Chapter 6 - The Long Wait in the Clover
Seventeen days is a long time in an Ozark September.
The heat broke on the ninth, the wind swinging around from the north and bringing the first dry, sweet smell of falling oak leaves and cedar smoke off the hills. The clover in my pasture went to seed, turning from bright green to a soft, dusty purple that smelled of honey when the children ran through it after school.
The house on Farm Road 142 changed.
It wasn't a loud change; it was the kind of settling that happens to an old barn after you replace the rotted sills with white oak timbers.
Every afternoon at four, the school bus would rattle down the blacktop, its air brakes hissing as it stopped by the cattle guard. Bo and Otis would jump down first, their canvas backpacks bouncing against their ribs, followed by Frankie and Mabel holding hands.
They didn't look down the road toward Republic anymore.
They looked toward the garden, where Lee had set up three wooden sawhorses and an eight-foot piece of exterior plywood to build the table for our wedding.
Lee was good with a circular saw. Her daddy had been a carpenter in Taney County before his lungs gave out from the cedar dust, and she had his old crosscut handsaws hanging in our utility room, their teeth still sharp enough to shave pine shavings thin as onionskin.
Otis stood beside her with a six-foot folding rule, marking the screw lines every twelve inches.
"Keep the edge square, buddy," Lee would say, her hand guiding his wrist. "If the table ain't square, the plates will slide when the wind comes up off the river."
"Is Grandma Sandy coming to the wedding?" Frankie asked one afternoon.
She was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket, using a piece of sandpaper to smooth the rough edges of a white pine 2x4. Her hair was pulled back in two crooked pigtails that Mabel had braided for her during recess, secured with red rubber bands from the kitchen junk drawer.
Lee stopped the saw. The blade whined down to a stop, the smell of burnt pine sap rising sweet in the cool air.
She looked at me where I was kneeling by the corner post, leveling the secondary leg with a torpedo level.
"No, baby," Lee said gently. "Grandma Sandy has other business that day."
"Is she mad about the purple paint?" Frankie asked, her small face serious, her gray eyes clear and unbothered.
"She’s just busy, Frankie," I said, standing up and dusting the sawdust from my knees. "Some folks have a hard time sitting down at a table they didn't build themselves."
Frankie thought about that for a second, then nodded once, satisfied, and went back to rubbing the sandpaper against the grain. "Uncle Ned said he’s bringing four gallons of apple cider from the mill in Billings. He said if I don't spill it, I can have two cups before the cake."
"Uncle Ned talks too much," Lee said, smiling, but her eyes stayed soft as she looked at the little girl.
Down at the road, a blue farm truck slowed down and turned into the drive.
It wasn't Wayne.
It was Hayden, his state conservation truck rattling over the cattle guard with three bales of clean wheat straw in the bed. He hopped out, wearing his green uniform trousers and a gray Old Fence BBQ t-shirt that had the sleeves cut off at the seams.
"Hey, Dawn," he called out, hauling the first bale onto his shoulder. "Trudy said you needed straw for the path between the garden and the porch so the folks from the church don't track mud if it rains on Saturday."
"Trudy thinks of everything," I said, walking down to help him.
Hayden dropped the bale by the well house, wiped his forehead with his forearm, and looked at me sideways. "You talk to Clara today?"
"She called at noon," I said. "Hearing’s set for nine o'clock tomorrow morning in Division Three. Judge Miller took the docket himself."
"Travis still in the jailhouse?"
"His sister tried to post the five thousand on Monday," Hayden said, leaning against the tailgate. "Judge Miller denied the bond. Said given the electronic evidence and the interstate nature of his employment, he was a flight risk with an active history of domestic intimidation. He’s sleeping on a steel bunk until the deputies walk him down the hall tomorrow."
Hayden looked down at his boots, then out toward the timber where the crows were circling over the corn stubble.
"Your mom went by Aunt Trudy’s yesterday, Dawn."
I stopped with my hands on the second bale of straw. "What did she want?"
"She brought a lemon pie," Hayden said, his mouth twitching with a dry, bitter humor that had no joy in it. "Sat on Trudy’s porch for forty-five minutes trying to get her to sign an affidavit saying that Travis was an invited guest at the cookout. Said if Trudy signed it, the county prosecutor would have to drop the felony facilitation charge."
"What did Aunt Trudy do?"
"Trudy took the pie," Hayden said, "walked out to the fence line, and scraped the whole thing into the hog trough right in front of her. Then she told Sandy that if she didn't get that Buick off her gravel by the count of ten, she was going to turn the hose on her."
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
In the Ozarks, when a woman scrapes a lemon pie into a hog trough, the conversation is over for three generations.
"She’s alone, Dawn," Hayden said quietly. "Uncle Wayne moved his cot out to the tool shed behind the garage on Friday. Uncle Ned went by to take him some tobacco, and Wayne was sitting out there on a five-gallon bucket, cleaning his chainsaw with an old toothbrush just so he didn't have to listen to her talk to her lawyer on the kitchen phone."
"He made his bed, Hayden."
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"I know he did," Hayden said. "We all know he did. I’m just saying... don't expect him to be sitting in the front row tomorrow. He doesn't have enough spit left in him to look the judge in the eye."
"I don't need him in the front row," I said, hauling the wheat straw toward the garden gate where Lee was already waiting with the wire cutters. "I’ve got the people who helped me carry the wood."
