Free Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories by Ron Rash

closer to him. “My bleed time is near over.”
    Sinkler smelled the honeysuckle and desire swamped him. He tried to clear his mind and come up with reasons to delay but none came.
    “We’ll leave in the morning,” Sinkler said.
    “All right,” she said, touching him a moment longer before removing her hand.
    “We’ll have to travel light.”
    “I don’t mind that,” Lucy said. “It ain’t like I got piddling anyway.”
    “Can you get me one of his shirts and some pants?”
    Lucy nodded.
    “Don’t pack any of it until tomorrow morning when he’s in the field,” Sinkler said.
    “Where are we going?” she asked. “I mean, for good?”
    “Where do you want to go?”
    “I was notioning California. They say it’s like paradise out there.”
    “That’ll do me just fine,” Sinkler said, then grinned. “That’s just where an angel like you belongs.”
    The next morning, he told Vickery that the Sorrelses’ well was going dry and he’d have to backtrack to the other one. “That’ll be almost a mile jaunt for you,” Vickery said, and shook his head in mock sympathy. Sinkler walked until he was out of sight. He found himself a marker, a big oak with a trunk cracked by lightning, then stepped over the ditch and entered the woods. He set the buckets by a rotting stump, close enough to the oak tree to be easily found if something went wrong. Because Sinkler knew that, when it came time to lay down or fold, Lucy might still think twice about trusting someone she’d hardly known two weeks, and a convict at that. Or the husband might notice a little thing like Lucy not gathering eggs or not putting a kettle on for supper, things Sinkler should have warned her to do.
    Sinkler stayed close to the road, and soon heard the clink of leg chains and the rasp of shovels gathering dirt. Glimpses of black and white caught his eye as he made his way past. The sounds of the chain gang faded, and not long after that the trees thinned, the barn’s gray planking filling the gaps. Sinkler did not enter the yard. Lucy stood just inside the farmhouse door. He studied the shack for any hint that the farmer had found out. But all was as it had been, clothing pinned on the wire between two trees, cracked corn spilled on the ground for the chickens, the axe still on the porch beside the hoe. He angled around the barn until he could see the field. The farmer was there, hitched to the horse and plow. Sinkler called her name and Lucy stepped out on the porch. She wore the same muslin dress and carried a knotted bedsheet in her hand. When she got to the woods, Lucy opened the bedsheet and removed a shirt and what was little more than two flaps of tied leather.
    “Go over by the well and put these brogans on,” Lucy said. “It’s a way to fool them hounds.”
    “We need to get going,” Sinkler said.
    “It’ll just take a minute.”
    He did what she asked, checking the field to make sure that the farmer wasn’t looking in their direction.
    “Keep your shoes in your hand,” Lucy said, and walked toward Sinkler with the shirt.
    When she was close, Lucy got on her knees and rubbed the shirt cloth over the ground, all the way to his feet. Smart of her, Sinkler had to admit, though it was an apple-knocker kind of smart.
    “Walk over to the other side of the barn,” she told him, scrubbing the ground as she followed.
    She motioned him to stay put and retrieved the bedsheet.
    “This way,” she said, and led him down the slanted ground and into the woods.
    “You expect me to wear these all the way to Asheville?” Sinkler said after the flapping leather almost tripped him.
    “No, just up to the ridge.”
    They stayed in the woods and along the field’s far edge and then climbed the ridge. At the top Sinkler took off the brogans and looked back through the trees and saw the square of plowed soil, now no bigger than a barn door. The farmer was still there.
    Lucy untied the bedsheet and handed him the pants and shirt. He took