Mrs. Phillip J. King said back in those days if you weren’t a Nance or a Dundee you didn’t have much of anything and if you were a Gottlieb you didn’t have anything at all. She said Buster and his daddy didn’t own but the two houses and the breezeway and the acre and a half of baked ground the whole mess sat on top of, and they helped tend another man’s tobacco when the season called for it but otherwise just trapped and fished and tried to wish a few vegetables up out of the hardpan. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said her momma told her that in November of the year preceding Mr. Alton’s daddy’s duck pond the Gottlieb fortunes took a turn for the worse when Grandaddy Gottlieb very nearly killed himself on account of a carp; Mrs. Phillip J. King called it a serious mishap. She said Granddaddy Gottlieb had set several bank hooks along the Haw River on the afternoon of a Tuesday and had left them overnight until midmorning Wednesday when he walked the four miles to the river bottom so see what he had caught. And Mrs. Phillip J. King imagined he hadn’t hauled in but a few bream and the rest bare hooks when he arrived at the last line and commenced rolling it up on the pole, but she said the hook seemed to have set itself into a log or at least a sizeable treelimb and it was all Granddaddy Gottlieb could do to bring in a half foot of line at the time for fear of breaking it off otherwise, so it was a tedious process, Mrs. Phillip J. King said, but finally Granddaddy Gottlieb drew the first lead sinker out from the water and then the second one and then the third one and then he brought in another handful of line and looked to see what sort of trash the hook might have snagged itself up on, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said Granddaddy Gottlieb found himself nearly eye to eye with a carp about the size of a full grown collie. Now it seems that the carp and Granddaddy Gottlieb saw each other at almost the same instant, and though Granddaddy Gottlieb knew right off he was looking at enough dinner for all the Gottliebs in both houses and the breezeway too, he did not know right off how to get the meal so far as the riverbank, not to mention the dinner table, while the carp for his part took action almost immediately and streaked for the deep water. So just as Granddaddy Gottlieb was deciding whether he would go into the river or not, he got yanked off the bank and went into it. And they set in to thrashing and wrestling and beating around in the water, Granddaddy Gottlieb and the carp, and Mrs. Phillip J. King told me and Momma it must have been a truly glorious and inspiring sight what with all that determination and all that valor and all that sheer brute strength and animal instinct coming together in the wilds of the Haw River bottom in November. Mrs. Phillip J. King said just the though of it made her shake and tremble all over. She said mortal combat had a way with her.
It seems Granddaddy Gottlieb would get the upper hand on the fish and then the fish would get the upper hand on Granddaddy Gottlieb and then the two of them would go at it even for awhile until one or the other of them would take the advantage again temporarily. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it didn’t appear that the carp could best Granddaddy Gottlieb or that Granddaddy Gottlieb could best the carp, but then once they both became fairly much worn out Granddaddy Gottlieb managed to lock one arm around the carp’s midsection, and with his free hand he groped in the back of his britches after the pistol he always carried there but what he found was only his underpants because the thrashing and the wrestling and the beating around in combination with all that glorious and inspiring determination and valor and brute strength and animal instinct had caused Granddaddy Gottlieb’s pistol to fall down his britches’ leg and into his right boot. So with his one arm still tight around the carp’s midsection, him and the fish together went down to the river bed after the pistol and three or four breaths later Granddaddy Gottlieb fetched up into the air what Mrs. Phillip J. King called the instrument of death which Granddaddy Gottlieb had made himself out of a filed-down rifle barrel and a shotgun trigger and a revolver hammer and a hunk of whittled oak for a grip. So Grandaddy Gottlieb leaned back as far as he could and brought the front end of the carp out of the water long enough to introduce it to the instrument of death, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said the shot played among the treetops and echoed and resounded throughout the valley while apparently killing the fish also since the carp became what Mrs. Phillip J. King called vanquished.
At first it was all Granddaddy Gottlieb could do to get his carp and himself out of the water and onto the river bank, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said he crawled on up into the underbrush and stretched out there for near three quarters of an hour in an attempt to recover his wind. Of course he was sopping wet all over, which is hardly any way to go around in November, so by the time he did get his breath back he was already genuinely ill and had to endure a number of shuddering fits before he could gather the strength to heft the carp up onto his shoulder. And as Mrs. Phillip J. King figured it Granddaddy Gottlieb was the rest of the morning making it from the river bottom to the Gottlieb acre and a half, what with the shuddering and the carp working together to slow him down, and she said it wasn’t until he got in sight of the bi-winged and breezewayed Gottlieb manor that he was set upon by a slew of little Gottliebs who relieved him of the carp and carried it on into the kitchen in triumph. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said the Gottliebs feasted off their granddaddy’s carp; she said they all got carp steaks and carp fritters and carp meat patties except for Granddaddy Gottlieb himself who got pneumonia.
