She tapped her pipe against the steps, knocking the ashes into the wet weeds. “Then why don’t we get you cleaned up a little?” She shook her head, dropping the pipe into a large pocket in her dress. “You sure aren’t going inside smelling like that.”

My knees popped as I found my feet. I reached out to help Grandma stand, but she waved me away.

“Bring that hose over here,” she said. “And while you’re at it, take off those damn shoes. They ain’t fit to scrub out a septic tank. I’ll put ’em out of their misery tomorrow and burn them.”

That sent a tiny, scrabbling shiver up my spine when I thought about the kitten and the burn barrel. But I shoved the image aside, buried it deep as I grabbed the hose and turned the spigot on. The water coming out was cold, but clean. That’s all I cared about. I dragged the hose back over to the steps and handed it to her, keeping the stream aimed at the lawn.

“Now hold still,” Grandma said.

The spray hit my chest and my breath caught in my throat from the sudden shock of the cold water. I pulled off my shirt and flung it to the side. Then I bent down to rip off my shoes. Grandma aimed the spray at the top of my head and for a moment all I could hear was the water hitting my scalp. It didn’t feel so cold anymore.

Later, as I stood dripping on the top steps, Grandma affectionately wrapped a towel around my shoulders. I pulled it together across my chest and met her gaze. “I … I’m just trying to do the right thing,” I said.

She nodded, taking a smaller towel and vigorously drying my hair. “That’s all you can do. And if you ever need any help, you just holler.”

“Thanks, Grandma.”

“Now get in there and take a shower. You need it.”

SATURDAY

CHAPTER 14

I wanted to say to hell with it and sleep in a little the next morning, but Grandma knocked softly on the bedroom door around seven and said quietly, “Arch? You up?”

“I’m up, I’m moving,” I said thickly. For a moment, I thought I’d overslept again and was late for work. And right around then everything from the night before came flooding back, collecting into seared images behind my eyes. The pit. Rotting steers. The worm thing trying to eat into my hand. Junior and his chainsaw. Intestines and worms spilling out all over the table. After all that, I wasn’t exactly in a rush to get to work.

“Yeah, I’m up.”

“You think you could thin out the squirrels a little? Little bastards have damn near eaten all of my squash and since the corn’s getting ripe, they’re just going to get worse. I’d keep an eye on things, but I promised Peg I’d take her some tomatoes.”

Peg was Grandma’s closest, well, her only friend really. She lived down the road about a mile and a half, and scratched out a living by raising mean, thin chickens. Once, when Peg chopped the head off of one of the chickens with a wood axe, I swear that headless chicken ran around for a full five minutes before the body realized that the head wasn’t attached and it was supposed to be dead. Even when it finally toppled over, it fought death the whole way, flapping its wings and kicking up a cloud of blood and dust. Grandma was always trading vegetables for eggs and headless, plucked chickens. I figured that half the time, the trading was just an excuse to get together and puff on their dead husbands’ pipes, filling the chicken yard with sweet-smelling blue smoke. Peg couldn’t walk too well, even worse than Grandma, so they always met at her house.

“Sure, Grandma. I got the time.”

“You still going into work?”

“I gotta, Grandma.”

She nodded and gave me a glimmer of a smile. “You take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

Grandma nodded and shut the door.

I slipped out of bed and took another long, hot shower, scrubbing my skin until it was a bright shade of pink. I stayed in there until the water had gone cold, and only then reluctantly climbed out.

Grandma had dug a pair of Grandpa’s old black boots out from somewhere and set them in the hall. There was no sign of my tennis shoes, and I figured it was for the best. Grandpa’s boots were a little big, but with two pairs of socks, the creased leather molded around my feet just fine.

A giant tomato and onion omelet was waiting for me on the counter in the kitchen. After last night, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever be hungry again, but I surprised myself and inhaled the breakfast.

I checked the clock. Seven-thirty. It was time for a few squirrels to meet their maker. I opened the front hall closet. More than two dozen boxes of shells were stacked neatly on the floor next to the encyclopedias. I could remember when the closet was full of Grandpa’s guns: Winchesters, Rugers, Remingtons, a couple of Browning shotguns, a Colt 1911 .45, and even an ancient Model 1885 High Wall single shot. They were all gone, all sold to pay for rent and food. Grandma cried when she had to sell the Highwall rifle, Grandpa’s favorite. That was the only time I ever saw Grandma cry.

All that remained was the Browning .10 gauge shotgun and Grandpa’s Springfield 30.06, the two guns Grandma refused to sell. I grabbed a box of shells and the rifle case. Nestled in threadbare red imitation velvet waited my grandfather’s 30.06. Bolt action, with a five-round clip. Walnut stock. Iron sights, grooved slots of metal at the end of the barrel.

I never liked using scopes. Looking through a scope always made me feel sort of disconnected from the rifle somehow. I felt much more comfortable sighting down the barrel, through the iron sights. It felt as if the rifle and I were working together, instead of screwing a chunk of glass on the top and using that to find your target. You never knew where the scope was aiming; if it was off just a little, you wouldn’t know it, you couldn’t feel it, but by sighting down the barrel, you knew roughly where you were putting the bullet. For long-distance shots, I used a pair of binoculars, just to double-check that the tiny brown blur in the distance was, in fact, a squirrel and not just a knotted root. Shells were too expensive to waste on killing a piece of wood.

The second reason was that using a scope felt too much like cheating.

The term “thirty-aught-six” simply meant that the rifle was a thirty caliber, that is, 308 thousandths of an inch wide, and the aught-six signified the year it was invented—1906. Besides loading her own shotgun shells, Grandma also kept me supplied with plenty of shells for the 30.06, using a 150-grain bullet, propelled by 52 grains of 4064 Dupont powder. This was a deer-hunting load, a huge load to inflict on the squirrels, but Grandma never changed or reduced it. For one thing, that was how Grandpa had set up his loading bench and dies, and Grandma got nostalgic about things like that.

The other was that she felt kind of sorry for the squirrels, even though they weren’t anything but country rats—these weren’t cute, fluffy gray tree squirrels, just disease-ridden rodents that lived in giant colonies of tunnels in the dirt.

“I won’t let them eat my garden, but I don’t see any need making ’em suffer either,” Grandma said.

Well, the squirrels sure didn’t suffer much when hit by a 150-grain bullet. They never even knew what hit them; the bullet usually just turned them inside out instantly. One second, they’re sniffing around in dust, and the next, they’re climbing that great oak tree up into the sky. They never felt much of anything.

Still, I can’t say I enjoyed killing them. I liked shooting, loved it, lived for it most days, but I never thought drawing blood when you pulled the trigger was much of a sport. It was too easy. I’d rather just throw some old golf ball as far as I could toward the foothills and shoot at that for a while. But we had to protect our food.