26
Cassandra
Chapter 1 – Pretty Girl in a Field
My life is forever changed. It’s funny how people never seem to know when their lives are about to turn completely upside down. At least, most of us never know it’s coming until it happens. But, apparently, certain people can see it coming from a long way off.
The first time I ever saw Cassandra, I was riding my bike home from the feed store, tearing along the muddy little dirt road that leads up the holler to our house. There are about half a dozen little wooden houses up in the holler, spaced out about a half-mile apart or more, and ours is the very last one. The old dirt road crosses back and forth five times over Sparrow Creek on some narrow, weather beaten wooden bridges. The creek bed is almost always dry, but it was early summer that first day I saw her, and the creek was swollen and rushing loudly from a hard rain the day before and all through the night. The whole earth seemed to smell sweet and wet, like it had just had a bath.
I spotted Cassandra before I even got to the first bridge, so I figured maybe her family might have recently moved into the first house right where our road turns off the paved farm road and starts up the holler. I knew all about that first house in the holler – the old Handley place – because it had stood there empty for as long as I could remember, and my buddies and I had sneaked inside many times over the years to smoke cigarettes, chew tobacco, and do all kinds of other mischief. We had hidden a bunch of magazines in there that we found at the county dump. Most were about muscle cars, dirt biking and motocross, but some also had some dirty pictures inside.
I couldn’t imagine anyone ever intentionally living in that old Handley house. I always figured it would fall down before anyone else moved in. It was already leaning slightly to one side as though it might tumble over at any moment. And when my buddies and I would sneak in there in the daytime, we could see sunlight shining between most of the boards. When I first saw the girl there, I thought, surely nobody would try to live in that place, especially not when the winter months come along.
At that moment when I first laid eyes on Cassandra, she was standing out in the middle of a fresh mown field of hay grazer, with several dozen of those huge, round hay bales lying around her in the meadow, which was still bright green after all the rain. The land was gradually slanted down toward the creek, with the old Handley house up against the hills behind her. Cassandra was twirling herself around in circles, like the little plastic twirling ballerina one of my little sisters has on her music box. Cassandra had her arms raised high and her head thrown back just like that ballerina. Her dark red hair was spinning out behind her head and shining in the sun. It stunned me to see her like that, with her arms up high and her blouse hiked up till six inches of her belly was showing. I was already feeling all excited and exhilarated from the smell of the rain and from the fast speed I was traveling, dodging wildly around puddles and muddy ruts in the road. I guess the added surprise of some strange and beautiful girl appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere kind of overwhelmed my senses.
“Wow!” I shouted, slamming on my brakes. The girl immediately stopped twirling and started looking super embarrassed and maybe even frightened, like she might have been afraid of who would be coming up that road toward her. Then she turned around and started running across the field like there was a grizzly bear behind her. Sure enough, she was racing straight toward the Handley place, and she disappeared quickly into the dark opening where the front door had fallen off years ago. The thick plank-wood walls, which had obviously gone unpainted for forty or fifty years, appeared grayish brown in the distance.
“Sorry!” I shouted. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” But by then, she might have been too far away to hear me. I had the feeling that she was probably up there watching me through one of the cracks in the walls, so I raised my hand and waved in a friendly manner.
I rode a lot slower after that, and I couldn’t stop thinking about that strange new girl whose name I didn’t even know yet. All the way home, then later while I was slopping the hogs, milking the cows and feeding the chickens, I kept seeing her in my mind, twirling there in that field. Hours later, even after I went to bed, I still couldn’t get her out of my thoughts. And I had begun to feel terribly ashamed – ashamed for startling and frightening her, ashamed for hiding those magazines in her house, and ashamed for staring at her like that when her whole waist was bare naked.
