December 29, 1999
The Day Before the Fire
Ashley Freeman had that adolescent thickness about her, one she was just starting to grow out of as the teeth in her head straightened into their adult positions. Her hair was dirty blond and homespun but tamed in a ponytail, her skin paler from bunkering in the shelter of “ay-kern” trees while wearing camouflage jackets that reversed into safety orange. She was just at the age when you could glimpse into what she’d look like as an adult, like her mother, but young enough that you could put your finger on exactly what she had looked like as a child. She was as country as country came. Photos often showed the girl, tall at five feet seven, sporting rifles and slinging the carcasses of various animals over her shoulder, proud like mink. Family bragged of her marksmanship and ate the deer she’d drag home from the hills, supper killed with unflinching precision. Sometimes, over the woodstove, Danny would make snack trays of turkey strips and deer steaks, paired with cans of Pepsi to wash them down, of which he could drink a six-pack in a day. Later, he’d make wind spinners from the cans and hang them from the gutters, to add flutter and rustle to their singing home. As a child, Ashley would watch the hypnotic silver and blue play against the sky on idle afternoons.
Like a good Oklahoma girl, she did her best to suppress her emotions, bred to see crying as weak but anger as strong. This is the Oklahoma way. But pain seemed to gnaw its way from the inside out, and in the past year, she’d lost a few pounds of that baby chub and the gold of her hair was losing its luster. Life had slapped her hard in the face, leaving a red mark of grief on her cheek that just wouldn’t go away since her big brother’s death. That afternoon, she arranged and rearranged the handpicked flowers of a bouquet, one made of hay from the yard, holly, Christmas rose, and fiery witch hazel sprigs, ready to replace the last bouquet from the side of a rural county road that had been stolen, plucked from the gravel.
The floral arrangement took her back to times when she and her father traveled together, over and under the nearby Oklahoma state lines between there and Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas. They went anywhere the gas could take them to collect cattails and lotus pods and various wildflowers (cattails were their best seller at ten cents apiece to local florists). Ashley’s mother would stay home to work at an optometrist’s office while Shane continued on with his extracurricular activities and time spent with friends. Notwithstanding the cattails, which would fill the backseat at any given time, Ashley and Danny would arrange their handpicked commodities into spectacular sprays of sunroots, rattlesnake masters, and Indian blankets, displays of fire and sky wrapped in ribbon and sold for twenty bucks apiece, though you could get the price down to fifteen if Ashley was feeling kind enough. That was summertime, when red sunsets lingered over the fields after long days, hair tangling in the thick, hot wind of a speeding truck. She’d trace her hand over the passing fields and a dirty fingernail along the horizon, wishing for all the things that teenage girls wished for: the carefree heart, the white-trash kiss, reckless love. What little she could have known of growing up back then, walking in her father’s shadow and eating fried pickles and pink lemonade on the side of the road to let the truck cool.
And now her sixteenth birthday.
It was the second half of winter break, one that lacked the vibrations of Christmas due to the weight of mourning. Ashley straightened the blond straw under her knee while listening to Billboard’s Best of Country from her brother’s radio. Because she had just moved up from her room to his, half of his furniture remained, though she couldn’t bear looking at his Sports Illustrated calendar a second longer. She kept his football trophies and dusted them often, his worn Nikes at the foot of her bed, the blue-and-white Welch Wildcats football jersey he should have been buried in hung on the wall. She’d even spray his favorite Tommy Hilfiger cologne once in a while on her own flannel shirts just so she could feel him near.
Ashley ignored the thick smell of breakfast, appetite lost with her youth. She thought of a million things she’d rather be doing than turning sixteen, including, but not limited to, practicing for her driver’s test.
“You know you’re ready,” her friend reassured her. “You’ve only been doing it since you were five.”
“It’s different when you’re taking a test,” Ashley replied. “You have to signal and all that crap. That’s why Jeremy’s been driving with me. Showing me all the formal stuff.”
“Sure.” The friend smiled, making quotation marks with her fingers. “‘Formal stuff.’”
Ashley threw baby’s breath at her best friend, sixteen-year-old Lauria (pronounced “Laura”) Bible, who planted the flower behind her own ear.
The best friends had spent the day before preparing for the livestock showings for the county and state fairs, as part of the FFA (Future Farmers of America) and the 4-H Club, community-leadership and agricultural clubs to which they belonged. They knew all there was to know about roughages, dehorning, cattle parasites, castration, cuts of beef. These were country kids who’d spent the morning adjusting the gaits and training the coats of Ashley’s goats, Jack and Jill. (Lauria had her own two pigs and a lamb back home.) They talked about seeding out the competition and making it all the way to the great Tulsa fair, which attracted more than a million visitors annually. Imagine, parades of antique tractors brandishing American flags, pie-eating contests with sun-warmed blueberries exploding on clean cotton, demolition derbies, carnival rides, and bull-riding rodeos. The county and state fairs were the very embodiment of American life in the heartland. But back in the bleakness of winter, they trained with their sights set on summer. Ashley and Lauria wandered around the property that morning, gathering the leaves of dogwoods and bois d’arcs for the goats to eat as the cold made their rough hands ache. While the “crick” babbled at the bottom of the backyard, a weeping willow swished against the ground like the straws of a broom at the west side of the trailer. In fact, that was what helped Ashley decide on leaving her old bedroom on the east end of the house for Shane’s on the west end: the branches that brushed against the windows and filtered dusk through strips of light like honey, a sense of security when the sun went down.
“Ashley!” her mother hollered from the kitchen. “Grab yer breakfast, birthday girl. It’s already after noon!”
Ashley rolled her eyes—the picture of teenage disdain. Sometimes she wished that she didn’t have to be the strong one within the family unit. Had it not been for Lauria’s stability and her support, she wondered if she’d have been able to survive that last year of the millennium.
I spend years sitting with Ashley’s family, friends, and neighbors, ambling her school hallways and stomping grounds, visiting classmates and teachers. I want to know what being Ashley Freeman was really like, and soon, another side of her emerges. Despite Ashley’s outwardly tough persona, there was something tender about her. Back then, the kids in school knew that her family home wasn’t the best, and the rumors as to why had long circulated, coming to a head with Shane’s death. One friend tells of a time she forgot that Ashley was supposed to ride home with her from school and left without her, only for Kathy to show up on the doorstep with a sobbing Ashley, demanding to know why her daughter had been forgotten. While she could hunt for and field-dress a deer by herself, she required validation from others. Though she could lift any grown man, she’d dance in her room when alone. She was never able to throw away her favorite Berenstain Bears books and stuffed animals, yet took no issue in cutting the heads clean off turkeys. She had her feet planted in the manure and her heart in the clouds. There were the face she let others see and the face she reserved for behind closed doors, the real heart of her spirit she’d share with those closest to her, including Lauria.