Free Half Wild by Robin MacArthur

fly dust. I looked out the window at the marbled cow field and line of shaggy trees and the brown hill and salmon-colored blushing sky. Something moved and I thought for a moment it was Jack, coming toward me, waving something bright in the sun, but it was just a scrap of torn plastic caught on some weeds at the edge of the field. I got out of the car and walked home. I lay in bed listening to “Helpless” over and over until the sun hit the top of my mother’s pines. A week later I got accepted to college in Illinois. Since then I’ve been all over: Mexico, Canada, California. No place is like I imagined. Love is different too.

6
GOD’S COUNTRY
    Cora doesn’t know much about her town these days, but she knows her grandson Kevin is one of the ones painting the signs and hanging them up by the side of the roads. She knows because he came and knocked on her door a few months back and asked if he could use the barn—said that he and his buddies had some projects they were working on—and since then she’s seen them unloading old pieces of plywood, a few cans of paint, six-packs of beer. They park their jacked-up trucks in her driveway and spend a few hours at a time in there with the lights on, a boom box playing country music she can hear through her closed kitchen windows. When they come out they are grinning, feisty, the way her own boys looked after they’d done something they shouldn’t have, like lock a kitten in the washing machine or cut the hair off their sister’s dolls: that kind of look. Cora can recognize it evenfrom where she sits at her kitchen window sipping her coffee. Not that she’d tell a soul.
    Kevin is a nice boy. In two days he will turn eighteen, and she has decided to tell him, on his birthday, her hope that someday he will take over this farm, what’s left of it. She always thought her sons would farm here, but one was killed in Khe Sahn and the other moved as far away as possible with no desire to return, and so she hopes that Kevin will; in summer he mows her lawn once a week, in winter he shovels her path, and every spring he helps her take the storm windows down. His mother, Cora’s daughter, Stacey, lives in a mobile home down the road with one man or another, and so Cora has always had a soft spot for Kevin: the towhead, the one she used to invite over after school for fresh bread with butter, the one who called her Grandma Thora until he was ten, before they taught him to say his hard c ’s. A sweet boy. Which is why she thinks there must be some reason for the signs. Something she doesn’t know about. Not that she knows much at all anymore.
    That much is clear this morning reading the paper. She’s pushed her coffee cup aside and sits at her kitchen table reading the story about the signs and thinking about the blacks she’s seen here; she sees them when she goes to the IGA or to the drugstore, and every time a small part wonders why they would want to come to a place like this, a place where they have no roots. None of their own people. Lord knows it’s not the jobs.
    The article is front-page, the headline in bold. It says they have found two signs, rough plywood with spray paint, nailed to trees along one of the two blacktop roads that run through their town. Both have said, GOD’S COUNTRY IS WHITE COUNTRY and have had an undeciphered acronym— NHR —scrawled at the bottom. The last paragraph says there is a police investigation, that if anyone knows anything, they are supposed to call. Good Lord. But she won’t call; she hasn’t seen a thing, really.
    She looks up from the table and out her kitchen window. It’s her favorite view: ragged fields stretching down to the valley of Silver Creek, then leaping upward into Round Mountain, raging with October color, and beyond that, blue with distance, the silent hills of New Hampshire. The view she’s known her whole life. The hills she calls