Country Hardball by Steve Weddle Read Free Book Online Page A

flap its wings and fly at his face. Maybe he’d wait long enough and the bird would die. But then what? The boy wondered what would happen, what he should do. Should he bury the bird? Say a prayer? He’d been too young last year to go to his mother’s funeral, but people had come to the house after and patted him on the head. Aunt Averdale. Uncle Horace. Aunt Janeva. Cousins he’d never seen before or since. People from the church they went to on holidays. Patted him on the back. Patted him on the knee.
    The boy leaned his rifle against a fence post, lay down next to the bird, and put his palm on the bird’s chest. The bird fluttered at his touch, shifted along the ground, then settled under the boy’s hand.
    The sun was dropping behind the scrub pines, and the boy had to close his eyes to the glare. He thought of lying in bed with his mother when she got the sadness. Of her stroking his hair and mumbling a song to him until they both fell asleep. So he hummed a little to the bird, then started singing the only thing he could think of to sing. The song he heard at the end of every service, waiting to see if someone had been saved. Every head bowed. Every eye closed. “Just as I am, without one plea. But that thy blood was shed for me.” He hummed some more, working in words when he could remember them. “With many a conflict, many a doubt. Oh, Lamb of God.”
    He kept his eyes closedhe pressed a button and the chair ming out as he hummed, took slow breaths. He thought about the story of Peter cutting off the Roman soldier’s ear and Jesus putting the man’s ear back. He thought of his Sunday school teacher walking him down to the church office where his father met him, everyone else crying. The news that his mother was gone. That she wouldn’t wake up. All the people in the church office standing around, with his father in the chair. So many men in suits and ushers’ boutonnieres, ready to go in to the church service. To big church. But now standing in the church office with his father sitting in a chair and some women in flowery dresses handing each other Kleenex. And him standing in the doorway with his Sunday school teacher, Miss Velma, until one of the women looked and saw him and ran over at him and scooped him up and hugged him and said she was sorry and everything was going to be all right and it would be fine and it would be okay. It’s bad now, but will be okay. It will be okay. But it wasn’t.
    • • •
    Averdale Tatum pulled the mason jars from the box, set them one at a time into the sink, turned on the tap, set a box of pectin on the counter. She pulled jar tongs from the drawer, pulled her apron from the back of the door. She’d always set aside extra jars of jellies and pickles for Champion. Sweet pickles for the boy, the kind he called “bug pickles” because of the black spice balls floating around the jar like bug eggs.
    He’d be back the end of the week, Champion had told her, but she didn’t believe him. She’d seen him drifting away from Eleanor for a couple of years, like he always had. A little nudge this way or that. Inertia. The sort of thing where someone says, “Let’s do this” and you just go along. When they were growing up, mostly left to themselves, she hadn’t minded so much. Let’s go see what the creek washed up. Let’s play school at the old barn. When Champion had started dating Eleanor, Averdale had noticed a new spark to him. A sparkle. Trying new things. Out on the town. Raising a family. But then he and the boy had started coming to Sunday dinners without her. And Averdale got the feeling that maybe Champion was sitting on the side of the creek, watching Eleanor drift along. And then when she—when she left like that—Averdale realized the sparkle she’d seen had just been someone else’s reflection. That Champion was just the boy standing back on the cinderblock steps, waiting.
    She looked through the kitchen window to see her nephew walking across the