Part Thirty Seven

The house they had in Hollywood Beach was right on the beach and a stone’s throw from the Diplomat Hotel. It wasn’t particularly attractive. In fact it was sort of dingy-looking, the roof sagged a bit in the middle, the porch canted to the right, and Preacher – who was meticulous about his kitchens – must’ve had a heart attack at the tiny, grease-spattered kitchen.

But it was right on the beach. Near the action. The sort of place you paid $1,500 a month for even in the early ‘90s. And Haywood’s arrival apparently coincided with a man named Armando Schisler getting arrested (again) for possession of cocaine. Which is not, in and of itself, particularly important, except that Armando was the roommate of a man named Matt Foxwell, and Foxwell was at the time a new Assistant District Attorney for Broward County, and couldn’t have a roommate who kept getting popped for possession. Which meant that Foxwell might have to give up his small, dingy, but right-on-the-beach home for want of a roommate.

Except, of course, Preacher sat down next to Foxwell at the Sea Crest, a small dark and dingy bar in Hallaway, and the next day Haywood advanced Foxwell three months’ rent and moved in to the beach house.

He took a job in Boca Raton working as an orderly at a nursing home. It took him all of three days to find a decent job and a beachfront home. That weekend he bought a 1952 Indian Chief motorcycle, and got laid for the first time in years – for the first time since Seattle, probably, although there are unconfirmed reports that he gave a couple of people at the Bar Nothing the full cowboy experience.

The most depressing thing of all is how…predictable that is. House job transportation sex without effort, whenever he wanted.

I have no idea where he learned how to operate a motorcycle. Matt recalls that he took some sort of mandatory highway safety class but never seemed the least bit unsure or unsteady on it.

Typical.

Matt and I have something in common – when Preacher left Miami he gave Foxwell the motorcycle, just as he’d left me his jeep when he graduated from college. I sold the jeep while I was in grad school, but Foxwell still has the motorcycle. Still in mint condition. Candy-apple red. He’s got a wife and two kids and says that mostly he just rides slowly around the block every couple of weekends and thinks about the six months or so he and Preacher lived together in that beach house.

“Jesus,” Foxwell said, “I am a happily married man, I love my wife, but Jesus, the pussy.”

I gave him my most inscrutable look.

“Right,” Matt said, “you used to live with him, you know what I’m talking about.”

His wife -- Elena Gutierrez-Foxwell -- had, in point of fact, dated Preacher Haywood. In those days she was another ADA in Broward County (she’s a judge now) and Matt decided that his poor roommate really needed to be introduced to someone a little more substantive than the fake-breasted, bikini-clad nymphs he was meeting up and down the Gold Coast. Right. Poor Preacher. So Elena was, Matt said, the best-looking woman he knew with a triple-digit IQ, and so he tried to fix the two of them up.

Three dates. No sex. Elena broke it off. Said he lacked ambition. Said he was the sort of person for whom women did incredibly stupid things, and she thought it was probably smart to run as fast as she could before it was too late. “He was like,” she said, “heroin. People try heroin thinking that they can handle it. And some of them are right. But a lot of them end up hooked. I wasn’t taking any chances, not with a nursing home orderly who didn’t seem to want anything more out of his life.”

They then told me a tedious story about how they got involved afterward, and I feigned interest.

When I walked down the promenade with Foxwell and saw the perfect bodies, the rollerblades, the convertibles, Foxwell told me things were really little changed in the last dozen years. “Everybody knew him,” he said. “The t-shirt vendors, the barmaids, the rich girls, from Boca and Miami. And even over on the Intracoastal – I don’t know how, but when we would go over there he would still keep running into people he knew. Let me tell you, you could drink cheap if you stuck with him on a Friday night.”

I nodded noncommittally, thinking of Ocean City.

