A Swollen Red Sun by Matthew McBride Read Free Book Online Page A

through his body like electricity, killing everything that lived inside.
    Fish had known a lifetime of pain, but this cut was the deepest. The perfect end to a miserable life. He could hear his father say. When he closed his eyes, he could see his dad, working on their farm. Pall Mall between his lips and a cold one in his hand.
    It was summertime. Dad was cutting hay on his old John Deere tractor. In the fields, making rounds. It was noon, and it was very hot. Wind a blanket of searing moisture.
    Mom sent Little Sister to the field to fetch him. But Dad hadn’t seen her walking.
    That year had been a good year for red clover. It grew freely and abundantly along the hillside. Pecan trees lined the field to the north and beyond. To the west, a wall of oak stood proudly. It gave shade that covered half the field, but not until late evening.
    That was the summer red clover grew tall. Taller than the fences that sagged between old posts that ran up and down hillsides and through crooks and swags and fields and woodland. That hay was as tall as she was.
    And then she had tripped, and he did not see her. Sun in his eyes.
    The shriek could be heard clearly over the sound of the machinery.
    He’d smashed the brake pedal with his foot and turned the key back. Cut the power to the PTO. Wanted to believe it was a stump he’d hit, but her screams cut as sharp as any razor.
    Big Fish had jumped down and turned white. Could not move or breathe. He had run her small body through the haybine.
    She was still alive, but she was silent. He could not move her. She’d been cut to pieces, one arm slashed off. Blood poured from her handless wrist onto the dirt.
    Big Fish reached into the machine with his arms to hold her. He touched her and loved her and told her he was sorry.
    When his wife ran out the door, she was screaming. But she stopped when she reached the gate and projectile-vomited in the yard. She was not the same woman after that day, and Big Fish was not the same man.
    Once Little Sister became a memory, everything in their lives changed.
    Dale Everett Banks stood at the edge of the garden and watched his son and daughter pick tomatoes. They had row after row of Big Boy and beefsteak and heirloom, Brandywine and Black Cherry and Boxcar Willie—three hundred plants that took two hours to pick, four days a week, but it kept Jake and Steph busy. Even young Grace did her part.
    “Everyone has a job to do,” Jude said. It had been her mother’s saying, and the first time she’d used it had shocked her. I have become my mother , she told Banks, who laughed. Well, then, I guess I’ve become my father , he’d said. Then she laughed. Told Banks he’d been his father since the first day they’d met. She asked him if he still remembered.
    “How could I forget?” he’d said. They’d been at a bar called the Blue Star, where Banks’s dad played music. It was a small place with smoke-stained walls and a beer-stained floor. His father was a drunk named Everett Roy Banks, and he’d played a mean banjo when he was sober, and a piss-poor banjo when he wasn’t.
    But that night, he was abstemious and his playing was electric. It was a memorable performance if ever there had been one.
    Banks sat down in a lawn chair and opened a beer and thought about life. Watched his children and his dog and his wife. Jake picked each tomato and gave it to Steph, who took it and blew her hair out of her face and set it gently in the box she carried.
    Dale Banks was a family man—because that came first—and then he was a farmer and a deputy. But between those last two it was a close tie for second.
    Jude was beside the house, on her knees, pulling weeds that threatened the daylilies in her flowerbed. She made a large pile, and Grace, their angel, filled her pink bucket and set it in her wagon and pulled it to the edge of the yard.
    These were the moments Banks lived for. Moments that moved too quickly—and he knew it—so he watched these moments