Page 107 of The Auction
“Turn the engine over,”Creed shouted, from under the hood of the tractor.
Amazingly, he’d gotten both trucks working again, almost by rebuilding the entire engine on mine. Flush with success, he was convinced he could save the tractor from its once muddy grave.
I turned the ignition and listened to it clunk a few times before it died.
“Fuck!” he snapped.
“You’ll get it. It’s just going to need time to dry out more.”
He muttered something under his breath about time that I couldn’t hear and then told me to get off. I didn’t take it personally.
He went back to work under the hood and I went about giving the chickens some extra love. No eggs, but I didn’t expect any after the trauma they suffered. The coop was repaired and we’d already started thinking about contingency plans for them when this happened again.
Because that was the thing about weather. Once it happened to you, you had to assume at some point it was going to happen again.
A truck pulled up and I recognized Jackson’s ball cap before I realized it was him. April got out of the passenger side and I found myself smiling. I gave them a wave to acknowledge I’d seen them, then turned back to the barn.
“Creed! The Talleys!”
Walking in their direction, I met them halfway. Jackson was muttering something to April and she was shaking her head at him, like she didn’t need her older brother telling her what to do.
“Hey Juliette,” she called. She had a canvas bag in one hand. “My mom went crazy with canning so you’re getting spillover canned goods.”
There’d hardly been any of the crop that had matured enough to be salvageable, but what I could save, I did.
Sugar beet jam could actually add a lot of flavor to food.
“I told you to give those to the neighbors,” I said, taking the bag.
“Oh, it’s not your beets. Your beets went to the Lucketts. You got corn. Everybody is trying to make do with what they have, so it’s all good. What goes around comes around.”
“Creed around?” Jackson asked me.
“The barn,” I said, my hand shielding my eyes from the early morning sun. “But I’m warning you now, he’s a cranky sonofabitch. Can’t get the tractor engine running yet.”
Jackson gave me a nod with his cap and then headed out in Creed’s direction.
“How are you doing?” April asked, then looked out over the washed out fields. “It’s so crazy. It’s like it just washed away the wholevalley.”
“Yeah, well, on the plus side, the creek is full to bursting.”
“You’re not going to try and replant?”
“Too late in the season for that,” I said. “We’ll try again next year.”
I said it like I was confident that would happen, when I was anything but. I hadn’t brought up Creed mentioning he had a plan a few nights ago. Given that he hadn’t brought it up the next morning, I didn’t think it was something he intended to share.
So whatever his plan was, I wasn’t entirely sure that I was a part of it.
April nodded. “It will come back. You’ll see. It always does.”
“Yep. I can take that bag inside. I’ve got some lemon cake if you would like a slice.”
The words came out of my mouth and I really couldn’t believe it.
April looked at me almost in the same way. We’d grown up in this town, only two years apart, on neighboring properties, and yet we hardly knew each other. That was because of Herb, but that was also because of me. At some point I’d stopped fighting him. We knew the church people, because that’s all he would allow, but even they weren’t welcome on the property for after church lunches or casual drop-ins.
I’d been isolated by him, but as I’d gotten older, I could have changed that. I could have reached out more when I was in town.
