Paul opened one eye to find Lee staring down at him, her housecoat gaping. She shook his shoulder. He closed his eye and thrust his face into the pillow, breath-sodden and hot. “What?”

“Corinne didn’t make it to school today. One of her friends called on her lunch period and asked if she was sick.”

The sweat began as he swung himself off the bed and rested his elbows on his knees, knowing already where to find Corinne—self-righteous sass on her lips, a two-month-old child in her gut now, sitting on Samuel French’s add-on porch, wood-stove blazing, eating peanut butter toast, playing video games. He pulled on his jeans and boots from the floor beside the bed and went to the kitchen for his keys.

How had it come to this? Corinne had been a tough little kid all along, never taking on a fight she couldn’t handle, though he might catch her silently crying at intervals for weeks after. It’d been one thing after another this year: cigarettes and diet pills, condoms, a light green jailhouse tattoo on her ankle, shady friends, and now pregnancy.

There had been other moments, nice ones when they would shoot baskets together in the front yard and make peanut butter and bacon sandwiches in the kitchen. But then they all led to moments like this. She had always needed a firmer hand, but it was too late for him to give it to her now. He scooped his keys from the end table and left, noticing her gray backpack. He considered not taking it, but he assumed there were things in it that girls needed, though God knew what they were. What did she need, other than a better father for her child? But he couldn’t do anything about who had done it to her—Sam French, Jr.

The truck started only after he’d rolled it down the hill, jerking and hawing to the right before he got control. The Frenches’ trailer was the last place on what he’d grown up calling the middle road, but the state had renamed it Stickpine Drive, with no regard for a tree Paul wasn’t sure even existed.

Corinne's troublemaking had started earlier this year, in the eighth grade, a few years after the unexpected calm during her start of puberty and the six-inch height gain that left her near his five-eleven. That September was the first time her rage came, fury resounding throughout the house about something or other, tears and mayhem and slammed doors. Fifteen minutes after a tantrum, she would plunk herself down in his lap and watch TV for two hours without saying a word, just chewing the drawstring of her sweatshirt to a thread. He’d barely dared to breathe.

She had grown breasts early and bled soon after—he found out when Lee and Corinne sat in the kitchen eating frosting from the plastic tub, midweek, no holiday or birthday for months. Then she became interested in boys. And now the pregnancy. He was suddenly directionless. Work occupied him but was nothing difficult, giving him sufficient time to wonder where Corinne was and what she was up to. He should have gotten her the fucking cell phone she’d wanted. She’d be innocent still, and the sight of her pubic hair curling from her underwear as she walked to her room from her shower might not send him into conniptions.

Paul leaned out the truck door when he reached the French place, watched the smoke curling from the rusted steel chimney. He left the truck running, planning to make this quick. He wasn’t going to kill Sam French’s boy—didn’t want to, and couldn’t, really—though part of him felt good, righteous, for thinking the thought to begin with. The kid did need a lesson that old Sam had never given him, and he thought of Corinne and a baby, of his being able to do the right thing, not only for her, but for poor Sam French’s kid.

At nineteen Sammy French spoke with a lisp and hid his eyes behind a dark shag of poorly dyed hair. Slow was a kind way to put what he was, though he had apparently learned where to stick his dick without being prepared for the consequences. Paul felt for the .357 under the front seat, held the grip in his hand for a moment and put it down. This could be worked through.

Corinne met him at the front door, wrapped and overlarge in young Sammy’s tan Vo-Ag Club coat. Her eyes were big. Sammy’s Buck knife, bloody, was in her hand. “He said he didn’t want the baby, Daddy,” Corinne said.

Paul could see the blood on the tan coat, leaned through the doorway long enough to see Sammy’s body on the floor, a wide smear of blood soaking the front of his T-shirt.

“I didn’t mean it. Oh God, Daddy, I love him.”

Paul froze, wondering all at once what might happen if he left, or if Corinne left and he took the blame, or if they waited for the cops, who would dress her in county orange, and then at home waited for the nightly news, and then for the sight of his girl, string-haired and chubby still, tears on her face, her eyes bloodshot as they stared at him from behind bars.

“Oh, Daddy. Oh my God, Daddy.”

