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.