I WASN’T sleeping so much as thinking, or at least I thought I was thinking, but I might have been sleeping a little too. It was my brain, skipping around, as if I was watching a play or reruns on a little TV screen, starring those girls whose husbands and boyfriends were on the team. I was picturing us, together at the Moose, the stories they told me, their lives so heavy that I could only listen and nod. My tongue felt stuck in my mouth, I never knew what to say in return. There was Jaynelle, tiny as a peanut, that bristle-haired baby on her knee, so fevered and so big for his age she could hardly lift him, five more to care for at home. There was Brenda, Coach’s wife, who told me she’d had a breast removed last year, and every bit of her hair fell out, week by week, from the chemo. I didn’t realize she wore a blond wig, tight curls, under her wide scarf. Over her green eyes, her eyelashes were glued on, her eyebrows drawn with a colored pencil. The only one she trusted to cut her hair as it was coming out in clumps was Hal the barber, she said, and only because he’d understand, since he’d troubles of his own. Hal’s son had up and left his wife and their children and run off with Gribble’s seventeen-year-old daughter while Gribble was stationed in Hanoi. I didn’t know what to do with these stories, these sorrowful lives. I saw Hal, trying hard to smile, his face pinched, drinking doubles. I saw Gribble, slouched into the bar at the end of the game, head in his hands, his eyes darting back and forth, looking like he wanted to find a place to hide.
It was bright in my head, brighter than the real Moose Lodge, where the bar had been kind of dark and by the end of the night, kind of quiet. I wondered if I was dreaming these women, these men, and dreaming their stories. Then, for some crazy reason, I saw clear as day a snapping turtle that Alan Ray’d caught last summer. He’d kept it alive locked in a big white cooler, feeding it worms and stew meat; he’d wanted me to cook it for him. Its head, when we opened the cooler, bigger than Alan Ray’s clenched fist, raised up in reflex, its terrible open mouth raked at the air. But I must have been dreaming this. I kept thinking that I could feel every bit of what they all were feeling, that it wasn’t too late for me to tell them all I loved them.
And then I saw bright spots, shining spots, headlights, two sets of them, coming from somewhere, seemed like maybe from across a field, and then from far off, Pap’s voice, breaking through, saying, “Wake up, wake up in there,” and Lux’s voice, yanking open the truck doors, saying, “Get them some air,” him shaking me and shaking Alan Ray, the glare of headlights against a wall of snow, hauling my whole self back from who knows where. “Get them chains out of the truck bed,” said Lux’s voice. Then someone who sounded a lot like Pap saying, “It’s the fumes, it’s from the tailpipe, there’s gas trapped in the cab, quick, get them some air now. You, Lux, just get out of the way, let me over there. Wake up, baby, wake up. Oh, dear God, give me back my baby girl.”
EIGHT
GUN SEASON (1979)
ON A BLUSTERY DARK NIGHT IN MID-NOVEMBER, LUX and Dessie sat in the parking lot of the Reader School in the cab of their black Ford pickup truck, deciding whether to keep their truckload of government surplus food. Two streetlights barely lit the parking lot, and Lux observed that if they cut the headlights and drove around the back of the school, they could unload the unopened boxes of powdered food right into the school’s dumpster.
Dessie shifted their two-year-old Tommy onto her other knee, toward the middle of the truck. Tommy kept wiggling around, first trying to pop up the door locks, then trying to roll down the window.
“Let’s get going, Lux,” Dessie said. Cars were pulling out of the parking lot around them, and parents and teachers stood in the lit doorway of the schoolhouse, chatting and smoking. Dessie covered Tommy’s shoulders with her sweater. The air was damp, and Tommy could get a chill. “Can’t we just keep the food?” She sat the baby down firmly between her legs on the floor of the truck and held onto his pudgy hands so he could not reach any of the levers and buttons on the inside of the truck door. “I wouldn’t want us to get caught throwing it out. What would they think of us?”
