The old family rooster crowed it's five-part morning song as the sun crested over the huge untouched oaks in the east at the tree line marking the outer limits of the Winner family lawn.
Young Quatre slipped on his handed down boots as he did every morning. It's a very warm August morning in the Red River Valley, deep in America's heartland. The boy bolted from bed as he does every morning in the summer time, glad and ready to forge through every day that comes free of school.
He finds the aluminum birdseed pail on a thick birch stump, grabs fistfuls of the yellow dots inside, and scatters them to-and-fro on the barren dry earth, where chickens peck for seed even before any rains atop the beige dry crackly dead Bermuda grass of rural Oklahoma.
A giant dust cloud rolls in the valley below the Winner home. Its horn pleads for someone to trot over. Quatre pays no attention. That's just the special commuter bus that services the little cotton ball of Oklahoma dubbed "Little Dixie" by the founders of Roosevelt's "New Deal" man that founded the program that carried the same name.
It comes now and then, rather irregularly, to shuttle Iria to her vocational classes at Kiamichi Tech, where she's training to become a nurse. He watched his sister go. She carried a brown lunch bag, sagging with a sandwich and a fruit, probably. She walked casually, to the ire of the bus driver, who jabbed his horn again. She hustled a bit faster.
The chickens looked fine, so Quatre moved on to hefting another fifty-pound cellulous sack to the cattle. He removed one from the 18x15 red barn, a little dry structure full of cattle feed sacks. He latched one bag to his chest, wrapping his small arms around it in a bear hug, and clasped his fingers together on one side. This way he walked normally to the gridiron gate.
He dropped the bag through, and leaped over. The cows, a black heifer and a steer, the first bull he'd ever castrated all by himself, galloped over to their cluster of feed troughs, five blocks of wood Quatre had nailed together, and waited for the bag's contents. The bag's lip was seamed as poorly as usual, and Quatre barely had to give it a tug, before dried hominy dripped into the troughs.
The hominy will bloat the cows before Papa Winner hauls them to the stockyard for auction later. The heifer joyously wagged its ears around, seconds before digging its snout into the feed.
He took one last look, to make certain the cows didn't bully one another, and parted from that duty. They looked happy enough for PITA to approve.
Quatre left his home duties to stalk into the woods with his .199 BB gun, an old favorite silent hunting weapon. After twenty pumps, he felt the pressure could take the game he tracked. Dad said squirrels were the problem, but the boy insisted rabbits were the ones nibbling the tomatoes. He'd seen them bathe in the sun at the tree line a few times, and knew they didn't show up for social purposes. He tried pointing out the small Amarillo pellet feces, typical of bunnies.
Papa Winner scarcely looked, and stuck to his point. Quatre would see who had the right conviction.
I made sure I'd pushed in the safety before lining the front and back sights over the brown animal, kept the stock on my shoulder, even through with a BB gun, all you'd get would be a click as the sole sign you shot. It twitched its nose and hopped. I was thirty odd feet away when I hit that animal. I felt the electric itch on my wrist that told me I killed it, and strode over. The creature's little black eye stared blankly out at the world, not following movement as it should. I didn't find the hole on it, and figured the BB got it in the gut underneath. I had a little yarn and tied him to the muzzle of my gun, and let it limply rock at arms length.
When I walked a few feet, I saw something black dripping off its foot. I didn't know what that could be, but I remember Iria saying something about black blood dripping out of the liver, when shot. I don't know about that, 'cause I think she just wanted to scare me out of becoming a soldier when I grow up. I don't know what it matters what color leaks from someone when they're shot, but I know most soldiers don't ever see the other soldiers in a war, but to that she said that it happens, though, even if the news doesn't see it that way, 'cause the President only shows them bombings from planes and satellites, so it only looks like buildings are killed, and it's wrong to do that, and junk.
I may only be a kid, but if that were so, why would the news show video of them human shields talking about being killed, before we see the bombed buildings? Then Dad tells me not to talk about it, and that God forbids killing, unless the man being killed is killed for killing somebody's kids, and the court agrees. We have judges and juries to decide who lives and who dies, and that's the best way things can be, until God brings paradise back to the good believers, then we can let God kill all the bad people in fire, 'cause he makes the last judgment of everybody.
Anyway, I backtracked and found oil flowing from the ground, where I shot the rabbit, and thought that had been pretty cool. I pictured my cousin Dorothy, and thought maybe she'd pay attention to me now, and that I'd fix her up so she wouldn't be flat as Kansas anymore, and that I'd get her fixed up with Colorado on her chest, and get her fancy china dolls, like she always wanted, and maybe she'd forget about other boys, and I wouldn't have to go to war to get her attention.
I shouted at the house and ran for the door. Later I learned I hit a gusher of light sweet crude, that bubbled up from the bedrock after the Mississippi Earthquake.