Seth and Joyce Curl live in a brick colonial style house full of guns on top of a hill that overlooks Quicksburg, Virginia, a town of ramshackle houses, a couple of churches and a general store by the railroad tracks. Hanging from the store window is a sign that says: For Sale. The store’s been closed for five years and is falling in on itself. If you want anything, you have to drive across the railroad tracks, down a long sloping hill pass cornfields to a bridge over the North Fork of the Shenandoah River. You come to Route 11, take a right and drive down the road about five miles. On the way, you pass Civil War memorials dedicated to the armies who fought at the Battle of New Market, a broken down bus in a weedy field that says “God Loves You!” on the front in blue letters, a broken down roadhouse called Chicken In the Rough where it is rumored Patsy Cline sang before she was famous, long, skinny white chicken houses, an apple orchard, a few antique stores, a few motels for the tourists before you pass into New Market, a town full of clapboard and brick houses, some ramshackle, a few with second floor porches that overhang the sidewalk, New Orleans style, the first settlers log cabin, and a railroad station where the bus picks up passengers because the trains, mostly freights, don’t stop here anymore. On the south end of town is the Southern Kitchen, the best fried chicken in the Shenandoah Valley, crowded on Sunday mornings after church. Then Moreway, a big box store owned by a local entrepreneur, carved out of a cornfield that you could easily miss in late summer because the corn is six feet high. It isn’t feed corn either. It’s for gasoline.
Joyce drives to Moreway twice a week, once on Wednesday and once on Saturday with Seth. She doesn’t like Saturday as much because Seth insists on carrying one of his guns. He believes in guns like Christians believe in Jesus. He once told Joyce that she was a sheep and he was a sheepdog. He explained it thusly:
“If you have no capacity for violence, then you are a healthy, productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath – a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, protecting the sheep from the wolf.”
One Saturday morning in late fall when the leaves are turning fiery red and orange and the temperature dips to the low forties, Seth dawdles in the basement trying to figure out what weapon to take to Moreway. He settles on the Glock because it’s small enough to conceal in a shoulder holster under his jacket and packs a wallop. He has thirty guns in his collection, mostly inherited from his dad, everything from a AK-15 to a Kalashnikov in the high capacity down to a derringer he purchased at a gun show in New Orleans. In between he owns shotguns, deer rifles with scopes, six-shooters from the Old West, Colt .45s, Confederate side arms, Yankee Spencer, you name it. He has it. He keeps all this and his ammunition in a walk in safe. Next to the safe is his chest freezer where he keeps his deer, duck, and rabbit meat that tides them over for the winter. Not that they need it. They’re kind of rich. Inherited money from his parents.
Every Saturday before they drive into town Joyce fixes breakfast. Seth slogs up the stairs, the Glock snugly tucked in the shoulder holster, and wanders through the living room to the glassed in porch where Joyce has set the table with a light meal. Biscuits. Marmalade. Blueberries. Bacon. Today is Joyce’s thirty-third birthday and they plan to have some friends over to celebrate. Seth plans to barbecue venison steak and, of course, they plan cake and ice cream for dessert.
“Looks delicious, baby,” he says, rubbing his hands. He pours coffee, piles in the cream and sugar, grabs four pieces of bacon and two biscuits.
“You’re not going to have room enough for dinner,” she says, patting his hand. Seth is a tall, slender man with a hard face and hooded gray eyes and long eyelashes that gives him a girlish look. He never seems to gain weight. All Joyce has to do is look at food. She sits next to him at the table so they can both enjoy a view of the Massanutten Mountains, a long straight green line on the horizon except for Signal Knob, which was used by the Confederate Signal Corp to spot Yankee troop movements in the Valley or so Seth told her a thousand times. Seth told her he wished he was there in the Civil War. “You know what kind of damage I could do with an AK-15.”
“They didn’t have those kind of guns back then.”
“They had Gatling guns.” Seth inherited his love of guns from his father who took him hunting and to the local shooting range. He told his son that it was important to own guns, not only for hunting but for self-protection. He was a John Bircher and thought the government was after him. Seth was heart-broken when his father died.