“That stuff ain’t real food. It’s just somebody’s idea of food. Someday I’d like to tell them where they can put them commodities,” Lux said. He started up the truck, but left it in neutral to warm up. He cracked open the driver’s door and spit. Dessie didn’t say anything. She hoped Lux would quit thinking about the boxes of food in the back of the truck. There was bound to be something there that she could use to stretch the remaining food stamps. She was more focused on the night’s parent-teacher conferences and how her kids were doing in school. The school building was brand-new. The county had just consolidated and blended the K–8 schools, and it meant getting to know a whole new crop of teachers. Lissy’s sixth-grade homeroom teacher, Miss Crowe, a surprisingly young woman with a feathered hairdo and red fingernails that clicked on the desk as she opened her grade book, told her, “Elisabeth is not working up to her potential. She does her work, but nothing more, just enough to get by. School seems to frighten her. She’s too quiet.”
Too quiet? When Lissy’s at home, Dessie thought, she’s so chatty she follows me around the house. All she talks about is school. Dessie couldn’t stop staring at those fingernails. They were the most useless-looking things she’d ever seen. Dessie thanked Miss Crowe for her time. She wished she’d had the time to check this information with all of Lissy’s teachers. But Lux was waiting out in the truck with Tommy, and Dessie had to visit two other sets of teachers.
Little Lux’s first-grade teacher also didn’t seem to have any idea what he was really like. Dessie had wondered during their conversation if Mr. Catalano had him confused with someone else’s son. He had no problems settling down at home. If she did say something, perhaps ask more questions, would Mr. Catalano think it was disrespectful? Would he hold it against her son? Are you sure you have the right Luther Cranfield Jr., the one who builds army forts for hours out of Lincoln Logs, setting up and strategizing battles on the kitchen floor? The more Dessie settled herself down into the student-sized desks and looked up at teachers whose desks and chairs dwarfed her own, the more her stomach began to hurt, and her heartburn began to act up.
Worst of all was what Dessie heard from all four teachers about Ron, their fifth grader. By the end of the night, after she’d made the rounds, she felt like she was the one who had failing grades. “Lux,” Dessie began, “what are we going to do about Ron? He doesn’t do his work, his teachers say he won’t give them any answers at all, and he sneaks out of class to go God only knows where when their backs are turned. We need to talk to that boy and find out what he’s doing all day.”
“Jesus, Dess. What the hell do they expect?” Lux revved the Ford’s engine and put it into gear. “Ron’s smart. He knows the score. He’s got sense enough to know when he’s being spoon-fed a cart full of horseshit. He’s just too polite to tell ’em all what he really thinks.” Lux switched on the headlights and pointed the truck out of the parking lot toward home, ignoring the dumpster. “I’ll tell you what,” Lux said, “they may be an educated bunch, but ain’t a one of them could teach me anything useful.” Dessie flashed back to Miss Crowe’s fingernails. What would Lux think of those? She wondered if Billie had noticed them too. AJ was in the same class.
“Well, maybe you can talk to Ronnie about getting better grades, Lux.” Dessie said, smoothing little Tommy’s hair, but then she stopped. She could tell that the night had put Lux into a mood. She did not want to get him started. The entire town of Fairchance had been up in arms about the school consolidation. Lux would say that the problems were not his kids at all, that if the kids had teachers who knew them, knew the family, there would be no issue at all. That was very likely where this conversation was heading, and Dessie did not have the strength to hear it all again.
Tommy stood up straight when the truck began to move. He started bouncing up and down on Dessie’s lap, reaching for the steering wheel. “Hey, buster,” she said to Tommy, “you stay put and let Daddy drive.�
� She tried to wrap the seatbelt around them both. But she hadn’t lost all her pregnancy weight from Tommy yet, and the belt barely clicked.
Dessie could see Lux’s point; there was something about the way the teachers in this new school talked to the parents. The teachers were all strangers from New Martinsville or somewhere to the west, and the whole lot of them talked like they thought they were better than the kids they taught. Before the teacher conferences, the principal, Mr. Stillwell, practically forced them to take all that commodity food. The way he put it, with the gymnasium light shining off his bald little head and his extremely precise pronunciation, “I am confident you people came for the good of your children’s education, and just remember, good nutrition makes good students.” Dessie looked down at his shoes, for a moment thinking that the fussy leather wingtip shoes on his feet might cost more than Lux made in a week at the mill. It was hard to look back at his face. What kind of a simpleton was he to think that her children didn’t eat well, Dessie thought. Her kids’ grades did not come from her kitchen.
