Rough Animals
Page 25
And if you’d grown up that way, in the dark of the woods and under the stars that shivered in the sweat on your face beside the dog gnawing rawhide and the father chewing tobacco, drawing blood to live and to breathe and chopping trees as if they were made of the same stuff as cattle, then maybe you could run through it, like coyotes or maybe even wolves, with a shadow like the one cast from her skirts. You could run through it and the trees might bend after you with the reachings of the men locked inside, and they might break out of there and they might not, but you’d have teeth to show them or hooves to hurtle away, and the land would sigh and go back to the slow decomposing it always had. But what was growing old anyway, if not a decomposition, and if you could hold off the land you could hold off that end forever. Be renewed, wash the blood off your face, with a new spring of cattle and crops again and again and again. He was home.
Lucy was standing in the kitchen and set down the pistol when he walked in.
He took the cash from his pockets and laid it in stacks on the counter in front of her as she watched him, then took her hand by the wrist, upturned it, and placed the rabbit’s jaw in her palm.
She looked back at him, knew. Closed her fingers around it.
He came around the counter to stand beside her and they stared out the window, to where the ground by the hill was closing now, five years after, like the hole healing in his arm.
Thank you to my agents, Jonny Geller and Chris Clemans—I am grateful every day for the privilege of working with you. To editors Maxim Brown and Cal Barksdale. To my Curtis Brown Creative classmates, who were there from this story’s inception and saw it through to its final shape. To Julian Robertson and the Robertson Scholars Leadership Program community—the gift of your support, in all of its forms, is the foundation of my work. To my father, my first editor. To my sister and mother and my family, extended—I’m damn proud to be a DelBianco. To Julia Glass, Jim Shepard, Douglas Brunt, Joshua Ferris, Philipp Meyer, and Roger Reeves. To Joe Tam for woodworking what became the cover. To Coach Alex for teaching me, and by proxy the girl, how to fight. To Professor Victor Strandberg—had you not first taught me to be a reader, I could not have become a writer. To Professors Nancy Armstrong and Daniel Wallace. To my Tin House Summer Workshop family, for challenging and inspiring in equal parts. To Angela, for everything. To Jakob, Emilia, Marcus, Sebastien, Jaisal, Sterling, Nils, Margaret, Gene, Justin, Christina, Paul, Newton, Devin, Ashok, Marith, West; because we have scarce opportunities to put our appreciation of our friends in print, so I’ll do it here. To the reading community on Instagram, for their unrelenting support. And to the one who opened her spare room and her life to me for the past three years so that I could pursue the novel—thank you chickie.