The Perk by Mark Gimenez Read Free Book Online

right then left then right.
When his father had built this road, he had not removed a single oak tree; so
the road zigzagged like a snake crawling across hot ground.
    The house sat on the highest point of the land;
you could see the sun rise over the distant hills to the east and set beyond
the distant hills to the west. And every day the sun had fed this land that
had fed the goats that had fed the Hardins for more than a hundred years. The
Hardins were goat ranchers.
    But where were the goats?
    The herd had numbered five thousand head.
A sea of woolly Angora goats should be grazing in the fields that sloped gently
down to the river. But the fields were empty and the goats were gone. The
barn, pens, and shearing shed, the pine wood weathered to a steel gray, sat
vacant. Beck felt as if he had come home for Christmas only to find that everyone
had moved away.
    He glanced out both sides of the car, being
careful not to drive into an oak tree. He didn't see goats, but he saw horses,
a few cows (J.B. Hardin had always raised his own beef), Axis deer, antelope, a
peacock, two wild turkeys flapping their wings at a pot-bellied pig lying in
the shade of a tree, and standing along the fence line as if planning an escape
a … llama?
    Before Beck Hardin had jumped the fence and fled
this land, he had lived his life by the seasons—sports and nature's. Summers
meant swimming in the river and shearing goats with J.B. in the shed. Falls
were filled with football and deer hunting. Winters were basketball and another
round of goat shearing. And each spring—his mother's favorite time of the year
when the color returned to the land—he had run track, played baseball, and
walked with Peggy Hardin through knee-high wildflowers—bluebonnets, Indian
paintbrush, and Mexican hat—wildflowers that turned the land into a canvas of
blue, red, orange, and yellow. His mother had picked roses but never
wildflowers.
    Beck braked at a fork in the road. The south fork
continued up to the house; a new west fork led over to a two-story structure that
hadn't been there when Beck had left home. He trailed his father's black Ford pickup
to the house. J.B. got out, followed by a white lab named Butch. Beck parked in
the shade of an oak tree and opened the back door for the kids. Luke didn't
budge, but Meggie jumped out and held the doll up as if to see.
    "Look, Mommy. This is where Daddy grew
up."
    The home was a one-story structure, simple and
sturdy. The main house was constructed of white limestone two feet thick; it faced
east. On the north and south sides were rock-and-cedar additions; the one on
the north side was new. The house had a porch across the front, a metal
standing-seam roof, and a river-rock fireplace. A windmill stood twenty yards
away.
    J.B.'s great-grandfather had moved to Fredericksburg after the Civil War; he hadn't been German but he had married a German
girl—as had every Hardin male until Beck had married a Chicago girl—and had
learned from her father everything there was to know about homebuilding and goat
ranching. The Hardin males had handed down what they knew, father to son,
until J.B.'s son had gone to Notre Dame to play football. The Hardins were
goat ranchers by trade, but they could plumb, wire, roof, and build with the
best of men. J.B. was no exception.
    "Added on again," Beck said to his
father.
    J.B. regarded the addition on the north side of
the house as if he'd just now noticed it there.
    "Bedrooms, for you and the kids."
    "J.B., we'll find a place in town."
    His father gazed off into the distance. "Eagle's
been making a nest, down by the river." Then, without looking at Beck, he
said, "You didn't come home to live in town."
    Beck sighed. J.B. was right.
    "Beck, my father told me this land was mine
from the day I was born. I reckon it's been yours since the day you were born.
It's just been waiting for you to come home. Land's patient."
    J.B. Hardin had always believed that a house was
a