Fee…
Though he wasn’t one for pets, when I was a wee girl Grandad had two dogs. One of them was a decrepit hound who mostly spent her time making sure the goats didn’t eat their way out of their pen. She was a fierce, wiry old girl, and all it took was a small growl, raising her lip to flash a fang and every animal on the farm fell in line.
Grandad said he kept her about to be my role model when I was growing up, as Grandma was already gone and my mother was the wrong sort of bitch.
The other was a mutt who was the result of a mangy stray jumping the fence to have his way with a neighbor’s prize-winning Irish Setter before dancing off into the night, uncaught and unrepentant. Sadly, the poor pup had his father’s looks and his mother’s brains. One time I had to save him from being run over by a backhoe that had been rented to remove a stump, which he had decided was the perfect thing to take a nap under. He bounced out, a second from losing a leg, covered in motor oil, which ended up all over me, licking my face, the farm hand’s face, Grandad’s face, and ready to play fetch.
Grandad said he kept him about because he reminded him so much of my Da.
I thought about that dog as I pulled the truck onto the farm road, after Grandad and I had gone to town to get some radiator partsand a few other things and nearly had a heart attack at the sight of Da and my kidnapped Godking taking a lovely afternoon stroll through the bean rows.
It had been a beautiful morning.Driving to town, watching the gold of the fields from the surrounding farms fade into the moss green and gray of empty land, was always a pleasure.A peregrine had raced along over the top of the truck for a while, then veered off looking for rodents.On the way back in the quiet I could hear the funny, raspy sound of a corncrake, answered by another, though I wasn’t able to spot them
That had put a smile on my face, rare as they were these days.
Da stopped from where he was gesturing at the irrigation ditch and waved, a big, sweet smile on his daft, old face. Davies copied him, so they were waving in perfect sync, his smile being a little too toothy for sweetness. He may have looked like a British lion, but that was only a costume, the man was pure wolf.
“JESUS BLOODY WEPT!” Grandad bellowed, then made a sound halfway between a laugh and a moan.
It was all I could do not to switch gears and chase the two of them around the Italian Borlattis and flat runners, but I had too much respect for the crops. Instead, I pulled next to one of the sheds, my hands so tight on the steering wheel I thought my knuckles would bleed and in a calm and pleasant tone said, “Can you get your shotgun, please?”
“Don’t you have that hand cannon of yer man’s in your handbag?”
I swear for a moment I thought Davies could hear us, because just then he turned and even from the distance I could tell he was staring dead at me, impossibly green eyes piercing, and still showing all of those wolfy teeth.
“I do, but it would scare Da if I pulled it. He already knows you’re trigger happy.”
He snorted, “Aye. Do you think Martin’s let him use the phone? Or is it just the Grand Tour he’s taking him on?”
“I’d say since the SAS isn’t paratrooping into the potatoes, probably not. You know they would have no sense of humor about someone taking one of their prize pig billionaires.”
By the time I joined them, Da had them closer to the house, in the massive herb garden that was on the side away from the animal barn. If the goats had their way they would eat all of the plants down to the soil, self-marinating from the inside. Davies stood there nodding, an exaggerated look of interest on his face as Da explained that the farm used to have fields of lavender, but that after his mother had died no one else had the heart to look after it. “It’s still Fee’s favorite, though, isn’t it?” He slipped his arm about my waist and kissed my cheek.
“Yeah,” I said. I tried to not vibrate with too much rage. It wasn’t Da’s fault that the grown-ups had been keeping things from him. Though a less dim fella might assume someone being kept under lock and keyandchain was not a normal guest.
“I bet you were a cute little thing, running about these fields, learning to love the land.”
Davies, despite standing knee-deep in fragrant, golden yarrow plants, wearing ancient overalls whose trouser part were too short, with one of the straps undone, managed to look regal. At ease. A tattoo’d, shockingly fit Godking surveying a tiny corner of his fiefdom.
I very much wanted to stamp on one of his feet and my head throbbed so hard I thought I might be having a stroke.
“Your father is quite the tour guide. He told me things about Cutrager carrots-”
“Kuttiger carrots,” Da gently corrected.
“AboutKuttigercarrots, thank you Martin,” the great English prick half bowed to my Da, and it was all I coulddo not to punch the smile from his face, “that I could never have imagined I might find interesting.”
“It's the least I could do for someone stuck wearing my old overalls!” Da punched Davies in the shoulder and several emotions passed through those uncanny green eyes, his body simultaneously, automatically, shifting into what I knew was a fighting stance.
I shifted my footing, so I was half between the two of them, my hand in my bag, closing over the butt of his gun. If he touched one hair on my Da’s head the world would have one less billionaire, though for some reason the thought didn’t please me entirely as much as I would have thought.
Then Davies sagged a bit, his expression amused, and laughed, “Appreciate the loan, Martin.”
“Ah, you can keep them. I can get more and if you are making silly bets for the price of a few pints of plain a new set of clothes probably wouldn’t go you amiss.”
A confused frown crossed Davies face, and he looked from Da to me. He started to say something, something that might have been sincere, and then that wolf grin returned to his face and he said, “Hello, Liam, or should I say, Fintan? Good to see you.”
He must have had eyes in the back of his head, since I hadn’t noticed Grandad was now standing on the edge of the patch, shotgun trained on Davies.
