Bull Mountain(24)

The entirety of the Burroughs clan and nearly every other family living on Bull Mountain surrounded Annette, waiting on a chance to see the newborn, while Gareth glad-handed and got drunk. Most of the people there came only to be seen by Cooper. To show respect, they called it. To kiss his ass was more like it, Annette thought. Her own family was no different.

“That’s a fine-looking boy,” Annette’s father said, stroking the baby’s cheek with the side of a curled finger. Her mother, Jeanine, held the baby like it was made of fine china.

“Thank you,” Annette said out loud. Fuck you, she said in her mind.

“And where is the proud grandfather?” Jeanine asked.

Like you care, Annette thought. You only want the old man to see you holding his grandson so maybe someday if you need some of his money, or a favor done, he’ll be more prone to give it. She wondered when she’d gotten so bitter. She should be happy. If not now, when?

Annette looked at Gareth, who looked around the crowded room. “I’ll see if I can find him,” he said. He moved through the house, shaking hands and looking over shoulders, until he spotted Cooper through the kitchen window. He was pacing the pastures outside.

“Pop,” Gareth yelled, but Cooper didn’t respond. He was talking to someone, but Gareth didn’t see anyone else out there. He made his way outside, walked up to his father, and took his arm. “Deddy?”

“Goddamn it, boy!” Cooper said, and snatched his arm away.

“What are you doing out here, Deddy? Come see Annette. Come see the baby.”

“I don’t care about all that nonsense. We need to settle this business right here.”

“What business? What are you talking about?”

Cooper took a hard pull from the copper flask in his hand. “Tell him,” he said, motioning with the flask toward the woods. “Tell this stubborn son of a bitch.”

Gareth looked out into the darkness. “Tell what to who?”

“To Rye,” Cooper said. “Tell your stubborn-ass uncle Rye. Tell him we had to do it. Tell him I’m tired of listening to his whinin’.”

Gareth considered his old man for a moment and looked back out into the darkness, this time knowing there wasn’t anything there. He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. Cooper tried to shake it off again, but Gareth held on. “There’s no one out here, Deddy. Just us.”

“Tell him we had to do it. Tell him.” Cooper shook his flask at the woods, spilling whiskey on the ground. “He just talks and talks and talks with nothing to say. I can’t shut him up, boy. We need to shut him up.”

“There’s no one out here, Deddy. Uncle Rye’s dead. You’re just confused, is all. Come on inside.” This wasn’t the first time Gareth had witnessed his father talking to himself, not making any sense, but this was the first time he’d given his hallucination a name. Uncle Rye died out there in the woods when Gareth was nine years old. He tried to contain it, but Cooper never really recovered from losing his brother in that accident. The older he got, the more it seeped through the cracks in his armor. Gareth barely remembered the man. “Just come inside, Deddy. We can sort this out later.”

Cooper sipped at the flask and let his son lead him into the house. Annette smelled the whiskey on them both as she handed her newborn baby over to its daddy and granddaddy. If she could’ve got up and run off right then, she just might’ve. She closed her eyes and saw Alaska.

3.

Annette had always heard that blood was spilt by the bucketful on Bull Mountain. Hell, she’d even witnessed some of it, but she also knew from experience that sometimes it happened one drop at a time. She didn’t leave Gareth the first time he hit her. She was drunk in love with him ever since that bloody night at his father’s house, and the slap came more as a shock than an assault. She didn’t even remember what set him off. It didn’t matter. She would come to find out that it was impossible to gauge what would set him off once he put a drunk on. He carried the burden of leadership on his shoulders and sometimes he lost his head. She understood that. He wouldn’t do it again. But he did. The second time he hit her was in front of their two sons, Halford and Buckley. She was eight months pregnant with their third. He was drunk on corn whiskey, but that was no different from most every other night. When they were younger, the whiskey on his breath turned her on. It always led to dark, violent sex. She used to crave it, and shiver at the thought of it. Now the stink of liquor was only a precursor to a different kind of darkness. A violence she prayed would pass over her like a thundercloud. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. He never hit the children, but she could see it brewing right behind his eyes. If her sons had been born daughters they wouldn’t have been shown the same mercies. She tried to convince herself Gareth would always see her the way he did back when she wore the Ruby Bliss lipstick and barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she was fooling herself. She became more of a burden to him as each son was born, as if a part of the love and respect he had for her was transferred into each new boy until one day there would be nothing left for her. The thought of it woke her at night, slick with sweat, her heart beating like a hammer in her chest.

The night Gareth backhanded her at the dinner table in front of her children, Halford let a small laugh escape before he covered his mouth with both hands to stifle it. She thought she might get sick. She wiped a single drop of blood from her nose with a cloth napkin and watched it soak in. It spread across the fabric like a cancer. She saw the sum of her entire life in that growing crimson stain, and in a perfect moment of clarity she knew that when the baby growing in her belly was born, she would have served her purpose. She’d be used up. The days of passionate lovemaking and planning the future with her dangerous new husband and stable of loyal sons were a distant and fading memory. Her life as the partner and confidante to an exciting, powerful man was over. She’d be regarded as no more than a burdensome housekeeper to this family of men. He’d teach her sons to view her that way. The boys would be raised in his image. There was no stopping it. She’d spend the rest of her life living in fear, watching her sons be poisoned, until the one night she stepped too far to the left or right of what was expected of her. Then Gareth would kill her. She was sure of it.