“You…”
Thorne whispered, her teeth bared in a snarl of pure, impotent rage.
“You knew the whole time.
You let Leonard take the loans.
You let Veronica sign the leases.
You sat in that kitchen for three years watching them destroy themselves!”
“A mother knows when her field has gone to cockleburs, Thorne,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a dry, gravelly rattle.
“You don’t pull ’em one by one.
You wait until the frost hits, and then you burn the whole pasture down to the roots so something clean can grow in the spring.”
She turned her back on the prosecutor.
“Get off my land,” Clara told her.
“Take your trucks, take your fancy suits, and take that woman in the weeds with you.
If I see a single wheel on this side of the cattle guard when the sun comes up, Roy’s got a twenty-two and fifty acres of briars to hide in.”
Thorne looked at Clara.
She looked at Hicks, who had picked up Jesse’s Remington shotgun from the pump-house apron, his thumb resting lightly on the safety, the twin twelve-gauge muzzles leveled directly at the center of her chest.
Then Thorne turned, walked back to the Suburban, and slammed the door.
The engines roared, tires chewing through the limestone ruts, headlights swinging in wide, sweeping arcs across the cedar trees as the three black vehicles backed out onto the county road, their red taillights disappearing into the dust of the highway.
Veronica did not get in the trucks.
She sat in the driveway, her knees pulled to her chin, her hands covered in dust, staring at the white photograph of her father lying in the red clay.
“Clara…”
Veronica whimpered, looking up through strands of greasy, tangled hair.
“Please…
I don’t have anywhere to go.
The accounts are frozen.
The lawyers took the keys to the townhouse… my father…”
Clara stopped on the bottom step of the back porch.
She did not turn around.
“The bus to Waco runs past the cotton gin at seven in the morning,” Clara said.
“It costs four dollars and fifty cents.
There’s a mason jar of silver quarters on the shelf behind the water heater in the cellar.
Take nine of ’em and leave the rest.”
She walked up the steps, her work shoes heavy and tired, and pushed open the screen door.
Inside, the kitchen was dark, save for the blue pilot light on the old Magic Chef stove.
The Seth Thomas clock was still ticking: *tick, tick, tick,* measuring out the minutes of a house that had finally been emptied of forty years of ghosts.
A shadow appeared in the doorway behind her.
Leonard stood on the threshold, his face swollen, his shirt torn, looking at the kitchen table where he had done his fifth-grade arithmetic by the light of a kerosene lamp.
“Ma?” he whispered.
Clara stood by the enamel table.
She took off her black wool shawl, shook the white fire-retardant powder into the wastebasket by the woodbox, and folded the wool neatly over the back of the cedar chair.
“The sheriff will be here in twenty minutes, Leonard,” she said, her back to him.
“Ma…
I’m your only boy,” he wept, taking a hesitant, trembling step onto the linoleum.
“You can tell ’em it was all Cobb.
You can tell ’em I was under duress.
They’ll listen to you, Ma.
Everyone in this county knows you’re an honest woman.
Just tell ’em I didn’t know about Thomas!”
Clara turned around slowly.
She looked at her son—at the soft hands that had never held a plow, at the weak chin that had inherited his uncle’s vanity without his uncle’s iron, at the expensive leather shoes that were now stained with the grease of a murdered family name.
“I am an honest woman, Leonard,” Clara said softly.
She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out the heavy .38 Special, and laid it on the center of the kitchen table, the steel frame resting flat against the oilcloth between the salt cellar and the sugar bowl.
Beside the gun, she set the silver plumb-bob and the single brass key to the cemetery plot in Oak Cliff.
“And that’s why I’m going to make you a pot of coffee,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a register of quiet, terrible peace.
“And then I’m going to sit on the front porch and watch the state troopers put the irons on your wrists.”
Leonard stared at the gun.
He stared at the key.
His knees buckled again, and he dropped onto the kitchen chair, his head hitting the table, his shoulders shaking with the ragged, ugly weeping of a man who had finally run out of lies, out of family, and out of road.
Clara did not look at him again.
She walked to the sink, pumped the iron handle until the sweet, cold well water began to flow from the tap, and filled the speckled enamel percolator to the four-cup line.
She set the pot on the burner, struck a kitchen match against the side of the stove, and watched the blue flame take hold beneath the iron.
“The onion always goes in first, Leonard,” Clara said to the empty room as the water began to hum against the tin.
“The garlic burns if you put it in too soon.
A man who forgets how to cook for himself will swallow whatever poison they put on his plate.”
She walked out the front door onto the porch, leaving her son weeping in the dark kitchen.
The night air was cold and clean, smelling of cedar smoke and dry buffalo grass.
Out on the county road, three miles away, the first red and blue lights were beginning to flicker through the mesquite trees, coming slow and steady down the valley.
Clara Vance sat down in the wooden rocking chair that Jesse had built from river oak in the spring of sixty-four.
She smoothed her apron over her knees, folded her calloused hands in her lap, and watched the lights come home across the dirt.
