a couple of weeks ago, so Grizz sure as hell didn’t want her on his land now.
Leah went up to the porch and knocked on the door and then peeked in the same open window the bull had looked in. Then she came out to the edge of the porch and surveyed the property. He moved away from his window and immediately felt ashamed. Moments before he’d been ready to crack the bull’s skull with an ax, and now here he was hiding from a girl.
Though the room was swept bare, he noticed a faint musky odor. The smell of gun oil, of a boy sweating in the heat while he sawed down the shotgun barrel. Like his son had just come and gone a few minutes before and if he rushed out he might catch him in time on the road to town and stop him from what he was about to do.
Seth. There are these things to be done. Grizz busied himself gathering his tools, the wire for the fence, a few staves, an old shovel. He repeated his mantra. There are these things. Seth was dead. He could not deny it. He was going to have to bury his boy and do so honorably. To be done. With a church service, because his mother would have wanted it that way. Jo. He would bury the boy beside his wife, in the plot he had purchased for himself at Eden Acres. This thought loosened some tightness in his chest. Even if Grizz had stopped going to church a long time ago he couldn’t shake loose from his childhood faith, its attendant hopes and fears. Then he hurried out into the sunshine before the smell could conjure Seth’s ghost fully. Before he lost himself once more.
With fence wire looped around his shoulder, shovel and staves in one hand, he opened the door. Only a few minutes had passed, but the girl was still waiting for him next to her car, keeping her distance from the cattle. “Mr. Fallon?” she said in a soft but firm voice. “I knew you’d be around here somewhere.”
“What do you want?” His voice had a harsher edge than he meant to give it. If there were forces that unsettled Seth, she was one of them. Grizz set his tools on the ground before he approached her.
“I haven’t been able to sleep,” she said. “I had to come see you.” She glanced up at him, her chin trembling. “Today’s the first day I’ve been back to work. I quit in the middle of my shift. I couldn’t stand the way they were all looking at me, the gossiping.”
“This what you came to tell me?” It seemed she had come here hoping for some kind of absolution, and he’d be damned if he was going to give it to her. Grizz glanced toward the plain white clapboard house where Seth had spent most of his life. “They didn’t know him. Nobody knew him.”
Leah smelled of fried grease from the pool hall, a faint odor of cigarettes in her hair. She stepped back as if suddenly conscious of where she was. Her mascara was a black smear under her eyes. She looked almost as much of a wreck as him, but now she was wary of her situation, way out in the middle of nowhere with a man who had done time over in Sauk County. Still, she asked, “Do you think it was my fault, because I broke up with him?”
Grizz felt so tired, undone by her wariness. He didn’t know what to do with such questions. “No. You aren’t to blame.” There. Now go away.
“I didn’t want to break up with him. Will Gunderson came to see my daddy and told him how he’d seen Seth and me down at the landing, swimming together.” She fidgeted, reaching down into the purse she carried and fumbling out a cigarette and lighter. Her hand shook as she lit it. She was clear eyed now, any tears gone. “He made it sound dirty. He told my dad all about your son.”
He didn’t want to hear any of this. What was he supposed to do with this information? Had Seth died a virgin? The girl drew on her cigarette, and the end flared red, and she tapped out her ash into the dry grass.
“There’s things you don’t know,” she said.
Now the air was going thin in his chest and down in his belly as though a hot wind blew