October 21, 2009

**There was a little confusion about the characters from a few readers so I added the following to be inserted between the first and second posts.**

Rawlins wasn’t Jasper and I’s dad, wasn’t even a real relative. He’d known my dad since they were kids, like brothers the way people tell it. Storming around, raising hell on hot gravel roads. I could make the two of them out somewhere behind my eyes, laughing quietly at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and whiskey, thinking Jasper and me were asleep. Can see Rawlins’ stiff grey face over the other side of the casket. None of it meant enough then, though, to forgive him. I was just a girl and he should have taken more care, care enough to not let things happen the way they did anyway.

I suppose it all started the day I first laid eyes on Rowdy.

**And this picks up after the second post.**

We bumped down the lane, summer grasses scraping the underbelly of truck, all of us letting our bodies limp and sway with the uneven movement. I slid my butt up further on the seat, leaned back and put a foot on the dash. Hot damp June air blowing back on my face. I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the road, or Nelson’s cornfield out past the fence. But even as I cursed myself for it, I turned my eyes back to Rawlins. He was looking straight ahead, right hand cupped up over the wheel, left arm curled out the window, fingertips up on top of the roof, tapping like they did. No give aways in his face.

Our first stop was Elsie’s place up on Missile Road. From the lane it was left down the hill past the Richards’ place, across the bridge, up just a bit with our place still hugging the left of the road and then right onto the smooth blacktop of Missile. Rawlins always took this stretch fast, pushing up against fourth gear so we could all hear the engine working. Despite myself, I hung my head out over my folded arm and smiled into the speed, skin pulling up against my bones. I looked down to the tall grass next to the road, tried to make my eyes fight the blurring and fix on one clump at a time. When it was too much and I started to get dizzy I brought my eyes up to the distance where things were still slow and easy, hills and trees moving even against the flat horizon.

Elsie was what people in town called poor country. When I was a little kid and heard someone say that, I’d asked my Dad about it. Asked him if we were poor country too. He’d pushed his John Deere cap up and back, scratched his forehead and looked at me long. He chuckled at something in his mind and then straightened his face back.

We’re working country, Jemma. That’s what we are. We work the land.

But aren’t we poor too? Just like Elsie and her boy? And don’t they work?

He’d struggled with a response, tried hard to find words that would catch up with his face. My Dad was like me, answered questions quicker and more honest with his eyes, his mouth, the set of his jaw. The words he chose were always a little less true. I don’t even remember what those words were, just that in his face he admitted to being every bit as confused as me.