Chapter 1
Countdown to Damnation:
13 days / 11 hours / 10 minutes
THE screeching rips peace and quiet from every soul within a mile of Polite Society Ranch. The farmhands outside the barn drop their rakes and bags of feed, step away from the animals in their charge—the blind chicken, the alpaca with alopecia, the pig who’s too thin.
All hearts are alarmed, all available eyes looking for the source of the racket, then at each other, then all at once to their leader, their boss: Chrissy Durang.
“Stretch those spines,” she shouts from her side porch, her graying hair carefully styled, presenting as easy but respectable, exactly as she requested from her hairdresser. “It’s gonna be a Category 4 today.”
The thick posts holding up Chrissy’s porch mirror her poise, her perfect posture, her five foot six inches of straight line from crown to heel. She breathes coolly and calmly, signaling strength, decreeing the dignity she expects from her staff, no matter the storm.
The next burst of wailing, even louder now, like metal grinding on metal, causes the ground to vibrate and the macaws in the barn to chant their panic, sounding alarm with the only words they know.
“Good morning!” they shout frantically.
“You’re so pretty!” they shout in blood-curdling bursts. If only the birds had a wider vocabulary. If only they knew how to say, “Warning.” Or, “It’s getting closer.”
Chrissy’s hands smooth her new white blouse. Her fingers delicately check that her gold-chain necklace is clasped perfectly at her nape. Her thumbs trace the waistline of her good jeans. She tugs on her belt, an old, cracking leather strap punched with letters spelling out “Farmer Mom,” her preferred title, her prized possession made years ago by her son, Barnett, when they first moved to Mader and he joined the Boy Scouts.
The town is perfect for the typically quiet ranch, located in one of the most rural parts of Louisiana, a heavily wooded part, a part far outside New Orleans, a part no one really wanted in The Purchase. Mader was born as an afterthought of an official hurricane evacuation route, rich with local pride in its recently blacktopped two-lane road that wiggles through forest like a pine snake.
The screech—
“It’s here!” the macaws would warn, if only they could.
As if out of thin, humid air, from a tunnel of untamed brush, atop the sweltering blacktop road, emerges a yellow school bus full of children. It lurches into view in front of the ranch, the driver riding the rusty brakes, which continue their blaring protest.
The young lives aboard the bus are bouncing in their seats, the namesake of their oppressor stenciled along the side of their chariot: “Mader Elementary School.” The kids, frantic as fire ants, sense their arrival on this long-awaited field trip, built on the backs of underpaid teachers and exhausted parents and tattered permission slips signed at the last minute.
These kids are the summer schoolers, the victims of poor grades or poor manners—neither of which is their fault, in most cases—enduring their August penance filled with spelling tests and word problems and, mercifully, today’s outing.
A total of seventeen students make up the third-grade summer school class, median age eight, all of them somehow bound to the soil of Mader. Their parents own farms here, work on farms here, run supply lines for farms here.
But none of these kids have ever seen a farm like this one. Or met a farmer like this one, a Farmer Mom like Chrissy.
Polite Society Ranch is well manicured and beautiful. Animals are treated with love, not as property, never as a future meal. The sign out front has the ranch slogan stenciled clearly and in a stately font, exactly as Chrissy requested of the artist: “A Place of Dignity.”
Encircled in white picket fencing, a large clearing with grass as green as a tree frog gives rise to five structures. The barn is painted bright blue, the chicken coop is bright blue, the kennel is bright blue, the stables are bright blue, and Chrissy’s home is bright blue. It’s a shade presenting as cheery but grounded, exactly as she requested from her handyman. On perfect days, when she’s not hunkered down because of rain or blinded by sweat or rushing to feed this animal or that, she notices that the blue of her house perfectly matches the blue of the sky, and Chrissy nods with pride, as if receiving confirmation that she and God are in cahoots.
The yellow bus screams and growls into the driveway of Polite Society Ranch, barely clearing the ditch. Finally, those poor brakes do their job, delivering the day’s headache to Chrissy’s feet.
“Let’s do it,” Chrissy says to Pauley, her chief farmhand, who stands at her right side, at least for now. “Remember the rules. Respect. Dignity. And don’t hog-tie anyone under nine years old unless it’s an emergency.”
