Grandfather had told him the story of how, deep in debt, the family farm mortgaged right down to the granular brown dirt that stubbornly refused to produced anything, he had met the county sheriff in the front yard cradling a shotgun in his arms. His father had disappeared onto the highways of a depressed America, hopping trains when possible, searching for something that was so impossible to find he had disappeared into it.
So it had been left to grandfather to ward off any representatives of law or bank that would try to drive him and his three sisters from the one place they could call their own, even if in loving it, it had not loved them back. Seeing the young man carrying the smoothbore gun that was longer than he was tall, the sheriff had drove on, signaling his temporary acquiescence with a comradely two-fingered salute from the tip of his Stetson.
See the author’s published work here.
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