“I remember this one time,” he said, “we met these three girls from Monaco. Perfect bodies. Preacher talks to them in French, and one thing leads to another, and eventually we’re out on the beach and these women are taking off their tops and insisting on a moonlight swim…” his voice trailed off, and I knew that at that moment he couldn’t have picked Judge Gutierrez-Foxwell out of a lineup.

The Vista Del Rey Assisted Living Community was called the Vista Del Rey Nursing Home when Preacher worked there. My guess is that a few new coats of coral and turquoise paint have been slapped on the place since then. It’s actually pretty nice, as such places go – big, modern, clean, quiet. Not surprisingly, there aren’t any residents left who remember him. It’s where old people go to die, after all. There are probably a few people on the staff who worked with him, but when I spoke to the director of HR no names were volunteered. I ran ads in the newspaper but there were no takers.

Most of the higher-ups have been replaced since then, not a few of them because of the circumstances surrounding his departure. Fortunately for posterity, Haywood came to Foxwell with the whole matter because of Foxwell’s legal expertise.

Seems that, for one thing, Preacher and the residents got along well. That’s not surprising. But over the course of a few months Haywood began to see signs of abuse. The patients were initially afraid to say anything but Preacher caught one of the other orderlies – a veteran of the place named Maurice Clarke – in the act of breaking an old man’s hand.

Brittle bones. Muscular orderly. Tight squeeze. And another resident punished for soiling his bed, or demanding a better meal, or refusing to leave the TV room… whatever.

Preacher did what he was supposed to do, which was report it up the chain, but nothing happened, and the abuse continued.

One of the residents was a man named Hank Feldman, who had grown up on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and who was, in fact, rather wealthy. Haywood and Feldman got along particularly well and sometimes when Preacher’s shift was over he would change into his civies and sit with Feldman and listen to stories about parties in the 1920s, about the Fitzgeralds and the Menckens and the Harrisses coming down from Baltimore to drink and carouse at his house near the mouth of the Tred Avon River.

I had to look up who RP Harriss was. My guess is that Preacher already knew.

At any rate, Preacher persuaded Feldman and one or two others – at personal risk – to support the abuse complaint against Clarke, in the naïve hope that this would somehow lead to the problem being addressed. It did not, and Feldman was denied food for a day as punishment – no marks that way, and Feldman was a diabetic… what Clarke and the other close-the-ranks assholes hadn’t counted on was Haywood leaving a warm bed with some 21-year-old roller-blader to go into work on his day off and check on a few old geezers.

And the next day he went to an alphabet soup of state agencies, and the DA’s office, and families of the victims, and unleashed a royal shit-storm. Backed up by his roommate, a prosecutor looking for a case that would get him some attention.

At that point Haywood’s days on the staff were numbered, of course. Officially, though, he was fired for gross misconduct.

It was a few weeks after the place was filled up with inspectors and regulators and police and prosecutors and all of the higher-ups were talking about how shocked, SHOCKED they were to learn about all this, and they just wish that Preacher had told someone before going public. The first one fired was Clarke, of course, and after picking up his last paycheck he walked up to Preacher and tried to punch him in the head.

I can so perfectly picture this that I don’t care that there aren’t any eyewitnesses. Anyone who knows Preacher can picture this. Preacher has a towel or something else in his hand – he’s too smart to punch someone with an open hand, even when it’s someone he’s wanted to punch for months – and he sees Clarke stride up to him purposefully and he stands there calmly, arms at his side, because he can’t believe that even an animal like Maurice Clarke would actually intend violence toward HIM, because he was just doing the right thing, and Clarke throws a well-telegraphed roundhouse punch that even one of the octogenarians could have ducked, and then without any change of expression at all Haywood throws a short, graceful left hook and Clarke hits the ground like a sack of potatoes.

I haven’t been in a fistfight since I was eight, and I am one of those people that nuns and crossing guards want to punch in the face just on general principles. Preacher Haywood was the nicest guy I ever met, he abhorred violence of all kinds, yet he was involved in at least four assaults after leaving high school – by all accounts not the aggressor in any of them, but not exactly turning the other cheek, either. Five assaults if you count the assassination attempt, but we haven’t gotten there yet.

