Read Online Cold Quiet Country by Clayton Lindemuth - Free Book Online Page A

unbroken snow. The motor races and the sound is distant though the car is only a dozen yards away.
    My heel catches an ice patch and I drop six inches just like that, and slip on the packed snow of the path to the barn. I land on my ass and sit as Burt’s mother, Margot Haudesert, explodes out of the car and hurries toward the Bronco.
    “Margot! No!”
    She spins. The wind blows her hair, still red, and she still doesn’t wear a hat. Her dress is too thin; her legs show through even as it flaps about them, and it is easy to remember them in the summer, bare, with water streaming from her sodden hair. It’s always easy to remember when she was Margot Swann.
    She stares at me with a passion that is not love. She turns, closes the remaining distance to the barn.
    Sager opens the Bronco door as Margot glides closer. He spreads his arms and steps toward her but she’s not yet to the Bronco and races around the other side.
    Fay Haudesert emerges from the house with a paper bag in hand, sees her mother-in-law and touches my shoulder as she passes me. My ass radiates pain through my back and legs, and there is no way to know, right now, what I’ll feel like standing. I twist partway to my side and press against the steps; as I bend my stove-up back, my legs decide they’re okay, and after twenty seconds of struggle, I’m on my feet. I take to the snow and break a new path.
    Margot is in the barn and a caterwaul cuts through the wind. She’s seen her only son.
    The sound does something to Sager; he clutches his belly, wobbles a few steps and vomits over the edge of the dirt tractor ramp where the Bronco is parked.
    Margot wails again. I stop halfway to the barn.
    Is this what I want to do, while Gwen is lost without her coat? With frostbitten hands and feet? I pivot to the field and in no time the wind erases Margot Haudesert’s sobs.

CHAPTER NINE
    A boy had come to work at the farm. Gwen first thought he was a runaway from a poor household in some neighboring county, some mongrel who’d thumbed a hundred-mile ride and now hoped to find a place to work long enough to earn a meal. He was ragged. Gangly, and even more awkward in voice than body. He stood in the kitchen watching her with hunger in his stare, and said Burt had told him she’d put some food together for him so he could go to the barn and work it off. From his look, he needed the nourishment just to get back to the barn.
    That night when Burt left Gwen’s room, she rolled to her side and pulled her pillow against her breast. She saw Gale’s clumsy smile. His clumsy innocence.
    Neither Gwen nor her school friend Liz Sunday had shared the details of her travails with the other, yet each understood the bruises, tear-swollen cheeks, and bloodshot morning eyes. They were scrunched in the second seat of the school bus, leaning conspiratorially close. They’d ridden in the same seat for a year, always tucked below the high-backed tops, knees curled into the seatback in front. They’d held their voices low and painted hopeful pictures of escape. Such musings were irresistible. They’d fantasized about running away to Mexico, or Hollywood, or some random Iowa crossroads. Anywhere. They’d pretend to be sisters. They’d expropriate enough money from their fathers—except neither of their fathers likely had that much cash.
    However, as late summer became fall and Gwen began noting little things—the way Gale’s Adam’s apple moved when he sang Amazing Grace, for instance—she dampened her runaway conversations with Liz. At the same time, Liz became more and more frantic to continue them. Her eyes seemed to be shrinking into black beads that disclosed nothing, ready to flash into any kind of wildness.
    “I’ll get away, someday,” Liz said. “Tell me about this Gale G’Wain again. What does he look like?”
    “He’s got red hair, like mine, and his joints are too big. But he works from sunup to down and never says anything but ‘thank you’ and ‘that