Sunken Graves, Alan Lee [all ebook reader .txt] 📗

He drove home but didn’t park at the homestead. Instead he braked hard where the blacktop ended at his new barn, still under construction. Workers had left for the day, the worthless immigrants.

He flung his jacket into the trees. Enough blood had trickled down his beard to ruin the white shirt but he kept it on against the November chill. He stalked through the pine and naked oak to a little clearing he’d created himself with sweat and an ax. The clearing was dotted with stumps and great stacks of split logs, piled as high as his head. Two oaks were felled and ready for limbing.

Multiple black walnut trees surrounded the clearing. Towering and straight, they were worth as much as ten thousand dollars each, prized for furniture and gun stocks. Lynch was eager to chop the walnut down and burn them in his fireplaces. He might invite some Amish master craftsmen over to watch the valuable resources reduce to ash for no reason other than his pleasure. If black walnut was valuable then that’s what he wanted heating his house and the furniture artisans could go to hell.

By now his daughter would be home, driven by her Homer. But he couldn’t see her yet. Not like this.

Lynch rolled up his sleeves and foisted a heavy section of oak onto his chopping stump. He had a new ax but preferred the old maul, thirty-six inches, felling size, bigger than most men used to split wood. But he wasn’t most men.

He hefted the maul and busted the wood in half. Spit out blood. Picked up the two pieces and split them too. Left the maul buried and quivering in the chopping stump and hoisted another big section of oak trunk beside it.

Lynch fell into a rhythm that soon relieved pressure on his gums and his mind. He’d been forced to chop wood as a child. He’d despised it. Now, though he disliked manual labor and disliked getting dirty, it was an exercise that kept him sane. It was part of him. This and digging. Purgative violence, opening the flues of his mental smokestack. Sometimes he could do neither so he pressed the fish hook on his keychain into his thumb and the pain was good. A fish hook like the ones he used as a hungry child, desperate to catch food.

He wanted to chop Daniel Jennings into pieces but he couldn’t yet so he projected onto the wood. He imagined the man’s skull breaking open instead of the wet lumber. A spine cracking, not the log. Daniel Jennings’ bones splintering, his fingers scattering across the ground, not oak slivers.

He hated that they both wanted Daisy Hathaway.

He hated that they were both younger siblings.

He hated they both lived in the shadow of a brother who’d taken the more respected route.

Screamed at the similarities.

Hated that his own brother kept him at a distance. Hated himself for wishing he and Francis were closer—that decision often wasn’t the younger brother’s to make, and he hated that too.

The muscles in his powerful back and long arms bunching and releasing like pistons, his body a grotesque machine, and he filled the forest with echoes of his exertion.

Dusk settled into the forest like a depression and he finished chopping an hour later. Some of his callouses were cracked but overall he felt refreshed. Some hard-won freedom from the hate.

He needed to dig a deep hole in the field beyond the trees, where he knew the black earth was soft and free of rock for at least ten feet. Deeper the better, but those holes required eight hours of work with a Bobcat and shovel, so maybe tomorrow.

Homer Caldwell, his full-time help and the Giant Mongoloid, had been drawn by the noises. He waited outside the clearing and when he saw Lynch finish he filled a wheelbarrow with firewood for their seasoning shed. They didn’t speak to one another. Lynch stared at the dark field for several minutes before walking toward his Jaguar, dripping sweat. Caldwell watched him go, like a dog eager to please.

Lynch went in through the backdoor to avoid his daughter and he locked himself into the master bathroom. A room without mirrors—Lynch hated a lot of things and one was the sight of himself naked. He didn’t have hypertrichosis; he’d been tested as a teenager. The physician had said it was simple bad luck to be born the hairiest son of a bitch he’d ever seen.

It wasn’t until Lynch started to undress that he realized he still held the splitting maul in his left hand. He’d driven the car without noticing. He forced his fingers to release the haft and he dropped it in the corner, its sharp toe chipping the marble tile.

Coach Murray sat next to his wife on the couch. Last Chance U played on the television but neither watched. She was bent over a pair of khaki pants and she worked on the hem. Jamal would never stop growing, it seemed, but she liked the chore and she hummed to herself.

Murray’s laptop sat open on his thighs and a forgotten notepad on the couch’s armrest. He had intended to study video of Fishburne Military’s last game for the championship tomorrow. FMS was a powerhouse this year and privately he thought he’d be lucky to lose by only two touchdowns. The Academy had far and away exceeded his expectations but their luck was about to run out. Murray was a pragmatic man and he understood the odds.

He should be watching the video. But he wasn’t.

Instead, he was watching books fly at Jennings’ face in Hathaway’s classroom.

Instead, he was listening to Jennings’ calm resolve to do something.

Instead, he was already wondering what he’d do when Lynch fired him for losing the game. Wondering how he’d tell his wife.

He should be worrying about Fishburne Military. Instead, he was wondering if he could find a way to defeat Lynch, the more dangerous opponent.

Daisy Hathaway sat in her