So they fired Preacher for knocking Clarke out cold. Clarke filed assault charges, a worker’s compensation case, and a civil lawsuit against Haywood. The criminal charges were dismissed almost immediately, the worker’s compensation case was thrown out because it happened after the firing, and Haywood’s trust gave the man $5,000 to go away, against the advice of the lawyers, who told Preacher not to pay a nickel.

Picture a late-night conversation right after Preacher was fired. Sitting on the deck in the twilight, drinking beer and watching the moon rise over the Atlantic, are Matt and Preacher, Elena and a woman named Karen Adder (I couldn’t find her, but apparently she was the closest thing to a real girlfriend that Preacher had, although according to Matt and Elena she was little more than a semi-regular booty caller; she was, at the time, a stripper).

And Elena, who by this time had left the DA’s office and was dating Matt, is telling Preacher: you weren’t going to be a nursing home orderly the rest of your life anyhow. It’s time for you to grow up and do something with your life.

Preacher says, duh.

Seriously, dude, Matt says. He was the sort of lawyer who said “dude,” but it was starting to sound increasingly forced. You keep talking about opening a restaurant. We’ll find someplace here on the beach. I’ve seen you in action, man, you’ll be able to raise all the capital you need.

Karen nuzzles his neck.

This place is not right for me, Preacher answers, not looking at them, looking out across the water. Everything is a little too effortless down here.

You’ve made that choice, Elena says. Doesn’t have to be that way. Go back to school. What about med school? You talked about that once. That’s not effortless. That’s something even you would have to work hard for. And something that would bring you some satisfaction, some sense of accomplishment.

You would look so hot in a lab coat, Karen says to him, and he smiles and kisses her. Matt and Elena roll their eyes.

I actually signed up to take the MCAT, he says to them. I have to read up on the science stuff. It’s not that long a test, really. So each question carries a lot of weight.

I think that’s a great idea, Matt says. I think that you would be a fantastic doctor. Would you go into gerontology?

Haywood shrugs noncommittally. Most of the doctors I’ve met, he says, tell me that they always had a burning desire to be a doctor, that it was all they really wanted to do, that you had to really love it to put up with all the bullshit they put you through to make you a doctor. I don’t have any of that. I’m not sure it’s for me. I don’t want to get halfway through it and decide I made the wrong choice.

Not making any choice, Elena said, is worse. Right now you’re not making any choices, but one day the frat party is going to end.

You seem sad, baby, Karen said. Let’s go see if I can cheer you up.

According to Matt, Preacher said he liked Karen because she had an uncomplicated view of life and a surprising amount of self-knowledge.

Right.

He took the MCAT. Some nauseatingly high score. It’s in the archive. But that was as far as it went. Afterward they threw an insane beach party that was broken up by the police twice, and the second time involved chasing away cops who’d never left after responding to the first call. And after the beach party he gave the Indian Chief to Matt and stuck out his thumb and disappeared.

Elena and Matt are both Worshipers. Low-key about it, but they’re in a Circle and their house has that look, that feel of a place where running the vacuum cleaner helps them commune with God and it always smells like lavender and fresh-baked cookies. It really, sometimes, just makes you want to scream. She’s a judge and he heads the felony trial division in the prosecutor’s office. Who the fuck has time to make the beds and bake cookies? And look after their perfect non-video-game-playing children? The Worshipers all want for a little sloth, in my opinion.

But given how truly bizarre Haywood’s life got after leaving Miami Beach, even I find it hard to begrudge him a few months of hedonism.

No, I take that back. I begrudge him that. I was married, with a non-tenure-track job at Bowling Green and working on my Ph.D, starving and desperate and contemplating law school, or suicide. As if there was a difference. And he was nailing European fashion models on the beaches of south Florida. I begrudge the hell out of him.

