“Oh, I can guess right, I bet.” His father’s face is broken with lines like tree bark. “You done the luck jars yet?” He yawns. “Put them with the soap. I filled a bag with every last bar. With any luck we’ll sell all of it. Don’t you leave it till morning. I’m leaving early and you’re not well enough for travel.”
“I never get to go into town.”
“Plenty to do right here.”
A wagon passes with a thin man in the driver’s seat wearing bright red suspenders. The man nods.
Orr and his father keep their ground.
A young lady stands in the back of the wagon, her face shadowed by a bright yellow bonnet.
“Come on now,” his father shouts at the wagon. “You all scaring my hogs!”
She walks toward the edge of the wagon, looking almost like she’ll jump if she gets the chance. She says, “It’s gonna be a glory day, and you all should join us tomorrow. We can dance with Him in His presence.” She shakes herself like she’s been doused with cold water. “You know about Heaven and hellfire, boy?”
Orr looks up at his Daddy, closing shut his hand in his pocket.
“We’re not particular, and you don’t talk to my son,” his daddy says as the lady in the wagon rides off. A bell makes a high, clean racket in the evening. “Makes no odds,” he says, looking at Orr. “Put them luck jars in the wagon, could fetch as much as three dollars apiece. Should be a good morning with all these folks going up.”
Some men on horseback come galloping. Orr moves closer to the path. The horse legs work feverishly, tossing up dirt clods and lime shards. He’s not so scared and he blocks his face from the dust as steam rises from the nostrils of the horses, their wet mucus shining.
“Get over here,” his father says. “Before you get yourself walked on.”
He turns back and stands beside his father as the men ride by.
Trees vein the blue dusk, and a sudden flutter like sheets of rustling paper comes from the slow-burning cane. He looks back that way, at the cave in the hill by the bank rocks, and the bats come rushing out of it, spat from a sick mouth, almost eclipsing the orange leaves of fire. The dizzy in his head drives the wet chill on his skin.
“Fire’s about done,” his father says, walking back toward the canebrake. “And you all keep moving now,” he says louder.
Orr watches his father scoop up his hat from the river and toss water at the fire. He pulls his hand from his pocket, opens it, and he can barely see the shrew in the evening light. He pulls a sharpened piece of cane wood from another pocket. He stares until his eyes see better. Not so sure he can do it, kill a pig. He turns toward the river, and his father pulling down the cane char. The moon is out somewhere, making a cold glow over and through the woods. He looks up, can’t find it. He looks down where now he sees the shrew nuzzling. He once watched his father sever the head of a deer with a rusted saw. They never let him see his mother’s body. Already a year now without her. He pushes at the shrew with the cane blade and looks back at his father hacking at the grasses. He stabs lightly at the shrew’s belly, seeing how far he can push without breaking the soft pink skin.
“Get those jars in the wagon, Orr. I’ve got an early morning.”
He wipes away a cold sweat from his warm face. It makes a dark spot on his sleeve. He presses the blade against the shrew’s soft tail as it bustles on its back like an upturned bug. The shrew squeals. He turns away, his small body bucking with revulsion. Bitters from his stomach spit up into his throat. Sometimes he naps with the hogs. Pig bellies are round and tough like leather. He slaps at a fly on his neck, and again he pokes the tip of the blade into the soft belly of the shrew.
“Why you dawdling? You need to get in bed.” His daddy comes up beside him again.
“I’m going, I’m going. There’s still light left.”
His father kicks a rock toward the path. “Dammit, Orr.” He points at the hill beyond the path, where a large black sow, the oldest, freely grazes on the hill. “Get her in the yard. Now.”
Orr rolls the cane back and forth between his fingers. Another wagon coming. “Why there so many wagons?”
His father bends and picks a stone from the grass. “Un-neighborlies telling us all what’s what. God don’t play particular and neither should we.” He throws the stone and hits the wagon broadside, the rider turns abruptly. “You’re breaking up stones from my path!”
His daddy says, “They used to come around some, and knocking on your door. But I haven’t seen them out this way since before your mother’s gone. Must be a camp meeting up north some.”
A lone rider approaches and slows, pulling up his reins, rubbing noises as they tighten around his gloves. He lets a rider go on beside him, and says, “You all should join us riverside tomorrow. A glory day and these years are glory years! We’re living in the Lord’s last century now!” He removes his hat and shows a smooth bald head. The man looks up. “These days are Last Days, and Heaven and Hell are hungry.”
Orr looks back at his father.
His father says, “Get moving out of my land.”
The rider smiles. “My scalp is clean like my conscience. And I’ll see you tomorrow yet. No staying away, I hear. You best bring your boy when the Lord comes calling.” He stands in his saddle and slaps at the neck of his horse, galloping off.
His daddy says, “Let’s just hope these folks got dollars in their pockets. Ladies do like soap, all kinds.”
“Where they all headed?”
His father studies him, and then says, “You see all around? Take a good look.”
Orr looks.
“All the God we need and church, too.” His father shows the wood, and the river. “All of this is mine. And yours. God’s, too, if there is one. And it don’t cost a penny from your pocket.”
Orr nods his head: makes sense.
“Your inheritance, boy. Good land to work, and the character of your mother. May not be much, but it’s yours.” His father looks around the farm. “This is everything.”
“Yessir.”
“You remember the Montgomerys who moved back east? We had business.”
“Yes sir.” The youngest Montgomery boy had shown Orr how to whittle.