As I lay there unable to sleep, I found myself wondering so many things about her: Where had she come from? Would she be staying around here from now on? Which room in that old place would she sleep in? How old was she? What grade would she be in? What was her name? Did she have other brothers and sisters? Why had she acted so scared? Did she have a boyfriend? Had she found the magazines we had hidden in there? I groaned in the dark with the pure shame of that thought. What if she knew somehow that I was one of the ones who hid them in there? What if that was the reason she had seemed so scared of me? But how could she have known? It seemed like I lay there for hours with all those ridiculous questions swimming through my brain before I finally fell asleep.
Chapter 2 – Duty
When I woke up to my alarm clock buzzing, I was still dreaming about the mysterious girl. In the dream, it seemed like something large and dangerous was chasing her across a field – some kind of dark, evil predator, but I couldn’t seem to run fast enough to reach her in time. It was like her scream in the dream turned into the sound of my alarm’s high-pitched buzzing.
I have to set my alarm for 4:30 A.M. because I have six cows to milk before I leave for my job at the feed store. In the summer, I work there full time, but during the school year, I’ll only work for a few hours every evening, plus all day Saturday. And during the football season, I didn’t plan to work at the store at all. During the football season, my whole life was about football. Old man Fannin is the owner of the feed store. He would always have me unloading heavy feedbags from his old beat up pickup truck first thing in the morning, then stocking shelves, sweeping, and helping customers all afternoon.
My pay at the store was kind of lousy, but I sure liked the job. I was still just 15, so I wasn’t old enough to work legally. Old Mr. Fannin said he’d have to keep me ‘off the books.’ What that really meant was that he could pay me a bit less than minimum wage, and he didn’t have to pay for any social security or health benefits. I didn’t mind though. At least he was nice to me.
Mr. Fannin hired me right when our local economy had gone to hell after the nearby tubular aluminum manufacturing plant closed down. He talked to me before he offered me the job, saying, “Luther, it’s like this;” (He called me Luther at first because my name really is Luther Daltry, like my dad’s name and my Gramps’, but everybody calls Dad ‘Lou’ and everybody calls me ‘Junior’ since neither of us really liked our first name.) “Luther,” Mr. Fannin told me, “I’ve got two choices. I can either close this place down and go on welfare like everyone else in the country is doing, or I can start cutting expenses. I’ve already let every employee go except for myself, and this place sure can’t afford any other full wage earner besides me. I had to let both my full-timers go. Everyone in the whole county around here used to come in to buy feed for their cows and pigs and such, but now, instead of feeding ‘em, they’re eatin’ ‘em ... just to stay alive. These are tough times we’re livin’ in, boy, tough times. So, if you’re willin’ to work hard, I can offer you six dollars an hour, straight cash. Can you live with that?”
“You’ve got a deal,” I told him, sticking out my hand to shake. “And, if you don’t mind, you can just call me Junior.”
The reason I also had to work so hard out at our place was because my dad had decided to go back into the Marines so he could get himself all shot to hell over in Iraq or Afghanistan or whatever other war zone they would send him to next. And the reason I wanted to work for old Fannin was because, by the time I turned 18, I planned to buy myself a sweet ride – like a Mustang or Corvette maybe – and drive as far from Turnbull County as I could possibly get, and I didn’t ever plan to come back. In the end, I guess I ended up leaving the county a lot sooner and going a lot farther away than I had ever expected – and I almost didn’t ever make it back … but I’ll tell you more about that later.
The week before Dad left on this last military tour, he had gone to a nearby dairy farmer who was going bankrupt, and he bought us six Guernsey milk cows for half what they were worth. Guernseys are a type of small, brown cows that have dark faces. They’re very friendly creatures, and they give a lot of milk – each cow produces about five gallons every day, counting both the morning and evening milkings, and it’s really creamy, delicious milk. But I sure get sick of milking them every morning and every evening seven days a week. Mom sells the milk for about half the store price to a lot of our friends and relatives. We aren’t really allowed to sell it legally because we can’t afford those fancy milking machines or the sterilization and pasteurization equipment required by the government. But our friends and neighbors have all kept right on buying from us because they know how good our milk is.
