Chapter 17
SPARK
The floodlights hum like a wasp nest.
I'm shaking.
Cole holds on while it moves through me, Wade's boot still in one of his hands, and over his shoulder I do what I do with any mess. I study the parts.
Six crates in a row at the barn mouth, one with its lid sprung.
Five men who came to my farm in the dark, every one of them face down or tied to a rail.
Brick bleeding through the tape on his shoulder and acting like the tape's the insult.
The panel truck with both doors open. The rotor button biting my palm where I still haven't let go of it.
Shaking's honest, Wade used to say. It's the body doing its bookkeeping once the work's over.
Cross works the yard with his phone and touches almost nothing.
He shoots pictures of the crates, the sprung lid, the wrapped rifles where they lie.
He climbs to the loft and shoots the dead space over the tack room with its boards laid aside neat as a made bed, Dewey's Ford, the panel truck's plates.
Every picture is a sentence in an argument nobody's had yet.
Rancor makes one phone call while Cross works. Ten words, maybe less. Then he stands where he can see the whole yard and waits, arms folded, a man who's done everything right and knows the night isn't finished grading him.
Warden finds his voice before the sky finds any light.
"Wade Briggs was weak." He says it loud enough to reach me on purpose.
"Weak heart, weak spine. Sat on this place twenty years and never made it earn a dime.
And you." His eyes come to me, swollen on one side, cold all the way through.
"You're still breathing because men keep stepping in front of you. "
Everybody goes quiet to see what happens. Cole shifts beside me, and I put my hand on his arm first, because this one's mine.
"Wade told you no with a bad heart and no club at his back, and he never once folded," I say. "You hid guns over a dead man's tack room. You’re scum.”
Warden doesn't answer. Turns out he had the one speech, and it needed the dark.
The sky's going gray at the east edge when they come up the lane. One car, two bikes, no rush anywhere in it.
A lean-looking man gets down from his bike first. His patch identifies him as the president. Rancor meets him in the open. Nobody offers a hand. They walk to the front of the barn together.
I watch him take it in. The crates. The sprung lid and what's inside it. His face doesn't give us anything, but he stands a long time looking at the broken crate, and when he finally turns to Warden there's no forgiveness anywhere in his eyes.
He crouches in front of Warden long enough to say one thing too low to carry. Warden goes the color of ash.
Two Hounds haul Warden up and put him in the car without a word passing between any of them. When it's done, they load the crates into the panel truck, all six, and one of them takes the wheel. Whatever happens to any of it now happens far from here, inside Spade's own house.
He looks at Dewey a moment, face down by the Ford he can't start.
"Not mine," Spade says. It lands on Dewey harder than the fender did.
Then he turns to Rancor and Boulder, and what comes next sounds like a survey line being drawn.
"This farm stays yours. My people don't come east of the creek again, and yours don't come looking west of it." He lets that sit. "And tonight doesn't buy your club a key to my county, and it doesn't make us friends."
"Never thought it would," Rancor says.
Spade starts back toward the car. Going past me, he stops. Not long.
"Wade Briggs didn't deserve this," he says.
It's no apology, but it's as close as a man like him gets to making one. So I give him a nod and nothing else. He takes it and goes.
The car, the bikes, and the loaded truck roll out the lane they came in.
Somebody kills the floods, and the farm doesn't feel occupied anymore. It feels like a body after a fever breaks, wrung out but alive.
Boulder looks at the farmhouse for a long moment. Then he crosses the yard to the porch, Wade's boot in his hand. I watch him take the steps, and he doesn't slow.
I don't think anyone else in this yard knows what those steps cost him.
I give him a minute, then I follow.
He's standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at the table when I come in.
Wade's chair has sat crooked at the head since the morning I found him, turned toward the window like he'd stood up to look at the fields and meant to come back to his coffee. I couldn't square it, couldn't touch it.
Boulder sets Wade's boot down by the door, square in the spot where Wade always kicked his off. Then he puts both hands on the chair back and turns it straight to the table, slow, like it weighs four hundred pounds and he's glad to carry every one of them.
Then he pulls out the chair beside it and sits down. After a second I sit next to him, and I set the rotor button on the table.
This morning the house no longer feels like a place where somebody died. It feels like a place where people are going to live.
Not haunted, ready for what’s to come.