Robert Andrews had a fondness for April, when rain fell daily and water puddled ankle-deep in the low areas around his yard. His pastures sprouted new grass and pink primroses, lifting his heart from the mild depression brought on by winter’s chill and an aching hip. And with spring’s longer days, he especially enjoyed the hours spent in his barn’s churchlike structure, its shadowed stalls ripe with the smell of hay and dung. The place served as his refuge from Ada whenever her temper flared or her Bible study group crowded their living room. Today, he just wanted solitude.
Fierce drops banged on the barn’s tin roof, waxing and waning with each gust of wind. In another week he’d plant feed corn, then work on Ada’s kitchen garden. Rob loved the scent of tilled earth and the certain knowledge that his world made sense through its seasons.
As he finished sharpening a hoe, the door creaked open. Ada stood in the dim light, holding a raincoat over her head like a crimson pup tent. “Sheriff just called. Cows are in the creek again.”
Last June, the town council had passed an ordinance against livestock roaming the creek. They didn’t want folks getting sick from cow shit. Robert’s farm was the only one in the county with acreage both in the city limits and along Strong Creek, a favored summer gathering place for his twenty head of Herefords. Robert had ignored the ordinance until late August, but after the sheriff hand-delivered a hundred dollar citation, Robert built a strong fence and a pond for the cattle fifty yards from the creek.
Ada snatched his rain slicker and hat from a wooden peg and held them out, an offering of yellow oilcloth. “Best hurry.”
“I’ll need help,” he said.
“I was just fixing to put a pie in the oven.”
“The pie can wait, Ada. If the cattle are out I’ll need help.”
She stuffed her ample arms into the sleeves of her raincoat and zipped it before cinching the hood around her chin. She looked like a pissed-off Little Red Riding Hood gone gray-haired and plump, but the color suited her pink cheeks. He led the way through the barn door, pausing to grab a six-foot staff he used for a cattle prod.
They trudged across the pasture toward Strong Creek, side-stepping ant beds and rabbit holes—no cow patties now that the Herefords were penned. Chartreuse spikes of wild onions poked from the sodden earth. Robert slipped once on the slick tufts but steadied himself with a muttered curse, hoping Ada hadn’t heard. She all but washed his mouth out with soap, the way his mother had when he was a boy, if he uttered so much as a hell or damn. Anything stronger merited the silent treatment until he apologized and let her pray over it. Out loud. Lord help if she ever found the pint of Old Charter he kept under a loose board in the hay mow.
The rain turned to drizzle as they checked the fencing and found it secure. A few calves stood under a curly willow near the pond, chewing on new grass. Robert sucked in the damp air. He could account for every head and nodded with satisfaction. The cattle hadn’t been in the creek. Even dumb animals knew to stay clear of high water churning down Longsought Mountain after three weeks of rain.
Ada dropped his hand. “Look at the jonquils, Rob. Where the old McIntosh place used to be.” Clumps of yellow flowers surrounded a crumbling foundation on the far side of the water. Ada moved closer to the creek. When she reached the bank, she gave a startled cry. “Robert!” She pointed to the swift-moving water. Something was caught on a trio of boulders.
He kept his eyes on the rocks. Saturated ground threatened to slide down the embankment, and he was glad for the pole. He sank it into the mud and turned to study the thing wedged between the rocks. Much as he wanted it to be an animal—a deer or large dog— it appeared to be the body of a woman floating face down. A blue dress fanned out from her hips, exposing narrow flanks and a white-pantied backside. Short, dark hair haloed around her head. The current slapped and tugged at her, but the rocks refused release.
Robert patted his pockets and cursed. His phone was in the barn. “Call the sheriff,” he shouted over the roar of the water.
“I don’t have my phone.”
“Then go back to the house, Ada.”
She paused as if to argue, then took off across the field as fast as her fat legs allowed.
Alone, save for his nearby cattle and the girl, Robert stood sentinel for what seemed like hours, listening to the rushing waters of Strong Creek. The only dead bodies he’d seen before this day were those of his parents, years earlier. Soon after he and Ada married, his mother died in her sleep. Then Robert found his father dead of a heart attack on the barn floor a decade later. Neither had suffered much, he reasoned. Had this one?
The body moved with the creek’s flow in a kind of dance Robert found both beautiful and heartbreaking. Years from now, he knew, that’s what he’d recall of the day’s events. A spring-green world and the peaceful, ballet-like movement of a dead woman’s body caught on three boulders in a swollen creek.
He heard a horn honk and the low drone of an engine. Blue lights flashed as the sheriff’s cruiser rolled across the pasture, slinging mud and scattering Herefords. The car stopped where Robert waited under a pin oak.
Clay Burns waved as he slammed the passenger side door. His deputy, Jake Donner, got out and opened the trunk. He pulled out a long pole with a tri-pronged grappling hook on one end. Robert’s stomach pitched. He reminded himself the woman had to be dead. She wouldn’t feel the barbed prick, likely wouldn’t bleed. Still, the thought of further injury made him queasy.
