The Decision

Sadie Hazelwood pulled back the stringy curtains that covered the window over the kitchen sink and look out toward the barn. She didn't need a clock. The black and white cows ambling in from the pasture told her milking time was near. She set about getting the stuff together that this chore called for. There was little enthusiasm in her step.

That emotion had been long replaced by a dogged determination. She just had to hold on for one more year.
Sadie was a widow woman. She'd been one going on two years now. She often wondered why Amos had gone and died and left her to face all these problems by herself. At first she was mad at him for doing it. But even in her anger she knew that such a feeling wasn't right. Then again, if he had just gone to the doctor with that indigestion and pain in his arm or taken better care of himself or if.... But he was just trying to save money and work toward the thing they both wanted more than anything else. She couldn't fault him for that-but she didn't bargain on losing him in the process.

They'd been together for forty-one years. Worked hard together in the fields. She looked down at her arms, brown and cracked like the sleeve of an old leather jacket. She knew that her face and neck looked the same. The sun had aged her past her sixty-three years. And now it was just her left to carry on-and she would carry on even if it killed her too.

Sadie picked up the pails and cloths and slipped on an old pair of tennis shoes as she opened the back door. The August afternoon was hot and she wore nothing but a light cotton housedress. But it didn't matter. There'd be nobody at the barn to see her. She also picked up the .22 rifle that stood in its regular place beside the door and put a handful of shells in pocket of her dress.

As she walked slowly toward the barn, her eyes surveyed all the 80-acre farm. It seemed so small, and it was much smaller than the 320 acres, a whole half section of land, that she and Amos had started out with-land that he hated to part with, but the parting had to be if they were to get the thing they wanted, and the thing they wanted was what Dolly wanted.

Dolly was their only child. She had come along late, long after they had given up hope. But they had not spoiled her. They taught her to work as they had been taught. By the time she was twelve, she could drive a tractor with the best of them and could put in a full day in the hot sun without complaining. Yes, Dolly was really something special.

But before she was very old, both Amos and Sadie knew that the farm would not be her life as it had been theirs. Dolly loved books and learning and showed a strong aptitude for both. Even before she got to high school, she had determined that she wanted to be a doctor. She began to volunteer at the hospital and especially liked working around the Emergency Room. Sadie thought she might be squeamish at the sight of all the blood but the early work with farm animals had prepared her for that. As best she could tell, human blood looked the same as animal blood.
However, Amos and Sadie knew that the main hindrance to Dolly's plans would be money rather than blood. They had some savings but the first year of college took most of that. Then, Amos turned to the only resource he had-his land. He began to sell if off in small parcels, forty or so acres at a time. It was good land and fetched a good price.

Sadie knew how it hurt him to part with it and she once tried to console him about it. "Hit don't make no difference," was Amos' gruff reply. "We don't have nobody but Dolly to leave it to nohow. And she ain't gonna farm it. Best we use it to make her a doctor. Now, I don't want to hear nothing more about it." Sadie knew he was right. She also knew that he felt a sense of failure at not being able to hold the land and that he was determined to be successful with Dolly. They all worked to ensure that success.

Amos began to farm more intensely, to raise more beans and corn and hay for sale rather than just to feed the dairy herd. He put off buying new equipment and making major repairs on the buildings. He wore his clothes until they were threadbare and refused to see a doctor until it was too late. And Sadie toiled beside him doing a man's share of the work.

Dolly did her part as well. Her grades earned some scholarship monies each year. She also got a job to pay for her clothes and living expenses. But as she got further into med school, the academic pressure increased and her contributions grew smaller and the land began to go faster.
Sadie got to the barn and paused for a moment letting her eyes survey the last eighty acres-the last and probably the best piece of the whole farm. It was to be used when Dolly finished her residency and started her practice and Sadie was determined to hold on until then.

Most of the land had been bought by Hugo Gerthman, a man who had migrated to their community a few years earlier and started raising beef cattle. He was a good farmer but somewhat arrogant and overbearing. Amos said that he was glad that his land would be in the hands of a good farmer, but he had no real liking for Gerthman. Of late he had seemed impatient-too impatient-to get his hands on the last eighty acres.

Sadie opened the sliding door and let the first two cows into the milking area. She washed their udders and hooked them up to the old milking machine. She cocked her head and listened to the sound of the milker. An untrained ear would have detected nothing amiss but Sadie's picked up the slightly irregular, grating sound that told her the machine was laboring toward another failure. She hoped it wouldn't play out on her today and leave her to finish the job by hand.

Her concern about the milking machine caused her to think of Kwapinsky. She didn't like even to think about him. From the first she'd never liked him, never liked anything about him right down to his name. What kind of name was Kwapinsky anyway? It wasn't even American. How did a man with a name like that get to Tennessee?

As her dislike for him grew, Sadie supposed that she actually hated him. She wasn't sure if what she felt was really hate. In all her days, Sadie had never hated anyone as far as she knew. But she also knew she had never felt as she did about anyone else. If the burning in her gut was hate, he'd earned it.

Kwapinsky was charged with inspecting dairies for health and code violations and it seemed that he could always find something wrong around Sadie's barn. The time the milking machine broke down, he had come by just as she was finishing the last cow and had made her pour out all the afternoon's milk-even that which had been done by the machine. Sadie prayed that a breakdown and a Kwapinsky visit would never happen again.

