Chapter 6: The County Came Down the Road

The County Came Down the Road

Nell ran the whole way to the county road, and when she came up onto it the county was already coming down: five of them in the morning light. The old man was out front in his town boots with his hands behind his back. Two of his own men came behind him, and two more were from off—a woman in a good coat with her collar up, and a young man walking beside her, with the dust of that road already on their shoes.

Nobody said a thing. The old man’s eyebrows came up and stayed up. He looked at Nell’s face, then at her hand, then past her up the road, and she watched him do it in that order.

“Morning, Nell,” he said. “Not today.”

She put the hand out in front of her, where all of them could see it, and left it out there. The blood on it wasn’t hers. She had gotten it off her mother a few minutes before, putting two fingers on her mother’s hand and getting her own back wet, and Roy had told her to wash it off, so she hadn’t.

“Uncle Vern beat my mother with a stick,” she said. “She can’t get up off the ground. I’m going for the doctor.”

“It’s nothing,” the old man said over his shoulder. “Family thing. You go on ahead, Mr. Grant, I’ll catch you up.” He gave Nell a look. “Go on home, now.”

“Family business can’t end with somebody dead,” the young man said.

He said it flat, the way a man reads a line off a piece of paper, and he didn’t look at the old man while he said it. He looked at Nell’s hand.

Then he was past her, walking.

The woman came after him. “We’ll go have a look,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

The old man stood there one second more. Then he turned and said something low to the man beside him, and the man went up the road at a trot, back toward the truck, to fetch the doctor. That was all she had come out here for.

Any other morning that year, the old man would have walked her home and had a word with Vern out in the yard, and by dark it would have been a family thing again. Vern had picked the wrong morning, was all. He was standing exactly where the county was going to walk.

They went back down the road, the woman on Nell’s left with the notebook out of her coat, writing as she walked.

“What’s your name?”

“Nell Vance.”

She wrote it down. Her hand was slow on the paper—slower than a name takes—and Nell watched the pen go.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

She wrote that down too. “Who else is at the house?”

The old man answered before Nell could, and he didn’t have to stop and count. “Roy and Darlene. Three girls. Roy’s mother. And Vern, the brother.”

The woman wrote all of it down.

“How old are the two little ones?”

“Twelve and seven,” Nell said.

Then the woman reached over and turned Nell’s other hand up by the wrist, and looked at the cuff, where the blood in the cloth had dried black. She didn’t say anything about it.

The old man walked along on her other side for a while. Then he leaned in.

“You put it out on the road,” he said. “You know what that does.”

She kept her eyes on the road.

“I could have talked to Vern,” he said.

She didn’t answer him. She’d been through that already, that morning, in the yard, with the stick up in the air.

The road came down to the rise, and the gate was at the bottom of it, with the worn place in the wire where everybody’s hand went in. Nell got there first and hauled it back.

Ida was still over by the fence in the wet, on her side, and nobody had moved her.

Darlene was still down in the dirt, in the same shape Nell had left her in. Frankie was on her knees at her mother’s head, screaming. Vern was out in the middle of the yard with the stick up over Bobbie, and Bobbie was against the fence with both arms over her head.

The stick was coming down.

Behind Nell, the county was coming in through the gate.

Vern hadn’t turned his head.