She worked. She got up when it was daylight and sometimes before, and she worked until dark, until she made herself so physically tired that she could shut her brain down enough for sleep. Otherwise it was impossible. Someone once sang that he needed a dump truck to unload his head. There wasn’t a truck big enough to handle Jo’s tangled menagerie of thoughts and regrets and anger and guilt.
So she worked. It was an unconscious and futile effort to forget something she wouldn’t forget if she lived a thousand years. There was nothing she could do about that and so she worked. She was fortunate that it was fall, the busiest time for the farm. She and Henry harvested every afternoon and drove to one farmers market or another nearly every morning. Sometimes she sent Henry on his own while she remained in the fields. She preferred not to see people if she could avoid it, especially happy people, trolling the market stalls, sometimes with little kids in tow.
Henry didn’t talk much anymore. He’d never been the most gregarious man, except around certain people, and now he grew even quieter. He did his work and at night either went to bed early or retreated to his woodworking shop, where he did little but sit there by the cold wood stove, drinking his wine and smoking his home-grown weed.
A week after the shooting, he went by himself to the livestock auction in Britnell and came home that night with a brown and white pony, the animal tethered in a trailer he’d borrowed from a neighbor. Jo was tearing down a sagging wooden chicken coop when he unloaded the animal and he’d looked at her defiantly, as if expecting some sort of confrontation, or at least a demand for an explanation as to why he would buy a pony now. She said nothing. That evening, after dinner, he began to train the animal to pull an old cart that had been tucked away in the corner of the barn for decades. He kept at it nightly and was usually out there when Jo came in, finished for the day. Henry talked to the animal constantly, reassuring it, even joking with it. Jo had heard the tone before. It was the voice he had used when talking to Grace.
Jo borrowed money from the bank and hired a local contractor to put up a building where the chicken coop had been, where she planned to make goat cheese. One end would house the stalls for milking and the other the equipment for the cheese production. She wanted it up and running by spring. In truth, she couldn’t afford the building or the equipment right now, but she did it anyway. She had no interest in reticence, in playing anything safe.
In the evenings she ate in the living room in front of the TV, flipping from one news station to the other. The coverage from Laureltown continued for weeks, long after there was anything new to tell. The gun debate roared and then sputtered and then faded away, as it always did. Experts were adamant in their various theories of how the tragedy could have been avoided, and not one of them knew—as Henry would say—shit from wild honey. How could they? The mental state of Arthur William Hays was dissected and analyzed and poked and prodded. To what avail? None of it would change what had happened and Jo doubted that any of it would stop it from happening again.
For a while she had called Susan every night. They couldn’t bring themselves to talk about the shooting, so Jo fell into a habit of telling Susan about her day. What she’d harvested, cut, sold, dug up, built, fixed or planted. After a while, she came to realize that Susan wasn’t paying all that much attention. Jo was a radio playing endlessly in a back room somewhere. Of course Susan wasn’t listening. She wasn’t listening to anything. How could she? The phone calls tailed off.
In spite of herself, Jo began to tune in to Sam Jackson’s show, if only for a few minutes, almost every night. During the day she told herself not to do it and then did it anyway. She was like an alcoholic, waking up every morning vowing to quit the sauce, only to reach for the bottle at end of day.
He had expanded his rant incrementally. Ridiculously. He was like a character out of Monty Python, a cruel and colossal joke. He called for ten-year-olds to be trained in firearms. He wanted teachers carrying weapons. He became revered by a legion of marginal louts who believed that a pistol-packing citizenry was the solution to all the country’s problems. And the louts were all tuning in, seeking direction from Sam Jackson, who was now signing off every night with the words, lifted from his tirade at Laureltown––“All bets are off!”
Jo, as she was watching, could imagine his disciples across the country, hurling the catch phrase back at the screen. A drooling mob. They believed what he was telling them. But did he believe it? Jo doubted it.
Each time she turned the show off, she vowed never to return to it. And yet she did. It was as if she wanted something from him, something to show that he didn’t believe it. Contrition or regret, something that made him human. Or maybe she wanted to nurture her hatred for the man. That part was easy.
One day in October she was filling hamper baskets with acorn squash, in readiness for the market in Middleton the next day, when she looked up to see Susan pulling into the laneway in her Honda SUV. She got out, a canvas tote slung over her shoulder. She’d lost considerable weight in the weeks since the shooting. Her jeans hung on her.
