Mean Season by Heather Cochran

Author:Heather Cochran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Dress Ink
Published: 2004-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

Day 36: the Fourth of July

Our backyard in Pinecob looked like this: you’d come out of the house through a sliding door in the back of the dining room, onto a deck Tommy had built years before. Nothing big, but it held a couple of chairs and one of those plastic all-weather tables. Then two steps down, you’d be in the backyard, with grass that Beau Ray kept mowed. Our backyard was much bigger than our front. It ran the length of the house and was maybe twenty-five, thirty feet across. At the far side stood a cluster of pine and oak trees that had felt to me like a deep, dark forest when I was little. Once I was older, it seemed more like a glen, protected and shady but tame, so that I stopped expecting to run across Bambi or Thumper in there.

A narrow ditch paralleled the far side of the trees, and after that rolled the big expanse of Brown’s Field. Brown’s Field was always called that, though officially its name was “the West Ridge field” and it was county land, facts I learned through my job at the clerk’s office. At the far edge of the field sat the Pinecob Elks Lodge and VFW building.

All the time I’d lived there, people rarely hung out in Brown’s Field. Teenagers would mess around in there on and off after dark (at least, I did, when I was one), and on Memorial Day and Veterans’ Day, the men from the VFW would host a big spaghetti dinner and bingo raffle, and pull tables out to the field’s edge. The only other time it regularly saw traffic was on the Fourth of July. The way the field sloped made it a good place to watch the fireworks that were annually set off over at the elementary school.

Beau Ray loved fireworks, and we’d spent many July fourths over at Brown’s, a blanket spread out on the gangly grass. That’s what I’d planned to do that year, too, though I’d figured on using lounge chairs instead of the usual blankets, since that Fourth of July was set to be soggy. It had rained the whole day before, and the sun had only broken through around three on the afternoon of the Fourth. Momma had gone to Elkins to visit Susan and the kids, so I was expected to stick close to home.

“Leanne, I expect you to keep the house from burning down” was how Momma said goodbye. You might think that we kept a fire stoked twenty-four hours by the frequency of that admonition. But far as I knew, our family hadn’t ever suffered a fire, and there was no great Pinecob burn to warrant her worry either. Paulie’s family once lost an outbuilding to fire, but that was because his father had been burning trash in a barrel, gone inside for a cold one and got distracted by a playoff football game on the television (another reason Momma had for disliking television).

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