Mrs. Phillip J. King said he was laid up throughout the winter and the spring and on into the summer which was a sorry time for Granddaddy Gottlieb and the rest of the Gottliebs also since circumstances put Buster at the head of the Gottlieb households and breezeway too, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said though Buster was highly accomplished at making heirs he could not be depended on for much of anything else. So Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb and Mrs. Buster Gottlieb boiled a plenty of bones that winter and that spring and the Gottliebs lived off broth mostly along with a few bream or bass every once and again and the occasional unfortunate grey squirrel all of which the little Gottliebs provided without the aid of their daddy who Mrs. Phillip J. King said spent the winter in a soft chair by the hearth where he lamented the Gottlieb predicament, and she said in the spring he moved out onto the back porch so as to do some beweeping in the open air. As Mrs. Phillip J. King figured it, the first of the Nance ducks did not begin to drop over the treetops into the new Nance pond until the sap had started to rise in April of the year of Granddaddy Gottlieb’s pneumonia, and since Granddaddy Gottlieb was sick under a comforter and the Mrs. Gottliebs were busy boiling bones and the little Gottliebs were off fishing and trapping and such it was left up to Buster to notice the ducks, which of course he failed to do at first burdened as he was with all the lamenting and beweeping, but Mrs. Phillip J. King said one morning on towards May Buster happened to come down off the porch into the backyard to stretch himself and just as he was working his neck a duck shot over the roof and disappeared beyond the pine trees at the back of the Gottlieb property. And Buster said to himself, “A duck,” and studied the sky over the roof of the house until two more sailed out of sight beyond the trees. And Buster said out loud but still to himself, “Two ducks,” and shaded his eyes with his hands and watched until five or six came over together. And Buster hollered, “Lord at the ducks!” which brought Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb and Mrs. Buster Gottlieb both out the kitchen window from the shoulders up and the two of them shouted more or less together, “What ducks?” which woke up Granddaddy Gottlieb who demanded, “Where’s a duck?” but who had failed to bring his head sufficiently out from under the comforter and so was not heard by anybody but himself.
And Mrs. Phillip J. King said before Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb and Mrs. Buster Gottlieb could draw themselves back into the kitchen and exit properly through the door a pair of drakes shot past the peak of the house and dipped below the pine trees and the two women together screamed, “Ducks!” and Buster hollered behind them, “Get the gun!” and Granddaddy Gottlieb rolled the comforter down below his chin and shouted, “What ducks?” And Mrs. Phillip J. King said Mrs. Buster Gottlieb fetched her husb
and’s shotgun out from behind the bedroom door and stormed into the backyard with it while Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb grabbed up her husband’s single shot rifle from the closet in the hallway and hit the porch at a gallop. Unfortunately Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb was not nearly so spry and sure-footed as she had once been and she stumbled somewhere between the porch planking and the first stairtread but happily managed to catch herself on the bannister and a little less happily managed to keep her hold on the rifle by the only piece of it her fingers could find to latch onto, which turned out to be the trigger, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said the gun didn’t discharge into the sky exactly but more into the backyard so that Mrs. Granddaddy Gottlieb very nearly bagged her boy Buster who in leaping wildly sideways touched off one barrel of the shotgun which did not discharge into the sky exactly either but emptied itself against the back part of the house with a tremendous racket, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said somewhere amidst the uproar and confusion Granddaddy Gottlieb, wrapped up to the neck in his comforter, stuck himself partway out the bedroom window and with his pistol blew the topnotch out of one of the pine trees. “I got him” Granddaddy Gottlieb hollered. “I got the son-of-a-bitch,” and he threw his arms up over his head by way of celebration, Mrs. Phillip J. King said, which caused him to fall over frontwards partway out the window but not entirely to the ground and he hung upsidedown against the siding with his thighs caught on the windowsill and Mrs. Phillip J. King said what with the lingering pneumonia Granddaddy Gottlieb was too weak-limbed to pull himself back up into the house and too weak headed to shut up for five seconds about the duck that he’d been too weak-eyed to see was not a duck at all but just a piece of a pine tree. And Granddaddy Gottlieb beat the clapboard with his pistol butt and yelled to his wife to go off through the pine grove after his bird until finally he wore himself out and dozed off just as he was.
