Legends (adaptation from upcoming novel)

Dennis is walking into the backyard, looking at the garden where Rhonda used to grow cucumbers, beets, and raspberries. He’s tall, and burly, and bald, and he’s got a 1911 revolver in his hand. His wife used to make pickles, jams and jellies, raspberry wine. But the garden’s dead now, and he shoots himself in the head.

Kenny -- my friend, Dennis’ son -- finds him. He’s grabbing his camo rucksack for drill weekend, picking up some food his aunt left in the fridge for him, and was planning to come right back to Madison. But his dad doesn’t answer the door, and he finds himself cleaning up brains in the backyard.

The red and white is just out of reach of his mom’s garden, almost as of he'd hoped some of his bits would make their way into the soil and grow into a new version of him.

So Kenny cleans up after him once the cops take his statement and the pistol. The report they write isn’t unique. I mean, it’s Reeseville -- the train tracks don’t rack up a body count low enough to consider them all accidents.

My husband Wayne and I do everything we can for Kenny after that, but our conversations, our nights out, our none-too-well-to-do 2 a.m. benders, are all plagued by his insistence on a family curse.

“Fuck the curse,” Wayne says one night. Behind Kenny, where we stand in his parents’ kitchen leaning against the sink and the counter, I see a hole punched in a door and soft yellow nicotine drips from years of Rhonda’s smoking. And then Wayne says, “If anything’s to blame it’s Dodge County.”

Kenny insists it’s not all that bad, that the neighbors, barflies, people in line behind you at the bank, are nice at least, that people don’t kill themselves because of where they live. “There’s definitely a curse,” he says then. He takes a long drink from his Captain and Coke. Watching him is like pushing a pair of glasses up as they slide down my nose. “Sometimes,” he says, “I’m sitting here, in my parents’ house, and it’s like I can feel their ghosts staring at me, or cracking open a beer, or sitting in the backyard.” He stares at the back door for a moment, tapping his shoe.

“There’s no fucking curse,” I say. My breath catches, and my fingers grip the rounded edge of the counter behind me.

“Oh, there’s a curse alright,” Kenny says. His eyes are wild. His foot is still tapping. His drink is half gone. “My mom dies, my dad kills himself. I live here, where they died. What do you think is going to happen?” He’s not looking at either of us, seems to be talking to the back door.

I ask him why, why he’s here, why not come back to Madison. I’m feeling urgent, then, like I’ve been waiting at the bar for six minutes and the bartender is getting close and I have to flag her down or I’m never going to get my drink. And he leaves, he flies out of the kitchen toward the door with the hole in it and he comes out a second later with the gun, his dad’s 1911. He holds it in both his hands in front of him like a deck of cards he’s about to shuffle.

“I didn’t want this back, but the cops brought it back,” he tells us. Wayne’s put his drink down.

“Why,” I ask again, urgently, like the bartender is even closer now.

Months go by and we’re going to baseball games, seeing movies, eating sushi. And some morning a few days after saying goodbye, I love you, drive safe, Kenny's walking along the side of the road toward Mud Lake with a 1911 in his hand, thinking about an evergreen aside the water where his dad used to sit and wait for deer and his mom would watch him sit. He puts himself where he wants to be buried, or sink into the dirt, or grow into a new version of who he’s always been, and shoots himself in the head.

Yes, I believe there’s a curse. I believe it’s like getting nervous when the music picks up in a horror movie, like puckering your lips when you bite into a lime, like laughing at a dad joke.