Good Hope Road

The driver laid on the horn as the silver car skidded to a halt. I rushed to the driver’s-side door, my heart pounding. On the armory steps, Caleb set down the stack of blankets he was carrying and also ran toward the car.

The smoked window lowered, and I realized it was Mrs. Sibley inside. My stomach twisted into a knot. “Is . . . is something wrong?”

She leaned out, both hands clasped on the halfway-open window. Her urgency lit my nerves like a sparkler. “Well, of course something’s wrong, Jenilee,” she sneered, then looked over my shoulder as Caleb stopped behind me. “Caleb, is the sheriff back yet?”

Caleb glanced at me and shrugged his shoulders, so I answered the question. “No. The last I heard, he went down to the rescue center at the lake. Can I help . . .” Can I help you? What a stupid question. Of course not.

She rolled her eyes and slung her head sideways, causing her helmet of fluffy gray hair to bounce up, then settle into place again. “Well, not unless you have a way to get a fifty-gallon barrel off a bull’s head.” She turned to Caleb again, talking to him instead of me. “I was just on my way down to the rescue station at the lake—I was needed there, you see—and just as I came onto farm road Nine-thirty-five, right there in the road, there was a . . . oh . . . ga-ra-cious! There it is!” She pointed far down Main Street.

Dr. Albright stepped out of the armory and walked down the steps, scowling as he approached the car. “Is something wrong out here? I heard a car horn.”

I shaded my eyes, trying to get a better look at the big white bull as it crashed through town, its head and neck wedged inside a crushed fifty-gallon metal barrel. “How in the world . . . ?”

Mazelle leaned farther out the window, pointing down the hill, waving her finger. “That thing rammed right into my car on the county road! I’m lucky to be alive. It knocked me right into the guardrail of the bridge.” She adjusted her glasses and peered at Dr. Albright, waving her finger at the dented fender and broken headlight on her car. “Call the sheriff. Tell him to bring a rifle. That creature is liable to kill someone! I’m lucky to be alive.”

Dr. Albright glanced down the hill, but the bull had disappeared into what remained of the old sale barn. The muted sound of crashing and bellowing testified to the fact that he was still inside.

“No!” I heard myself say. “No. Don’t call the sheriff. That’s Mr. Jaans’s old bull, Charlie. He’s a big pet. He’s just scared.”

Dr. Albright shifted from one foot to the other. “We can’t have a dangerous animal on the loose. We have a whole field full of injured people down there. What we don’t need are any more injuries.”

“Ex-actly,” Mrs. Sibley chimed in. “We don’t need any more injuries.” She climbed from the car and slammed the door. “For heaven’s sake, I’ll go in and call the sheriff my-self. This is a dangerous situation. Lord. I think I have whiplash.” She disappeared through the armory door, screaming, “June, that worthless bull of yours is crashing through town like a wild animal.”

“No one is shooting that bull!” I hollered after her, then wondered whose voice that was. I had never, ever in my life raised my voice to anyone that way before, especially not to Mrs. Sibley.

The sheriff’s car skidded into the parking lot between the vet clinic and the sale barn. “Oh, no!” I gasped, and started running down the hill. Caleb followed, passing me before I reached the ditch.

As I crossed the road, the sheriff and his deputy started banging on the pipe fence, trying to keep Charlie from charging. The bull was trapped in the corner of one of the sale pens, pawing mud into the air and slinging his head and the barrel into the pipe fence.

The sheriff glanced over his shoulder at me. “I ain’t sure what we’re gonna do. Darnedest thing I ever seen. Don’t know how in the world that bull got that bent-up barrel stuck on his head, but one thing’s for sure: We can’t let him get out of here, and we can’t go in there with him. He’s likely to kill somebody. There isn’t a corral here that’s still in one piece to lock him up in, either.”

“Well, what in the world you gonna rope, Tom?” the sheriff scoffed, banging his nightstick against the iron fence to keep the bull from charging. “His horns are inside the barrel.”

