She Walks in Shadows(8)

So, Nate was already in a bad mood when they started the drive home. Zeke and Teddy had been late meeting them at the truck, and Merrill had knocked down a chocolate display at Horwell’s. Abigail understood. They were restless children. Sure, they had all the bicycling down country lanes that they could want, all the smashing of rotten pumpkins, but they needed people. They needed to look at things that weren’t stalks or clouds. Teddy, especially. She could see the look in his eyes getting pounded in deeper all the time: the look of a cornered animal.

“Did you get that nutrient analysis back?” Abigail asked and she really shouldn’t have.

Nate, chewing on a thumbnail, widened his eyes. “What?”

“For the corn.”

“Why would you ask me that?”

A welt of worry in Abigail’s stomach became a full-on ulcer as she searched the horizon — just corn and trees and ditch and road — for something that would answer Nate’s question to his satisfaction. “I just was wondering.” No, that wasn’t good enough. The ache didn’t stop.

“Did Pierce tell you to say that? Back at Horwell’s? Huh?”

Her mouth was opening and closing, but only breath was coming out. She heard something constrict in Nate’s ribs and he suddenly ripped the steering wheel to the right, pulling the truck to the shoulder of the road. She knew the boys were holding their breath, so she felt the need, then, to make some noise of protest on their behalf.

“Are you sleeping with him?”

“What?” Her voice broke. “Nate, the boys are right ….”

His shout punched down like a hammer of God. “Answer me, Abby! Was this some whore’s bargain? Said you’d jump into bed if he’d just cut your poor idiot husband a break?”

The radio was playing a mellowed-out beach-pop song by a local band that had made it out. They used to get her dreaming about coarse California sand from the anarchic desolation of Sokol Auditorium. This song always made her think of breaking surf, of drinks with plastic umbrellas. Maybe they should go on vacation. Maybe they should never come back.

“No,” she hissed. “You know I would never do that. You know I would never want to.” She nodded toward the backseat. “Can we please talk about this later?”

For five minutes, they all breathed together. Then Nate changed the station with a sudden strike of his hand, muttered, “Hate that song,” and drove back onto the road. So, the rest of the way they listened to Dr. Touchdown on KMKO out of Lincoln. “Wear them down,” said Dr. Touchdown. “The key is to wear down the defense, go for the throat, and don’t let up. Lights out. Bam!” From the backseat, Merrill echoed, very softly, “Bam!”

She was ready — no, not ready, never ready, but resigned — for a fight, but when they got home, Nate went into the field and started running the combine even though there was nothing to strip, anymore. He watched in a state of near-motionlessness. And Abigail watched him from behind the muslin curtain, and the boys watched her over the stained pages of their homework, and the dogs watched the boys with sad, bovine eyes. Boys and dogs alike asked for things — food, drink — and eventually, after the sun began to set, Teddy put down his American History book and asked for an explanation of Croatoan. When the Roanoke Colony disappeared, he said, they left that word behind. Yes, a sign post. Salvation, five miles south of Cripple Creek.

“Nobody knows,” said Zeke. “They probably got eaten by an Indian tribe.”

“Maybe they ran away,” Abigail said. “Maybe they wanted to.”



The cats were gone. She waited for them by their little bowls of dirt-colored pellets for a week, but they weren’t coming back. She had looked everywhere. She even peeked down into the well. She didn’t know why, exactly. Cats didn’t just jump into wells. Did a tiny piece of her think that perhaps someone — who? — had killed the cats and thrown them in? There was something down there, ding dong bell, but the flashlight revealed a collar, a yellow tag, a long nose. It was the dogs. She had last seen them the day before, pacing near the corn and whimpering. Nate had gone to tie them up and, she assumed, to untie them.

She was watching the kitchen clock tick toward, 3:30 and wondering how to tell the boys, when a silver Dodge Ram pulled up to the house. Like a crocodile, or a tyrannosaur, sidling up to its prey. Ambrose Pierce stepped out of the cab and she immediately calculated how long it would take Nate to get back from his meeting with Ticonderoga Mills.

“I haven’t seen you and the boys in town much.” Ambrose looked aside at the barely-tilting wind chimes. “Haven’t heard from you lately, neither.”

Abigail ground her teeth, head shaking slightly to the internal retinue of all the things she’d really like to say to Ambrose, to Nate. Finally, she conceded that “Nate’s been acting a little different, lately. Since that light came down ….”

“What light? ‘Different’ how?”

“Different” like standing in the sea of corn, humming at the sky? “Different” like telling Zeke he couldn’t go out for Junior League baseball this year, because he was “needed” at home? “Different” like picking up the phone and telling her sister that she wasn’t home when she was just around the corner, fixing dinner? No, that was more trouble than it was worth.