Page 75 of On the Land, We Shoot Straight
Grady met his eyes. Cole stared down at him with hope and fear warring in his pale face.
“I wanna know if you’re gonna be leavin’. I ain’t got no hold on you.” Grady sat back and waved his hand. “You’re a free man. But I reckon I’d like to know it if you’re plannin’ to bolt.”
Cole was nodding along as Grady spoke, but something about it was both sad and disappointed.
“I wasn’t leavin’.”
Grady nodded. “All right.”
“I wouldn’t steal your horse.”
Grady looked up at the bitterness in Cole’s tone.
“I ain’t talkin’ about the horse.”
Cole nodded, eyes down; he nodded like he didn’t believe him.
“Hell, take the goddamn horse,” Grady said and stood up.
Cole startled. Grady gripped his shoulders, and even through the towel they felt cold. Cole was searching his eyes like he was waiting on something and scared of what it might be.
“This ain’t about the horse,” Grady said.
Cole looked back at him steadily, his body losing its tension in Grady’s grip. Grady tightened his hands and flicked his eyes from Cole’s to his lips and watched them part. Grady leaned down and kissed him, soft and gentle in answer to the invitation. He pulled back and met Cole’s eyes.
“You let me know, ya hear?”
Cole nodded. “I will.”
“All right.”
Grady let him go, told him to get warmed up in front of the fire and he’d get his dinner.
“I can do it,” Cole said.
“Go on in and sit. I’ll be needin’ you come harvest, and if you get pneumonia, you gonna put us right in it.”
Grady smiled in the hopes Cole took his real meaning, and Cole rolled his eyes and tugged the towel close and muttered, “Yeah, yeah,” and went on in to the fire. Grady opened the fridge and exhaled long and slow.
He started fixing a plate, turned the stove on to heat it all up and thought back on how he’d reckoned this was a bad idea when Cole turned up on his doorstep.
As he placed the steak in the pan and listened to it sizzle, he felt a smile spreading on his face, a quiet thing, and reckoned he’d been right, it was a bad idea. But the feeling he had when Cole walked in the back door just now? Well, he reckoned it might’ve been the best bad idea he’d ever had.
39
S
pring was peeking hereyes around the corner of winter when Grady and Cole reckoned they might be able to let out a breath that’d been holding on account of fearing for more hail. Turned out, they needn’t have worried about the hail. Instead, a once-in-a-century swarm of locusts swept the land and decimated most of the crops with plenty of time to spare before harvest. As Grady understood it, locusts had gone extinct after the Great Plague of 1874, but as he and Cole watched the sky turn black under the swarm of them, he reckoned they must’ve been resurrected on the back of the torrential rain and the promise of a good feed. Or on the bottom of someone’s boot heel walking over from the south.
But if Grady was disappointed, Cole could only be described as catatonically gutted.
“This is all my fault,” Cole said as he swigged on his third or fourth beer and flicked the locusts that kept on swarming in off the porch.
“You reckon you God now?” Grady asked and finished his second beer.
“I’m cursed!”
Grady laughed. “This ain’t biblical.” He swatted at a locust buzzing in. “Though it sure as hell feels it.”