Joyce scoops a half cup of blueberries in a bowl, a bacon slice, and half a biscuit. She keeps track of all the food that enters her mouth, not wanting to exceed 1,700 calories per day. The total for this small meal will be 270 calories, she figures in her head. Later, she’ll record it in her exercise journal. She wants to remain the same weight she was as a cheerleader at Stonewall Jackson High School. She is a petite woman with a cute figure, and a cute round face that comes to a point at her chin, red curly hair down to her shoulders, big blue eyes, a button nose, and freckles on her chubby cheeks. The boys called her Mountain Nymph, a name she hated. She didn’t like her freckles either. But that didn’t matter. Seth thinks she’s perfect and she thinks the same about him.
They’ve been married ten years. Seth is a plumber, Joyce a desk clerk at one of the tourist motels. They don’t have any children. The doc says it’s Seth’s fault.
Seth slathers a spoonful of orange marmalade on top of his biscuit, tops it with bacon, and bolts it down. “Darling, I have a special birthday present for you,” he says, wiping his fingers with a napkin and taking a sip of coffee. “I consulted Pastor Ralph about our problem conceiving children and he agreed that we should try other ways. He gave me the name of a fertility specialist in Richmond. We’ll call on Monday.”
“You’re not fooling me,” says Joyce, clapping her hands together and giggling.
“No, I’m not fooling,” he says, leaning towards her with a big smile. “You know how hard it was for me to go to Ralph. I mean we’re both men. Well, he said, I shouldn’t be ashamed of myself. God works in mysterious ways. He has a plan for all of us and maybe this is His plan for me. Besides, the problem could be very simple. The specialist does some tinkering here and there and what do you know, I’m back to normal.”
“What if it doesn’t work. What if we can’t have children. Are you willing to adopt?”
“Right now, I’m thinking I don’t want to raise someone else’s child,” he says, crunching on a piece of bacon. “But I could change my mind.”
On the way across the railroad tracks, down the long sloping hill pass the cornfields to the bridge over the North Fork, Joyce and Seth discuss next weekend, one of their favorite times of year when they go duck hunting in Delaware with two other couples. While the husbands wake up at the crack of dawn to hunker down in duck blinds at the State Park until late afternoon, the wives sleep late, relax over breakfast before they head out to the beach in front of the hotel if it’s warm enough or wander the boardwalk peeking in the stores and the arcades if it’s too cold. They have a great time and it’s always sad when they have to leave. The only problem is that Seth and Joyce are the only ones without children. It is the sort of subject they never broach with their friends, but now that they’ve made a decision, Joyce is all excited. “I mean don’t you think we ought to say something?”
“No, I don’t,” says Seth gripping the steering wheel of their Ford pick-up tightly and scowling at the road in a sudden change of mood that she recognizes. She can read him like a book. She knows he wants children. That having children is the business of life. He can’t wait to take his son hunting. Seth’s father was from a Mississippi family that practiced a ritual that has gone on for generations. The son kills his first deer. The father dips a piece of cloth in the blood of the slain animal and rubs it on the forehead of the son. It is the first sign of the son reaching manhood. Seth wants to rub blood on his son’s forehead just as his father rubbed blood on his forehead, and his father’s father, all the way back to the Colonel who fell at the Battle of Franklin.
Joyce understands her husband’s feelings and she tells him so.
Seth relaxes, pats her on the stomach. “We’ll say something about a baby when it’s cooking in the oven.”
The truth is Seth has a lot of pride. He played quarterback for Jackson. He took his team to the state championship and lost. The next year he promised to win, but in the first game the opposing linemen were closing in on him when he jumped in the air and threw a wobbly pass that was deflected and run for a touchdown by the other team. Seth landed awkwardly. The linemen hit him. One rolled off his leg and broke his ankle. Two operations later, the doctors fused his ankle joint. He could barely walk, much less dance around like a quarterback needs to. He couldn’t even play baseball in the spring. His pride was hurt, but what hurt it more, was when his father said, “You’re a good boy and a fine athlete, but you lack good judgement.”
