Sandy, Stink walked in a wide arc around him, stalking carefully back to his tractor tire, emitting a low, guttural growl as he moved. Once back inside the ring of his tire, Stink kept his eyes locked on Tommy Akers, his jowl flaps twitching with the growl he maintained.
“That damn dog just never has taken much of a shine to me.” Tommy looked at Stink, spit a thin brown stream onto the ground, and rested the palm of one hand on the great, protruding hump of his belly.
“Can you really blame him, Tommy?” Sandy said. “After all, you did shoot him once.”
“That much is true.”
Tommy Akers lived just up Willard Road from Sandy’s place on what he called the “skinniest” farm in the valley, an elongated stretch of land, somewhere less than sixty acres, wedged between Willard Road, the river, and what Tommy always called “that goddamned government dam.” He kept a massive vegetable garden and a couple dozen head of Angus beef cattle on the slender plot of land that had been in the Akers family for five generations. Tommy was, as he often said, the latest, and likely the last, in that long family line. There had been a son who’d enlisted in the army immediately after high school and was promptly shipped off to the first Gulf War, where he was promptly killed. In addition to his more conventional grief, his son’s death became yet one more proof to validate Tommy Akers’s suspicion of anything to do with the government. There was a daughter, too, but Tommy heard little from her these days. She lived in South Carolina with problems of her own.
“Now that I think of it,” Sandy said, “you took a shot at me once, too.”
“Oh Lord,” Tommy said, his round, stubble-covered, ruddy cheeks flushing still redder. “All these years, and I still feel just plumb awful about that.” Sandy had first encountered Tommy while fishing the tailwaters adjacent to his farm. He’d taken a hasty, poorly aimed shot at a groundhog raiding his garden. The spray of misguided birdshot had torn through the trees and splattered across the river right in front of Sandy.
“Good thing for Stink and me both that your aim isn’t better.”
“Looks like you been fishing.” Tommy nodded toward Sandy, still in her waders and fishing vest. “Do any good?”
“Little bit,” Sandy said. Her prideful response to the big brown trout had receded to the standard response.
Tommy had kept the family farm going with a fence-building business. A little over a year ago, he’d sold the business, planning to settle into a sort of retirement, just him and the wife, their garden and the cattle. His wife was dead before the summer was out. Sandy’s friendship with Tommy had most often been carried out away from his farm. Tommy would roll up the driveway in his red truck for one reason or another, or they’d talk window-to-window, their pickups stopped beside each other in the road, pointed in opposite directions. You could carry on a conversation from the cab of a pickup truck for a good long while on Willard Road. Sandy’d had only the most cursory encounters with Tommy’s wife. She was a quiet, retiring woman, marked, in Sandy’s estimation, by a certain timidity. According to Tommy, she’d never really rebounded from their son’s death, had withdrawn still further into the quiet of her house and garden. “Never could really dig out from under that one,” Tommy had said. “Not sure that she wanted to.” In keeping with her reticence, she’d kept whatever complaints she had to herself. By the time the cancer had been discovered, hospice was the only option. Sandy had come down to the farm to help from time to time, especially to tend to the delicate cleaning necessary for the failing body of a woman, which Tommy’s sausage-like fingers and broken heart could barely manage. Sandy had even helped some around the house and garden. She’d been out in the garden, on her knees, pulling weeds from around the cabbages, when Tommy stepped out onto the porch of his house. Sandy had seen the look before. Brushing the dirt from her hands onto her jeans, she’d walked to him and folded her arms around as much of his rotund body as she could, but all she’d been able to muster to say was “I’m sorry, Tommy.” She’d wished that Margie had been there then. At these moments, Margie knew exactly what to say. Always. At the funeral, Tommy had sat stunned, looking like a cow the moment after the maul strikes. Perhaps for the occasional help she’d given, perhaps because she’d been there at that moment, Tommy accorded Sandy a sort of reverential gratitude. Now and then, in his simple way, he brought her little offerings of that gratitude.
“What’s in the bag?” Sandy asked.
“Strawberries are coming in. I got more than I know what to do with.” Tommy held out the bag. Sandy took it and looked inside.
“Oh, they’re beautiful. And so many. Thank you, Tommy.”
“I got strawberries coming out my ears. Thought maybe you’d like some. Maybe bake a few pies. They’re mighty good for that.” Sandy had never baked a pie in her life.
“They look wonderful.” Sandy motioned toward her back door. “Come on in. I’ll get us something to drink.”
“Just as soon sit out here, if it’s okay with you.” Tommy lowered his girth into the one flimsy lawn chair behind Sandy’s house. “Spring’s fading out, and summer’s on the way in. Air’s too sweet to go in just yet. Would like a cup of that herb tea of yours. Gotten kind of partial to it. If you don’t mind.”
“It’d be my pleasure. Let me get a kettle on and get out of this gear. I’ll be right back.”
“Don’t take too long,” Tommy said, “or that damned dog of yours is liable to chew me all up.”
A few minutes later, Sandy returned, dressed in jeans and a dark green blouse with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She carried two mugs of chamomile tea. After giving a mug to Tommy, she settled onto the low concrete stoop at her back door. Tommy sipped at his tea and looked up the slope behind Sandy’s house to the twilight sky above the ridge.
“This stuff tastes like grass. And damned if I don’t like it. Spending too much time with them cattle. Starting to eat like them now.”
Sandy smiled and dipped her lips to her mug of tea. They sat quietly for a few minutes, drinking their tea, watching the darkening light in the sky, and listening to the faint snarl of Stink in his tractor tire.
“Haven’t seen you in a couple weeks,” Sandy said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I been plumb crazy. Still just don’t know what to do with myself sometimes.”
Tommy wore the weight of his grief like a second belly heaped onto the already prodigious one that pushed his T-shirt to its limits.
“I keep the garden going, but mostly because she set such store in it. Like it’s, well, sort of part of her still there.”
Sandy held her mug in both hands and nodded as she listened.
“When the strawberries come in, she always put up a load of them in preserves. Best you ever tasted.” Tommy’s chest heaved as he choked back a sob. He washed it down with a swallow of his chamomile. “Thought it might be better if I made her preserves for her, do the things she used to do. Well, what a hell of a mess I made of that. Thought I’d best bring you some of the berries before I ruined the whole lot.”
Sandy reached out and softly squeezed Tommy’s forearm, all she could think to do. Again, she wished Margie was there to say something, the right thing.
“I just can’t get my head around it. She was always so quiet. Never made a fuss. Barely made a peep when she did talk.” Tommy sucked down a huge gulp of tea. “Her such a quiet woman and all, so how come the place is so all-fired noisy now that she’s gone?”
A hawk rode the air above the ridge behind the house, dipped into a wide spiral, then dropped behind the tree line. “There goes a red-tail,” Tommy said. “Hope he’s headed down to my place. Some days, seems I’ve got more rabbits and groundhogs than I do strawberries.”
SOME nights, if the weather was good, Stink would still sleep outside inside his tractor tire. But most often these days, he preferred to be with Sandy. And since the cow ticks on Willard Road