Part Thirty Six

Preacher got a helicopter ride to Atlanta. The state police arrived Frank was violating parole by possessing a handgun. The trespass was irrefutable, the attempted arson was pretty self-evident, and so the three men went to the hospital in Macon with an armed escort, and then to jail. The cops looked at Arthur’s rabies certificate and declared themselves satisfied.

Everyone gave a statement. Which, I learned, you can get with an FOIA request. They’re in the archive. The women heard noises, screaming, Arthur, they saw lights in the driveway, they raced outside, and… bang. None of the three men suffered any life-threatening injuries in the melee, although in the transcript of his sentencing hearing Michael’s lawyer notes that he required two surgeries to put his hand back together, and had some second-degree burns.

Preacher and Cassie were summonsed to court as witnesses, but the three men pleaded out, and they never had to testify. The prosecutor asked them if they wanted to give a “victim impact statement.” Preacher just laughed. Cassie said, “the impact of my foot on his balls was my statement.”

As for Preacher, he spent a couple days in a hospital and came home to the farm. Anna told the people at Emory that she was his wife so she could stay in his room. Karen told them – slightly more plausibly – that she was his lawyer, so his chart was kept in immaculate form. Donna told them, laughably, that she was his sister, but nobody at the hospital wanted to challenge this assertion after looking her in the eye.

Arthur continued to sleep, morosely, in the goat shed while Preacher was gone.

I have a picture taken late that summer, after Preacher was home. Karen took it. Preacher is standing in the back of a wagon, his shirt off, wearing cut-offs and work gloves. There are hay bales stacked around him. You can see the scar from the bullet, on the right side, about four inches above the nipple. It went between two ribs and nicked the top of his lung and came out the other side near his shoulder blade. Nice, clean, in-and-out. He was lucky.

They baled hay, they sheared sheep, they discussed re-entering the goat dairy market. They sold organic corn and soybeans. Cassie could handle all the machinery, and keep it in good repair, too. Donna got almost as good as Preacher at shearing sheep. Ellen showed a knack for carpentry. Anna – things grew in Anna’s footsteps, so she took care of all things green and growing. Karen managed the whole show, handled accounts, wheedled and bargained and kept the operation in the black.

In the wintertime he watched videos in the house with them at night, but always went back to the goat shed to sleep. He had a space heater. Plus, he said to them, it’s Georgia. I used to work in Alaska. How cold can it get?

The Spring arrived and they were busy again, but not as bad as the year before. Attribute that to both more experience and better winter upkeep. And to Preacher, who was as indefatigable as ever. Fields were plowed. Crops were planted. Lambs were born.

And after the first shearing and hay-cutting, with the crops in the ground, Cassie and Anna came to Preacher and said:

“We have a favor to ask.”

“Ask,” he said, caulking the seal on a window at the farmhouse.

Anna said to him, “you know that we’ve been putting money away.”

“For the baby,” he said. They wanted a baby. He would certainly have known that after a year there.

“And Karen thinks that our carrier will cover fertility treatments,” Cassie said.

“Great,” Preacher said warmly. “Can you hand me that putty knife?”

Anna handed him the knife. The two women looked at one another.

“So… we were sort of wondering,” Anna said, wondering why he was making them go through such efforts for such an obvious question.

Preacher said nothing, just kept on working in that oblivious way he has. Had. Has. I’m assuming he’s still mostly ignorant about the way real human beings act in awkward situations.

“We, um,” Anna said, and looked at Cassie for help.

“We want you to come to Atlanta with us and whack off in a cup,” Cassie said, helpfully. “It works better when it’s fresh.”

Preacher looked at them, then, and raised one eyebrow with a bemused smile. “Aren’t you supposed to at least buy me dinner first?”

They laughed, nervously. Preacher put down the caulking gun and wiped his hands on his pants, and turned to face them.