“Sorry about that,” Pauley says through his square jaw. He’s somewhere in his midtwenties, though in Mader, value comes not from time lived, but from time lived on a farm, and by that metric Pauley is practically an old man.
“Close your mouth, please,” Chrissy says to Pauley, who’s as stunned as she is that so many kids are on the bus. Chrissy wasn’t even expecting a bus, she was expecting the old Mader Elementary van. This will strain the schedule, she thinks.
Except for his look of shock at the day’s oversize tour, Pauley is otherwise exact in mandated appearance, as are the other staffers milling about: blue jeans, white T-shirt (tucked in), clean fingernails.
At last, Pauley has stopped wearing his ratty baseball cap. For months, Chrissy issued polite signals to him. “Baseball cap,” she’d point out. And the next day, “Baseball cap,” and the next, “Baseball cap.” Eventually, she asked him to step into the farm’s office. “Sweetie, I’m not calling you ‘Baseball Cap’ as a nickname. I’m telling you a baseball cap is not part of the dress code.”
“Oh, shit—I mean—shucks, Miss Chrissy. Sorry about that,” Pauley said, grabbing the cap with his whole hand and dragging it from his skull like a shameful toupee.
“This isn’t Casual Society Ranch, Pauley. It’s Polite Society Ranch. But you’re welcome to wear a cowboy hat if you’d like.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. Sorry again—”
Chrissy reached into a desk drawer and lifted two gifts, each neatly wrapped in thick, glossy-white paper and sturdy red-velvet ribbons tied into big blossoming bows. One package was large, one smaller. She handed the large one to Pauley.
“What’s this for?”
“A little appreciation gift.”
Pauley ripped it open and stared at the Stetson beaver roper cowboy hat, factory dusted, soft, pliable, premium, medium pinch front, Silverton crown, made in the USA, color: acorn. “Holy shucks, Miss Chrissy!”
“You don’t have to keep it or wear it. The receipt is in there if you want to exchange it. Or if you need the cash and want to return it, that’s okay, too.”
“I don’t know what to say, except, shucks, again.”
“You deserve something nice, Pauley. Thanks for all you’ve done for me and my critters out here. LSU will be lucky to have you. You’re gonna be the best vet this side of the lake.”
Pauley blushed, smiled. “You’re gonna make it real hard to say goodbye.”
“Nonsense. That’s what family is for. I have Barnett.”
Oh, Barnett, Chrissy thought, awash in her usual delight at the very mention of her son’s name, a thrill almost as meaningful as actually seeing him on his rare trips home, or as comforting as hearing his voice on one of his calls. Just by talking to him on the phone, Chrissy can tell if Barnett needs a haircut. He phones often to tell his mother, “Good night,” or, “I love you,” or, only half-jokingly, “Just making sure you’re not dead.”
Pauley popped the cowboy hat atop his noggin, a grin upon his face. He eyed the other gift, the smaller one. “Is that for me, too?” he joked.
Chrissy held the package carefully. “This one is for Barnett.”
Pauley studied her face, still beaming from thinking of her son. Pauley wished his own mother would glow in that way, effuse any semblance of pride. “How is Barnett? How’s his job? How’s his … roommate … thing?”
Chrissy’s eyebrows twitched. Not many people ask so directly for details about Barnett these days. She smiled, stood, and said, “Let’s get back to work.”
Pauley also stood, headed for the door, opening it a little wider than he did when he first entered so his exit would accommodate his new headdress. “Is Barnett coming for a visit anytime soon?”
Chrissy held the small gift in her hands even more tightly, as if much depended on its contents. “Monday,” she said.
“Monday!” the macaws would shout.
“It’s here!” they would shout, if only they could.
The day came as fast and as loud as the yellow bus now parked out front of the farm. Chrissy adjusts her Farmer Mom belt and double-checks that she put a five-dollar bill in her front pocket—bribe money for when one of the kids visiting the farm has a tantrum. Chrissy has learned that five bucks can stop tears in an emergency, when Hershey’s Kisses or Elmo Band-Aids don’t do the trick.
Chrissy reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a small orange notepad and half a pencil she accidentally stole from Saint Michael the Archangel Catholic Church. She licks the tip of the pencil and holds it beside one of the items on her to-do list: “9 a.m., tour arrives.” Just under that is written: “10 a.m., Barnett comes home.”
