thickening with all the hardships they had been through, or maybe the anxiety did it. Either way, the reassurance only lasted an instant.
She followed Will as he walked around the back of the barn and searched the grass for clues. Just like the day before, there wasn't a single sign that anything had been disturbed. There weren't even any signs of Tucker himself.
“Is it possible that he jumped out of the pen?” Will asked her.
“No. I've never seen him jump that high. Besides, why would the pen walls be that height if he could?”
Will frowned. “I don't know. I was just thinking out loud I guess.” He walked along the edge of the cornfield, periodically pulling stalks apart like blinds and peeking inside. “I just don't see any other tracks except the ones from them coming outside. There's nothing that seems to lead away from the barn.”
Ruby sighed heavily and leaned against a large blue plastic drum that they stored feed in. “He's gone, Will.”
He turned and looked at his wife, her eyes breaking his heart. How could he let her become so unhappy? How could he not figure things out and keep everyone safe?
“We can't just give up,” he said. “I'm going to go looking around. You can come if you want.”
Ruby shook her head. “I'm too tired,” she said. “I couldn't sleep at all last night. Every time I tried I had the nightmare over and over.”
Will frowned. “I didn’t know. You should’ve woke me.”
“Why?” she asked, “it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was nothing you could do and you needed your sleep anyway.”
This made Will feel terrible. Ruby now felt that what little he could do for her just by being there and offering any sort of support or comfort wasn’t even worth her time. He used to be her rock and she would come to him whenever there was a problem. Whenever she was upset about even the littlest things should would run to him. But then the anxiety reared its ugly head. It was more like a living entity than an incorrect way of thinking. It was dark and malicious, always hiding in the shadows and waiting for any opportunity to spring out and ruin a moment. Sometimes, to ruin every moment. The larger Ruby’s anxiety grew, the wider the hole between them grew as well, and before he even realized it, she was no longer coming to him with her problems. Before she would have run to him for everything, and now she was running away.
“I’m sorry,” he said. It was all he could think to say.
“I’m going to go back inside. I know you won’t find my goat.” And with that she turned and slowly walked back to the house.
Will wasn’t about to give up so easily. He went back into the barn and examined the gate to the goat pen. Latching and unlatching it over and over, he looked for any sign of weakness. As far as he could tell there weren’t any. Going inside, he ran around behind the goats and tried to get to them to jump.
“Come on you bastards,” he said. All he wanted to do was see if it was possible for one of them to leap the height of the gate. But no matter what he tried they just wouldn’t. No amount of yelling and waving his arms scared them enough to run for their lives.
Maybe they’re just used to me, he thought. A valid idea, so he decided not to waste any more time trying to scare them.
He walked around the outside of the barn looking for any sign that Tucker had wandered off. Hundreds of hooves cast impressions in the dirt around the yard, but they always kept to the same area. When the goats weren’t in the pen they didn’t wander far. Tucker hadn’t run out of the pen.
If the goats weren’t willing to jump, and there aren’t any tracks, I have to assume he was carried. But by what?
The latch on the goat pen was secure. It was a simple device, one that any average person could easily figure out how to use. It wasn’t unreasonable to assume then that Tucker had been carried out of the pen by a someone rather than a something. He went to the road to search for tire tracks, abnormal wear in the dirt, or any piece of gravel that seemed oddly out of place in his driveway. He came up empty-handed.
Ruby would have noticed if someone pulled up. He scratched his head, completely stumped. Searching around the barn and road gave him no answers, so he headed for the cornfield. He picked a spot that seemed closest to the back door opening of the barn and stepped inside. The corn was tall and heavy. He had a good harvest going that year, one that surely would help them get through the winter despite a series of bad years. He pushed on through the corn without seeing a single depression or break anywhere. Before he knew it, he came out on the other side. In front of him the woods stretched in both directions to infinity. Either he had missed the path the culprit had taken, or they didn’t travel through the cornfield. He was stumped, without any answers, and had wasted a couple hours in the process.
When he returned to the house, Ruby was sitting quietly in the living room with the TV off, her books still piled on the floor next to her chair. She looked like depression, if it had a body and a face, and could sit in an arm chair.
He cleared his throat before speaking. “I, uh, didn’t find anything. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t even bother looking up.
He took a deep breath. Losing one of her goats, especially Tucker, was like losing a child for her. She was very sensitive about the subject. Ruby had wanted children her entire life, a dream that imprinted itself on her mind decades before she met Will, but for a reason unknown to the both of them, it couldn’t happen. After they were married they tried and tried. Months passed without a single pregnancy and soon they were at the doctor. He had been tested, but everything had come back normal. When Ruby was examined, she was deemed infertile. The doctors couldn’t give her an exact reason. A hormonal imbalance, they called it. For some reason known only to God, her ovaries just wouldn’t release the eggs. She was devastated. To help compensate, Will bought her the goats. It was the closest thing to children that he could offer her.
“I know how important they are to you,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to Tucker, but I won’t let anything happen to the others.”
She didn’t say anything.
“I’m going to go into the city and get some things to fortify the goat pen. When I went to Cray’s this morning, he didn’t have the things I needed.” He thought about telling her about Dell. He wasn’t sure if it would offer her any solace, to know that her loss wasn’t the only loss. But after watching her sit there motionless in her chair, he decided not to. “You should come.”
She turned and looked at him. “I don’t want to leave.”
“I think it would be good for you to get out of the house, and get away from all of this if even for a couple hours. We could stop and have lunch and really make a day out of it.”
She turned and looked at the TV again, it’s screen still black and infinitely empty. “I’m not hungry. If you want to go, then just go. I just want to stay here and rest.”
Will was stubborn. He knelt in front of her and softly grabbed her hands from her lap. “Come on honey, I want you to go. I need you to go. It’s a long drive into the city and I need you there, at the very least to talk to. It would be good for you. Please?”
She looked at him, her eyes flashing in a cold annoyance. But the way her tone carried through her throat and onto her lips, she didn’t sound annoyed at all. Just sad. “I don’t want to leave.”
Will couldn’t take a hint, but he was capable of understanding. She was like a flower waiting to bloom. He couldn’t force her to move or open any more than he could a flower. The best thing he could do was to try and encourage her to. With a soft and sweet tone, he tried to say all the nice things he could to get her out of the house and away from the day’s tragedy. It might’ve been selfish, but he thought that if he could get her away from all the darkness, she would come alive a little more. They could talk, they could laugh, and they could forget about all the bad things that happened. If only for a little while.
But she didn’t budge. He sighed and stood up. Grabbing his truck keys, he went for the door, turning b
efore he walked outside.
“You know I love you, right?” he said.
She stared at the floor. “I know. I love you too.”
He knew she meant what she said. Somewhere, deep underneath the heavy darkness that had buried the bright and wonderful woman that he had married twenty years ago, she was still there. It was just going to take time for her to come back out. The world was spinning at a million miles per hour out of control, and he was afraid that he would lose her in the turning.
He got into his truck, thinking about how he could use whatever he could to make the goat pen stronger. It would need to be impenetrable. No animal would get in, and no person would be able to get inside without knowing how. If he had to go to drastic measures to protect the goats for Ruby, then he would. It was that or he had to bring them into the house to live, and that just wasn’t going to happen.
8
Will’s mind was a muddled mess. His body was on autopilot, guiding him into the front of his truck, turning the key and backing out of the driveway all without him really knowing. He had a similar experience when he was nineteen, driving home from his factory job more than an hour away.
Those were the glory days. He was young, stupid, and fresh into a relationship with who he would later deem his high school sweetheart. Back then they lived together in the city, and Will thought it was