“Can’t,” he said, regretfully.

“What?”

“I want you to have a baby, and I’ll do anything I can to help you, but I won’t do that,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I couldn’t have a baby and not be a part of its life, and I couldn’t be a part of this baby’s life,” he said.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Cassie said, “the baby would be right here with us.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Preacher said, “but someday I might be.”

The women looked at each other, and then back at him. “What?”

“I’m not going anywhere tomorrow,” Preacher said, “I’m not going anywhere next week, but one of these days I’m going to be moving on, and that would be very hard to do with a baby here.”

They talked about it for a bit more but it was clear his mind wasn’t going to be changed.

That night after he was back in the goat shed the women discussed this turn of events. Donna opined that it had now been at least a year since the man had gotten laid, and that he would be much more favorably inclined toward staying if he got off the farm and had some sort of social life once in awhile.

Ellen pointed out that he lived in a goat shed and was reminded each night that he was just a hired hand.

Karen said, if you had just gotten him drunk and fucked him like I suggested, it would have saved us a lot of time and money.

Cassie said, when it’s your turn, do it however you want.

Anna said, we don’t need him anymore. That doesn’t mean I want him to go. He’s a part of this now. We should make that clear to him. It’s not a question of needing an extra pair of hands, or having him serve as a go-between with the local idiots. I mean there’s five of us, we have a better idea of what we’re up against now, we could probably manage OK now. But losing him would be like losing one of you. It would… it would change everything. Change the balance.

Karen said, we can make him a partner. Will that make him stay?

No, Donna and Cassie said together.

Why does he stay now? Ellen wondered.

Because he likes it here. Because he feels safe here. Because he likes us, and the work, Cassie said. The same reason we stay here. Except we have something he doesn’t have, which is a future here. I mean look at him. He is young and strong and beautiful. Smart, funny, kind. His future is not a lifetime of celibacy, growing old with a bunch of dykes. I mean, Karen’s single, but if she met someone nice, we could easily make a place for her here – Elizabeth fit, mostly. But even assuming Preacher met someone, what then? Bring her back to live in the goat shed? I mean, let’s be realistic. Karen met that woman in Atlanta and the four of us did a pretty good job of scaring her off last year.

My brothers, Anna said slowly, used to screen my boyfriends. It’s one of the reasons I became a lesbian. He’s like our baby brother, and you’re right – if I was straight, I wouldn’t want to move into this. Even if he had hot water in the goat shed.

And, Karen said, speaking from experience, his options are pretty limited in Barlow, Georgia. I mean not as limited as mine, but limited nonetheless. But Preacher knows all this. So why has he stayed this long?

They looked at each other without an answer.

Karen went to him the next day, after he finished helping Donna worm sheep.

“Preacher, you scared the hell out of us with that ‘I’ll be leaving someday’ comment yesterday.”

“That wasn’t my intention. I just meant that, you know, this isn’t going to last forever.”

“Why not? Why can’t it last? The five of us plan on it lasting. Cassie and Anna plan on raising a child here.”

“It’s different for you guys,” he said, rinsing worming paste off his hands at the faucet.

“Because we have equity? We talked about that. We want to make you a partner. Give you a full stake.”

But not, she thought, a bed in the house. And he knew that, but didn’t say it.

“It’s not that. This is your thing. I’m just the hand.”

“Oh, that’s crap, and you know it. You’re a part of this place, now, just like we are. A part of our family. And you’ve put as much of your sweat into this as we have.”

“Do you need the capital?” he said, wondering for a moment if this was a business venture disguised as something else. “Because you don’t have to sell me a stake. I can just loan you some money.”

“No, it’s not about money.” She wondered what a 1/6 interest in the place was worth. “It’s about the whole… the whole… ecosystem here, for want of a better word. The equilibrium. You’re a part of this place. We depend on you, the whole place depends on you to run properly, just like it depends on me and everyone else. We were afraid that taking you on was going to upset the balance, remember that? But instead it balanced us. It stabilized the whole place, made everything run better. And the thought of losing you…I don’t know what it would do.”

