Calvin Hooper pushed himself back in a weathered gray rocking chair with the toes of his leather brogans. Mrs. Moody sat next to him, the two slowly inching closer and closer together the longer they rocked. A speckled blue heeler named Prescott lay with his head resting flat on the porch planks between his front paws, smacking his lips with his tongue, panting, and looking back at the two of them when Calvin spoke.
“I don’t think I could eat another bite if I tried.”
“Something tells me when that pie comes out of the oven, you’ll find room,” Mrs. Moody said. “I bought that candy roaster off Lebern Dills. Went in there to see him about a church raffle and it looked about as pretty as a sunset sitting there on his floor.”
They’d come for Sunday supper, Calvin and Angie, Marla, Rusty, and the kids, the whole house filled with smiling and laughing and fighting and bickering like it always had been. Mrs. Moody stretched three cans of salmon, a heap of pole beans, red potatoes, and vidalias, and two cakes of corn bread into a ten-dollar meal that fed them all.
Calvin could hear pots and pans clanking inside the house as Marla and Rusty split the dishes, her washing and him drying. Out in the yard Angie was carrying their littlest one, an amber-eyed little girl named Ruth, while the three boys showed her a lean-to they’d built at the edge of the woods.
“So, you bought that girl a ring yet?” Mrs. Moody looked over and raised her eyebrows.
“Not yet,” Calvin said.
She reached across and placed her hand on top of his fingers. Liver spots dotted her hands, veins raised and blue, and she squeezed tight to his knuckles. “You know I’m giving you a hard time.”
“I know it.”
“But you ain’t going to find one better than that,” she said. “A woman like that doesn’t come along every day.”
“She’s a good one,” Calvin said, and that was it, because men here never said anything more than that, never let emotion show or opened their hearts with their tongues.
“Well, I’m going to run in the house right fast.” Mrs. Moody leaned forward and pushed herself up from the rocking chair. “You need anything while I’m up?”
“No, ma’am.”
The dog stood and raised his ears. He watched her with hopeful eyes and she scratched under his chin as she passed. When she was inside, Prescott plopped back down on the porch by Calvin’s feet, curled himself into a ball, sighed, and closed his eyes.
The weather had turned warm the past two days. Seasons were strange anymore, the world turning more peculiar as time passed. Nowadays, there might come two feet of snow that melted off by the next afternoon, then the day after that they were back to T-shirt weather in the middle of December. But it was nice to be sitting there right then. All Calvin could think was, This is as nice as I’ve felt in a while.
Over by an empty dogwood at the corner of the yard, Angie had the child hugged to her chest with one arm, her other wrapped around the youngest boy’s waist as she boosted him into the tree. When he had ahold, she backed up and he swung his leg over the limb, hauled himself up, and climbed higher. The two older boys were already nearing the top and the little one was tearing up the tree like a monkey to catch them. Angie turned back toward the house with a big smile on her face. Calvin met her eyes and she shook her head.
He raised his hand cupped to his mouth and hollered, “They’re going to break their necks!” And Angie nodded, but didn’t say a word or turn around to stop them.
Seeing her standing there with that little girl on her hip, Calvin knew Mrs. Moody was right: Women like Angie Moss didn’t come around often. He could see himself buying her a ring, something simple because that’s what she’d always said, just something simple. He could see the two of them at the front of the church, all the folks who loved them smiling silently from the pews, see that little girl in her arms right then as their own. More than any of that, though, Calvin could see the two of them growing old together like everyone around them, like his own parents and like hers, sharing a quiet kind of love the same as Mrs. Moody and Darl’s father. That kind of love wasn’t for anyone outside the two of them. It was private and silent, sufficient as grace.
Something tapped against the porch planks beside his chair and Calvin looked over to find what had slipped from his pocket. There on those weathered slats as shiny as a coin lay the bullet he’d found in front of his face when he awoke in the grave. Calvin snatched it up, something so tiny filling him with a sense of exposure, like all that he carried was suddenly out on the table for anyone to see. He held that cartridge inside his fingers and scrubbed his thumb against the brass casing as if he were rubbing a worry stone. Ever since that day, he’d carried it. Ever since that day, it was impossible to forget even for a moment how quickly the hammer could come down.
The spring creaked open and slapped the screen door closed as Mrs. Moody came back onto the porch and the sound startled him. She had something wrapped in an old prairie queen quilt stitched from flour sacks and scraps of clothes. When she was standing in front of him, she held it out to him and Calvin took it from her hands.
“I wanted you to have this,” she said.
What he held was heavy, and as he folded back the quilt he could see the stainless barrel and gray laminate stock, a short brush gun Darl had bought a few years back, for a hunting trip he took with a fellow named Goob to chase black bear in Maine.
“I can’t take this,” Calvin said.
“Yes, you can,” Mrs. Moody insisted. “He’d want you to have that.”
“You ought to give it to one of Marla’s boys.”
“Those boys will have plenty,” she said. “He had a couple hunting rifles that belonged to his daddy and I figured I’d save those for the boys once they get old enough to have them. But this one I want you to have. He saved up for that rifle and that hunting trip for two years, and when him and that boy piled out of here I think that was about as happy as I ever saw him. They had one of those GPS giving them directions and it routed them right through New York City. I can see the two of them in that pickup truck with dog boxes and a pile of walkers bawling in the back driving down Park Avenue.” She laughed and shook her head. “He used to love when you’d go in the woods with him, running bear. I don’t know that that was your cup of tea, chasing a bunch of dogs all over creation, but he loved it when you went with him.”
Calvin ran his fingers over the receiver, shouldered the rifle, and ran the lever, its action smooth as silk. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you’ll take those boys out in the woods when they’re older and tell them stories about their uncle.”
“I can do that,” Calvin said.
“Then there’s nothing else to say.” Mrs. Moody reached across and patted him on his cheek the way she always did, squinted her eyes and clenched her jaw. No one had said a word about Darl that entire afternoon and there’d been something nice about that, something nice about life getting back to how it was even if that feeling was short-lived. The thing about this old world was that nothing had come along yet that could slow or stop its turning.
They sat for a long time without speaking, neither having words to say nor having any want to say them. Sometimes proximity was all that a person needed and that simple act of being close carried no need for sound. Tomorrow the sun would rise over the balsams the same as it had forever, but right then Calvin Hooper and Mrs. Moody watched its descent. The afternoon lowered dim as candlelight, a yellow pale but stunning. He watched Angie chasing the boys through the yard, all of them screaming and laughing, and all he could think was, I have so much to lose.