“What are you doing here?” Jo said as they hugged.
“I don’t know,” Susan replied. “Woke up this morning and felt like a drive.”
“A long drive.”
“Well, Dave’s back to work and I’m—well, I’m not ready to go back yet. I cannot be around those well-meaning people all day long.”
“So you came here?”
Susan laughed. “You see? I needed that. Yeah, I thought I’d come and see you. You can put me to work if you want.”
“I will absolutely put you to work.”
Susan hesitated. There was something else. “And I brought you this.” She reached into the bag and brought out the book. “You should have this, Jo.”
“No,” Jo said at once, pushing it away. “You should keep it. I couldn’t take it.”
Susan held the book forward again; her hand was shaking slightly. “You don’t understand. I can’t have this in my house. I can’t.” She began to cry. “Every time I see it, it tears me to fucking pieces.”
Jo took the book from her and hugged her again. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
They worked all afternoon, crating pumpkins and melons and squash. They shoveled out the goats’ stall and Jo showed Susan how to drive the Ford tractor to spread the manure over the bean field. Henry came home from market and showed off the pony, unabashedly calling it Grace’s, which made Susan tear up and smile at the same time. They had chicken for dinner and a bottle of Henry’s wine, the quality somewhat suspect.
“There’s stuff floating in there,” Jo said, looking at the bottle.
“What the hell, it’s still wine,” he told her.
After they opened the second bottle it was agreed that Susan would spend the night. By ten o’clock Henry was gone to bed. Jo and Susan took their glasses outside to sit on the old porch. They could hear the frogs in the pond, and the goats and the chickens as they settled in for the night, the hens clucking softly, deep in their throats.
“So Dave’s back to work,” Jo said.
“Yeah.”
“Is he okay?” She put her hand up to deflect any reply. “I’m sorry, that’s an incredibly stupid question.”
Susan dismissed the apology. “He’s doing all right. Better than me, I’m afraid. He devotes a portion of his day to firing off nasty emails to ABN about Sam Jackson.”
“He does?”
Susan nodded. “He’s become obsessed with the guy. He wants him banned from the air. It’s his mission, as if that would make things… better somehow.”
“It would make the world better.”
Susan nodded. “But apparently he’s more popular than ever. Explain that to me. What does that say about us? What does that say about the country?”
“Not much,” Jo said. “Or maybe it says too much.”
“Do you ever turn it on?” Susan asked.
“No way,” Jo lied. She indicated the barns. “I have plenty of manure right here. What do I need him for?”
“Dave watches sometimes. He only lasts a couple minutes though. Then he’s yelling at the TV.” Susan took a drink of the bad wine. “Dave knows some people in Pittsburgh, network guys. They say this saved Jackson’s show. He was about to get cancelled.”
“Good for him. I hope he can sleep at night. Oh shit, he probably sleeps like a baby.”
Susan fell quiet. After a while she appeared to shrink in her chair and her breathing became ragged. Jo watched for a moment.
“What is it?”
“It’s just…I keep wondering,” Susan said. “I know I shouldn’t. But what if he’s right? What if it is our fault?” She began to cry now, the tears rising like a pot boiling over. “I didn’t protect my baby. If I did, she’d still be alive. He’s right, you know.”
Jo stood quickly and went over to kneel in front of Susan. She took her friend’s face in her hands, felt the warm tears on her fingers. “Don’t you do that! Don’t you fucking do that. That sonofabitch is a lot of things. But right isn’t one of them.”
She held Susan in her arms for a long time, until the sobbing subsided. They drank more wine and talked for another hour about things of no consequence.
When they went to bed, Jo lay awake in her room, thinking about it all. Susan in a grief so blinding she could actually consider that what happened was her fault. Dave writing angry and futile emails to a TV network that couldn’t care less about him. Henry talking to a pony he’d purchased for a little girl gone away forever. That same little girl in the gazebo, the wonder in her eyes seeing a book about herself. And Sam Jackson. His hatred and his horseshit and his rhetoric, how pervasive it could be. And Jo still tuning in to the program, in spite of her overwhelming contempt for a man who was in every way an abomination. A man whose only function in life was to hurt people, to tear things down.
Somebody needed to tear him down.