“You really don’t need me,” he said. “Not that much. Having an extra body is helpful but not critical. And the balance – look, if that’s the metaphor we’re going to use, I didn’t balance this. I just stopped the wobble. It will run fine without me. But unless you’re kicking me out – unless my choices are partnership, or leaving – I’m fine with things the way they are. For now. All I’m saying is that at some point, I know, I need to leave this beautiful little oasis and go back to the real world.”

She said nothing. He finished cleaning up. “I need to go help Anna over in the truck garden,” he said.

“Donna thinks this is about you getting laid,” Karen blurted out.

He laughed. “Is that why she keeps telling me to ask that girl at the lumber yard out?”

“Yeah.”

“The girl at the lumber yard says ‘supposably,’” Preacher said. “I keep telling Donna, I’m not that desperate. Yet.”

“But you know you don’t have to spend all your time with us. You could go out and socialize once in awhile.”

“I could say the same thing about you.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

“If and when I leave,” he said, “it won’t be to get laid, or because I want to get married, or anything like that.”

“Then what will it be?”

“It will be because it’s time,” he said. “And I’ll know it when it happens.”

It happened in October of that year. There were tears all around. They visited him in pairs, en masse, individually, to ask him to change his mind, but they all knew it wasn’t going to happen. He gave a short speech that sounded suspiciously like the one he’d uttered in Seattle before leaving, destiny, blah blah blah, and he left. Arthur trotted down the driveway after him until Preacher knelt, said something to him, and sent him back to the house.

The man walked out to the highway, stuck out his thumb, and headed south.

Part Thirty-Five

So, there’s not much to report except that he lasted there longer than at just about any other job he ever had. Nineteen months.

He fixed the barn roof, first, in the tentative spring sunshine, cutting up his hands pretty good on the sheets of tin.

He sheared the sheep – turns out he had a knack for getting the coat off quickly and in one piece. [“You should see him work a brassiere,” I mumbled when they told me this. They laughed.]

He brought in a hay cutting and handed Cassie tools when she fixed the tractor. He repaired fences. Helped Karen plant their truck garden and helped Anna vaccinate the sheep and when the money crops – organic corn, soy, and sunflowers – started coming in he watched over the seedlings like they were his kids.

One thing he didn’t do was live in the barn. Not for long, anyhow.

He came to Karen and said, walk this way.

They walked down the gently sloping front yard to the driveway and stopped at the far edge. There was a drop-off of about five feet right past the drive and then the lower fields, green but still a bit patchy. The sheep wintered there.

Haywood turned and pointed to the tottering remains of the goat shed, just off the drop-off from the driveway. “What’s that?”

It was a goat shed. Actually, it was a workshop for my grandfather, but when we got here we were going to start a goat dairy, and that was where the first goat lived.

[The goat died. And was a male anyhow. An early lesson on getting into agriculture when you didn’t know what you were doing.]

It’s got an electric line that ties in there, Preacher said, pointing to the cable. And running water. Most of the lumber’s still in good shape. It looks like hell, but there’s a lot to be salvaged there. I was thinking that I could rebuild it.

You want to live in the goat shed?

I want to see if I can replaced the goat shed with a shack for the hired hand.

A tenant shack? I don’t know if we want those sorts living that close to the house.

Beats the barn. You never know when one of them will get drunk and pass out with a cigarette in his hand.

I’ve never seen you drink or smoke.

I might start.

What would you need?

A lot. But you’d have something nice for the next hitchhiker you take in.

She thought about it. Making him sleep in the barn always made her feel a little guilty. OK, give me a list, she said.

He gave her the list. And worked on the place before, during, and after his other chores around the farm. They all remember him talking about it as his “Thoreauvian folly.” Karen remembers that when she came to see him working on it the first week, when he was just dismantling the thing and sorting the lumber into “usable” and “firewood” piles, he said this to her:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings; There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet's wings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart's core.

