The New Lease

Webb Stevens was a simple man in a complicated situation. Twisted fibers of the jute rope around his neck tickled his skin as he watched the two men he called neighbors attempt in vain to throw the other end of the rope over the rafter above their heads. Their wasted efforts elicited laughter that added insult to his impending injury, but he seemed too distracted to notice the spectacle playing out in front of him. If he were going die in the next few minutes, provided they managed to get that rope over the rafter, it seemed somehow right that he’d die in that old barn.

Two days ago, Webb had what he’d thought was a chance encounter with who he’d known wasn’t a friendly woman. It had happened at Zuckerman’s five and dime as he gassed up his truck and stopped inside for some chew. He was just scooping up his change when he heard that voice. The one it seemed like everyone in town wished would just go away but were too scared to say so.

“Webb Stevens! You aren’t supposed to be dipping now are ya?”

That shrill voice sliced right through his good mood. He shared a glance of mutual understanding with the store clerk before he turned around to face the source of his sudden misery. She was standing a little too close for his liking which gave him a front-row seat to the coverup show. Her hair was done up like usual, blown out and bleached blonde. Her makeup was applied in sheets rather than dabs, but even that couldn’t hide her age. Her wardrobe was typical for her, dark and unflattering.

“Oh, I don’t know Dorothy. Did someone say I couldn’t dip?” He stepped around her and pushed the door open to the blazing Texas sun outside. For the first time in a long while he felt the urge to sprint even though his bones weren’t up for it anymore. It was no surprise to him when he heard the clatter of her fake pearl bracelets against the door as she pushed it open in pursuit.

“We both know what Susanna thought about you dipping Webb.” Her heels clacked the pavement just a few steps behind him as he worked the wrapper on his chew and focused on his truck door getting closer. “She wouldn’t have liked you coming down here spending her life insurance on tobacco and you know it.”

He resisted the urge to respond. He wasn’t as educated as most, but he still knew that if you wrestle with a pig in the mud the pig will like it, and you’ll just end up muddy.

Dorothy picked up her pace, her frustration spilling over more than usual. “I’ve tried calling you thirty times didn’t your daughter tell you that?”

“She mentioned it.”

“Well it’s the courteous thing to do to call someone back Webb. Surely Susanna taught you that much.”

Webb popped open the door to his weathered truck and turned around to face his uninvited guest. “I guess she didn’t.” He reached up and tucked more than a helping of chew behind his lip as he watched her try to stomach her disdain. He found it amusing.

“Well you know what it’s about, don’t ya? I told ya again and again these leasing offers from the oil companies aren’t gonna just keep coming!”

Webb climbed into his truck and tossed his chew into the passenger seat next to him.

“There’s a lot of land out here Webb,” She motioned all around as if he didn’t know what land she was referring to, “They’re just gonna go somewhere else and then we all lose!”

Webb reached over and pulled his truck door shut, narrowly missing her nose. The thought occurred to him how satisfying even a thin layer of glass between them was. He turned the ignition and felt his V8 wake up with a rumble.

She smacked her hand against his truck window, “We’ve all signed but you Webb! I’ve worked too hard on this to watch a second-rate cotton farmer get in the way. I’m getting tired of asking you nice!”

He labored the gear shift into first and talked himself out of jerking the wheel to the left as the truck lurched forward.

She didn’t budge an inch as the wheels rolled by, and that was to be expected.

“Susanna would have talked sense into you! Man like you needs that more than you know!”

Webb didn’t hear her over the truck engine, but if he did, he had enough good sense to have agreed with her on that point anyway. He offered only a glance in his side mirror as he pulled onto the highway, and he saw her standing there watching him leave, her hands planted on her hips.

Something Susanna did teach him suddenly crossed his mind. Beware a woman’s scorn she’d say. He smiled to himself and drove on.

As Webb stood there balanced on two stacked milk crates and listened to his neighbors debate the best knot to secure the end of the rope tied around his neck, the thought finally occurred to him that he might have underestimated Dorothy Halbert. At the risk of the milk crates collapsing, Webb shifted his stance to relieve the gnawing ache of sciatica in his leg.

“Whoa there Webb. Don’t move okay?” Henry held out a hand as if to steady the old man. “Almost done back here.” He turned his attention back to the rope and finished tying the bowline knot around the center column of the barn.

Avery stepped in front of Webb and looked up at him without a hint of sympathy in his battered eyes. Webb hadn’t punched a man in almost forty years, but there was an undeniable sense of gratification knowing he’d left a mark on his way out. His executioners made the mistake of thinking he’d go quietly, and the destruction left behind in his kitchen was proof he didn’t. It was only when they threatened to do the same to his daughter that he put his fists down and willingly followed them to that barn.