An idea came to me. “Wait, just keep him there for a minute.” I hurried across the parking lot to what remained of the vet clinic, partially tumbled cement-block walls with the roof ripped off.

“Getting some . . . ouch . . . tranquilizers,” I called back, scrambling across the debris toward Doc’s medicine room. “Doc keeps all of that in the old refrigerator.” I climbed through another collapsed doorway into the back room. The refrigerator was lying on its side with the door hanging open. Bottles of livestock medicine were everywhere, some shattered, some intact. I searched through them until I found a vial of Acepromozine and a syringe. One of Doc’s vet kits lay nearby. I grabbed it and headed through the debris again.

“I’m going to tranquilize him.” I took out a syringe and pulled a dose of Ace, then squirted a little from the tip to remove the air bubble.

“You’re gonna what?” Caleb looked doubtfully at the syringe as he followed me toward the corral. “You going to throw that at him or something? Because you can’t get in there with him. He’s ramming those fences at a hundred miles an hour.”

The sheriff reached out and caught my arm just as I was going to squeeze past his deputy into the corral. “What are you gonna do with that?”

“How the heck you gonna do that?” The sheriff stopped banging on the fence and looked at me as if I had gone completely out of my mind. “Minute he hears you in there, he’s gonna charge.”

I moved slowly across the corral, thinking, This ain’t an episode of Wild Kingdom. Holding the syringe ahead of me, I moved one careful step at a time through the mud as Charlie slung his head and rammed the fences with the fervor of an animal gone mad from hunger, thirst, and fear.

My heart stopped in my chest as I inched closer and felt the heat of the bull’s body, smelled the scent of sweat and dirt. I heard the rattle of his breath as he paused for a moment, and then the deafening collision of metal against metal as he charged the fence again. I waited for him to stagger to his feet and pause again; then I rushed forward the last few steps, stabbed him in the flank with the syringe, squeezed the plunger, and jumped out of the way with the needle still hanging loosely in Charlie’s skin.

The bull bellowed, wheeled around, and charged toward the men, who scattered across the parking lot with Charlie roaring behind them.

The sheriff, beer belly and all, shinnied up the trunk of a tree with the grace of an acrobat. Charlie rammed the tree, then stumbled unsteadily backward as the tranquilizer began to take effect. In slow motion, he took another run at the tree, stumbled back, charged again, then fell to his knees and lay down, panting inside the barrel.

Ashen-faced, the sheriff climbed down from the tree. “If I told that story, no one would believe it. Come on, boys, let’s see if we can get this thing off him. Maybe if we twist it around some and pull, his head might slide on out.”

I moved forward and tried to help guide the barrel off the bull’s neck as the men pulled. Slowly, inch by inch, the barrel worked loose until finally Charlie’s head, bloodied and bruised, tumbled free. He laid his massive head on the ground and sighed, as if he knew his misadventure was finally over.

Caleb squatted down and rubbed the curly tuft of hair between Charlie’s ears. “Poor fella. Been one heck of a day, hasn’t it?”

Charlie rolled his eyes drunkenly at the sound of Caleb’s voice, then pulled in a huge breath and let out a long snort, clearing his nose on Caleb’s jeans.

I stood up and retrieved the vet box. “Be careful what you do with him. He’s an escape artist. He gets loose from the Jaans place every time there’s a storm.” Kneeling down beside old Charlie, I stroked his bloodied coat. “I’m going to go ahead and suture this cut where the barrel was on his neck and give him a shot of penicillin. It’ll be easier to do it before he wakes up.” I pulled out a suturing packet. No one argued about whether I was capable of doing it or not. They just watched me clean Charlie’s wound and put in an even row of stitches, then give him a dose of intramuscular penicillin just before he started to come back to life.

Caleb cleaned up the supplies and closed the vet box hastily. “Well, no wonder you were so good at dissecting frogs in science class,” he joked as we started up the hill. “I didn’t know you knew how to do that.”

