In the summertime, the mountains of Franklin can be seen a good stretch from the outskirts of town. Bass fill the river to the brim, and the water is a clear blue, the type of blue which makes a guy think he can look right through it and into the ground yonder. The sunlight dances on the peaks well into the early eve, and the fields surrounding the town are yellow with barley and suchlike. In the wintertime, the mountains disappear into the abys, engulfed by the vicious weather and looking like giant gateways to hell in the nighttime. The winter wind makes such a noise that some folk liken it to the cry of the wolves over in Fayetteville.
Marsh and Roderick stand in the driveway of the station, the fog thickening around their ankles. The wind from over the mountains brings a harsh scent of swampland from the west. They watch as a pintail flees across the path, disappearing underneath the shelter of a birch and out through a hedgerow. Its feet leave imprints in the snow, like miniscule marks on a blank canvas. “We’ll take the truck,” Roderick mutters, lighting a cigarette and kicking at a pebble. “I’ll be damned if I’m driving that car up to the George’s. Hell, we’ll never be back down again.”
Marsh looks towards the blue speckled pickup truck. Its flanks are covered in mud and the windows are scratched up something awful. He remembers the time when the boys brought it up from town, pushed it all the way from the creek and over the big hill at the Saunders’ ranch. A bunch of good-for-nothing sons-of-bitches, he’d thought, as they’d stood proudly observing the scene, the freshly painted automobile with slightly severed parts, in all her glory. Ten men, it took that day, to shift the thing through town. He’d sat on a rock with a cigar and watched the parts come off, the engine be torn to pieces, the disheveled tyres be hurriedly thrown out and replaced by new ones. It was a hot July, with flies buzzing about like nobody’s business.
Back in the days before the fire, when a certain stillness prospered over the town, the boys talked for hours over nothing. There was work to be done, sure, but the atmosphere was different. These days, it was like a man couldn’t relax around here. Somebody was always making a business over something, like they couldn’t leave be what should be dead and buried. It happened that time of the silly hanging of 1850. Three men slung up on a tree in the Monongahela, and no one had a clue who was responsible. People were sneaking around all over the place after that, watching their backs like there was something about to creep up on them and swallow them whole.
The Em Word 