Read Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) for Free Online Page B

out of my way.”
    â€œWhy do you always have to be so mean to him?” his mother asked. “Now he’s gone off somewhere to pout.”
    â€œLet him pout,” the boy said. “At least I won’t be tripping over him all afternoon.”
    After lunch, the work resumed. Bales were stacked eight deep on top of the sleeping child. Impossible to believe that a boy could sleep through that, except that it had happened. They never would have found him till the next summer but for the mother’s dream three days after the boy disappeared. She shook her husband, Walter, awake and told him, “He’s in the hay.” Walt Rose was a serious man who knew not to doubt his wife. He left his other sons to sleep, then single-handedly tossed two hundred bales of hay down onto the barn floor. By dawn, when he pulled the last one aside, the coroner was waiting in the kitchen.
    But not this time, not for Jesse. Besides, the heat in the loft was getting to Gatesman. The air was both heavy and dry, sitting like sand in Gatesman’s chest. He let himself down the ladder, returned outside, swung the door shut, and latched it. The exterior air was cool in comparison and soothing to his eyes. You never could’ve made it as a farmer, he told himself. He walked along the side of the barn, following the rutted wagon path to where it ended at the gate to a fenced-in pasture.
    Everywhere he went, Gatesman carried with him the tragedies of his county. He was in his sixteenth year as sheriff, and ever since Patrice’s and Chelsea’s deaths in the September of his third year, he seemed to retain the miseries too vividly. People got married and had babies and won lotteries and fishing tournaments and got their grinning faces in the paper, but it was the car wrecks and house fires and bar knifings that stuck with him, the suicides and beatings, the pregnant young wife who fell over dead in her yard from an aneurysm, the Amish carpenter who raped his twelve-year-old daughter. Life’s happy moments, he imagined, were of a lighter nature and tended to float away from him, pretty but momentary butterflies that soon caught an updraft and sailed away. The pain of life, on the other hand, clung to him ounce by ounce, incident by incident. When his wife and daughter rolled over an embankment on that wet, foggy night, he had weighed one hundred ninety-two pounds. Since then, he had gained an average of four pounds per year. Exercise didn’t help and neither did diet, mainly because he practiced neither of them. By his calculations, he could hold his job another five years, another twenty pounds of accumulated misery, then retire to a mountain cabin with a moderate pension and a fighting chance of avoiding a heart attack before AARP started sending him recruitment letters.
    At the rear of the barn, the lower level opened onto a fenced-in pasture of approximately fifteen acres. Gatesman stood against the plank fence and gazed across the high weeds to the other side and to the row of trees beyond. No cows had grazed in that pasture for several years, not since the auction a year before Old Bert packed up for Kansas City. Scattered among the weeds were spindly, top-heavy umbrellas of Queen Anne’s lace and yellow splashes of wild mustard. Running through these weeds was a skinny, sinuous path, still fresh enough that the weeds, heavy from last night’s rain, had not sprung back up to conceal it; but the path was so arbitrary and directionless, no clear aim to its weaving, circling convolutions, that it certainly had not been cut by a boy who, coming out of the trees, bored with waiting for something to shoot at, had wandered across the corn stubble to the fence, then had slipped between the flat boards to make his way to the open entrance at the back of the barn. More like a stray dog chasing a rabbit, Gatesman surmised, because of the quick darting and zigzagging movements a terrified rabbit would make. And