Free Circle View by Brad Barkley Page B

in winter as it hacks chunks from the mahogany of her dining room table, the apple press that he’d made from it. He walks back in, his hand bloodied with the gash from the hatchet. Without speaking he is out the front door and into the orchard. She makes the front window just in time to see him grab the first peacock he comes to and drag it by its tail from the low branches of the apple tree, put his boot on its neck and hack the bird in half. He tosses the tail into the yard while the bird twitches under the tree. He takes them one by one, in the calm of work, as if he is pruning branches. They screech and flap, then are caught by the blade, their noise hacked off just as sudden, their iridescent tails tossed away like sheaves of winter wheat.
    Ten of them dead in the thin shade of the young trees, then Garrett stops and turns to look at her looking at him through the window, where it seems she has stood for six years, waiting for this to happen. He is dressed in blood, the bits of feathers shimmering green like sequins along his arms. She is glad to God then for Garrett Junior not home, for the school she knows he has skipped with the money he has stolen from the tobacco jar to play pool or watch movies in town, and she knowing for these six years and not telling. She thinks of telling Garrett now, reminding him of what he’d given up or lost in Japan, that his place is at the head of a family and not at the head of an orchard, that there is discipline to hand out. That boy, he’d say if she told, and smile admiring the trouble a son will find. When Garrett starts toward the house he is running, the hatchet loose in his hand. She steps onto the porch wearing the housecoat he had bought her when he was happiest about his apples, silk and blue-green, Garrett telling her in nighttime whispers it was the kind of present he should have brought her from Japan—the kind the other men brought to their wives and girlfriends—if only he could have found his way out of his sadness to do it. She opens her arms to him and then sees the hatchet and the emptiness in his face, and in that moment all her muted love for him is bubbled out by fear, and she turns so that the belt of the housecoat catches on a nail on the porch rail post and tears loose, slipping its loops. She runs in through the house and hides herself behind the wingback chair in the den. She hears Garrett crawl under their bed, hears him find the box, and in the silence that follows she knows that he is tossing her letters one-by-one across the quilt on the bed, their sound almost silence, like the sound of snow hitting the windowpanes, and she knows then that he is gone already and that this tossing of the letters, not tearing them, not throwing, is the last gentle thing he will do. In the noise of the singing of the trees what has not been kept, not sung nor said, is the sound of the pistol shot, its edges softened by palate and cheek and closed lips—a noise long since let go, scattered and blown away like papers caught up in a windstorm.
    The doorbell rings and Etta thinks of Garrett home from war, no telegram or letters to warn her, ringing the bell of his own house as if her not answering it would send him away. Silly Garrett , she says when he walks in with his duffel bag and sunken eyes, Garrett Junior climbing his legs while Garrett’s arms remain stiff at his sides. She opens the door and the tinny voice that comes from her says again Silly Garrett , while the boy in the red lightning hat, his face powdered with wood, wipes the sweat from his neck with the back of his hand.
    â€œThey’re cut,” he says, “but they’re not down.” He blows his nose into his fingers, and his fingers pull away bloody. “Saw kept kicking on me,” he says.
    Behind him she sees the crabapple trees tall against the sky, their leaves full of voices, the five blackened trunks.
    â€œI’d like you to take down those trees,”