I bent down and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel, hard enough to leave a mark. Hard enough to push the memories back where they belonged. I needed to be in control. The place I was going didn’t allow for weakness.

It was only fifteen miles to my mom’s trailer, but it took more than forty minutes to make the trip. The last five miles over terrain that could only be loosely termed an actual road. Dirt and pitted gravel, not featured on any Google map or adorned with a single road sign. What little mail my mom got was picked up at a post office box in town. She didn’t have an actual address. Growing up, I didn’t know a single person who did. Locations were given in terms of landmarks and miles traveled: Take the first right at the rusted pickup; head south for about a mile; veer left at the gravel fork in the road; if you pass a burned-out double-wide, you’ve gone too far.

“Damn it,” I whispered over and over again as my car slammed against the rough road. I was getting close now, and tension curled between my shoulder blades, stretched its talons up into my neck. A headache throbbed behind my eyes. To the right I saw Carl Swanson’s trailer, one end completely rotted off, the hole patched with a tattered tarp and ribbons of duct tape. There was a new sign in his yard, black paint on an old piece of plywood. Rabbits $2. The greasy taste of rabbit rose in my throat, even though it had been years since I’d eaten one. Around here rabbits weren’t sold as pets, to be cuddled and loved by small children. They were meat, cheap and readily available. Chopped up in stew, legs boiled on the stove, stringy gray meat slopped over plates of gummy rice.

I glanced to the left, looking at the view where the land dropped off, a valley of ripening green stretching out, dotted with old-growth woods, a glint of silver reflecting off the river snaking through. I’d seen it a thousand times—from winter bare to summer lush—but the view never got old. The kind of unblemished beauty that tethered people to this part of the world. Nature that still felt untouched and pure. It was this exact valley, apparently, that had given Barren Springs its name. As the legend went, when the first settlers found this place, there was only one almost-dry little creek and a bunch of dead trees. Soil too hard and rocky to grow much of anything but weeds. But the settlers were tired, out of provisions and choices. So they stayed. And prayed. Begged the Lord to bless them any way he saw fit, but, hey, some water, plentiful game, and better land would be a nice start. Beat their breasts and wept and gave it all up to God. Woke up the next morning to this green abundance. Rivers and creeks flowing, woods full of animals, soil still crap, but beggars can’t be choosers, and two out of three ain’t bad. They decided to name this place Barren Springs to remind themselves how easily things could go bad and how God answered prayers if you truly believed. Most of the town had been praying to God ever since with crappier and crappier results, as far as I could see. For her part, my mama always subscribed to the theory that the settlers were such dumb shits they mistook a simple change of seasons for divine intervention.