“Sometimes I think the world is against me,” Seth told Joyce later. She knew that his father was right. Seth should’ve buried the ball in his gut and fallen to the ground rather than jump in the air. But Beth didn’t tell him that. She didn’t want to hurt his pride even more. Perhaps she lacked good judgement as well.
When he found out they couldn’t have babies, he posted a photo of his guns on Facebook with the message, “you break in my house, you get what’s coming.”
This time Beth screwed up her courage a little bit and told him he ought to take down the post. “It might offend your Facebook friends.”
“No way I’m going to take it down. I want people to know that it’s my duty to protect my family.”
They pass the Bloody Cedars Civil War monument, a stone sentinel on a pedestal marking the location of one of the bloodiest sectors of the New Market battlefield.
They pass slowly through town, heavily congested by tourists. When they park in the Moreway lot, Joyce begs Seth to leave his gun in the glove compartment.
“No, I won’t,” he says, zipping up his coat. She can barely see the bulge of his shoulder holster. “You know how I feel about this.”
He kisses her on the forehead. Joyce hates guns. She can understand hunting. After all her father and two brothers are hunters though killing an animal is not her idea of fun, but who is she to complain since she eats animals. But lately with the NRA and their harping about gun rights, things have gone haywire and this is what she thinks is worrying Seth. He is thinking that the government is after his guns, his constitutional right to hunt and protect his family. Many of his friends feel the same way. Even Joyce’s father is afraid that he won’t be able to hunt anymore if the liberals get their way. Not that she can sooth their feelings. She sighs. What’s the use? She shrugs and follows Seth in to Moreway thinking, at the same time, that she loves her husband. She doesn’t want harm to come to him no matter how remote it seems in this situation.
Joyce grabs a cart. They wander down the long aisle to the food section and separate, he off to the bakery to pick up her birthday cake, she off to the produce section to pick the ingredients for the salad for the birthday party tonight, Caesar salad, and produce for the rest of week until Wednesday when she shops again. She daydreams about her birthday present. Last year Seth gave her a sterling silver derringer pistol pendent on a silver chain. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings so she wore it on occasion, but she couldn’t fool him.
In the summer they traveled to the Southwest for vacation and, in a jewelry store near a motel in Tucumcari where they stayed, she pointed out a Navajo turquoise and silver necklace that ended in a turquoise heart surrounded by tiny red garnet stones. I love this necklace, she said. The red garnets matched the color of her hair. Seth seemed not to be paying attention to her though, when they returned to the motel to rest before dinner, he said he had to go out for something. He returned an hour later with a glean in his eyes. She guessed exactly what he was up to. A surprise. The necklace. But she knew she would have to wait until her birthday tonight.
She is daydreaming about the necklace when in front of the store she hears a series of bangs like firecrackers going off, very loud firecrackers, the sound echoing through the whole store. Then she hears screams. Her heart is full of dread. She runs towards the bakery side of the store and as she comes to the main aisle that runs from one end of the store to the other, she sees two things. To her left she sees a man in a military uniform holding an automatic rifle, a AK-15, no doubt, hunching over staring down a side aisle. He snaps a magazine into place and cocks his weapon. To her right a few aisles up she sees her husband unzip his jacket and reach in for the Glock in his shoulder holster, but he doesn’t get a shot off because the hunched over man whirls around – he must’ve seen something out of the side of his eye, and sprays the main aisle with high velocity bullets that tear through Seth’s stomach. The Glock flies out of his hand. It skids down the aisle toward the shooter. Seth flies in the other direction, bangs against a display case, and collapses to the ground. His stomach is mostly gone. Joyce can see his exposed intestines shining in the fluorescent light from the ceiling.
The gunman disappears down a side aisle. She hears a few more screams, a short burst of gunfire. It takes Joyce a while to gather it all in. She is like a frozen statue that slowly comes to life. She rushes toward her dead husband, her heart full of remorse.