The priest was droning on inexorably toward “till death do us part,” and Anna began to get nervous. At some point over the years, the well-worn phrase had come to feel more like a sinister threat than a romantic promise. Death had parted Anna from her husband years ago...
Local politics, for all that it seemed small-time to outsiders, carried much of the same low-down, mud-slinging, high-stakes ramifications as a bid for the presidency.
The first order of business was light. Having threaded her way through the clutter to the bay window, she threw open the heavy drapes and was rewarded by a shower of dust. A spider, her web disarranged probably for the first time in generations, ran for cover. She was small and not overly alarming so Anna let her live. The sheers were opened next. Though Anna did not handle them with undue violence one of them tore, the fabric so old it had become almost as fragile as the spider’s web. The window shade was last. Finally, to Anna’s relief, there was light. It had been in her mind to throw wide the casement and let in the rejuvenating air of autumn, but one look at the paint-encrusted sill convinced her it wasn’t worth the time and effort. She turned back to the room. When the library had been forced into use as a bedroom no changes had been made, no closet added, a bed had just been jammed up against one of the built-ins. The books were long gone, and the cases were used to house an eclectic collection of the deceased’s belongings.
The bed, a single that looked as if it had survived Doyce’s childhood in the 1950s, was unmade. Blankets were tangled in a ball and the bottom sheet had come loose, exposing the mattress ticking. Adolescents were prone to crawling into nests of that sort rather than taking the trouble to make things neat. In an adult it spoke of a disregard or disrespect for one’s self. An unwelcome memory bloomed behind Anna’s eyes. After Zach had died there’d come months she’d retired to just such a bed night after night. Usually fully dressed. Often too drunk to care. She shook off the image.
It didn’t surprise her Doyce lived as he did. From what little she’d seen, she didn’t need a degree in psychiatry to know this was a seriously dysfunctional family. The clothes scattered over the floor and the room’s one chair told her little but that Doyce favored sweatpants, T-shirts and camo-patterned army fatigues. She supposed the former to be for at-home lounging and the latter for more formal occasions. Half a dozen snapshots, unframed but propped up against old sneakers and a half-empty box of rifle shells, showed Doyce in his finery. He and two other men, also in full camouflage dress, posed around the empty-eyed carcass of a deer. The rifles were equipped with night scopes. The men had traces of blacking on their faces, aping commandos on night maneuvers. Anna shook her head. The stealth and technology men put behind stalking a timid herbivore with the cognitive capacity of an eighteen-month-old child mystified her. She turned the photos over but luck was not with her; no names had been scrawled on the backs. Still, she slipped one in her pocket for future use. Chances were good at least one if not all of his hunting buddies would also be a poker-playing buddy. The room offered up little else. Doyce’s personal life was evidently centered on eating and sleeping. There were no books, only magazines, two on hunting. A third, imperfectly hidden behind a shoebox half full of loose change, matchbooks and spent shotgun cartridges, was a Penthouse from August 1998.
The little things that tell of life and interests, checkbooks, letters, lists, pictures, gifts from friends and family, were missing. The door pushed open and Raymond “Digger” Barnette shoved his long face into the room. “Are you about finished up?” he asked. “I need to get back up and see how Mama’s doing.” “Finished,” Anna said. She fished the snapshot of the hunters from her pocket. “Mind if I take this?” Raymond looked at it for a long time as if seeking to see if there was anything objectionable in it. “Go ahead,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll get it back to you,” Anna promised. “Keep it.” Anna buttoned the photo back in her pocket.
Clintus met her in the foyer. “Anything?” he asked as Raymond hovered around, trying to urge them out the door. “Not much,” Anna admitted. “You?” “A phone message left last night at six-forty-nine. ‘Hey Doyce, Herm, you up for it? Come on down,”’ the sheriff recited, dropping into a heavy southern drawl that made Anna smile. “A place to start,” he said. “There’s just not that many Hermans in this part of the country.” Raymond saw them to the front door, then closed it behind them. Anna trotted down the front steps and suppressed an urge to spread her arms like wings, turn her face to the sky and spin in the childhood dance celebrating life, air and the sun.
The misery embedded in the house wasn’t static. It lived and grew. Anna could feel it like a fungus on her skin. The touch of the sun burned it away. Clintus didn’t dance but he tilted his face to the light then rubbed it with both palms as if he washed in light. “I’d never been inside before,” he said. “Man. If this had been a suicide I doubt I’d even of questioned it.” “There’s not enough Prozac in the world to induce me to live like that,” Anna said. She’d seen dumps before. Clintus would have, too. Places eaten away by poverty or neglect. Rooms and buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property. It wasn’t the disarray downstairs or the absence of light and fresh air that had struck at Anna. The Barnette house was closed up, shut off in some way. Keeping in old pain and old pride. Shutting out a flow of life that, in normal circumstances, would bring new emotions, new interests, to replace those time had used up. The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of Great Expectations, of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms. The analogy wasn’t quite right, but as Anna did not choose to think any more about it, it would have to stand until she came up with something better.
“Ish,” she said as they fled for the second time to the sheriff’s patrol car. Clintus was in, and as Anna reached for the door handle, she was stopped by a faint insistent beeping. Because of the bleak mental landscape the house had engendered, a sudden picture of bombs, the kind favored by filmmakers, with the last seconds ticking away before the explosion, filled her mind. Standing stock-still, she listened. The beeping came from Raymond Barnette’s Cadillac, a shining heap of Detroit iron painted, as befitted his calling, as funeral-black as any hearse. “Hang on a second,” she said to Clintus through the open window...
~~~~~~
If I read just for my own pleasure, I'd be reading complete series of those authors who have become my favorite writers. Barr is one of those. But I read, often to provide as many writers who gain some type of response to each and every book I've read since starting over 20 years ago... I believe God had this ready for me when I went into Job Burnout and was forced to retire for my own health--NOT because of what had been done to incite that job burnout...
So I was somewhat surprised in the book, Hunting Season, when Anna was now in an administrative position instead of roaming free to deal with those who have no regard for our environment and she, as a Park Ranger, was one who was out there working hard to ensure laws were followed...
Was it a purposeful shift? I didn't immediately think so...and was disappointed... But then, why should a successful Ranger not get a promotion? Key reason I pondered? Anna was clearly not enjoying being in her position... So, for now, let's just continue with a new case which necessarily included the local sheriff. A Murder. A murder by a clearly mentally challenged individual, or, one that had been staged...
Me, I wasn't ready to say about that, but I was willing to have chosen the villain by that time... Sometimes I lose, but many times I'm right as to which character is likely to be criminally inclined...
The setting, at least for me, played a big part... in the story...
Well, folks, graveyards, illegal hunting, harassment, and southern people who just can't get over the facts that they lost a war (and their slaves) who made money from them, together with an actual murder, a grave robbing and reburial--all add up to an historical novel that quite simply is not only intriguing but, unfortunately, also reminiscent of today's headlines where white supremacists seem to be working to remake the United States into a world where all non-white people will either join a cult or once again be forced to fight for freedom... Yeah, since my eyes were open in 2015, I tend to recognize the bad guys are far too many to still be hating those who offend them in some way, and pull in others to support that hate in strange and dangerous ways... Especially when the good ole boys are huge in comparison to Anny Pigeon... Funny about that, though, with brains, brawn still doesn't win unless using weapons of mass destruction used like we've never seen before... Or, rather recently...
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