Chapter 5

At 5:40 Saturday morning I walked out to the burn barrel with the yard light still on and the sleet finished and the sky in the east gone that hard, bright, cold blue that means the day is going to hurt.

Nora was standing at the barrel with the diesel can in both hands.

She'd already got the top off. She had it tipped, and the first splash was on the boards, and the mash of old cardboard in that barrel was soaked black.

I took it out of her hands.

She fought me. My nine-year-old daughter fought me in the slush with her fists, and she wasn't crying, she was furious, the kind of furious I've only ever seen in my own mirror, and she got one good hit in on my arm and I got the can away and set it behind me and held her by the shoulders.

"Stop," I said. "Stop."

"If there's nothing to find he can't take it and say you made it up!" she shouted. "You'll lose the yard! You'll lose everything and then you'll give me to Miss Charlene and I'll be there!"

I went down on my knees in the mud in front of her.

She told me the rest of it standing over me. The key off his ring so the cellar door wouldn't open and she could sleep. The belt that lived on the nail in the parts loft. The hose on the wall in bay 2. The counting, because he counts so he doesn't lose his place, and it's always under ten, and last night was seven.

And then she told me about November 2.

She'd come out to the shop to feed Rufus. She saw him push me on the stairs. She saw me go down and hit the landing and stay there a second before I got up and said it was my footing. She picked up my black cap off the floor while he was walking away and she put it in her crate two hours later.

I put my face in my hands in the freezing mud and I sobbed in front of my daughter, which is a thing I have never once done in her life, and I don't know how long it went on.

When I looked up she was standing there with her arms wrapped around herself.

"What if nobody believes us?" she said.

I stood up. I wiped my face with the back of my glove. I said, "Then we're going to make them watch."

At 8:15 it was twenty-six degrees and bright and the scrap line was six deep - six pickups and a flatbed and old Pruit with his gooseneck, exhaust plumes standing straight up in the cold. Ardith Pike's Corolla was parked by the scale house with the folder on the seat. Boyd Doss's cruiser was nosed up on the pad with him out of it, standing by the door with his arms folded, because I'd asked, and because he's the kind of man who shows up to something he means to keep small.

I carried the crate out of bay 2 and set it on the scale platform. Nineteen feet of steel plate, the only place in this county where a working man has to stand still in front of his neighbors.

Clay came out of the scale house with his coffee.

I opened the crate and I laid the things out in a row on the steel. The belt. The hose, doubled and taped. The yardstick, snapped. The padlock with no key. The three shirts, each in its own bag. My black cap.

Then I said, loud enough for the line, "Clay. Tell these men what these are."

He didn't miss a beat. He never has.

"That's my belt," he said. "That's my heater hose off the wall in bay two. That's a yardstick out of the scale house. And boys, I apologize for the wait, we'll have you on the scale in ten minutes."

Somebody in the line laughed.

He turned back to me with his hands out, palms up, reasonable, sad about it. "Roz. Honey. I know it's been a hard year." He said it right to them. "She's been taking things since she was little. She took forty dollars out of my console Thursday night. This is my wife's hard year talking and I'd appreciate you all giving her some room."

And I stood there and let him do it, because I'd promised myself I would not swing.

Then my daughter came out of the scale house in her blue hoodie and walked past all six trucks and stepped up onto the scale plate, and every man in that line went quiet, and she said, "Eleven."

Clay said, "Nora, go in the house."

She said it again, to the trucks. "Eleven months. He counts out loud so he doesn't lose his place. Last night was seven."

Then she turned around and pulled her hoodie up and her shirt up with it, and there it was, two days old and yellowing at the edges and still a band, and the whole pad could see it.

Clay's hand closed on her wrist.

Not hard. That's what I want written down. Not hard. He took her by the wrist the way you'd take a girl by the wrist to walk her inside, and he said her name low, and he pulled.

Six men stood on the pad with their trucks idling and not one of them moved, and Boyd Doss, standing eight feet away with his arms folded, saw his own cousin put his hand on a nine-year-old girl in front of the scrap line.

Boyd's face did the thing his face does.

I didn't go at Clay. I didn't say one word about what he'd done to me. I walked up to that deputy on my own gravel with my hands at my sides and I said, "Boyd. Do it here. In front of the trucks." I said, "You can have the crate all day. You can have the folder. You can have whatever you want, but you do it here."

Clay let go of her wrist.

For the first time in two years I watched that man not know what to do with his face, because every tool he owned - the money, the school, my temper, the deputy, the whole town's opinion of him - was standing in a line of idling pickups, waiting on the scale.

Boyd took out the cuffs.

They were there forty minutes. They photographed my daughter in the light of the scale house door and then drove her down to the hospital in Portsmouth and photographed her again in a room with a paper sheet on the table, and I stood in the corner with my coat on and watched a nurse's aide be gentle with her, which undid me worse than anything else that day.

By Sunday the phone had stopped ringing, which was the point. Two accounts pulled. The wrecker out of Greenup took the Saturday rotation. Somebody sprayed LIAR across the scale house door in red, and I let it dry, and left it up for a week, because it was the truth as far as the town was concerned and I was done arguing with the town.

Monday at ten a.m. I was in the courthouse annex with the crate in the truck outside and a lawyer I couldn't afford, and the adoption didn't happen, and it will never happen. In April, Clay pled out to endangering children with a no-contact order, largely on the strength of a carbon copy of a form one schoolteacher kept in a manila folder on the passenger seat of her Corolla, because the county's own October report still says unfounded, and that is going to be true for the rest of my life. Charlene came to the gate the Sunday after, asking to see her granddaughter, and I stood in the mudroom and didn't open it. She never said a word against her son, not once, to anybody. I don't expect her to.

I sold the rotator in June, and the tow rotation with it, and I took a job driving a gravel hauler out of two counties over, days, home by six. The yard's rented out to Pruit. It's smaller now, and so are we.

In April, on the bridge over the Ohio, coming back from the last hearing, Nora rolled her window down and picked at the red rubber band on her wrist until it came off, and held it over the rail.

"You don't have to do that anymore," I told her.

"I know," she said. "That's why."

She dropped it in the water, and we drove home.