When the Devil Dances

“We never were real compatible. She was the communal nature-lover artist type and me, well,” he shrugged. “The best you could say about me is that I never killed anybody that didn’t deserve it. She never liked what I did, but she put up with it, and me. Part of that was that I was gone a lot and she sort of got to be her own person. She lived here, raised Mike Junior here for that matter. Pappy was still alive back then, but he practically lived up in the hills so she ran the farm her way.

“Anyway when I came back for good, we got along for a while then we commenced to fighting. Finally she discovered her ‘true calling’ to be a priestess and left for that commune and I understand she’s been happily living there ever since.”

“The ‘Woodstock/Peace through superior firepower’ graffiti,” Shari said with a smile.

“Ah, you saw that,” O’Neal said, laughing. “Yep. That was us all over. She got massively pissed at me for scrawling that on her butt. My point was that she shouldn’t have gotten so stoned she let me. I told her what I was doing and she thought it was a cool enough idea that… well… she thought it was a good idea at the time.”

“So no grandmother to help out,” Shari sighed. “And somebody has to have a girl talk with Cally.”

“Assuming you can find her,” Papa O’Neal said. “I haven’t seen her all morning. I’ve heard her; she’s using her drill-sergeant voice on your kids. But I haven’t seen her at all. We’re usually up around dawn, but she was up even earlier and out the door before I got up.”

“I thought you were getting up and slaughtering the fatted pig this morning,” Shari said with a smile. The eggs and bacon had been wonderful and she had more of an appetite than yesterday.

“I did,” O’Neal said, grinning. “And it’s on the barbeque, slow roasting even as we speak. And Cally normally would have been right there with me. But not this morning; she hasn’t gotten within fifty yards of me this morning.”

He paused and rubbed his chin then looked at the ceiling in puzzlement.

“She hasn’t been within fifty yards of me all morning,” he repeated thoughfully.

“I wonder what she’s done wrong,” Shari said with a grin.

* * *

“You have to tell him,” Shannon said. “You can’t go on hiding all the rest of your life.”

“I can too,” Cally answered. She forked another load of hay over into the stall with more vehemence than it actually needed. “I can hide as long as I have to, put it that way.”

The barn was huge and quite old. The original structure dated to just after the War of Northern Aggression, as Papa O’Neal called it. There were several horse stalls, an area for milking and a large hay loft. Along one wall several hay rolls had been stacked. Leaning against them was an odd rifle with a large, flat drum on top of it. Cally never left the house unarmed.

“It’s a natural thing,” Shannon argued. The ten-year-old slipped off the hay round and picked up a chunk of clay on the floor of the barn. She waited just a moment until the mouse stuck its head out of the hole again and pitched the clay at it. The chunk shattered on the wall above the hole and the mouse disappeared. “You have a right to live your own life!”

“Sure, tell that to Granpa,” Cally said with a pout.

“Tell what to Granpa?”

Cally froze and stuck the pitchfork into the hay without turning around. “Nothing.”

“Shari and I were just wondering where you’d been all morning,” Papa O’Neal said from behind her. “I notice you’ve got all your chores done. But you somehow managed to get them all done without coming within a mile of me.”

“Uh, huh.” Cally looked around, but short of actively fleeing by climbing up into the hay loft and then, all things being equal, probably having to climb out the side of the barn through a window, there was no way to escape. And sooner or later she’d have to turn around. She knew she was caught fair and square. She thought briefly of either turning around and shooting her way out or, alternatively, jumping out the window and going to Oregon to live with Granma. But she doubted she could get the drop on the old man. And as for living with Granma, the commune depended on the local military for protection; they’d take her guns away. Blow that.

Shannon, the fink, had actually made an escape. Bolted. What a jerk.

Finally she sighed and turned around.

* * *

Papa O’Neal took one look and pulled out his pouch of Red Man. He extracted about half the pouch, laboriously worked it into a ball just a bit under the size of a baseball and then stuffed it into his left cheek. Then he put the pouch away. The whole time he had been looking at Cally’s face.

“Granddaughter,” he said, his voice slightly muffled, “what happened to your eyes?”

“Don’t you start, Granpa,” Cally said dangerously.

“I mean, you look like a raccoon…”

“I think she was going for the Britney Spears look,” Shari said delicately. “But… that density doesn’t really… suit you, dear.”