An assortment of little Gottliebs who had been playing together across the road in a bramble thicket came beating it around the side of the house and into the backyard to see who’d been shot and why and there with Granddaddy Gottlieb hanging upsidedown out the bedroom window it seemed he’d gotten the worst of it and all the little Gottliebs set in to screaming and wailing and demanding to know how come, and Buster and Mrs. Buster and Mrs. Granddaddy had only just begun to quiet them down when the littlest Gottlieb, who was Tanya Alice, took her finger out of her mouth long enough to point it at the sky and say, “Ducks.” And Mrs. Phillip J. King said Buster brought the shotgun to his shoulder and fired off the remaining barrel before he ever bothered to take a bead so the near about half dozen mallards disappeared over the treetops untouched, and before the little Gottliebs could even begin to draw their fingers out of their ears their granddaddy roused up and commenced to slamming his pistol butt against the clapboard again. “I got one. I got the son-of-a-bitch,” he hollered.
But the truth of it was, according to Mrs. Phillip J. King, that a flying duck proved considerably more difficult to hit than a pine tree or a section of clapboard siding, especially with a pistol or a rifle and even with a shotgun. So after two full days of some very heavy gunfire interspersed with duckless periods of silence, the Gottliebs were still living off boiled bone soup and fish, and to make things worse all that sitting around and squatting in the backyard had given Buster and Buster’s oldest boy, little Buster, and little Buster’s brothers Dale and J.G. painful and severe sunburns on their forearms and the tops of their feet, and as for Granddaddy Gottlieb, who refused to remain in the bedroom or even to dangle out the bedroom window but instead took up a position in the backyard in a kitchen chair with his comforter around his shoulders and his pistol in his lap, he did not contract any noticeable sunburn himself but instead came down with a rare and unusual case of double hemorrhoids, which Mrs. Phillip J. King told me and Momma right there in the breakfast room must have felt like a couple of ears of corn and the shucks too.
And Momma said, “Helen!” and jerked her head in my direction.
And Mrs. Phillip J. King said to Momma, “Well, Inez.”
And I said to Mrs. Phillip J. King, “The shucks too?”
And Momma said, “Louis!” very quick and sharp.
And Mrs. Phillip J. King told me, “The shucks too.”
So they hauled Granddaddy Gottlieb’s bed on out into the backyard and when Granddaddy Gottlieb wasn’t inside the house soaking in the galvanized tub he was outside under his comforter with his pistol in his right hand and his eye fixed on the sky, and Buster and little Buster and Dale and J.G. buried their feet in the dirt and wore their winter shirts, which meant that most everything that could be remedied was remedied except for the bone soup and the fish. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said towards the end of the third day after the Gottliebs had opened up on a number of ducks flying single and nearly as many flying in bunches without felling a one, Buster and little Buster and Dale were setting themselves to carry Granddaddy Gottlieb and his bed back into the house when a sizeable flock of some variety of duck or another came flapping and honking over the rooftop, and seeing as how Buster and little Buster and Dale had their hands full of bedposts and Granddaddy Gottlieb had already stuck his pistol into the back of his pajama bottoms in preparation for the trip, that left only J.G. to see to the ducks, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said he was sitting on top of an upsidedown no. 10 can, which itself was sitting on top of a stump and without bothering to get up he raised the shotgun, leaving the butt of it against his stomach, and squeezed off both barrels at once the force of which, of course, blew him backwards off the can and off the stump too and near about drove him into the ground, so Mrs. Phillip J. King said J.G. found himself in no position to see that he’d hit a duck or to even care that he had since it very possibly seemed to him at the time that he would never draw breath again. But Buster and little Buster and Dale and Granddaddy Gottlieb too saw that duck turn over once in the air and then dip out of sight behind the pine trees, and Buster and little Buster and Dale let loose of the bedposts to go after it and so dropped Granddaddy Gottlieb in the middle of the backyard, which proved to be unfortunate for him since he fell directly on top of his homemade filed-down rifle barrel pistol and consequently undid most all the healthful effects of a whole day’s worth of soaking on his condition.