Then there was Lee oh God Lee, and then, idiotically, he knew the answer to the oldest question in the world: If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it never fell. He held Corinne briefly to his chest, got his hand around the knife, closed it and put it into his pocket. It was like she was five again, and had fought with the boy down the road and bloodied his nose in a rage. He saw himself shaking her, saw her tears, felt himself go soft in the middle with primitive need for her tears to stop. She needed a lesson, but not the one the state would give her. He could save her from herself.

Paul dragged her by the arm, put her in the truck and shut the door behind her. The muddy logging road connected with the main drag for about two miles of easy going, but he’d have to cut the chains on the gate at the other end. Momentarily he considered not taking Corinne and her bloody hands back down the road. They had some time before Mrs. French and Sam Sr. made it home, and Corinne needed to be out and driven the six hours into Canada by then. They had relatives in Toronto, though distant. Blood counted for something, he hoped, as he turned up the road a few hundred yards from the Frenches’ driveway. “It’ll be fine. We’ll send you up to Carnell’s in Toronto. He’ll find you a school and a part-time job. You can’t go back now, Corinne. You can never go back.”

Corinne uncovered her bloodless face. “Dad, I need to get out. I’m going to throw up. Please, Daddy.”

He tried to slow down, felt the pull of mud and water on the wheels, a great suck of power surging, and cursed as he shuddered to a stop, and Corinne bolted from the truck—he grabbed for her and missed—jumping awkwardly over a stick, hand cupped protectively around her belly, and was gone into the trees. He shut his door and went after her.

She moved quickly, as if driving deer for him, the way he had for his dad, and he had to blink back tears as he ran, already breathless. Branches slapped at him, and more than once he tripped on unseen stones the way he never would have at her age. The leaves stirred up where she had stepped, a small kick-pile of dirt and mulch with her every long and even stride. He stopped to catch his breath, and knew he’d gone the wrong way. He ought to hear her by now, or see her, and there was nothing but the sound of his own breathing. “This mountain is more than you want to walk, Missy,” Paul yelled. The words were swallowed up by low-lying tree branches, a hush of bitter wood and black cold. He’d shot a one-antlered buck here once and took it only a few hundred feet from the logging road, dragged it down the hill by the horn, walking ahead of it all the time, worried it would beat him down if he let go rolling down.

Paul wondered how long she would be gone, how far she might walk, how pissed off she might be when she got back, wet-footed and wild at him. He swore into the collar of his coat, and took off log-hopping up the hill, hoping she would stay with the fieldstone property line, at least. If she bushwhacked at all, he’d never find her, dark as the wood was in the dying near-spring light.

He could see something tan moving quickly just ahead of him and felt a surge of adrenaline. She was thirteen, only a girl. He could catch her yet. He would catch her. Ahead, he could see a deer’s tail flagging, and deep in the background behind him he heard his truck cough to life. He slapped his empty pocket and turned, ran with everything he had left. She couldn’t rock the truck out, could she? The engine ran high, slowed, revved again and caught momentarily, and failed. The road was within sight, the entire side hill limned in yellow, the lights of the town nowhere to be found, and as if he were centuries older, chasing through the woods away from something huge that would eat him alive, he heard a single shot that would reverberate throughout the rest of his life. When he saw her slumped against the steering wheel, truck stalled, the world turned gray around him. Paul fell to his knees and howled into the silent woods.

When he reached her in the truck, he felt the woods closing in around him, around the circumference of his breath where it landed on her cheek, turning the trails of her tears into something like a lifeline, split by the occasional freckle and enlarged pore and by the things she had done that he could not make right for her anymore. Paul took her hand from the gun, looked at the hole underneath her chin. It was such a tiny thing, as if he could plug it with his finger and, so simply, make it all better.

Rusty Barnes grew up in rural northern Appalachia. He received his B.A. from Mansfield University of Pennsylvania and his M.F.A. from Emerson College. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction have appeared in journals like Salt Flats Annual, Pindeldyboz and the Red Rock Review. He co-founded Night Train,, a literary journal which has been featured in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and on National Public Radio. He will be a guest editor at the 2007 Writers@Work Conference and you can view his webspace here