Chapter One

I was thirty-three years old when my husband walked out into the field one one who found him; that was Sam Gill, who'd come by to ask Mitchell to help him load a horse. He'd fallen off the tractor and under the blades of the mower -- my husband, Mitchell, not the horse; I guess we'll never know how. Try as I might, and I have a thousand times on a thousand nights, I cannot imagine such a thing; my mind creeps up on it, then turns and bolts. I can't let myself think it, a man shredded like a handful of husks, bleeding dry in the sun. I've never much liked machines, never trusted them, but Mitchell could drive anything, repair it, make it run, and he was not a careless man. I didn't love Mitchell, which you'd think would help but it doesn't, really, not when you've been with someone fourteen years and worn their presence next to you so long it's like a favorite old shirt, come to take for granted its smell and its feel. I didn't love Mitchell, but he was mine and that was something.

I never expected to be a young woman alone. I'd left home for Texarkana to type for an import-export company the week I graduated from high school, and wouldn't you know I'd meet a farmer and wind up not six months later, back in the country. It seemed like all I ever wanted, getting up while the sky was still purple velvet with just a rim of pink in the east, Mitchell in his overalls already headed for the barn when I carried my coffee cup out onto the porch to watch the horizon as one by one the fields went a slow, shimmering gold. Even in the heart of the summer I liked the windows flung open, filling the house with the smell of hay and horses and the sweetbriar roses that bloomed wild along the porch rail. The nights were as black and bottomless as water in a quarry, and when the moon rose over the pines the countryside seemed cast in liquid silver.

Mitchell was twenty-seven to my nineteen when we married and I admit I was taken in by it all, by the pull of the land, by Mitchell's years, his size and sureness, by the silence I mistook for a mark of masculinity. Still waters run deep; I'd heard it all my life and so I believed it, went on believing it, and accepted it because I'd been raised to fear the Lord and stand by my man. That Mitchell never particularly drew me was so far down the list of qualities I, at nineteen, found important in a man, I'd have laughed if you'd even put it on the list. Mitchell was big, quiet, constant. As opposed to my daddy Raymond Hatch, who, legend had it, was quick and sleek and loved to laugh. Who left on a sales trip and never came back. So I married stability and virtue, and virtue, as we know, is its own reward. On the one hand, I can say in truth that in fourteen years Mitchell never raised hand nor voice to me; on the other, I have to admit that he never grabbed me up hard in passion, and rarely laughed. But like anything that's not too uncomfortable, you find you can live with it. I became, in time, without even noticing, someone whose life she's learned not to mind.

Still, I went a little crazy when he died. It was so swift and so awful -- one minute I was wiping my hands on a dish towel at the kitchen sink, looking out between the curtains with their neat little rows of yellow teacups at the pear tree just starting to bud out beside the barn and thinking nothing much past what I'd cook for supper and tapping my toe to the radio. The next thing I knew, Sam Gill was standing outside the screen door with his CAT cap in his hands, his face bleached white under the tan, and even before he got his mouth open I knew. I'd never seen death before, not up close and grinning, but when it walked in I recognized it right away, no one had to introduce me. I don't remember what Sam said to me that morning, the words, although I can see every petal of the painted roses on the china cup sitting on the drainboard, a ring of cold coffee in its saucer, and I can hear as clear as anything the voice of Ernest Tubb, 'round and 'round, walking the floor over you. One look at Sam's face and I went to ice all over, and when he finally spoke I heard myself let loose a wild bark of laughter, my shock was so deep and so unspeakable -- as if Mitchell's silence was a crime deserving that hard a punishment.

I sat down at the kitchen table, still twisting the dish towel in my fists, while Sam lifted the telephone receiver off the wall. Pretty soon his wife, Mary, was there, and I started to laugh all over again when I saw the tears swimming in her round blue eyes. She went rummaging in the pantry until she found the bourbon and poured me a glassful, then pulled up a chair and circled me with her doughy arm; she smelled of yeast and cinnamon, like a fresh-baked sweet roll. The sheriff came, and then the long black car from the funeral home. I didn't stop laughing until Dr. Spikes arrived and gave me a pill, and made me wash it down with another...

Excerpted from The Second Coming of Lucy Hatch © Copyright 2003 by Marsha Moyer. Reprinted with permission by Avon, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.