Lux switched on the radio, and soon Tommy fell asleep. The truck turned toward the narrower local roads. With each pothole, Dessie heard the rattle of the food boxes over the voice of Merle Haggard. Of course, they could use surplus food. This time of year, work was on again off again. But who could get a man like Lux that was raised on fresh milk, scratch-made cornbread, and fresh-dug potatoes to eat that government surplus? Two huge boxes of powdered milk, four of powdered potato buds, twenty-five pounds of rice, honey and square rubbery blocks of orange cheese, even powdered biscuit mix.
Dessie’s mouth felt dry after the long wait in hallways of the heated building for the teacher conferences. She rummaged around in her purse and found a hot cinnamon jawbreaker. The kids liked fried-cheese sandwiches, so she knew that if she bought a loaf of bread, at least the government cheese wouldn’t go to waste. Come gun season, starting the Monday of Thanksgiving week, Lux could shoot a deer, she thought. Thanksgiving they could eat stewed venison with the last of this year’s turnips. Maybe the First Apostolic would take the commodities if she couldn’t figure out a way to sneak them onto their dinner table.
SINCE HE was failing in math, social studies, and English, and since Lux did not weigh in on the matter, Dessie told Ron that he had to go to school on the first day of gun season. After Lux left for work early the next morning, she sat Ron down in the kitchen and broke the news to him, just loud enough for Lissy and Little Lux to hear, to put some fear into them, too. Ron, a lanky, blond eleven-year-old, fidgeted silently at the table, and then finally spoke up. “I’ll make you a deal, Ma,” he said. “If I bring home an A on something, anything at all, will you let me go out with Dad to get my buck?”
Dessie stopped mixing up the powdered milk and dried her hands on a dish towel. Tommy sat up in his high chair when she put another handful of Cheerios for him on the tray. Then she came up behind Ron and began smoothing his wavy hair. “You bring me home one A, honey, in any subject at all,” she said, “and I’ll find some money to buy you a whole extra box of shells.”
But that afternoon, when Lux arrived home early from the mill, he said Ron had to help him hunt regardless of that bargain. Work had slowed way down at the mill due to the weather, Lux had taken the following week off for gun season, and he wouldn’t be getting paid. “We spent thirty dollars on a vest for the boy and a hunting license with the buck stamp. And come winter, there ain’t enough lumber coming into the mill. They can’t drag nothing out of the woods when it’s so slick out there.” Lux was at the kitchen sink, scrubbing at his fingernails.
“What am I supposed to do, Lux?” Dessie asked. “When’s that boy going to think about his future? He’s got to go through school if he wants to get anywhere. Do you want him kept back?” She stood at the stove, adding diced-up bacon from last year’s hog to the government rice, trying to cook up something interesting. She blew on the rice, tasted it, shook her head, and reached for the lemon pepper seasoning.
Lux shrugged. “Let him take his licks if he won’t do his work. I ain’t going to be there to hold Ron’s hand his whole life.”
Dessie looked up at Lux to gauge how far to press this. She was trying to get it right. She told Lux that she’d been giving it some thought, and that Ron had Thanksgiving, and even the Wednesday before, which was also a school holiday, to go out deer hunting. The more she talked, the more he shook his head from side to side.
“Aw, shit,” Lux said, hanging on to his eyepatch while he took off the A-1 Lumber cap. He ran his wet hands through his thick black hair. “You know we gotta get out there on the first day. All them out of state boys come in from Ohio and Michigan, they drive up here and run off our deer. The deer get wind of all that activity in the woods, and they get scarce in a hurry. I’m taking Ron first thing next Monday morning. We’re getting out ahead of the sunrise, and we’ll find those bucks before anyone else gets to ’em. First day’s the best, but hell, we’ll have to be pretty lucky to get one anytime. It ain’t like we live up the hollow where they used to walk right past our front door.”
