Ten Miles Past Normal

Chapter Twenty-three


Loretta Lynn: A Love Story





Monster and Loretta Lynn develop a thing for each other right away.

“I like a goat with personality,” Monster tells me, rubbing Loretta Lynn on her big Roman nose. “A goat that likes a good time. A lot of goats you meet, they’re way too serious.”

“They’ve got a lot on their minds,” I agree.

My mom is in the kitchen, pureeing basil and pine nuts for the pesto. My dad and Avery are in the barn, tending to the chickens. Monster, for reasons beyond my capacity to understand, has volunteered to help me milk the goats.

“I thought I’d start with goats and then work my way up to cows,” he tells me. “And then maybe a moose.”

“I’ve never heard of moose milk,” I say, pulling my milking stool into place for him. “Sounds yummy.”

“It’s big in Japan,” Monster informs me. He lowers himself onto the stool and starts sweet-talking Loretta Lynn, which I’ve explained to him is necessary if he’s going to get a good milk haul. “Now, you are one fine goat,” he murmurs into her ear. “I ain’t ever seen a goat as pretty as you.”

Loretta Lynn nuzzles Monster’s neck. She’s clearly smitten. After Monster gets into the rhythm of milking her, he looks up at me and grins.

“You know, you really are something,” he says. “Only a freshman and already a B and E charge to your name, and on top of that you have your very own herd of goats. You got a lot of potential.”

“For what? Becoming an A-number-one goat herder?”

“Well, that and a major felon.”

I smile sweetly. “Gosh, gee, Monster, thanks.”

Monster returns to his milking. After a few minutes pass, he gives Loretta Lynn one last squeeze and then stands to present me with a bucket of goat’s milk. “You’d think I was born and raised on a farm, now, wouldn’t you?”

“You sure would,” I agree.

And then suddenly Monster is leaning toward me. He’s smiling. He puts a hand on my shoulder. He looks me in the eye.

I feel myself start to panic. What’s happening? What do I want to happen? Butterflies swoosh around my stomach as I consider the possibilities.

Me and Monster?

Is that what I’ve wanted all along?

I flash back suddenly to eighth grade and Marc Roberts, my eighth-grade crush. He had short brown hair that always needed combing, and wore striped T-shirts that made him look like a little kid. I liked him because he was smart and funny, and different from the other eighth-grade boys. He didn’t snap bra straps or huddle with his friends in the hallways and rate the girls as they walked by. Mostly you’d see him reading or hanging out with his longtime best friend, Christian Moore.

Nothing ever happened with me and Marc Roberts. When Sarah hinted around that I might like it if he asked me to the eighth-grade dance, he told her he was going to Washington, DC, with his parents that weekend, to visit the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian. That was the kind of boy Marc Roberts was. That was what I liked about him, really—that he was still a boy. The other eighth-grade boys I knew were on their way to becoming something else. Criminals. Fraternity brothers. Humongous pains in the butt.

Looking up at Monster, it occurs to me that he’s on his way to becoming a grown-up. He has his own apartment, a job, a truck. He’s tall and powerful, kind and a little wild, but in a good, bighearted way.

He is—I realize, standing next to my favorite goat in the world—way too much for me.

Still, we stand there staring into each other’s eyes like we just can’t stop.

And then Monster stops. He blinks, takes a step back. Says, “You know, if you were a couple years older, I’d probably fall in love with you.”

I nod my head. “Me too.”

The kiss is short and very sweet. We step away from each other.

“We can still play rock and roll together, though,” Monster promises me. “That don’t have to change.”

“And we’ll always have Paris,” I reply.

We walk toward the back door, swinging the bucket of milk between us. I imagine one day in the future, when the difference in our ages won’t seem like such a big deal. Mr. Pritchard was eight years older than Mrs. Pritchard, after all, I remind myself.

