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.”
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