Barking Man Read Online Free Page A

that he owned, and an easement down to the lake shore. Maybe a third of that land was too rocky to farm and another third was grown up in cedars, fine old trees he never cared to cut down. There was the place his house was set and what was left you could grow tobacco on. He did just about all the work himself, hiring a couple of hands only once in a while, at cutting and drying time, for instance.
    “Tobacco,” he was known to say, and then he’d pause and spit a splash of it to one side of the courthouse steps. “Tobacco, now, that’s eight days a week …” Like most farmers he’d come to town on Saturday, visit the Co-op or the Standard Farm Store, maybe get a few things at the supermarket. When he got done his errands he might wander through the courthouse square and talk a while with this one and that one. One Sunday a month, more or less, he’d drive in with his wife and they’d both go to church, and two, three times a year he’d come in by himself and get falling-down drunk. At the end of his evening he’d just go to sleep in the cab of his truck, then in the morning hitch himself straight and drive on out home. Never caused anybody any more trouble than that. Later on, after he’d got the dogs, he cut out the drinking and the church along with it, right about at the same time.
    A steady fellow, then, and mostly known as a hard worker. Quiet, never had a whole lot to say, but what he said was reasonable. Whatever he told you he would do would get done if nothing serious kept him from it. That was the kind of thing any of us might have said of him, supposing we’d been asked.
    Amy was the name of his wife, who’d been a Puckett before she married. Never raised any objection to living so far out from town. She was fond of the woods and fond of the lake, so maybe that made up for whatever loneliness there may have been to it. They didn’t have any neighbors near, though a couple of Nashville people had built summer houses on the far side of the lake. Like Peter Jackson, Amy was a worker; she grew a garden, put up food for the winter. They were both in the garden picking tomatoes on the late September evening when she all of a sudden fell over dead. Heart attack was what did her in, faster than a bullet. Jackson said he spent a minute twirling around to see where the shot might have come from, before he went to her. They had been working opposite ends of the row, and she was already getting cold by the time he got to her, he said. And she not more than fifty, fifty-five.
    Jackson wasn’t as broke up about it as you could have thought a man might be, losing his wife in her prime that way. Or if he was, he didn’t show it much. There was a good turnout at the funeral, for Amy was well liked around the town. The old hens were forever coming up to him and saying how terrible they thought it was, and every time he told them, No. No, it ain’t so terrible, not really. If her time had come to go, then better she went quickly, with no pain. So everybody said how well he was bearing it. And then his children started to die.
    They had two children, son and daughter: June and Richard were their names. Both of them looked fair to rise above their raising, both going on past high school, which neither of their parents had. The boy was putting himself through UT Knoxville on an ROTC scholarship, and then one summer he got himself killed in a training accident, some kind of a foolish, avoidable thing. Well, he went quick too, did Richard. It put Peter Jackson back at the graveside just under a year after they buried Amy. He was dry-eyed again, but tight around the mouth, and whatever people spoke to him he didn’t have much to say back. June stood with him the whole time through, hanging on to his elbow and sort of fending people off. It might have been she was already sick herself by that time, though nobody knew anything of it yet.
    June was the older of the two. She’d gone to nursing school in Nashville and kept