Avery wiped the sweat off his face with an oil-stained rag, “Wish you woulda just signed those papers you old coot.” He paused for a reaction but didn’t get one, “Would have been a sight easier than all this.”

Henry stepped into view now too but kept his gaze off of Webb’s face.

“Sorry Webb.”

Henry shook his head and pondered what a shame it was that it had come to this. “It’s just, you know my grandboy is sick and all. Helen’s behind on the bills and he needs better care. Stupid son-in-law ran off and left em’ both. I just….I gotta take care of mine.” He ventured a glimpse up at Webb in the hope that he’d be granted some understanding but was met with the hardened face of a man who didn’t give a damn.

Avery shoved the rag in his back pocket and motioned for Henry to follow him. They stepped behind Webb and exchanged a look that only cowards can really appreciate. It only took one kick to flip those milk crates out from under Webb Stevens. As his makeshift stool disappeared from under his feet and he felt that brief exhilaration of weightlessness, he thought about his wife. If there was anything after this, he just hoped he’d get to see her again.

They had met right there in that barn more than sixty years before he found himself with a noose around his neck. His father had hired her to tend to the smaller animals when Webb had begun taking on more work in the fields. He didn’t believe in fancy things like ‘love at first sight’ but you could say it was that when he first saw Susanna Briggs standing in that barn. Hair disheveled from honest work and mud splashed across her arms and legs.

Even after the barn had given way to the decades of weather and decay, he couldn’t bring himself to tear it down. It was where he met the love of his life. It was hallowed ground. Sometimes he’d even risk going inside just to see if she might be standing there again. Young and free. Unbroken by the years of cancer that took her from him. Before the droughts and bad crop yields. Before they had to bury two stillborn children that she never forgave herself for. It was never a surprise when she wasn’t magically standing there again in that barn, but he had never stopped hoping.

Avery’s eyelids opened the way you’d expect a concussed man’s eyelids to open. Slow and dazed. Even with a headache unlike one he’d ever had, it didn’t take more than a moment for him to register he was looking down the twin barrels of a scattergun, and Webb Stevens was on the trigger side of it.

Avery was sprawled out on the dirt floor of the barn and half-covered by splintered sections of the rafter and roof. His body was broken throughout, and he felt every inch of it. He kept his head still but let his eyes drift to the right. There was Henry, his head caved in, nearly covered up in a pile of what was left of that rotten rafter. He looked back upwards. Some of the roof of the barn had fallen in when the rafter broke in two, and the daylight shining through it illuminated the gunman standing over the top of him.

Webb mustered a smile, “Termites.”

Avery did his best to take in what he was looking at through the haze of the thud in his head. Webb had blood trickling down the left side of his face and bruising already coloring his neck.

“Webb?” Avery was surprised by his own voice. It sounded as wrecked as his body felt.

“Should have used the old oak out front,” Webb squinted his wounded eye, “Lot better for hanging a man.”

Avery attempted to lift both hands, “I didn’t want this.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

Avery swallowed hard, “I mean….it didn’t have to come to this.”

“It has though by God.” Webb lifted his shoulder to wipe his bloody brow on his shirt. “Now….I know you don’t have the brass to come up with a foolish idea as all this.” He looked around him, and then motioned at the lump of meat that used to be Henry, “And I know he don’t have the brains….so who put ya up to it?”

“Webb,” Avery’s panic cut through his dulled senses, “I was just doing what I was told.”

As if to punctuate the unanswered question Webb pressed the cold steel of the blued double-barrel against Avery’s forehead and pulled back both hammers. “Not asking twice.”

Webb’s truck threw up a cloud of dust like only a dry Texas backroad can produce. He wiped his blood-stained face with his shirt sleeve and rubbed the stinging rope burn that stretched across his neck. He never much believed in the divine. There were plenty of Sundays that he left an empty seat next to Susanna in the church pew. But if that broken rafter and the air in his lungs weren’t a sign of an Almighty then it was surely a sign of dumb luck. He was grateful for whichever it was.

While his neighbors were worrying about oil contracts and land leases, all Webb could think about as that fiery Texas air blew across his face through the open truck window, was the new lease on life he’d just been given. It didn’t seem right to go spending it on revenge. But as his truck dodged potholes on the way to Dorothy Halbert’s farm, he glanced over at his double-barreled passenger, and thought he might spend it on justice instead.