Chester Wyrick sat on the front porch with his elbows on his knees and his fingers twirling a cigarette, looking intently at the empty road that ran up the holler. To his left lay a hubcap full of cigarette butts. His smoke rose silently, eventually blending in with the overcast sky. No more than ten cars traveled the dirt road every day, but Chester followed each with his eyes until the dust settled, long after the car was out of earshot.
Just inside the door the beat of Mildred's head banging against the wall provided a tuneless rhythm for Chester's vigil. He saw her for what she was, an idiot, and he treated her like a mule. "Two hundred and thirty pounds of soup beans and corn bread," he would tell his wife, "and she ain't able to taste the difference between that and hay. Whyn't you keep her in the barn?" Birdie Wyrick always responded to Chester's bluntness with all the indignation of a disturbed chicken, and it would take a minute or two of wheezing before her small, frail body could muster a response. "She goes to the barn, I go to the barn. That's all they is to it."
When Chester was sober he would sit on the porch all day, getting up only to let the hound in, or to eat. When he was drunk, Birdie never saw him. He had been sober now for a month, and Birdie was beginning to prepare meals for him again, whenever her arthritis let her. "Chester, you better git in here 'fore yore taters gets cold." Chester squashed out his cigarette and shuffled to the door.
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