None of you knew anything about me, I thought, but I said, “Caleb, I worked for Doc Howard almost all the way through high school. Until I took the job writing invoices at Bell’s Construction Company, that is.”

I smiled back. “Well, there are a lot of things you don’t know about me.” The wrong thing to say. It opened up too many doors to too many subjects.

I tried to decide how to answer, wondering why he would ask about Shad and me. I pretended to focus on my footing as we crossed the ditch. “Shad’s been gone out of town ever since”—since he got caught selling drugs, and his daddy sent him to Wyoming to get him out of the state—“since he went to Wyoming to work on his uncle’s ranch. We’ve only seen each other a couple of times since he moved back to Poetry last month.” That wasn’t exactly true. I saw Shad every day at work in the construction company office. He wanted things to be the way they used to be when we were dating in high school, and I wasn’t sure they could be.

“Well, I just figured, with you working for his daddy . . .” He paused, as if there were something else he didn’t want to say, then finished with, “I just saw his truck pulling into the armory. I thought maybe Shad was here to give you a ride home.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “I wanted to make sure I had a chance to tell you . . . well, thanks . . . before you left.”

You’re welcome, Caleb. You’re really welcome. “You don’t have to say thanks. Anyway, I’m not going anywhere. I want to stay here, in case word comes about my father or my brothers.”

The rumble of an engine rattled the late-afternoon stillness on the hill above us. I knew the sound even before we crested the hill and the truck came into view—red Dodge four-by-four, custom paint job, glass packs on the pipes. Shad’s truck.

Caleb paused at the corner of the parking lot. “I’m going down and get something to eat at the motor home. You want to come along? Cold chili and dry corn bread ought to taste good after a full day of bull wrestling.” He gave Shad’s truck a narrow look. I couldn’t blame him. Shad was one of those kids who’d liked to pick on Caleb back in school.

“No. I want to see if Shad has news about Daddy or my brothers. They might have contacted the construction office, looking for me.”

He turned and walked off, and I hurried to Shad’s truck, hoping he would have news. On the heels of that thought came apprehension, murky and black, a sense of something bad about to happen.

“What?” I stepped back, a habit from a past with him that didn’t seem so long ago now. He was already acting jealous and possessive, the way he used to when we were together back in high school.

He stopped about two feet away and threw his hands in the air. “I been lookin’ all over the woods by your house, thinkin’ something happened, that maybe you was outside when the tornado come through, and you was layin’ in the woods dead. Where’s Nate and your daddy?”

Tears pressed into my eyes, because I realized he didn’t have any news. I swallowed hard. Shad hated it when I cried. “They never came back from the sale in Kansas City yesterday.” Was it just yesterday? “Nobody has heard anything about them at all. I thought maybe you were coming with news.”

“I haven’t heard anything. I’m sure they’re just holed up somewhere waitin’. There’s a lot of roads flooded and blocked between here and Kansas City.” Again, he threw his hands into the air, widening his eyes at me. “How are they supposed to let you know anything if you ain’t home?”

I winced and looked away. I hated it when he talked to me like I was stupid. “The phones are out. They couldn’t get in touch with me there, anyway.”

“Well, at least I could of found you there.” His voice echoed across the parking lot. By the soup kettles below, Mrs. Gibson stopped talking and looked our way.

“I’m all right. I couldn’t just sit at the house alone.” I wondered why I was explaining myself to him. Why I felt I had to.

He pulled me into his arms. I wanted to push away from him, but I knew he would get mad and make a scene in front of everyone. I closed my eyes and tried to think.

He kicked a boot toe into the gravel, sending tiny stones across the parking lot. “What’s wrong with you? You get knocked in the head or somethin’?”

The way he said it cut deep—as if there were no possibility that I could do something so important. I wanted to tell him about everything that had happened today. I wanted to say, I know more about taking care of people than you think. I’ve been doing it all my life. Instead, I looked away and said, “Enough, I guess.”

