Tonight he wasn’t thinking at all about his money troubles, or what it was going to cost him to replace the head gasket on his battered Ford pickup. Tonight he couldn’t have cared less about the mortgage payment due on Wednesday or the fact that the sprinkler system on the western ten acres was older than he was and needed an overhaul. He didn’t care about the heating bill, the cost of day labor, or the fact that he’d recently discovered that his sixteen-year-old daughter was taking the Pill. Tonight he was thinking about what was going on in town. Yesterday he’d had lunch with Gus and some of the boys from town, and even though everyone was all laughs and buddy-buddy, he could see in their eyes that they were scared. Even Gus was scared. Killers running around, people dying. Carby was scared, too. So scared that he had unlocked the gun cabinet and made Tyler clean, oil, and load each rifle and shotgun, and then, with the whole family trailing along, he’d taken one long gun to each bedroom in the house, wrapped it in a pillowcase, and put in between mattress and box spring.
“Any of those rat bastards break in here, I want everyone to grab the closest gun. We ain’t going to end up like Henry Guthrie, God rest him.” Carby had taught Tyler and Jilly how to shoot before they were out of single digits and by the time they were in their teens both of them could drop a pheasant at fifty yards. Lily? Well, she could fire a shotgun and anyone could hit something with a shotgun, especially an intruder in the close confines of a small farmhouse. Even so, Carby was scared for his family. He walked the fenceline with his pipe between his teeth and his own shotgun in the crook of his arm; the gun was broken open at the breech but loaded with buckshot. His dog, a big shepherd named Spooker, was back at the house with the girls and Tyler.
“Yeah, life’s a bitch and then you die,” he said aloud, and that made him think of death. Not just the headline deaths out at the Guthrie place, but death closer to home. His buddy Bailey Frane had buried his mother yesterday morning. Passed in her sleep, even though she’d been healthy as a horse for all her eighty years. Carby had stood by Bailey during the funeral and had sipped kitchen whiskey with him all afternoon, the two of them growing more philosophic about life and death as the tide-line of the bottle receded.
There was a breeze coming out of the southwest and he stopped for a moment at the edge of a fallow field where he planned to grow blueberries next season. So far the blight hadn’t touched the berry crops in the region, so he thought he’d try blueberries, strawberries, blackberries, and maybe some raspberries. The better berries sold pretty well in farmers’ markets or to the buyers for the store chains; the second-best always sold to the jelly companies in New Jersey.
He sniffed the wind, searching for the scents he liked—tilled earth, manure, sweetgrass—but then he frowned. There was an odd smell on the air; threaded through the earthy smell of churned soil, wood smoke, and dried corn, there were other scents, and Carby had a farmer’s nose. There was some old skunk there, but that was from roadkill over on Seven Mile Road on the other side of the Pine River, less potent than it had been a few nights ago. A whiff of gasoline, too. And something else. Sweeter, but not sweet like fruit. More like the sugar-up-your-nose stink of something left out to rot. Sweet like that. Nasty sweet. He took his pipe out of his mouth and held it at arm’s length, clearing his nose as much as possible. The breeze brought the olio of smells again, and there it was. The bad sweet smell. Only this time it was stronger. Fresher. Nearer, he thought.
