"Sweat not, that ye be not sweated," Thomas said. "That’s in the Bible."

Wallace didn’t necessarily eschew the wisdom of her father, she just sometimes didn’t quite trust it. Of course, it was he who named her Wallace, a name that did its own kind of eschewing - like eschewing the good people in the small west Texas town of Laverne who couldn’t easily adapt to such an odd name worn by such an odd girl. Her name denied everything the good people in the town of Laverne stood for: simplicity, honesty, forthrightness.

Not that Wallace was inherently odd. The only thing inherently odd about her was her genius, which she never brandished. She wore it down-right bashfully, but then she had a bashful nature - a disposition which stood in direct contrast to her father’s outgoing personality and her mother’s flashy ways. The rest of her perceived strangeness was put upon her by circumstance, but all of it, taken as a whole, made her an outcast.

The biggest circumstance was her mother’s tragic death on that cool spring day in 1995 when Wallace was ten years old. Her mother drove with the top down on her little cherry red 1964 Mustang as soon as the weather promised a high of seventy or better, and she always drove fast, with the radio blaring, paying attention to almost anything but the road. It was probably inevitable that she would die in a car crash, but that picture in the newspaper of that longhorn steer lying across the hood, its body collapsing the windshield and its horn piercing her mother’s chest, well, that was an image that seared itself into the town’s memory. Nobody could look at Wallace without conjuring that picture of her pretty mother sitting in her pretty car, impaled by the misplaced longhorn.

The town thought of it as some kind of strange karma, some kind of voodoo curse. Not that they didn’t have compassion for the poor motherless little girl, but they didn’t want to catch whatever disease she had.

The wind blew ceaselessly through Laverne, traveling from here to there, picking up the cursed red dirt and forcing it into unseen breaches in her domicile so Wallace spent her life in a similarly ceaseless routine of wiping and washing it away. The red dust settled, she wiped, and the wind, that happy sojourner, moved on, free from the stifling sameness of existence, freely insinuating itself into the spaces that people tried to make between it and themselves, free from the responsibility to clean up the mess it made.

Though the people of Laverne couldn’t quite grasp Wallace and her introspective, contemplative ways, they liked her father. Thomas wasn’t from Laverne, nor from Texas even, but it seemed like everywhere he went he just made himself at home. He had swindled just about everybody in town in one fashion or another, but the more he took from them, the more they apologized for him, or tried to cover for him, or tried to give to him.

Most recently it was that combine that he figured he could drive away in unnoticed because he took it at two in the morning. He told Wallace he would have gotten away with it, too, had it not been for his love of creature comfort. He settled back into the seat, turned on the radio, and cruised out onto the empty highway, and it was right about then that Hank Williams came on singing Settin’ The Woods On Fire. Thomas didn’t need to tell Wallace any more than that. She knew what happened next. He turned it up and sang along.

Thomas told her she got her genius from him, but sometimes she questioned his veracity on that point. The way he told the story, they came to the school to test all the children’s IQ’s, because they wanted to identify "gifted" students in order to better demand of them what their genius promised, and perhaps win some extra federal funding. The administrators of the test came when Wallace was in fifth grade. She tested at 184. Of course they figured there must have been some kind of error, so they sent them back out to test her again. The results came back the same, and that’s when Thomas took decisive action. He contacted the testing company and paid them to test him. They measured his IQ at 187, or, at least, that’s what the framed certificate in the living room said.

"You bought that certificate," Wallace told him.

"I can’t believe you’d suspect your own father of that kind of deceit," he said.

"Nobody else got a certificate," she challenged.

"They didn’t want you kids to get swelled heads. We adults know how to handle our genius."

"By framing it and hanging it in the front room," she said.

Thomas exasperated his daughter. She was not of the constitution that could process the degree of stress that her father’s dubious and sporadic lifestyle pressed upon them. "You made the front page of the Daily News," Wallace told him.

That made Thomas angry, and she knew it would make him angry, that’s why she told him.

"Well, not you, exactly," she said. "Mr. Lyle did. Standing there on the highway with his combine they recovered from you."

That made him doubly angry, and she knew it would make him doubly angry, that’s why she added it.

Thomas rarely indulged his anger, at least not outwardly. Like a fearless punt returner, he rarely called for a fair catch, and on the occasions when he got plowed by the opposition, no matter how badly he was injured, he jumped right up and trotted off the field. "Never let them know they hurt you," he once told Wallace.

"You know I disapprove of you soiling yourself with that rag," he said. "Despite whatever twist Mr. Lyle may have put on the whole matter, it was not a theft, it was a loan."

"Funny, the article didn’t mention a loan."

"Probably because it slipped his mind. A busy man like Mr. Lyle can’t be expected to remember little details like that when he’s got his mind so full of so many important tasks: gossip to write, pictures to print, lives to destroy."

Wallace paced and wrung her hands and fretted. There was no love lost between her father and the owner of the local paper ever since Mr. Lyle published that picture of her mother’s accident all those years ago. Her father tried to hide it from her, but it was inevitable that she would see it, it being so prominently and conspicuously displayed on the front page. Coming as it did simultaneous to the greatest tragedy of their lives only magnified its hideousness, and caused Thomas to enter into his own personal vendetta against the publisher of his family’s pain. He didn’t make a show of declaring his intentions, he just visited Mr. Lyle in the crumbling brick edifice of the Daily News and said, "A little girl ought never to have to see her Mama in that condition."

