Wynona stirs the pot on the stove.
“I hope you like Brunswick stew,” she says, laying a blue lid over the pot on the stove.
Squirrel meat. I haven’t had any since I was a boy in eastern Arkansas.
“I remember my mother fixing it,” I say, nodding. I remember how the meat used to stick to my teeth.
“Trey,” she says, “take Mr. Page out back to talk to your dad and then come back inside. I won’t be ready in here for a while.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Trey seems disappointed, but there isn’t a lot of give in his mother’s voice. Behind the friendly smile is a hint of steel. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be Wynona who taught Trey his hand shake. I follow him out a door off the kitchen and see Bracken sitting out on a deck that runs the width of the cabin with his feet up on a rail. A cooler is at his feet, and a beer is in his hand.
“Dad,” Trey says casually, “Mr. Page is here.”
It sounds a little shocking to hear Bracken addressed so lovingly. Nervously, I clear my throat and look beyond Bracken to the woods no more than fifty yards away. The sun is about down now, giving the dense growth to the rear of the cabin a forbidding look.
“Pull up a chair. Page,” he says gruffly. He smiles at Trey, who grins and shoves his hands in his pants.
“Trey, show Mr. Page how you can shoot.”
Leaning against the wall is a .22 rifle that Trey lugs to the railing of the porch. He is too short to cradle the stock against his shoulder, so he steadies it under his arm and begins blasting at a tin can near the edge of the forest. The metal jumps as if it has acquired a life of its own as Trey sprays it around the shorn grass. Bracken watches with obvious satisfaction. I wonder what it would be like to have a son. I wouldn’t trade her for anything, but Sarah has always been more than a match for me. Though Rainey disagrees, I have little to teach her except what to avoid when it comes time to choose a mate. Since her mother died, I haven’t been the most consistent of fathers too many nights I left Sarah alone while I went prowling around bars after lonely women who were eager to scratch a similar itch.
“He can sure pop ‘em,” I say admiringly.
“Can he try?” Trey asks, stopping after firing five rounds.
I haven’t shot a rifle since I was twelve. My dad (before he went completely nuts and before my mother confiscated his guns) and I used to shoot turtles and gar off the St. Francis River bridge about ten miles from town. I was a decent shot then, but today only manage to hit the can one out of five shots. I offer the rifle to Bracken, but he waves it away. How much pain is he in, I wonder. It is easy to forget that he is probably doped up right now. With only a little time left, how can he think about law at all? What is death like? My mind resists contemplating its absence. Bracken doesn’t have that luxury. If I were in his condition, I’d be tempted to say the hell with it and concentrate on keeping the cooler full. Other people are a mystery. Bracken may be spending the time he could be working on the Wallace case bargaining with God as if he were trying to cut a deal with a tough prosecutor. Given Bracken’s reputation for insisting on absolute control, I’d like to be a fly on the wall during that conversation. The door opens, and Wynona waves Trey inside. Bracken looks up and gives her a warm smile.
“We’re lucky we’re not counting on Page,” he chuckles, “to defend Leigh in a shooting match.”
She winks at the men in her life.
“Y’all practice all the time,” she drawls.
“Be another twenty minutes.
Come on in. Trey.”
Reluctantly, the boy walks into the house, and I watch while Bracken unloads the rifle and checks the chamber.
“Good kid,” I say.
“I thought he was gonna crush my fingers when he met me at the door.”
Bracken reaches down beside him and picks up a rag from the floor and begins to oil the rifle.
“It’s hard to explain to a boy his age you’re not going to be around much longer. They don’t get it. Take a brew if you want.”
For the first time, I feel some empathy for this man.
Until this moment, his intensity and my own unacknowledged envy of his success had made us seem like beings from different galaxies. His need to dominate our previous encounters has repulsed me in a way that might say more about myself than him. He is successful because he leaves nothing to chance. I don’t have his drive or single-mindedness. The fact is, I am flattered silly that he has asked me to help him, even if it means nothing more than sitting through the trial like a utility player on a team with an all-star infield. I lift the lid off the Igloo and pull out a Heineken. No light beer, but I guess there wouldn’t be much point.
“I don’t get it either. My wife died a few years back, and I still haven’t figured it out.”
Bracken pauses from his labors to take a sip from his can of Miller.
“Dying young is going against the grain, all right.”
Going against the grain? Well, I didn’t expect Chet Bracken to burst into tears. I want to ask him about what he’s personally getting from Christian Life, but now it seems an invasion of privacy.
“I read the file and copied it,” I say, withdrawing the Wallace folder from my briefcase.
“If Leigh had kept her mouth shut, they couldn’t have charged her because they wouldn’t have had any real evidence. All they would have had was a wife discovering her husband’s dead body and a neighbor’s testimony they argued the night before.”
Bracken shifts in the green canvas chair at the mention of the case. He nods, his plain face gloomy.
“We’ve talked to everybody who claimed to be at the church that day, and not a single one of them can testify she was there during the time she says she was. Worse, two people flat out contradict her story that she spoke to them.”
On Bracken’s property there is a garden off to the right of the cabin I hadn’t noticed until now. Maybe he does live here.
“You think she could have been having an affair and was supposed to be at the church and can’t bring herself to admit where she was?”
Bracken pokes his rag, which he has tied to a stick, down the barrel.
“Not at all likely,” he grunts.
“She and Wallace had been married less than a year, and the word is she was crazy about him. Her daddy complained she was spending too much time at home with him instead of being at the church.”
So if she thought he hung the moon, why would she kill him? At the edge of the woods, I detect some movement. I think I’d be nervous at night out here.
“Was Wallace a member?”
An ugly sound comes from Bracken’s throat.
“Not in good standing,” he says, spitting over the railing into the yard, which is blooming with yellow forsythia and pink redbud trees. A butane tank only a few feet from the deck is mostly hidden by dense shrubbery, out of which arises a birdhouse for martins.
“Shane Norman wouldn’t have let his daughter marry Wallace if he hadn’t joined his church, but right after they married, he quit coming much.”
A small gray rabbit hops into the cleared field and cautiously sniffs the shot-up can. I am reminded of the days when my father and I used to hunt rabbits when I was a kid, and I look to see if Bracken will load the rifle.
He yawns and looks down the barrel.
“Maybe Wallace was playing around,” I guess, “and she caught him at it.”
Satisfied with his job. Bracken props the rifle in the corner against the beam supporting the roof. My father never fired a shot without cleaning and oiling his guns afterward. I think those acts of maintenance somehow gave him as much satisfaction as firing the guns. When his schizophrenia and drinking got bad (eventually he hung himself at the state hospital in Benton), my mother took the guns and gave them to her brother, telling my father someone had stolen them. He had to know what she had done (burglary of the home of a white person in a small town thirty-five years ago was as rare as a comet sighting), but, probably as a result of his illness, he preferred the theory that a crime had been committed. Bracken glances in the direction of the rabbit which has tentatively hopped a couple of feet toward the garden.