Dark hardwood floors. A woodstove. A couch and two chairs. A large braided rug in the center of the room. Everything the same as it had always been, the way Maggie Hardy had set it up decades ago, when she’d married Jack and moved in. On the porch a wasp began to circle him, and he looked up to see that there was a nest in the corner of the window: the small, tan cylinders tucked together like a fist. He swatted at the wasp that was after him and stepped back quickly.
He wandered down to the barn but, seeing the Holsteins push and nudge each other and then eye him warily, he turned around and headed back to the Jimmy. He didn’t like cows, never had.
The stench, of course, was unbearable, but there was more to it than that. Red was a Pittsburgh boy, born and raised in McKee’s Rocks, along the south bank of the Ohio River. The Rocks, everyone called it. When his class had visited a Westmoreland County dairy farm for a field trip in the second grade, all he could think about was how the bones in his foot would collapse beneath the weight of one of the animals. He thought, too, of how his small body could sink into the knee-deep mud and disappear. All the other kids in his class had loved that field trip, everybody getting a turn at squeezing a cow’s udder, milk spraying into a metal pail—they’d talked about that for weeks—but Red had hated every minute of it. Looking at the barn now, he felt the same way.
He paused and turned, looking over the farm: one large field of perfect rows of corn, not even knee-high this early in the year, three fields of hay, some soybeans. Beyond the barn, in the field Jack had let grow wild the summer Maggie was sick, he saw it—a massive metal-sided building, red tanks, a bright yellow backhoe clawing at the hillside, enormous fans on the beds of three trailers. Movement, human specks floating across the too-flat, cindered gray site. This was the first he was seeing it, and it was bigger than he’d imagined—acres and acres. More sites were coming, he knew. The Witherspoons had just sold. The Franklins, too. Following Transom’s lead.
He wandered toward Transom’s black Lincoln, fished his camera from his pocket, and snapped a photograph. He slid on a pair of blue rubber gloves he’d grabbed from the storage closet, tight and pulling at the hair on his knuckles—Leigh used them when she cleaned the bathroom—and he tried the front passenger door. Not locked. Inside, a vanilla-scented air freshener in the middle console. An old Styrofoam cup. Clean, very clean inside. He took another picture. He clicked open the glove compartment. A bottle of prescription pills tumbled forward onto the ledge. Red took a photo and then turned the brown bottle in his palm and read the label. Transom’s. Vicodin, from a doctor in Philadelphia. He snapped another photo. He carefully slid the bottle into a Ziploc gallon bag and then turned his attention back to the glove compartment. Wallet, cell phone. He picked up the phone: dead, not surprisingly. It’d been sitting in the vehicle for six days. Red dropped it into the bag, along with the wallet. Nothing in the back seat, nothing in the side pockets. Plenty in the trunk: a baseball and glove, a cooler with a six-pack of Rolling Rock, a sleeping bag, two down pillows, expensive. Also an accordion file stuffed full. He peered inside and grabbed a sheet of paper. A cell phone bill. And a thick stapled stack, from a few files back: a contract from an oil company. Strange, Red thought. Most people didn’t keep their paperwork in the trunk. He tucked the file under his arm and carried it over to the Jimmy.
He paused to look at the garden in the front yard. Tomato plants, zucchini: no blossoms yet, but he recognized the leaves. Cosmos, not yet in bloom. His wife Sue’s favorite flower. She would’ve stopped to pull her fingers from the stem up and over the delicate buds. He kneeled and touched one.
“Hey!”
Red stood quickly, his knees protesting, the left one especially, and he thought of old hinges, whining from overuse and rust. He turned, nearly losing his balance.
Chase Hardy stood behind him, a huge tan bag slung over his shoulder. He wore a baseball cap, worn jeans, a blue t-shirt, and knee-high rubber boots. “Sheriff? Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. You all right?” He stepped closer, placed a strong hand on Red’s shoulder. “You gave me a scare,” Chase said. “I didn’t hear you pull up, wasn’t expecting to see anyone here. Thought maybe you were from the oil company, someone snooping around.”
“Sorry,” Red said. “I knocked, nobody came to the door. I figured you weren’t here.”
“I was in the root cellar out back.” He bent and placed the bag on the ground and leaned it against his leg. He gestured to the garden. “Maggie always liked them, too. Cosmos. I plant them every year, get a packet of seeds at Tractor Supply.” He looked at the sky and shrugged. “Sort of to remember her by. Plus sometimes I think, whatever heaven’s like, if she can see the farm, it’d make her happy to look down at her old garden and see them.”
Red hadn’t planted a garden for two years now, not since Sue passed, a ruthless bout of pancreatic cancer, the only mercy of which had been its swiftness. Some things, he’d realized, were just too hard, and the garden was such a thing.
“You here for business or pleasure, Sheriff?” Chase asked.
Red pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his forehead. “Business, I’m afraid. Transom’s girlfriend came into the station yesterday. Fiancée, I should say. Reported him missing.” He tried to read Chase’s response to the news. Surprise? Anxiety? Concern? Those unnaturally serene eyes of his, the gentle face: Red looked but could find nothing there. “Did you know? I mean that she’s worried about him.”
