Over the Plain Houses. Julia Franks

the horse that died in labor or the quick wring of chicken necks, the hot slaughter of lamb and pig. Yet here his wife had given Brodis the picture of his son grown powerful again, this time as a leader, and after so many fallow months, the image burned with surprising strength. For the first time Brodis envisioned his son at sitting-down work, at a desk in the courthouse or the school, his hair the same ruffled color as the light on the river in the late afternoon.

      His wife kept talking. “A hired man would make. Clabe Ingles would do it.”

      Brodis grunted. It wasn’t the point. “It’s fine and good to send a boy for a education, but first you’ve got to ask yourself is it the education he needs.” He turned the rotted board over and examined it for nails.

      His wife studied his face. Behind her, the crows hung in the whispering air, waiting. “Mrs. Furman said some of the students go into business. A good portion of them go to college.”

      College? Last night his son had asked why Jesus gave three different people three different requirements for getting into Heaven. “I’m not talking about that sort of education. That’s books and reading and arithmetic. He’s already good at that.”

      Irenie seemed to consider this. She didn’t argue. “You mean church.”

      He turned to her. “You know and I know there’s no point studying history and algebra when there’s no ensuring he’s going to church.”

      His wife stood the next replacement board before her like a shield. Her voice came out small, but it didn’t back away, as if some part of her that had been submerged all these years were finally breaking the surface. “They have churches in Asheville.” Maybe the same part that sneaked out of the house and left footprints in the frost.

      “Yep.”

      “He can go to church without us.”

      “Could. If you’re willing to bet his soul on it. I’m not. You saw him last night.” He reached for a new board. “Eternity is a long time, Irenie. A good portion longer than a little unpleasantness here in this world.”

      Incredibly, she kept at it, her voice wobbling but still coming at him. “Mrs. Furman said that the—”

      “The boy has enough.”

      “But he’s—”

      “Enough.”

      Finally, silence. Or almost. His wife turned her face toward the fence and made something that sounded like a squeak.

      He shoved the new board into place. The hammer arced through the air and met the nail head with a loud crack. A man hadn’t ought to suffer a woman to teach, nor to take authority over him, but to be in silence.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      HER HUSBAND HAD SAID NO. NO WAS NO. IRENIE leaned her weight into the handles of the wheelbarrow and pushed. The single rubber tire cut a deep groove in the mudded earth.

      Worse, she hadn’t stood against him. Not that time and not the time he’d told Matthew he’d never be a firm kind of man. Her son had given her the one look that night, the one beseechment. He must have seen it in her face, that she’d not help, because he didn’t turn around a second time. And he hadn’t in the days since.

      She hadn’t figured herself for the kind of person who knew a thing to be wrong and sat by and watched it anyway. She wondered was this the person she’d compromised herself to be or had she always been this way and just never stepped outside herself enough to see it.

      The lady agent was younger than her, but she’d dressed up in a fitted suit and driven by herself up to a town full of strangers for something she knew to be right. That fact unsettled Irenie, not because of what it told about Mrs. Furman but because of what it told about Irenie Lambey.

      She set the wheelbarrow by the tobacco frames. Ahead, a jay watched, tapped the ground twice with his beak, then jerked his head up to check her, just like the chickens did. Peck, peck, look. Peck, peck, look. Very same waltz. Blue liverleaf flowers starred the grass. The service trees bloomed on the mountains like puffs of fog, and the branches of the redbud curved and wingled against the naked forest. A wren’s voice see-sawed the morning air. Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle. It had been two weeks since she’d seen the pigs. Since then, they hadn’t intruded into the talk in town or in church or in school. But Irenie knew what she knew. They would be back.

      She sank the shovel into the manure in the wheelbarrow and emptied two loads onto each plot. Then she began working it in with a spading fork, using the tines to break up the red earth and separate the greenish-black clumps of compost until each frame was a rich uniform brown. She tamped the tops with the back of the shovel. After the last one she set the blade in the ground and leaned on it. Each box looked the same, dark brown, fecund with nutrients, a promise. She spread the page of newsprint, nicked a corner of the waxed seed pouch, and tilted the contents onto the center of the paper. The seeds were small as sugar grains, and she pressed her index finger into the pile, rubbing her thumb against the pad so that the grains fell from her skin and scattered somewhere on the brown compost, though she couldn’t see where. Even after three years of tobacco, it seemed impossible that something so invisible would grow.

      The preacher birds had returned and taunted without stop. Over here, whaddya want? Tell him no. Whaddya want? It was the sound of planting. Another winter had passed. Another summer would begin. Pretty bird, tell him no. Whaddya want? The pallid seasons of the future stretched before her.

      Then the songs went quiet, and a jay took flight. A shadow glided across the tobacco frames, the spread of its wings a broken jag against the pine-walled boxes. The outline flapped hard against the sun and cut across the sky. Vultures didn’t do that way. They spiraled in the updrafts, lazy and effortless and beautiful. But this bird was working hard. It flexed its wings once, then twice, and drew itself up on a wooden fence post twenty feet away. A red-tail. Irenie held her breath. The bird was sizeable, the band around her waist and the feathers on her back the color of brick. She folded her wings, hunched her withers and puffed her chest with quick energy, her white breast pulsing and her yellow eye unafraid because she knew that she’d soared across a valley on her own and that she could take to the air again at any moment. Somewhere she had a nest, with young ones, and somewhere responsibilities to them, but that didn’t keep her from sitting here now, magestical in her survey of everything that belonged in her territory. Then, as if deciding that Irenie was no threat, she shifted her interest to the yard below, now empty of chickens—then to the unsprung wolf trap balanced atop the nearby gatepost, the jaws dropped below the level of the wood. Irenie held her breath. There were two traps, each with a wide mouth on a spring lever. If a wolf was to step on the plate, the spring would trigger, clamping the device around the animal’s leg. No amount of thrashing or biting would loosen it. But the rusty traps had hung in the back of the tool shed as long as Irenie could remember, ever since her uncle had owned the land. She’d never known anyone to use them. There were no more wolves.

      But last winter Brodis had discovered the contraptions and set to scraping and steel-wooling and oiling. Underneath the orange, the metal was gun-barrel gray.

      And when he’d told her they were for the hawks, she’d shaken her head and said it was too much trap for a bird. It was the only thing she could think to say that sounded reasonable, though she knew when she said it that it was no reason at all.

      “No such thing as too much trap,” he’d countered. “Dead is dead.”

      “But you can’t kill all of them. There’ll be another one to move in when that one’s gone.”

      He jerked his head up. “Which is it. It’s either too much trap or it’s no sense doing, but it ain’t both.”

      But it was both, and it was neither. He watched her, the steel wool immobile between his fingers. “I don’t know,” was all she could muster.

      He