“Man, we got some dumb ones, don’t we, though?” he asks.
“My dad had more.”
When Charlie is back driving and I’m allowing myself a break, I go back into the cool shade of the barn, listening to some Freedy Johnston today over Charlie’s sound system. Right now, Freedy’s singing about a girl who’d gone off and left him for New York City, but there’s a line in the middle of the song that gets all the way inside me:
But I want somebody to lie
And release me into the past…
I tell myself then, or maybe remind myself, that I’m not a country song, that this is my own damn life now and it’s real, and I don’t get to live it in reverse.
My last ride in the combine, before we call it a day a little before three because of the heat, makes me feel the way I used to after a good practice no matter how grueling it had been, knowing that my workday wasn’t over, that as soon as I was out of my pads I’d be heading directly for the weight room.
Before I turn back toward the barn from the far end of the fields, I just sit there behind the wheel, knowing that I’m the one lying these days, if not more to myself than to everybody else, and not just about the past.
That’s the quiet part for me when the music stops.
That’s my secret, one I haven’t shared with EJ, at least not yet.
Maybe Tay once I get with her, just because I’ve always been able to tell her everything. I’ve had no choice—she’s always known when I’ve been holding back on her.
I’m about to put the combine back in gear when I see Leamon Ridenour walking all the way out here and toward me, looking as if he’s carrying all the sad in the world on his back.
He had lost his wife, Libby, to cancer when Holly Ridenour had been five years old. Leamon had raised the girl on his own with the help of his mother-in-law, but then she had died, too. So it was just Leamon and Holly at his soybean farm over on the border of town closest to Old Mill. But he had made it work. EJ said that Holly was one of the prettiest girls at Cross Rivers High, the most popular, smart as a whip. Fastest one on the track team.
Now she is gone along with the other girls.
I climb down and shake Leamon’s hand.
“Heard you were back,” Leamon says.
“Good to see you, sir,” I say. “Been meaning to stop by and pay my respects and tell you how sick I am about your daughter. Frankly should have done it already.”
“No words, Silas,” he mumbles. “No words.”
There’s a Charlie Hall quality about Leamon, almost as if it comes with the territory. A North Carolina farmer, but almost with an old-cowboy vibe to him. Hard and lean and just like Charlie in another way, which means that he’s soft-spoken when he speaks at all.
“Holly’s why I’m here,” Leamon says. “You got to help me get her back.”
TWENTY
WE SIT RIGHT there in the dirt in what little shade the tractor can provide, our backs against the side of it.
It’s been years since I’ve seen him, but it’s an old man sitting next to me now, one way older than his years. It was the same as how Mitchell Garland had aged almost overnight after Gideon had died in the crash.
I’d taken one journalism course at UNC, for the fun of it, mostly, and remembered the professor telling us one day that the best stories in sports often come out of the losers’ locker room.
He was right on his facts, but a little off on his emphasis. Those locker-room stories are about people who had only lost a game. The man in front of me, even though he still has his farm, looks as if he’s lost everything, including what appears to be the will to keep going.
I give him a quick sideways glance and suddenly can see him at church before I went off to college, me sitting there with EJ and Leamon with Holly, the little girl in her church clothes.
I ask, “Isn’t Burt Webb the one you should be talking to? Or Sheriff Hader?”
Sheriff Nash Hader runs the County Police with an iron fist. Two of those, actually.
Leamon turns to look at me, and even that small motion seems to take everything he has in him.
“I’ve talked to both of them until I was blue in the face,” he says. “More Burt than Nash on account of Holly being local. He’s been back to the farm on multiple occasions with his forensics team, mostly Holly’s room because she got took right out of it while I was asleep that night. But with each passing day and each passing week, Silas, I feel more and more desperate.”
