Chapter 4 - The Restoration of the Dirt
By Tuesday afternoon, the red clay had begun to cure under a high, dry wind that smelled of western cedar and burning brush.
Aaron had stayed in the cab of the John Deere until two o'clock in the morning on Sunday, using the hydraulic angle of the box blade to drag the displaced subsoil back into the forty-foot trench Darren Petway had cut through the pasture. He had worked by the twin halogen lights mounted to the tractor’s roll bar, the yellow beams cutting through the blowing dust until his face was coated in a fine, rust-colored powder that made his teeth look white as chalk.
Now, the trench was gone.
There was only a long, flat scar of raw, dark earth running from the corner of the metal shop toward the fence line, straight as a string line, bordered on both sides by the green shoots of the spring rye grass that had survived the tracks of the backhoe.
Callie sat on the bottom step of the back porch, wearing her rubber boots with the yellow duck faces on the toes and an old pair of denim overalls that had belonged to one of her cousins two seasons ago. Her knees were scabbed over—two dark, dry crusts that smelled of iodine and tea tree oil—but she wasn't limping anymore.
She had an empty tin coffee can between her knees.
"What are you collecting, Cal?" I asked, coming down the steps with a rake and a five-pound sack of Kentucky 31 fescue seed.
"The shiny rocks," she said, without looking up. She held up a piece of white chert the size of a walnut, its edges sharp from where the backhoe teeth had struck it out of the subsoil. "Daddy said the ditch turned up the deep stones. He said if we pick them up before the grass grows, the mower won't throw them through the window."
"That's right," I said, setting the seed sack on the bottom rail.
She looked toward the workshop.
The orange STOP WORK ORDER was gone from the metal door. I had taken it down myself that morning after Bob called to tell me that Arlin had signed the settlement agreement. The door was locked with a heavy brass Master lock Aaron had keyed to his own truck key, and the two-inch PVC pipe that Darren had left sticking out of the slab had been capped with a threaded plug and driven six inches below the grade with an eight-pound sledge.
"Are they coming back, Mommy?" she asked.
Her voice didn't have the terror in it today; it had that small, practical gravity that children get when they realize that the adults in their world are capable of doing things that don't make any sense.
"No, baby," I said.
"Not Bryce?"
"Not Bryce. Not Braden. Not Aunt Danielle."
She set the white stone into the coffee can with a dull clink.
"Grandpa told Bryce he was going to have a pony behind the shop," she said. She picked up another pebble, turning it over between her thumb and forefinger to inspect the mud on the underside. "He said the pony was gonna eat my clover."
My hands tightened on the ash handle of the rake until the wood creaked.
"There won't be any ponies here, Callie," I said, keeping my voice level, down where it belonged. "This yard belongs to you, and me, and Daddy. The only thing that's going to grow behind that shop is grass, and maybe some more of those blue irises you helped me plant by the cistern."
She nodded once—a short, decisive bob of her chin that looked so much like Aaron it made my throat ache.
"Good," she said. "I don't like ponies anyway. They have big teeth."
She went back to her stones.
I walked the length of the scar with the rake, breaking the hard red clods until the soil was as fine as cornmeal. It was heavy, rhythmic labor—the iron tines catching on the roots of the wild bermuda, the dust rising into the wind, the sun warm against the back of my neck.
For the first time in three weeks, my shoulders didn't feel like they were being held together with baling wire.
The obligation was gone.
It was a strange, hollow sensation at first—the way a tooth feels right after the dentist pulls it, that large, empty socket that your tongue keeps exploring because it can't believe the pain is gone. For thirty-four years, my place in the Eubanks family had been defined by what I could carry. I was the one who remembered birthdays; I was the one who had five hundred dollars when Danielle’s alternator went out; I was the one who listened to Arlin complain about the county commissioners for two hours on a Sunday afternoon without hanging up the phone.
I had thought that was love.
I had thought that if you just carried enough of the load, eventually the people behind you would look at your back and say, That's enough. She’s tired. Let's take the handles for a while.
They don't do that.
If you show people you can carry fifty pounds, they will put seventy-five on your shoulders and then complain that you aren't walking fast enough to suit them.
Around four o'clock, a white county truck slowed down on the blacktop.
It didn't turn into the drive. It stopped by the cattle guard, its amber roof beacon flashing twice before the driver killed the engine.
It was Darren Petway’s truck.
I laid the rake across the seed sack and walked down the limestone lane, my boots crunching on the stone. Aaron was down by the cedar break, checking the tension on the five-strand barbed wire, but he saw the truck stop and began walking toward the gate with his fencing pliers in his hand.
Darren didn't get out of the cab. He had his window rolled down, his left elbow resting on the door frame, a pair of polarized sunglasses pushed up onto his graying hair.
"Crystal," he said, nodding as I reached the fence.
"Darren."
He reached over to the passenger seat and pulled out a small, green carbon-copy receipt. He held it out through the window.
"Bob Bannister’s runner brought me the cashier's check this morning," Darren said. His voice was flat, professional, slightly embarrassed. "Seven hundred and fifty dollars. Five hundred for the machine mobilization, two-fifty for the permit cancellation. The account is cleared on my ledger."
I took the slip. "Thank you, Darren."
He looked past me toward the workshop, then toward the scar of raw earth where Aaron had graded the ditch shut.
"I didn't know about that signature, Crystal," Darren said, his eyes coming back to mine. "Arlin showed me that paper with your name on it while we were standing outside the feed store in Guthrie. He told me you were working twelve-hour shifts at the city and told him to handle the paperwork so you wouldn't have to take leave. If I’d known he was running around your back, I wouldn't have brought that Kubota across your cattle guard."
"I know, Darren," I said. "Arlin’s spent thirty years convincing people he had authority he didn't own."
"He was my road supervisor back in ninety-two," Darren murmured, shaking his head. "He was a hard man to say no to then. He’s a harder man now because he’s got old and mean with it."
He started the engine. The diesel clattered to life, sending a small puff of blue smoke into the wild plum bushes beside the culvert.
"He told the boys down at the lumberyard this morning that you were selling the place," Darren said, looking out through the windshield. "Said you and Aaron were moving back to Kansas because you couldn't make the taxes."
I looked back down the lane.
Callie was standing by the porch, holding her tin can by the wire handle, watching a red-tailed hawk circle over the pasture. Aaron had reached the yard gate; he had stopped to pick up a piece of baling wire from the grass, his large frame dark against the whitewashed pickets of the garden.
"Tell them he lied about that, too, Darren," I said.
Darren looked at me for three seconds. Then a slow, faint grin touched the corners of his mouth—the kind of grin Oklahoma men give each other when they see a yearling steer finally learn which side of the fence the grass is sweet on.
May you like
"I'll tell them," he said.
He dropped the truck into gear, pulled out onto the blacktop, and drove away toward the highway, leaving the dust to settle back down into the ditch weeds.