Dessie held her tongue. There was no way she could answer that point. Sometimes it seemed like he carried the world on his shoulders, she thought. It felt like yesterday they’d moved back down the hollow, but it had been two years. She stirred at the rice, trying to keep it from sticking.
Lux strolled across the living room and stretched out his arm like a rifle. He took aim out the window, pointing his index finger in an arc at an imaginary target. Then he frowned. “You know what I heard? I heard that over in Monongalia and Harrison County they close the schools all week during gun season. Now there’s a bunch of folks that have some thought about putting food on the tables of the kids they teach.” He walked back to the bedroom to find a flannel shirt before starting the evening chores.
Dessie chewed on her lower lip and looked up from the rice, out the steamy window to where the kids would soon get off the school bus. Ron still had a couple of days before the weekend. Maybe he would bring home an A, she thought. Otherwise she was going to have to let him go with his dad anyway, and then what in God’s name would keep that boy in class?
But as the bus stopped and the kids got out, Dessie could see Ron trudging up the driveway carrying something huge. Little Lux had Ron’s coat draped over his arm, hanging almost to the ground, and Lissy had his bulging bookbag. When he finally made it up to the house Ron poked his head in the door with a grin on his face, and he threw his cap up into the air toward the gun rack. “Hey, Ma. Come on outside and see what I brung you!”
Dessie smiled and turned off the burners on the stove. Then she picked up Tommy and hurried down the front steps of the porch, over to Lissy, Little Lux, and Ron. There, halfway across the yard, under their old apple tree, as big as life, was a large plywood cutout of a bear, painted dark brown with red gums, white circles around its eyes, white teeth, lips pulled back in a snarl, and a red tongue. From the front, with the sun creating a low shadow behind it, the bear looked oddly realistic, just like a small, shaggy, bristling black bear was standing under their tree, near the edge of their field, getting ready to snack on the last few apples that had fallen to the ground. “Take a good look, Ma,” said Ron, and he pointed to some writing on the back of the bear, where the plywood had been left unpainted. “I been saving this for a surprise,” he said. Dessie knelt down to read what the shop teacher had written. “Nice Job!” it said in red magic marker, up the inside of one forepaw, and then, on a hind leg, the letter A.
Dessie looked up at Ron. “Hang in there, Ronnie,” she said. “I knew you could show them. Just look what you can do when you put your mind to it.”
Lux walked across the yard, looked at Ron’s bear, and started to laugh. “Hey Ron, what’d you bring home now, a new dog?” Ron looked up at his dad, not sure whether to be mad or to laugh. “That’s no dog, you blind old man, that’s a bear.” Tommy echoed his brother. “Dat bear, bear, Daddy, dat bear.”
&
nbsp; “Come out in the woods with me on Monday, I’ll find you a real one to paint,” Lux said, and under his short black beard a smile curled the corners of his mouth.
OVER THE weekend, all Ron could talk about was buck hunting. In fact, all Lux and Alan Ray could talk about was hunting, too. There was an apple orchard way back at the head of the Goshen Road, with the last few apples dangling off the branches. Lux had been up there on Dakota and seen buck scrapes on saplings and deer tracks along the creek. The two men had also built a tree stand a few years earlier above a natural mineral lick beside the creek. They decided that before sunrise on Monday, Alan Ray and Ron would walk from opposite sides of the hill and try to drive any deer over toward the salt lick, while Lux waited, ready to shoot, above the trail in the tree stand.
When Monday came, the weather was crisp and clear. The men got out into the woods long before sunrise and took the pickup up the Goshen Road, leaving it at the old house site. Then they spread out in the woods. Leaves on the forest floor crunched loudly underfoot, and the wind whipped around behind Ron and Alan Ray. Lux realized that it was going to be hard to walk without being noticed, but he found his way to the tree stand and climbed a good fifteen feet above the trail to wait. But except for the raucous and continual warning calls of crows, it was as if all the wildlife in the woods had disappeared, not a grouse or even a squirrel.
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