Nineteen
CHARLIE’S SON, LES, who’d made the varsity team at Cross Rivers last season as a sophomore wide receiver, tells me on my third morning back that if I ever get an urge to throw a ball around after work, he’d not only be happy to do it with me, he’d consider it an honor.
He looks so much like his dad it’s as if he’d been cloned, and I can already see clear as day the man he’s on his way to becoming.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” Les says. “Is it true you broke one of your own wide receiver’s hands with one of those bullet passes of yours at NC?”
“It was only a small fracture,” I say with a shrug.
“So do you want to maybe have a catch sometime?”
“Maybe when my shoulder gets a little stronger,” I say. “But for the time being, my pass-throwing days are over. Even my grandma says I’m just a simple country farmer now.”
“Only temporarily,” he says.
“Your lips,” I say. “God’s ears.”
I take a closer look at the kid’s wiry frame, maybe a couple of inches shy of six feet.
I’d once asked Charlie if his boy had enough talent for football and he’d said, “He might have a chance. All’s I know for sure is that nobody on that team will outwork him.”
“Not Charlie Hall’s boy,” I’d said.
“Either way, he’s got the same dream they all have around here,” Charlie said then. “He wants to be you.”
In this moment, though, the kid right in front of me, not all that much younger than I am, me knowing that a new season is going to start for him when summer is over, I know I’d give anything to be him.
“You all right there, Silas?” Les asks. “Looks like I lost you there for a second.”
“Right here,” I say. “Let’s go load some seed into that big-assed John Deere planter over there.” I give him a playful shove. “These days, all’s I am is the quarterback of the John Deere All-Stars.”
The planter is hitched to our second combine, just out of the shop itself, Charlie having driven it back from town.
Out of sight of both of the Halls, I sneak around the barn and do some stretching, knowing the grunt work that’s about to begin and the world of hurt that will come with it once we start hefting those heavy bags.
“You sure you got this?” Charlie asks when the three of us are standing next to the combine, as if he’s reading my mind.
“Like they always say around these parts,” I tell him. “Sure as a cat’s got climbing gear.”
“Man, we got some dumb ones, don’t we, though?” he asks.
“My dad had more.”
When Charlie is back driving and I’m allowing myself a break, I go back into the cool shade of the barn, listening to some Freedy Johnston today over Charlie’s sound system.
Right now, Freedy’s singing about a girl who’d gone off and left him for New York City, but there’s a line in the middle of the song that gets all the way inside me:
But I want somebody to lie
And release me into the past…
I tell myself then, or maybe remind myself, that I’m not a country song, that this is my own damn life now and it’s real, and I don’t get to live it in reverse.
My last ride in the combine, before we call it a day a little before three because of the heat, makes me feel the way I used to after a good practice no matter how grueling it had been, knowing that my workday wasn’t over, that as soon as I was out of my pads I’d be heading directly for the weight room.
Before I turn back toward the barn from the far end of the fields, I just sit there behind the wheel, knowing that I’m the one lying these days, if not more to myself than to everybody else, and not just about the past.
That’s the quiet part for me when the music stops.
That’s my secret, one I haven’t shared with EJ, at least not yet.
Maybe Tay once I get with her, just because I’ve always been able to tell her everything. I’ve had no choice—she’s always known when I’ve been holding back on her.
I’m about to put the combine back in gear when I see Leamon Ridenour walking all the way out here and toward me, looking as if he’s carrying all the sad in the world on his back.
He had lost his wife, Libby, to cancer when Holly Ridenour had been five years old.
Leamon had raised the girl on his own with the help of his mother-in-law, but then she had died, too.
So it was just Leamon and Holly at his soybean farm over on the border of town closest to Old Mill.
But he had made it work. EJ said that Holly was one of the prettiest girls at Cross Rivers High, the most popular, smart as a whip. Fastest one on the track team.
Now she is gone along with the other girls.
I climb down and shake Leamon’s hand.
“Heard you were back,” Leamon says.
“Good to see you, sir,” I say. “Been meaning to stop by and pay my respects and tell you how sick I am about your daughter. Frankly should have done it already.”
“No words, Silas,” he mumbles. “No words.”
There’s a Charlie Hall quality about Leamon, almost as if it comes with the territory. A North Carolina farmer, but almost with an old-cowboy vibe to him. Hard and lean and just like Charlie in another way, which means that he’s soft-spoken when he speaks at all.
“Holly’s why I’m here,” Leamon says. “You got to help me get her back.”