I hope they’re together somewhere right now. Maybe they’re on the front porch of their old house, looking out across the wild abundance of their yard, remembering how the morning glories climbed the burnt cross every spring, how just by leaving it there and letting nature take its course, they’d turned it into art.

That’s when it occurs to me to wonder: What will happen to the cross after the house is sold?

And that’s when I get that feeling again, the feeling that I want to do something—something meaningful. Something big.

“When my dad drives you over to get your truck, I’m going too,” I tell Monster, opening the back door for him. “I need you to take me somewhere.”

“The prom?” Monster asks. “’Cause I gotta tell you, my tux is at the cleaners, and I got two left feet.”

“Somewhere a lot more interesting than the prom,” I promise.

“Consider me intrigued,” comes Monster’s reply.

By the time Monster and I get to Mr. Pritchard’s house, it’s almost nine o’clock, and the sky is blazing with stars. The cross stands in the moonlight, the brown vines of faded morning glories still clinging to it.

“So I guess you’re wondering why I brought a couple of shovels,” I say to Monster as we climb out of the truck. “In fact, I bet you’re wondering what we’re doing here at all.”

“Considering that I’ve asked you seventeen times since we left your house, that’s a pretty safe bet,” Monster replies, reaching into the truck bed to get out our tools.

I point to the cross. “We’re going to dig that up and take it back to my house.”

When Monster’s eyes land on the cross, he takes a few steps back. “Man, I got to warn you, them Baptists get mean when you start digging up their holy relics.”

“This isn’t a church,” I tell him. “It’s Mr. Pritchard’s house. That’s the cross the Klan burned. He left it there. But as soon as his house gets sold, the new owners will take it down probably. They won’t understand that it’s art.”

“They’ll probably put in a few lawn gnomes instead,” Monster agrees. “Not that you can necessarily blame ’em. That’s a pretty powerful statement to have to mow around every Saturday.”

We walk over to the cross, which has to be at least ten feet tall. I look up at it and feel a shiver go through me. “Is it sacrilege to dig up a cross?” I ask, starting to have doubts about what we’re going to do. “Or, I don’t know, weird?”

Monster considers this for a moment. “Well, it’s gonna get dug up one way or another, right? Probably by a real estate agent now that Mr. Pritchard’s gone and don’t have a say in it. A burnt cross on the lawn ain’t exactly a selling point. So it’ll get dug up and thrown into a dump truck, and dumped into the landfill. That seems a lot more sacrilegious to me than us digging it up and making some kind of memorial out of it.”

And so we begin to dig.

I don’t know how much time you’ve spent digging up a ten-foot burnt cross from somebody’s front yard, but I’m here to tell you, it takes a while. Five minutes into it, I’m seriously regretting that I didn’t bring gloves. I can feel the blisters rising in painful little relief maps all over my palms.

“You know, if you were really my friend, you’d tell me to take a break while you finish up,” I tell Monster, leaning against my shovel and breathing hard. “I think I forgot to mention that I’m a delicate flower.”

“Well, you smell good,” Monster agrees, still digging. “But you throw around a bass too easy for me to think you can’t do a little yard work when the situation calls for it.”

He’s right. I’ve only been playing bass a few weeks and you can already see the change in my biceps. I start digging again.

It takes us forty-five minutes to dig through the rocky ground and carefully pull out the cross and lay it on the yard. I kneel beside it and put my hand on a burned place. It feels evil to me.

“Only one thing to do about hate that big,” Monster says, pulling my hand away so it’s no longer touching the dark spot. “And that’s to put a bigger love out there. Like your friend Mr. Pritchard did.”

“And Mrs. Pritchard,” I add. “And Mrs. Brown.”

“Big love, dude,” Monster says, pulling me up. “Beats big hate every time.”

We haul the cross to the truck and carefully lift it into the back.

And so ends the strangest and maybe most amazing day of my life, with me and Monster driving down the road in the dark, a burnt cross in the truck bed behind us, the two of us singing along with the radio to a song I don’t even know the words to, and I don’t even care. I just keep singing.