She remembered distinctly that he recited the whole thing, softly, not really looking at her. Just pulling nails out of the boards while he worked. When he was finished he told her they should think about adding honeybees to the mix.

I sat on their front porch and looked past the tight, cozy little cabin down the hill, and at the white boxes in the field below, and the black specks that darted in and out of them. I thought about him memorizing Yeats and spitting it back out like that. For the first time in… for the first time ever, I missed him. Even as I recalled why I wanted to punch him in the face.

While he worked on the house the dog lay in the tall grass and watched him impassively. Occasionally Arthur would stir himself enough to chase a rabbit, but mostly he just watched.

The house went up. He dug a shallow foundation, just about a foot deep, and lined it with cinderblock. Anchored the house to treated 6x6s set deep in the ground – he dug the holes by hand, and Anna recalled that when he worked the posthole diggers with his shirt off it made her recall her heterosexual days with some fondness.

[At this Cassie glared at her. They all then laughed. They all swore they never touched him. I suppose I believe them.]

He put in a small window that peered across the surface of the driveway and two others that looked out into the fields. A Dutch door. The faucet turned into a shower head (cold water only; he said it was a simple, elegant solution to living with five lesbians) that stood above a concrete pad he poured. A little field drain below it.

No toilet. It was easier to just walk up to the house. Or use the weeds down near the stream.

The hay was cut; the sheep were sheared; the crops were planted, and grew, and the people who certify that things are “organic” were kept happy. Preacher’s cheerful, relentless approach to the hard work proved infectious and they started looking for things to do, buildings to repair, fields to tend.

Preacher offered to quit as the summer turned ungodly hot. You only needed me short-term. You’re caught up. I’m an unnecessary expense.

Do you want to leave?

No.

Then shut the hell up and get back in the kitchen. We’d keep you here just to cook.

Too bad, Ellen said, we can’t keep him barefoot and pregnant, too. Think about it. We underpay him, work the hell out of him, and take him for granted. In every other respect, he’s a perfect Georgia farmer’s wife.

I heard that, he said from the kitchen.

On a piece of yellowed paper in their kitchen they have his recipe for chocolate meringue pie. Every time he made it he gave them a lecture on the “spiritual symmetry” of chocolate meringue pie. The egg, he said, represents the soul. The chocolate takes three egg yolks. The meringue takes three egg whites. When you are shoveling down a piece of chocolate meringue pie – or two, if you’re Cassie – you are symbolically reuniting your soul.

They rolled their eyes and he would laugh delightedly. And he would scramble an extra egg and put it in Arthur’s feed dish, so the dog could have a treat, too.

And each night the dog went down the steps (he cut steps into the drop-off by the driveway, lined with railroad ties) behind Preacher and slept across the doorway.

They remember the one night very vividly, of course.

In August they got a check for their wool. Sort of. They had a deal with a Navajo co-op that used their wool and paid them, not for the wool, but a percentage of the proceeds they got from the sale of the blankets. After a year without getting any money at all Karen had decided they were either being robbed or had hooked up with the least-successful Navajo blanket-weavers of all time, and then suddenly there was a check in the high four figures sitting there in the mailbox.

That called for a celebration, and they were all tired of looking for things to do anyhow, so they piled in the pickup and went into Macon. Yes, where they live, Macon is the big city.

This was a day they all remembered vividly, and clearly, and their versions were enough alike that I wondered if they had rehearsed it. Usually if I ask five people to describe the same event – the same event from a dozen years ago – I get five different versions but here… here the only difference was in who came in second when they played miniature golf. Some said Cassie. Some said Donna.

Ellen had brought her softball bat and they went into the pitching cage and hit. She was impressed with Preacher’s stroke. She asked me if it was true that he was scouted by the majors. I broke my rule and told her: yes. I’ve seen the scouting reports.