One day it occurred to her that Kwapinsky was coming by more often than former inspectors had. She was about to decide that it was just her imagination when she overheard a disturbing conversation. She was in the back corner of Huff's Country Store looking for some buttons for a dress she was making. Several local loafers were sitting around the pot-bellied stove swapping stories. Sadie was hidden from their view and was paying little attention to them until she heard Kwapinsky's name mentioned. She listened as one of the farmers related what Kwapinsky had said one night when he'd had a few too many beers at a nearby roadhouse. Said Gerthman had put him on his payroll and all he had to do was just give some "special attention" to Sadie's dairy.

Now it all made sense-Gerthman's growing impatience and the frequent inspections. Gerthman wanted the last eighty acres and he wanted it quickly. If the dairy went under, Sadie would have no choice but to sell and sell at Gerthman's price. It was that day that she first felt the burning in her stomach. And the burning had grown more intense with every Kwapinsky visit and more intense with every check she had to pay for the corrections of the violations he found. Yes, it had to be hate.

Sadie had lain awake many nights trying to figure out a solution. But none would come to her mind. She was just an old widow woman with a ramshackle dairy and no proof. They might beat her but they'd never make her quit. Amos would be proud of her for that.

As the machine worked on the second pair of cows, it began to sound better. Sadie felt a sense of relief but the burning did not diminish. She picked up the rifle, dropped a shell into the chamber, and moved around to the other side of the barn.

Amos had taught her to shoot. She had become almost as good a shot as he was. On many days she would accompany him to the barn and shoot rats while he saw to the milking. Her marksmanship had just about solved the rat problem but they had come back after Amos' death.

Sadie stood quietly for a few minutes in the dim light before she heard the scratching of a rat's claws on a rafter as he moved toward the area where the cow feed was stored. She knocked him off with one well-placed shot. A few minutes later another emerged from a hole near the outside wall. He only twitched a few times after the bullet passed through the center of his body. Sadie didn't like to waste ammunition and prided herself on seldom missing and even more on seldom having to shoot a rat more than once.
After putting two more cows on the machine, she returned to her hunting. She had been standing motionless for several minutes waiting for the next rat to show itself when her eye caught a movement outside through one of the cracks between the wallboards. She thought little about it thinking it was a bird until she saw it the second time. For some reason it didn't look right. Sadie walked over and put one eye up to one of the larger cracks.

Then she saw him. It was Kwapinsky. He liked to surprise her at milking time but he usually drove up to the barn lot gate and Sadie could hear his truck when he started up the hill. This time he had parked over on the main road and was sneaking up from the back of the barn. If she hadn't been shooting rats, Sadie would never have known he was coming until he walked in on her. The burning in her gut got hotter.

Sadie moved over to the milking area to await him. He would come through the side door. She wanted to do something. But what? Kwapinsky was about as sorry an excuse for a person she'd ever known. She had no more respect for him that she did for the rats she'd just been shooting. She looked down at the sweaty housedress and the rifle she carried-and she knew what she would do. She hoped that Amos would forgive her.

Kwapinsky circled the barn trying to keep some cover between himself and it most of the time. That way he could drop down and hide in case Sadie came outside unexpectedly. The sound of the milking machine told him that she was inside. He covered the last few yards in a low crouch so that his shadow would not fall on the wall. He paused for an instant, took a deep breath, stood up, and jerked the door open. The old barn wall sagged downhill on the hinged side of the door and the force of Kwapinsky's pull plus gravity tore the handle from his hand causing the door to bang loudly against the side of the barn. He started to enter but what he saw inside made him freeze with one foot over the threshold.

The rays of the low afternoon sun streamed through the open door and threw a rectangular spotlight on the interior. Kwapinsky saw everything at once and all the parts separately at the same time. Sadie stood facing him with her left hand resting on the rump of one of the cows. On her feet were the dirty tennis shoes with their tongues sticking up at odd angles. But the part of the picture which seemed to draw his attention was the rifle in Sadie's right arm. The end of the barrel was a black hole that seemed to probe through his body. He expected to see flashes come from its depths and to feel its lead missiles tear into his heart and other vital organs.

For what seemed like an eternity, Kwapinsky could not move. He felt as if his feet were encased in concrete. But then, he knew that he had to move. As he whirled to escape, his foot found a fresh pile of cow manure which caused it to slide to one side, pitching him to the ground. He landed in another pile and rolled through a couple more before regaining his feet and his balance.

Kwapinsky ran harder than he had ever run in his life. He tried to vault the barn fence but was caught by the top strand of barbed wire. It tore one leg of his pants from hip to knee and sliced a long gash in the leg inside. He thought he heard several shots but if they hit him, he didn't feel anything.

He jumped into his truck without stopping to clean the cow manure off his clothes. He drove straight to Gerthman's house and barged in when his knock was not immediately answered. He didn't give Gerthman the opportunity to say anything-just told him to take him off the payroll, that he would not inspect Sadie Hazelwood's dairy again if she lived to be a hundred.

After delivering his message, Kwapinsky turned on his heel and left, leaving Gerthman to stare at the fresh blobs of cow manure and spots of blood on his new Persian rug.
Sadie stood without moving, as the sounds of Kwapinsky's departure grew fainter. When she heard the roar of the truck engine and the squeal of the tires on the asphalt, she set the rifle down against a post and reached up and took her dress down off the nail where she'd hung it. After putting it on over her head, she picked up the rifle, dropped a shell into its empty chamber, and moved to the other side of the barn to see if any more rats were coming out of their holes. Yes, she hoped Amos would forgive her. Up to this day, he had been the only man she'd ever allowed to see her naked.

Next: A Rude Awakening

Previous: The Whuppin 

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