Pastoral

On the morning of the Saturday Vera and Rich would die, they sit at the kitchen table together going through the newspaper as always. Vera lays her section of the paper down, drags a white coffee cup toward the edge of the kitchen table and picks it up. She stands and pours the cup in the sink. She’s in a blue bathrobe and blue slippers. Rich is in his underwear at the table reading his section. They just finished talking about the story on the front page of an old man whose wife perished in a house fire. Rich suggested the old man set the fire for the insurance money; otherwise, he would have gone in and got her out. Vera pointed to the reports that the fire was very intense and the old man fought fiercely with firefighters as they dragged him from his living room. Rich and Vera are at an impasse over this.

They live out a gravel road. If you come from town, you pass big farms and thick woods before you get there. If you keep going out the road, you pass more farms and woods and come to an intersection with a single-lane county road that eventually meets up with a two-lane state road. If you take the state road east, you can be in Kentucky in five minutes.

Once you get there, you won’t find a serious town for twenty miles. The sheriff’s department has jurisdiction out around Rich and Vera’s. Headquarters is on the other side of the county. It’d take a deputy a half hour to get to their house.

They bought the property a year ago. They had lived in an apartment in town until the bosses at the steel mill promoted Rich to a section manager and Vera got on as an accountant in the mill offices. The mill is pretty much all there is for work here unless you’re in a family that has a funeral home, or if you can tend bar or farm. The mill pays well, but it’s been downsizing because of foreign competition. The mill used to employ thousands of people. Now there’s about three hundred on the payroll.

Their house sits back from the road at the end of a short dirt driveway lined with pines. The house is an old farmhouse.

The Bertram’s lived here when they had their farm. A few years ago, old man Bertram died from complications due to shingles and his wife moved to Phoenix to live with their daughter. The family had sold off most of the farm’s three hundred acres by the time Rich got wind of the liquidation.

One person already bid on the house and the remaining two acres that came with it. However, the family took Rich’s bid because it was ten thousand more. Once Rich got the promotion and pay raise, he spent money. He bragged to everyone at work about his outbidding. He bragged about his new television, the stereo, the new truck and tractor. After six years of marriage, he declared he finally bought Vera a diamond engagement ring. “She’s been wearing a mood ring,” he told the guys in his section. A couple of weeks ago he announced he was having a tin roof installed on the house and barn this summer. Some of the men he used to work alongside are now his subordinates and don’t like hearing these things. Most of them have been at the mill longer than him. They talk angrily about him in the lunchroom.

Vera’s twenty-nine, a year older than Rich. She’s pretty and has nice long brown hair. Since she handles payroll, she deals with workers coming in for their checks. The men flirt with her. Some are old enough to be her grandfather. A lot of the men call her “Love,” a nickname that grew out of “L.V.,” which were initials for “Little Vera,” the first nickname. She tells Rich about this and says it bothers her the way the men act. But she flirts back sometimes. There was a rumor going around that Vera and a worker named Burt had sex in his car in the parking lot during lunch. Rich found out about it because someone taped a note to the front of his locker. Rich didn’t know of a Burt at the mill. When he confronted Vera about it at home, she told him the rumor wasn’t true.

“Workplace politics,” she told him. “It’s a lie.”

~O~ Rich walks out to the porch in his underwear. He just took a drug test at work and passed and the next one isn’t scheduled until next month, so he carries a joint. He looks out over his big front yard. It’s a sunny, warm morning; forecasted to be in the upper-eighties by noon. He plans to get the tractor out of the barn and mow today. The grass is high. It’ll be the first time this season he mows. Last season he cut with a push mower. Took him a full day to do the job.

Wind works up from the valleys on either side of the house and makes it difficult for him to light the joint. He cups his hands over the joint and hunches with his back turned for the lighter to work. He gets it going and turns back to the road and smokes. The sun is just over the green hills across the road. The gray posts of the barbwire fence that keep in Henderson’s cattle look black with the light behind. Their house sits on a crest. The road slopes down both ways and fades into the shadows of the forested valleys.