She wasn’t surprised.

They went to the mall and ate pizza and (half-)jokingly tried to fix him up with the girl who worked at the record store. And then it was time to go home, and they were tired, and happy, and he rode in the back with Anna and Karen and Donna and they sang John Mellancamp songs.

They are all just old enough to still think of him as John Cougar, of course.

So they arrived home and tended to the livestock and gave Arthur a rawhide bone they’d bought. Then they retired to their respective locations, and Arthur took up his position in front of Preacher’s door, gnawing happily on the rawhide.

Arthur, not Preacher. One assumes.

Part of what happened next was related by Preacher to Anna to me, so allow room for error regarding his internal monologue. But late – around 2 a.m. – Arthur gave a low, guttural cough that roused Haywood. And he heard, over the sound of peepers and crickets, the faint squeak of worn brakes.

The pickup truck easing up the driveway, its headlights out, bore the three men from Southern States. For purposes of posterity their names were Gus, Michael, and Frank, but that’s not really important. Look at the archive, all the particulars are in there.

All three were pretty loaded. Whenever they got drunk Gus started thinking about the time the dyke bitch broke his nose, and they would talk about their revenge, and generally get too drunk to actually execute any of their intricate revenge fantasies. Generally, but not this time. This time beer money ran out too soon, and so Frank was piloting his truck up the driveway with the headlights out, while Gus and Michael giggled nervously in the front seat.

Both of them held Mason jars filled with gasoline, with a bit of tee-shirt sticking out from under the cap.

Preacher heard the faint pop of a stone under a truck tire and slipped out of the cabin with the softball bat in his hand. Saw the silhouette of the truck pass by above. And he said later that at that moment there was this terrible, frightening calmness that came over him, and in his head – and this part is so weird that it has to be true – he heard the opening notes of “Beyond Belief” by Elvis Costello. He said that everything he did for the next three minutes was perfectly timed with, choreographed to, that song, which played in his head like some ridiculously inappropriate soundtrack.

He climbed up the embankment onto the driveway and saw two figures standing outside the truck, bent over something. Then there was a flare of light and one of the men – Gus, as it turns out – screamed “Hey, Bitch,” and cocked back to throw the molotov at the nearby barn. And Preacher (as calmly and effortlessly, I’m sure, as he would swing at a 3-1 fastball) stepped into his swing and shattered the bottle, and the man’s hand, with one motion.

Gus screamed again, this time wordlessly, both at the searing agony in his mangled hand and at the burning gasoline that sprayed across him. Michael – still too drunk to make good decisions – stood there with his burning bomb still in his hand, but before Preacher could make a decision, Arthur launched himself from the shadows and latched onto the man’s arm. He dropped the bottle, which amazingly did not break, but simply rolled down the driveway, leaving a trail of burning gasoline from its leaky lid.

Light snapped on in the house and out of the corner of his eye Preacher saw Cassie running across the front yard. Michael ran down the driveway trying to shake the dog loose, and Preacher saw the cabin light come on in the truck as Frank started scrabbling madly through his glove compartment. Preacher advanced on the truck, Frank climbed out of the truck, Arthur was growling like a hellhound, Gus was still screaming, rolling on the ground to extinguish the flames, and the sound of the pistol cracked into the night sky. Preacher did a half-turn, then kept on advancing, but Cassie got there first. She slammed the truck door on Frank, he dropped the gun, she kicked it away, kicked his balls halfway through the roof of his mouth, then picked up the weapon.

She heard Preacher say “Arthur” loudly, commandingly, and Arthur gave Michael one last shake and then trotted back.

Cassie looked triumphantly over at Preacher as the others came down from the farmhouse, and saw him lying in the driveway. Karen cradled his head.

“Oh, fuck,” Ellen said softly. Anna reached into the truck and turned on the headlights. His blood looked black in the glare.