CHAPTER 1

The Measure of a Man

A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away andit is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman withflame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise.Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness andmarveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweighthe pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. Theshame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worstof it, in a town where everyone knew them. Even the teenagecashiers at the grocery would take an edge with her after this,clicking painted fingernails on the counter while she wrote hercheck, eying the oatmeal and frozen peas of an unhinged familyand exchanging looks with the bag boy: She's that one. Howthey admired their own steadfast lives. Right up to the day whenhope in all its versions went out of stock, including the crummydiscount brands, and the heart had just one instruction left: run.Like a hunted animal, or a racehorse, winning or losing feltexactly alike at this stage, with the same coursing of blood andshortness of breath. She smoked too much, that was anothermortification to throw in with the others. But she had cast herlot. Plenty of people took this way out, looking future damagein the eye and naming it something else. Now it was her turn.She could claim the tightness in her chest and call it bliss, ratherthan the same breathlessness she could be feeling at home rightnow while toting a heavy laundry basket, behaving like asensible mother of two.

The children were with her mother-in-law. She'd dropped offthose babies this morning on barely sufficient grounds and itmight just kill her to dwell on that now. Their little faces turnedup to her like the round hearts of two daisies: She loves me, loves menot. All those hopes placed in such a precarious vessel. Realistically,the family could be totaled. That was the word, like awrecked car wrapped around a telephone pole, no salvageableparts. No husband worth having is going to forgive adultery ifit comes to that. And still she felt pulled up this incline by thehand whose touch might bring down all she knew. Maybe sheeven craved the collapse, with an appetite larger than sense.

At the top of the pasture she leaned against the fence to catchup on oxygen, feeling the slight give of the netted woven wireagainst her back. No safety net. Unsnapped her purse, countedher cigarettes, discovered she'd have to ration them. This hadnot been a thinking ahead kind of day. The suede jacket waswrong, too warm, and what if it rained? She frowned at theNovember sky. It was the same dull, stippled ceiling that had beenup there last week, last month, forever. All summer. Whoeverwas in charge of weather had put a recall on blue and nailed upthis mess of dirty white sky like a lousy drywall job. The pasturepond seemed to reflect more light off its surface than thesky itself had to offer. The sheep huddled close around its shineas if they too had given up on the sun and settled for secondbest. Little puddles winked all the way down Highway 7 towardFeathertown and out the other side of it, toward Cleary, a longtrail of potholes glinting with watery light.

The sheep in the field below, the Turnbow family land, the white framehouse she had not slept outside for a single night in ten-plus yearsof marriage: that was pretty much it. The wide screen version of her lifesince age seventeen. Not including the brief hospital excursions,childbirth related. Apparently, today was the day she walked out of the picture.Distinguishing herself from the luckless sheep that stood down therein the mud surrounded by the deep stiletto holes of their footprints,enduring life's bad deals. They'd worn their heavy wool through themuggy summer and now that winter was almost here, theywould be shorn. Life was just one long proposition they neversaw coming. Their pasture looked drowned. In the next fieldover, the orchard painstakingly planted by the neighbors lastyear was now dying under the rain. From here it all looked fixedand strange, even her house, probably due to the angle. She onlylooked out those windows, never into them, given the companyshe kept with people who rolled plastic trucks on the floor.Certainly she never climbed up here to check out the domesticarrangement. The condition of the roof was not encouraging.Her car was parked in the only spot in the county that wouldn'tincite gossip, her own driveway. People knew that station wagonand still tended to think of it as belonging to her mother. She'drescued this one thing from her mother's death, an unreliable setof wheels adequate for short errands with kids in tow. The priceof that was a disquieting sense of Mama still coming along forthe ride, her tiny frame wedged between the kids' car seats,reaching across them to ash her cigarette out the open window. Butno such thoughts today. This morning after leaving the kids atHester's, she had floored it for the half mile back home, feelinghigh and wobbly as a kite. Went back into the house only to brushher teeth, shed her glasses and put on eyeliner, no other preparationsnecessary prior to lighting out her own back door to wreckher reputation. The electric pulse of desire buzzed through herbody like an alarm clock gone off in the early light, setting inmotion all the things in a day that can't be stopped.

She picked her way now through churned up mud along thefence, lifted the chain fastener on the steel gate and slippedthrough. Beyond the fence an ordinary wildness of ironweed andbriar thickets began. An old road cut through it, long unused,crisscrossed by wild raspberries bending across in tall arcs. Inrecent times she'd come up here only once, berry picking with herhusband Cub and some of his buddies two summers ago, and itdefinitely wasn't her idea. She'd been barrel round pregnantwith Cordelia and thinking she might be called on to deliver thechild right there in the brambles, that's how she knew whichJune that was. So Preston would have been four. She rememberedhim holding her hand for dear life while Cub's hotdogfriends scared them half to death about snakes. These raspberrycanes were a weird color for a plant, she noticed now, not thatshe would know nature if it bit her. But bright pink? The colorof a frosted lipstick some thirteen-year old might want to wear.She had probably skipped that phase, heading straight forImmoral Coral and Come-to-Bed Red.

The saplings gave way to a forest. The trees clenched the lastof summer's leaves in their fists, and something made her thinkof Lot's wife in the Bible, who turned back for one last look athome. Poor woman, struck into a pile of salt for such a smalldisobedience. She did not look back, but headed into the woodson the rutted track her husband's family had always called theHigh Road. As if, she thought. Taking the High Road to damnation;the irony had failed to cross her mind when she devisedthis plan. The road up the mountain must have been cut forlogging in the old days. The woods had grown back. Cub andhis dad drove the all terrain up this way sometimes to get to thelittle shack on the ridge they used for turkey hunting. Or theyused to do that, once upon a time, when the combined weightof the Turnbow men senior and junior was about sixty poundsless than the present day. Back when they used their feet forsomething other than framing the view of the television set.The road must have been poorly maintained even then. Sherecalled their taking the chain saw for clearing windfall.

She...