For the first time in my life, I stood my ground. “I’m staying here. You could stay and help, too.” Some part of me hoped he would say yes, even though I knew better. Shad only did what Shad wanted to do.

He started toward his truck, cussing under his breath. “I ain’t got time. I gotta go check on the construction site down Ataberry Road. We got a dozer and a few other things still there. Daddy said to load the dozer up and take it home, so nobody gets ideas about using it.”

He climbed in the truck and started the engine, rattling the ground beneath my feet. I stood watching him, thinking about what he had said. Daddy said to load the dozer and take it home, so nobody gets ideas about using it.

Had he even considered how much a dozer would help in town right now? Had he even thought about the fact that, even though his daddy told him to take the dozer home, it might not be the right thing to do?

I crossed my arms over myself and watched him drive away, the truck roaring through the parking lot, scattering debris. I watched it turn onto Main Street, steering haphazardly around downed branches and piles of rubble, until it disappeared behind what was left of the sale barn.

Staring at the spot where it had left my sight, I thought about how much had changed in the space of one ordinary day. It was late afternoon again. Just twenty-four hours ago we were living in a different world. I was somebody different. How could so much change in so short a time?

The second voice was close, the high-pitched singsong of a child. I looked down to see a little red-haired girl, maybe five years old, sitting on the armory steps holding the injured cat I had found earlier in the day.

She glanced up as her mother crested the hill, looking frantic. “Amanda! I asked you not to wander off. You scared me to death!”

The little girl stood up, frowning guiltily at her mother. “I had to find Gray Kitty.” Rubbing her face against the softness of the cat’s fur, she smiled at me. “Anyways, I was talkin’ to the doctor lady. That’s all. I wasn’t alone.” She shifted the cat and put her hand in her mother’s.

“Sorry,” her mother said, smiling at me. “She’s been fussing over this cat all day. She let him get out the door yesterday, and we couldn’t find him when the tornado came. She felt so bad about it, she just cried and cried, and then this morning when we came here, all of a sudden, there was her cat. It was amazing. It was a miracle.”

“That is amazing,” I replied. A miracle. Is there a place for miracles in the middle of something so terrible? “I’m glad you got your cat back, Amanda Lynne.”

Something about saying her name triggered a memory in me, and I raised a finger. “Don’t leave yet. I think I have something else of yours.” Excitement filled me, and I hurried into the armory and grabbed my forgotten bag of keepsakes from under Mr. Jaans’s bed. He jerked in surprise and looked at me.

Amanda Lynne and her mother watched me questioningly as I unfolded the sack on the steps and dug through the photos until I found the little gold bracelet. Untangling it from the nest of papers, I read the engraving, Amanda Lynne. “This must be yours,” I said, holding it out to her.

She covered her mouth with her hands. “My bracelet!” she gasped behind her fingers, then took it carefully, as if she couldn’t believe it was really there. Holding it in front of herself with one hand, she danced in a circle, singing, “My bracelet! My bracelet!”

“About three miles out on Good Hope Road, just lying by the ditch.” I caught a dose of Amanda’s joy and found myself smiling. The horrible feeling inside me vanished, and the joy of the moment replaced it.

Amanda’s mother touched her trembling lips, then laid a hand over her heart. “Oh,” she breathed, watching her daughter dance with the cat in one arm and the bracelet held out in front of her. “Her grandpa got her that bracelet. It’s special to her. Thank you so much for returning it.”

“You’re welcome.” Of all the people I could have run into, I ran into Amanda Lynne, and I was the one who found her bracelet. Miracles do happen. Even here. Even now.

“When everything’s gone, little things matter a lot,” Amanda’s mother said. “We still haven’t heard from her grandpa. He lives up toward Kansas City. We’re keeping our fingers crossed and praying.”

Perhaps the cat and the bracelet are the answer to a prayer. Maybe prayers do get answered. “Me too,” I said finally, thinking of Nate and Daddy.

She seemed to know what I was thinking. “Good luck.” She took Amanda’s hand, the bracelet laced between their intertwined fingers as they started down the hill.