A small blue pickup comes up the road from the direction of the county road. The pickup travels slow as it passes the house, almost comes to a stop. Rich holds the joint down behind his back and waves. He can’t see the driver clearly, but it’s obviously a man in a ball cap. He sees the bill of the cap turn in his direction, then back to the road. The pickup is rusted around the wheel wells. It keeps crawling by and then picks up speed as it heads down the road toward town. Rich takes a hit off the joint and scratches his stomach. Some of Henderson’s brown cows stand behind the fence and watch him.

When the joint is half smoked, Rich butts it out on the banister and tosses it on a low table between two rocking chairs. He opens the screen door and goes inside. Vera is in the shower. He dresses in shorts and a t-shirt in the bedroom. He grabs a pair of socks out of the drawer. In the kitchen, he pulls on his socks and work boots. Then he heads back out the front screen door, grabs the joint, and lighter off the table and heads around the side of the house to the barn.

He’s got a new tractor in there. He forgot the key to the padlock on the front door of the barn, so he goes back in through the back door for the key, which is in the kitchen.

“Rich!” Vera calls from the bathroom.

“What?”

“Get my lawn chair out of the basement and set it up in the front yard. I’m going to lay out and read.”

“I’m going to mow.”

“I’ll move when you get that far.”

Rich heads down to the basement and brings up a lawn chair. He begins to go out the front door with it, then remembers what he came in the house for and goes back in the kitchen for the key and puts it in his pocket. Outside, he opens up the lawn chair in the front where there is the most sun. In the barn, he lights the joint again and holds it between his lips. He takes the big red gas can and fills up the tractor. He squints against the smoke rolling into his eyes.

He screws the cap back on the tractor and puts the gas can away. He finishes the joint and pinches off the cherry with his fingers. Then he puts it in his pocket with the padlock key. The back of the house and barn are still in shadow. The area is cooler than the front yard. Rich climbs on the tractor and starts it up.

Henderson’s cows watch him make his first pass next to the road. He rides back and forth across the yard. The red metal of the tractor’s hood gleams. He wears earphones and listens to loud music. Now and again, he raises his face to the sun.

Things are good for him. By the time he gets to where he set the lawn chair, Vera has not made it outside yet. He stops the tractor and leaves it running. He moves the lawn chair out in a part of the yard toward the road where he already cut. Then he continues mowing next to the porch, and then around the sides of the house. He travels in circuits that run the length of the house—toward the barn—toward the road. Vera waves to him from the porch on one of his circuits toward the road.

She wears a blue bikini and is barefooted. He waves back and turns toward the barn.

Vera walks through the yard to the lawn chair. She carries a book of stories by an Argentine writer and a can of beer. She wears black sunglasses and has her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her skin is slick with suntan oil. The sun is higher now and the air is getting hot and windy. She adjusts the chair, then reclines and opens the book.

Rich, on a circuit toward the road, idles the tractor and looks at his wife. Her skin is shiny and smooth. She looks over at him and smiles and takes drink of the beer and then goes back to the book. The music blasts in his ears over the tractor’s engine. He is looking at his wife when the pickup comes up the hill from the direction of town, faster this time. When the pickup pulls into the driveway, dust blows out behind it in a cloud and swirls up around when the pickup comes to a sudden stop. Rich turns off the tractor and pulls the earphones down around his neck. He can still hear the music. Vera closes her book and marks it with her finger. She shades her eyes and looks at the pickup.

A man opens the door of the pickup and steps out. His face is in the shadow of the red ball cap’s bill. He wears blue jeans and a flannel shirt. Cowboy boots. The man waves to Rich and hollers, “Ho!” For a moment, the man flicks his face into sunlight and flashes Rich a toothy grin. Rich doesn’t recognize him. The man walks around the front of the pickup. There are at least thirty yards between Rich and the man. Rich waves back and climbs off the tractor. The man opens the passenger side door and leans in on the bench seat. When he stands back in the sunlight, he first directs the hunting rifle at Vera.