Chrissy looks at her watch: 9:10 a.m. The tour is large, and late. Barnett’s plane, if on time, if all is going according to plan, should have already landed at New Orleans International Airport, a facility built not in New Orleans, but in the neighboring city of Metairie—an airport for a city within another city. The world makes no sense, Chrissy thinks. I’m never leaving the farm again.
She returns the orange notepad to her back pocket.
The school bus engine ends its roar in the driveway and nature takes its cue, picks up the slack. Birds and breeze and insects resume whispering sweet nothings.
Chrissy looks at her watch again. Barnett will get a ride to the farm. Even though the drive from Polite Society Ranch to the airport is a whole tank of gas away, she would have gone to pick him up. She always offers. She’s always relieved not that he declines, but by how he declines. “I can’t possibly take you away from the ranch. Those little animals need you more than I do. I’ll get an Uber,” Barnett said. And then, “I don’t have a return flight yet. I’m hoping we can find time to talk.”
Find time to talk. Those were his exact words, Chrissy recalls.
Chrissy almost laughed as he said it. Oh, Barnett. She knows what he wants to talk about. She’s been planning it for years, and accepting it of late: her retirement, her passing the farm to its heir, her son, Barnett, her “Farmer Son,” just like it says on the brand-new leather belt in the neatly wrapped small white box with the sturdy red-velvet ribbon tied in a big blossoming bow in the office.
No wonder he doesn’t have a return flight. He’s moving home, Chrissy thinks. She and Barnett talk in circles about it all the time. “This farm will be yours someday,” she’s said so often that the macaws occasionally repeat it.
“My favorite place on earth,” Barnett always says right back to her.
Outside the bus, Chrissy and Pauley can hear the kids’ teacher, Miss Iva, giving her usual speech about behaving. “What do we do?” she asks. The students repeat the words with her—“Listen! Learn! Listen harder!”
Chrissy and Pauley compose themselves as if the ranch is Downton Abbey and the lords and ladies are about to step from their carriage. Pauley touches the brim of his acorn-colored cowboy hat and nods to Chrissy like a hero in a Western. And gazing at the blues and greens and white picket fence behind him, Chrissy fills with pride, wondering if she should have named it Perfect Society Ranch instead.
The kids on these tours always remind Chrissy of youth, and its absence. She never had a singular moment when she realized she was old. She figures she’s old simply because she doesn’t feel young. Of course, she’s noticed occasional aches and pains through the years. But nowadays, everything hurts even when she’s standing still. Caring for other lives all day has led her to consider, more than once, Who will take care of me?
Oh, Barnett, she thinks.
Recently, at a whisper past one in the morning, the motion light outside her barn popped on with a click. It turned out to be nothing, but she jolted up in bed. Jolting up in bed isn’t what it used to be, not for Chrissy, not for anyone in their sixties. Plus, she was new at it. It used to be her husband who did the jolting up and running out of the bedroom and out the back door.
Oh, John, she thinks.
John Durang once killed a fox. He once killed a coyote. In later years, she scolded him something fierce when he grabbed her good bread knife to chase off a critter. “You think that raccoon is made of corn bread?” she asked. “Why didn’t you just take the shotgun? What if it was a person out there?”
He shook his head, looked at the floor. “I don’t think I could pull the trigger,” he said. “I don’t know if I can kill. I don’t think I have it in me anymore.”
And sometimes, there on the farm, Chrissy feels she doesn’t have it in her anymore, either. Not enough of it, anyway. She’s ready to pass it along to Barnett. She thinks of her son in colorful snapshots like in the pictures beside her bed. Her favorite photo is from Barnett’s graduation from high school over ten years ago. Chrissy took the picture with a disposable camera. She feels she captured Barnett at his best, at what she knows is surely his happiest, him looking directly at her. Photos of him—and John, but mostly Barnett—also line the long hallway in her home. That boy’s smile—it’s caffeine. All the pictures tell a history of his growth, of her parenting. But the pictures don’t chronicle Barnett’s path all the way to now. It’s hard to find a picture of present-day Barnett Durang, age thirty-four. Chrissy used to update the wall regularly, until Barnett moved away, until the time when she could no longer control him, no longer vouch for his values and whatnot. Your child is a reflection of you, up to a point, she figures. Barnett’s adult life is nobody’s business, she thinks.
Copyright © 2023 by Byron Lane
