.185.grain.injection.
They ask why we bury our dead miles from our farmlands. They ask why the animals behave strangely; why the birds fall from the sky and the dogs crawl along the ground. We don't tell them. We're simple folk, with no education in matters of biology. If they're wanting to know -- those people from the cities -- then let them come here with their technology.
Let them die here.
What I know is this; the disease comes from the ground. Like tetanus, like anthrax, it lives within the earth . . . and it lives within the dead.
Ricky was the only thing that kept me here. I said that to Cameron, and he toasted it with a sweating beer. "Amen, sister. Amen. Wait 'til you start squeezing out pups. Then you'll have twice the reason to stay and twice the reason to leave."
I swatted a mosquito off my neck. "Fat chance of that. The day I get pregnant is the day I leave this place."
"You'll get comfortable enough someday," he answered, and then he dealt another hand. "White wedding, house in the country, caring husband . . . three fourths of a dream ain't bad."
Cameron was right about that, just like he was right about a lot of other things. That man could forecast rain on a sunny day, and he knew every dark corner of the human heart. When I got myself pregnant, I fussed about it for months . . . but I fussed about it right here in this county.
I didn't leave for my unborn son anymore than I left for myself three years ago, when Ricky sat me down to explain just what got into the animals out here.
Cameron said it was only right that I pull the trigger. "If you're woman enough to live out here, then you can do what needs done. It's a wife's place. Ricky would've done it for you."
He stood beside me as the coronor reported the cause of death. "Internal bleeding," he said, looking past the shotgun blast that tore off half of Ricky's face.
I found a broken board in the barn, and a patch of bloodstained hay. Ricky fell from the loft. He fell badly, and after he died, he banged on the screen door.
"Let me in, Wendy. It's been a long day."
I can still hear his voice, hoarse and hollow. Something missing and gone, like he was forgetting what it meant to be Ricky. Forgetting, like the birds forget what it means to fly.
This was the place where it started.
I called down to those people, the ones that keep asking questions, and I told them about my farm. I asked if they could come and fix our land, and the polite man on the other end of the line, he reassured me they could.
And if they couldn't, then he'd give me an awful lot of money for the trouble.