"News is news," Mr. Lyle responded. "I understand the personal value that event held for you and your daughter, but to the town, it was news. My first responsibility is to the truth. My second responsibility is to my subscribers."

A casual observer wouldn’t have seen how twitchy Thomas got inside. He wouldn’t have seen how close Thomas came to murder that day. He held himself in check for his daughter’s benefit. "Responsibility can be costly," he told Mr. Lyle. Then he left.

Thomas dedicated himself more diligently to making Mr. Lyle realize the cost of responsibility than he did to anything else. Since most of the people in the county had at one time or another been stung by Mr. Lyle’s responsibility to truth and to his subscribers, Thomas’ efforts won him a great deal of support among the silent masses. They respected him. They loved him.

Wallace paced from the kitchen table to her father’s easy chair, then back again. "You’ve gone too far this time, Daddy. I had to spend our mortgage payment to bail you out. Bullshit may dazzle the masses, but this time you’ll have to convince a judge."

"Not a judge, darlin’, a jury." He smiled. He had that charming, fetching kind of smile which, in itself, purchased for him more favors than he could count, and Wallace couldn’t help but smile back.

"And don’t cuss. It doesn’t become a lady," he added. "I don’t know how many times I’ve had to tell you."

Wallace wiped her bangs back and sighed to force the smile from her face. It made her mad how she was as susceptible to him as everybody else, but, damn, he had charisma. "You should have been the leader of a religious cult," she told him.

"I thought about that as a career option after your mother died," he said, "but I decided against it."

"How come?"

"Because it’s dishonest."

Wallace sighed again, then stomped her foot. Her father loved her dramatics, so she indulged him now and then. "This is serious. You could go to prison! We could lose this place."

"It would have been so much better if you’d said, ‘the farm,’" he observed.

"It was my mother’s farm," she said. "It’s all I have left of her."

"Now that’s good. That’s good stuff, there, darlin’. That’d wrench a tear from the hardest heart."

"I’m serious," she said.

"So am I."

Wallace wrung her hands and commenced to pace again. By her second round to the living room and back her anxiety turned to fear. By her third round, her fear turned to exasperation. By her fourth, her exasperation turned to helplessness, and her father had reached his limit.

He reached out for her and pulled her onto the chair next to his. "Sit," he commanded. "You worry too much. I don’t know where you got that from. It’s bad for your health."

"You’re bad for my health," she countered.

"Now that hurt," he said. "That hurt deep."

"Oh, Daddy. I’m sorry, I’m just scared."

"There’s nothing to be scared about."

"I can’t lose you," she said, whispering the darkest fear of her heart. She never said it out loud lest it be overheard by any visiting demons. She didn’t want to needlessly empower any unseen forces. "You’re all I’ve got."

Thomas knew his daughter’s fear, for he shared it. His voice softened when he assured her, "Do you think I’m going to let anything take me away from you?"

"You can’t fix everything."

"That’s where you’re wrong, sweetheart. I never get myself into anything that I can’t get myself out of. Haven’t I proven that to you by now? That certificate, there, tells the whole story."

Wallace didn’t look at the certificate, she kept her eyes pinned on her father. "What makes you think Mr. Lyle’s going to say he lent you that combine? He hates you. Nothing would make him happier than to send you to prison."

"But such is life. Rarely does a man get the thing that will make him happy. Mr. Lyle will testify, even against that thing he wants so badly, because he, like all of mankind, has a weakness."

"And what’s Mr. Lyle’s big weakness?"

"That’s so easy, I’m ashamed you have to ask. Why, it’s his reputation."

That was easy, Wallace thought. Of course that was it. "He has a sterling reputation," she said. "You’ll never find anything against him."

"As John Donne said all those dozens of years ago…"

"Hundreds," Wallace interrupted.

"Don’t interrupt," Thomas said. "It’s impolite. Dozens doesn’t preclude hundreds, now does it?"

"No."

"There you go. As I was saying, as John Donne said all those dozens of years ago," and at this point, Thomas adopted the dramatic tone of voice he used in the old days when he read Wallace bedtime stories from Poe, "No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away…"

"I know the poem," Wallace said, impatiently. "What’s your point?"

"I know the poem, too," Thomas said. "I would think that a person of an intellect nearly as advanced as my own might enjoy a little literary indulgence. My point is that a man’s reputation is as tied to the mainland as he is."

"What does that mean?"

"It means that I have every reason to believe that Mrs. Lyle will testify that she loaned me that combine, and that she told Mr. Lyle about it days ago."

Wallace let this information sink into her consciousness. She pictured Mrs. Lyle, a fine looking though matronly woman, then her cheeks reddened at the implication of her father’s words. She rubbed the embarrassment from her face, picked up her ever present dust cloth and headed straight for the certificate on the wall.

"You bought that certificate," she said, as she carefully wiped the red dust off the glass covering the document.

"This certifies that Thomas Atwood has an official measured IQ (Intelligence Quotient) of 187 (one hundred, eighty-seven,)" it declared.

Despite herself, she smiled.