This would be my dad’s sixth tour of combat duty in just twelve years. I hardly even know him. I had seen more of him over the past six months than I had my entire life before that. My mom was extremely ticked off about him going back to war. I can still remember them having this same argument about him staying in the Marines way back when I was little. This last argument was the worst though. Either they thought I couldn’t hear them yelling at each other before they went to bed or they just didn’t care if I heard. By now, I have their never-ending argument pretty well memorized, so I’ll tell you how it sounded this last time:
Mom’s Voice: “Why didn’t you talk to me first before you signed the stupid reenlistment papers?” By this time, Mom was already practically screaming.
Dad’s Voice: “Cause I knew what you’d say?”
Mom’s Voice: “And maybe cause you were too cowardly to face me, just like the last time you went back in … You would have found work eventually. I already told you I wouldn’t mind if we moved elsewhere for you to look for a job … into the city even, if we had to.”
Dad’s Voice: “This is where we’ve always lived. We’ve got no family or friends anywhere else. We’re not moving,” Dad told her. I was kind of glad to hear that. I sure didn’t want to switch to some high school somewhere that I didn’t even know anyone. How would you like to have to do that for your last two years of high school?
Mom’s Voice: “Where we’ve always lived?” Mom shouted back at him. “Yeah, right! … Maybe the kids and I have always lived here, but you already moved away a long time ago. Your real home is across the world in some damned Arabian desert.”
Dad’s Voice: “I’m not over there because I like it. I do what I have to do to provide for this family. I never would have found a job around here with this economy – not here or anywhere else. Half the country’s out of work.”
Mom’s Voice: “Aw, you didn’t even try! You could have gotten on at the mine. They were hiring.”
Dad’s Voice: “They’re only hiring because the miners are out on strike. You think I would actually go in there working as a scab, walking past all the miners every day? All our friends on the picket line would hate our guts forever. Hell, your own dad was one of the miners yelling the loudest that it was time to go out on strike.”
Mom’s Voice: “Well, something else would have turned up. Your unemployment wouldn’t have run out for another eleven months. You could have waited more than a few lousy months. There are plenty of folks around here who’ve been out of work a lot longer than that. I don’t see them rushing off to fight someone else’s war.”
Dad’s Voice: “Yeah? Well, maybe that’s cause they’re just a bunch of lazy cowards who enjoy being out of work.”
Mom’s Voice: “So you’re saying your dad and your brother are lazy cowards?” Mom challenged him.
Dad’s Voice: “No, I wasn’t talking about them … They both have a job.”
Mom’s Voice: “Your dad said that welding business of theirs took in less than a thousand dollars last year. I heard him when he told you that … That’s not a job, Lou. It’s a hobby. And unless the plant opens up again, they never will make any more money.” Mom wasn’t yelling anymore. Her voice sounded more like she was begging.
Dad’s Voice: “That’s my point exactly, Sweetheart,” he told her. “As long as the plant’s shut down, none of us will ever find jobs. And the plant’s never opening again because the company moved their whole operation to Indonesia or some place.”
Mom’s Voice: “Well, you could have waited a little while longer, at least until the unemployment money ran out.”
Dad’s Voice: “We can’t get by on what the unemployment pays anyway. We’d have the kids starting back to school with no shoes or clothes.”
Mom’s Voice: “Just like all the other kids.”
Dad’s Voice: “Well, by God, our kids aren’t gonna live like that.”
Mom’s Voice: “That’s better than living without a daddy.”
Dad’s Voice: “They’ve got a daddy.”
Mom’s Voice: “Yeah, for maybe two months out of every two years.” She was right about that part. Dad would come home for about two months, then go off to war for 18 or 24 months again. He’d be home just long enough to get Mom pregnant again, and off he’d go. Her voice got soft and pleading again. “Lou, don’t you remember what you wrote me when Bo and Ernie got killed over there right in front of you. You said you’d never go back. That was less than a year ago.”