Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson

Author:Ash Davidson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

COLLEEN

Rain pelted the truck, windshield a blur, even on fast wipe. The downpour had let loose almost as soon as they’d left Helen’s.

“You waited out front the whole time?” Colleen quizzed Chub.

Chub nodded. Rich had never forgotten him before. Should she check the mill lot? Gail would have said if something had happened, wouldn’t she? Worry pulsed in Colleen’s mind—Please, please—so consuming that when she bounced up the driveway and saw his truck parked out front, it took a moment for anger to leak in. Chub disappeared to his room.

Rich was laid out on top of the bedspread, still in his work clothes.

“You forgot Chub?” she demanded.

“I’ve got a hell of a headache.” Rich squinted at her, dropped his head back onto the pillow.

“A headache? You forgot your son.”

“I put my shoulder out,” Rich explained. “They blocked the road off. ‘Save Damnation Grove.’ ”

“Again?” she asked. He reached for the painkillers on the nightstand. “You’re only supposed to take two.” She picked the extras out of his palm, snatched the empty water glass, filled it at the bathroom sink, and thrust it back.

“Thanks. You okay?” he asked.

She should have been furious with him still—buying that land and not telling her—but here were the tears she’d been holding back since she’d seen the swaddle hanging over the side of the crib at Helen’s.

He lifted his good arm. “Come here.”

She crawled in. He raked hair out of her eyes. He smelled of sawdust and gasoline. He took her hand, guided it to the egg.

“What happened?” she asked.

“For a bunch of pacifists, they got a funny way of showing it.”

She slid her hand down the side of his neck.

“Up on the Rib today,” Rich said, “there were these three dead deer, just laid out in a clearing. Not a scratch on them—” He shifted uncomfortably, hissed air through his teeth. “I really did a number on it this time.”

She helped him out of his shirt, cupped her hand over the swollen lump on his head, like she could heal it.

Once Rich fell asleep, she went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet below the junk drawer, and removed a single jam jar, a masking-tape label across the lid—Daniel’s scrawl, handwriting she recognized from the lab notes she’d sometimes helped him type up, from the little pad he’d kept in his pocket to jot down things to look up at the library later, but never, not once, from a letter addressed to her. She’d thought the label would say her name, but it read only DC-31. She unscrewed the gold ring, pried off the canning lid underneath, filled it at the tap, closed it tight, and labeled it, 11/22/77, then slid it back into the cupboard. If Rich could gamble on seven hundred acres of trees, refuse to tell her what it cost, she could do this.

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