Mrs. Phillip J. King said her momma told her it so happened that Mr. Alton’s daddy was taking in the twilight from his hewn log bench in the woods when the momentum of J.G.’s duck carried it on beyond the trees and into the water with the rest of the flock, but Mrs. Phillip J. King did not suppose Mr. Alton’s daddy noticed one of his ducks was dead when it hit the water since the live ones dropped into the pond with about as much abandon and since Mr. Alton’s daddy was most attracted to the splashing down and the lifting off and not the swimming around in between which of course the whole flock immediately engaged in except for the dead one, which sort of bobbed on the backwash and then drifted off to itself. So Mr. Alton’s daddy rolled from one shank to the other and made himself comfortable on the log bench while he waited for a new selection of ducks to swoop over the treetops and set down in the pond for the night, but instead of ducks what he spied was a species of Gottlieb that wandered out from the scrubby undergrowth on the far bank and took to poking around the reedy shallows with a stick. This particular Gottlieb happened to be little Buster though Mr. Alton’s daddy did not know it was little Buster, did not even know it was a Gottlieb since the Gottliebs were not the sort of people that a Nance would have anything to do with. Mr. Alton’s daddy simply knew it was not a duck and could see for himself it was poking around in a place where only ducks should be poking around, so Mrs. Phillip J. King said he became very understandably annoyed and rose up from his hewn log bench so as to charge little Buster, Mrs. Phillip J. King called it, to identify himself. “You there, young man,” Mr. Alton’s daddy shouted across the lake, and for no more than a second or two the top of little Buster’s head became little Buster’s face before it went back to being the top of his head again. And Mrs. P
hillip J. King said Mr. Alton’s daddy demanded to know just who Buster was and what he was doing and why he thought he had any right to do it on the bank of the Nance duck pond. But the top of Buster’s head remained the top of his head this time until two more Gottliebs, a big one and a little one, came out from the scrubby undergrowth and caused the top of Buster’s head to become the back of his head momentarily. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said the sight of three Gottliebs where there had been only one previously stirred up sufficient indignation in Mr. Nance’s daddy to cause him to jump on top of the hewn log bench from where he set in to charging all three Gottliebs to tell him just why they were where they were and just who they were anyway, and all the commotion and indignant screeching did not have much of any noticeable effect on little Buster but the uproar from Mr. Alton’s daddy did cause the tops of big Buster and Dale’s heads to become their faces momentarily before going back to being the tops of their heads again.
Mrs. Phillip J. King said of course the trouble was that none of the three Gottliebs could find the duck. They had been all through the pine grove without any success and now had ended up in the undergrowth around Mr. Nance’s pond, which was as far as they figured a dead duck could fly to. But even after considerable poking and prodding around in the reeds and high grass none of them could find much of anything except for Dale who ran up on a banded water snake and tormented it for awhile until his daddy made him stop. And Mrs. Phillip J. King said it wasn’t until little Buster couldn’t turn up the duck anywhere else that he decided to look out into the pond for it and found it floating upsidedown in the middle of a pack of rightsideup ducks, and he pointed at it with his stick and called out to his daddy who pointed at it with his arm and called out to Dale who pointed at it himself. Mrs. Phillip J. King said from where he was Mr. Alton’s daddy could see all the pointing and could see all the rightsideup ducks but couldn’t make out the dead one and so still did not understand exactly what the Gottlieb invasion was all about, still did not even know it was a Gottlieb invasion, and he clapped his hands sharply twice as an attention getter and hollered, “You there, you there,” several times in an attempt to turn the sides of the Gottliebs’ heads, which was all he could see now, into faces once again. But Mrs. Phillip J. King said the Gottliebs didn’t pay any mind to Mr. Alton’s daddy no matter how many “you theres” he cut loose across the pond since the Gottliebs were busily engaged in what Mrs. Phillip J. King called a discussion. And once Mr. Alton’s daddy left off his hand clapping and left off his shouting he could hear some of the noise the discussion was generating, especially after it became what Mrs. Phillip J. King called heated with most of the heat supplied by Dale who apparently had some strong objections to whatever it was little Buster and big Buster were agreeing to, and Mrs. Phillip J. King said things became outright fiery before big Buster grabbed Dale by the one arm and little Buster took hold of the other and the two of them together flung him on out into the pond, which seemed to bring the discussion to an abrupt close.
A Short History of a Small Place Page 25