The sheriff and deputy nodded to Robert when they joined him creekside. They stood a moment, studying the body lodged in the boulders, letting the water’s roar make up for their silence. The rain had stopped, but drops plopped from tree branches, filling the world with a clean, good scent.
Burns slapped his deputy’s back. “Let’s get this over with.”
Jake donned suspendered waders that rose to his armpits. The men formed a human chain anchored by a rope they wrapped around the sturdy oak and tied to their waists, leaving a long tail at the end.
Jake cantilevered over the creek. He stretched out as far as he could with the pole but couldn’t get hold of the body. “Let the rope all the way out,” he yelled. When they did, he stepped into the creek using the pole as leverage and dipped his hand in the rapids. “Damn, it’s cold!” He slogged through the waist-high water, taking his time, planting each footstep with care.
When Jake reached the boulders, Robert turned his eyes to the sky not wanting to watch the hook bite into the pale flesh.
The three men wrestled the body onto the bank, then rested, panting a wordless minute before they released the knots that bound them to the rope and each other and the woman.
Jake gently rolled the body over. She was younger than Robert expected. Her sightless, half-closed eyes seemed fixed on something in the trees. Jake wiped matted strands of hair from her face, exposing a deep gash above one eyebrow.
Burns grunted.
“Know her?” Robert asked.
“No.” He turned to Jake. “You?”
Jake shook his head.
One short, sharp wail from the EMT siren made the men look up. The boxy ambulance bounced over the pasture, leaving deep ruts in the wet earth, and came to a halt. For some reason, Robert recalled the day his father died, the shock of finding him face down on the barn floor, the streak of drool mixed with dirt when Robert rolled him over. It had been raining that day, too.
Clay and Jake called hello to the two uniformed EMTs who opened the back doors and went about their business without talking. They slid the girl’s body into a thick, black bag with the efficiency of experience. Robert felt a surge of vertigo and closed his eyes. The day his father died, the undertaker from Palmer’s Funeral Home had driven out with his assistant, both dressed in dark suits and navy ties, white shirts stiff with starch. They’d covered his father with a white cotton drape and gently slid him into the hearse. After shaking hands and setting a funeral date, they’d quietly left Robert and Ada alone with their grief. Who would mourn this girl?
Robert felt bile rise in his throat. He spit in the mud and mashed the wad with the toe of his boot. The EMTs slammed the back door and left without saying goodbye. No light. No siren. No hurry.
As Jake stripped off the waders, Clay shook Robert’s hand. “We’ll need a statement from you next time you’re in town.”
“Sure,” he said. “Tomorrow soon enough?”
“Anytime this week. Don’t make a special trip.” He pointed to the cattle. “You got those Herefords penned up good. Must’ve been a prank call about them being in the creek.”
Robert’s hands were freezing, and he stuffed them in his pockets. “Must’ve been.”
Jake cranked the cruiser’s engine. Clay went around to the passenger side and waved a two fingered salute in farewell.
Robert watched until they turned on to the highway. Near the pond, a calf bellowed. Another replied. He longed to be such an animal, free from worry and heartache with a tough, red hide. He stared at the creek a moment, thinking of the dead girl, wondering what had happened to her, then soldiered across the pasture to the house.
Ada was pulling a pie from the oven when he stepped inside the warm kitchen. He shrugged off the rain slicker and let it drop to the floor, ignoring the wet grass and muddy puddle his boots left on the worn linoleum.
Ada looked up in surprise. She set the pie on the stove and flattened her palms to her hips. “I just mopped that floor and here you come, tracking in all kinds of dirt.” Her lips closed together hard as a fist. Then a look of tenderness washed over her. He hadn’t seen that look since early February when he’d suffered through a bout of covid. She’d spoon-fed him chicken soup once the fever broke, had made him boiled custard.
He folded her into his arms and kissed her forehead, grateful when she softened against his body.
“Who was it?” she asked.
He began to sway, humming “Wildwood Flower” and mimicking the dance of the dead girl’s body in the water. Ada shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other then stopped. He continued to move, pulling her with him, singing softly. My poor heart is wondering no misery can tell…
“Robert?”
He yearned to tell her his greatest fear—of ever-lurking Death. He was seventy-six now. His joints ached with every rainfall, especially his right hip. Sometimes his heart raced like kids in a school yard. Twenty extra pounds padded his middle, and he didn’t want to do what he should to lose the weight.
“Robert? Are you all right?”
Death would come for him, just as it had for his father. The end drew closer with each passing day, the final hour a cruel mystery. He wanted her to understand these fears he carried in his heart, but how could he share them and not worry her?
She stepped away from his embrace, clasping his cold hands. “Honey?”
The kitchen was alive with the fragrance of apples swimming in butter and sugar and cinnamon. Ada’s hands felt warm in his. Robert pulled her close and fixed a kiss upon her lips, praying she’d never let him go.
*
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- Crossing the Pasture by Ruth Jones - December 12, 2024