Bull of the Woods

Buck and Cheryl hadn't been married long when they stumbled across an overgrown pasture back off the highway. A Mr. Jones owned the pasture; it had no cows. This was back in the summer of '75.

This Mr. Jones said, "I'm going to tell you, young ones. There's perks to living in the country. You can wear your underwear in the yard. Hell, nobody will mess with you." He said, "They won't even know you're here."

Cheryl asked him, "Where are your cows?"

"You can go for days," he said, "and not encounter a soul."

It was noon, summertime, and standing on his porch, Mr. Jones appeared to have been shocked by natural light. "I've been cooped up," he said, apologetic, his eyes nearly squint shut. Behind him, the door to his house swung wide, the inside all dark.

He said, "You take this mess off my hands, and I guess I'm about ready to get on down the road."

No one would have known the pasture was there, not except that Mr. Jones had nailed a wooden land-for-sale sign into some weeds down by 15, and then, and only then, had Cheryl and Buck noticed the narrow dirt drive that weaved around a bend and disappeared into the pines.

The pines opened up to a clearing with a house that had a bad slope. In the pasture was a cow trough with a few inches of dirty rain water, enough to fatten mosquitoes.

Mr. Jones didn't think to advertise the house; he thought anybody with a lick of sense would have known to tear it down and start over.

After the old man got on down the road with Buck and Cheryl's savings, Buck opened the windows in the farmhouse, all the windows upstairs and down, and the windows had no curtains, and some windows had no panes, so there was nothing to block the cool breeze that moved around their home, not even furniture.

Buck stepped out on the porch. He said, "I can't hear a thing."

And Cheryl tilted her head. She was listening for human commotion, cars and trucks flying down 15. But like Buck, she couldn't hear a thing.

They were in love, and that night, he and Cheryl stripped down and ran naked around the yard, and Cheryl said, laughing, "I'll never need to live close to the road again." She said, not covering her breasts, "Nobody will run up on us out here."

But, just last weekend, on the Saturday morning of the day Buck died, a warm summer day in '05, Buck sipped a cup of coffee at the kitchen table and marveled at a crow, tiptoeing, quietly, in the dew, out near their garden.

It'd been a long time since he'd heard his wife laugh. The crow that morning, unlike Cheryl, seemed perfectly content to stay on the ground. "Fly," she'd said. "He flies."

"He" was a man named George Godfrey, and though Cheryl was still in bed that morning, upstairs in bed alone, Buck felt George up there too.

He imagined her in their bedroom, lying on her side, wide awake and stewing. They'd had an argument, a bad one, and he knew she expected an apology.

In a little while, if he didn't come offering one, she'd fling the covers off and march down the stairs, straight to him.

She'd squeeze out a way to include George in a sentence.

"George likes …"

"George thinks …"

"George can …"

Buck never found out where that Mr. Jones went, but sometimes he imagined him pulling up in the yard, getting out of his truck, and standing in awe. Buck would have said to him, "You didn't have enough imagination, now did you?"

Because it's true: the tomatoes in their garden had turned out, big, red, juicy tomatoes, a long row of corn, and if Mr. Jones had stood in this garden, he could have turned to see the house, a fresh coat of white paint, big hanging baskets overflowing. On...