“They was like these but different. Catholics. Same thing, but different. At least they had enough sense to keep to themselves and never come knocking.”
Orr’s bones ache, and he thinks of dead pigs, and horses gone, and of his sleeping and buried mother. All of them in one place. He’s warm and cold in all different parts of his body.
He says, “God’s here, too?”
“All we need of Him.”
Orr thinks on this. So He’s somewhere else, too, where we don’t need Him.
He looks at the pigs in the yard, his stomach weaseling up in his throat. Mamma’s in a place where we don’t need Him.
His daddy rubs his fingers together. “And I can’t figure why God’d want my corn to dry anyway.”
Orr opens his palm and watches the shrew crawl. His father snaps a broken branch from a hickory and walks off, saying, “Every few years they get together, particulars in bunches, swearing God is particular. All that sort of horse shit. Your mother, she wouldn’t hear none of it.”
The shrew’s fine, just fine. Get the jars on the wagon pull, and bed the sow.
A blond woman passes along in the back of a flat wagon. She stares about, looking lost, misplaced. Her face is long and blank. She reaches out a hand toward Orr. She’s reaching. He wants to take it, not sure why.
His father says, “Give me any tulip tree, a hundred feet high, and I’ll bow down like any one of them.” His father waves at the path. “Wave goodbye, Orr. They won’t be back for a long while.”
Orr waves. His father tosses a stone. The bats fly over, screeching, changing positions in the trees.
His father says, “Just like them, moving in bunches. What Kentucky needs is independent persons. You, me, and like your mother was.”
A wagon stops a
nd the driver tips his hat to the boy. The driver says, “Get on now.” He smacks the resting horse’s back. “I said get on!” But the horse stands still with his eyes bewildered, and looking backward, spying on Orr and what lies in his palm.
A thin switch snaps backward, comes down with a cleaving thwack. The driver shouts, “Get on!” And the horse snarls and buckles from the switch, rearing slightly, then falls forward into a reluctant trot.
Orr buckles, too, and is sure he smells the burning stripe on the horse’s hide. His father’s voice comes from behind him.
As the smell of cane char wafts from the river.
The black sow watches from the hill.
She’s fat and she’s proud, lifting up her gray snout, her black belly swaying as she moves. She’s queenly there against the sky, the biggest of the lot. The oldest one of all. Her tail curls up in silhouette. A hot sick stirs in Orr’s stomach. He shivers, heaves, and vomits. Not much, but it empties him. He wipes his mouth and spits. He cries some, but makes sure his daddy can’t see. He dries his eyes, and opens up his palm. He presses the blade to his own soft neck, looking down there at the baby shrew. He presses hard, but does not break his own skin. It hurts. It’s not that he’s just afraid of killing, but also of what lies beyond the act, and he can’t seem to figure it. He pulls the blade away, and puts it back in his pocket. He sets the shrew down in the grass. He walks across the path toward the black sow grazing in the dark.
* * *
It’s early morning and a cold blue canopy stretches over the farm. The hogs are asleep in the yard. With a deep breath, Orr walks toward a large oak tree, dew dripping from the prickly browning tubers of a cancer root growing at the base. A dog barks, and Orr says, “Be quiet.” A good sleep, but he’s woken with a kindling in his chest, the kind of brittle breathing that comes with a slow-breaking fever. He snaps off a piece of the root and rubs it against his neck, at the same place he’d pressed with his blade last night. He walks toward the barn, itching at his heavy shirt and wiping sweat from his brow. “Wet morning,” he says to the dog. “Think she’ll rain?” He takes a piece of ham from his pocket, bites it, and throws the rest into the grass.
He hears the wooden clatter of a passing wagon but he refuses to look, afraid he might see the woman’s face again. He reaches up and pulls at the heavy barn doors.
It’s dark inside and the air is chilled and still. He walks along toward the back table, hay grass snapping underfoot. The black sow grunts and snorts, a few piglets asleep there at her teats. He looks away from her. A subtle light is bleeding through the clapboard slats, and the chickens are waking. Beside is the soap table. All empty now, every last bar for sale. The barrel beside it filled with ash for making lye. He takes hold of a long spade and pushes back open the doors. Morning coins of sun blink between the oak leaves and cast bright flashes as he walks toward the river. Horses are coming, but Orr won’t look to the road.
He stabs at the earth by the bank rocks, digging, sweat gathering over his eyes until he strikes a hard surface. He presses the spade against the side until he can wedge the point beneath it. He presses with his slight weight until the object comes loose, breaking through the soil like a small coffin. His daddy’s been gone for hours already. He never gets to leave the farm.
He pulls the old luck jar from the ground and wipes away the soil from its bellied surface. The molded shape of a man’s bearded face stares back from the jar, his hard clay beard uncoiling, painted and covering one full side of the jar. A cork has been stuffed forcefully into the opening and seems almost fused to the jar. He studies it, turning the thing in his hands, and wiping the bearded face clean. He wonders how such a thing truly works. His father once told him they used to get made by witches. But not anymore. Anyone can make one, as long he believes, if he truly believes. Call it magic, luck, or religion, boy, it’s God in a bottle and it works. The air still tastes some of chalky cane char. The bare and burnt stalks naked beside him. He sees clearly through the canebrake now. No place for hiding anymore. Their luck has been good since Mamma died, when the raiders came sneaking from behind the canebrake. They put a knife through her belly, left her lying on the bed. His daddy found her. He told Orr not to come any closer. His daddy pulling the petticoat back in place … You have to feed your luck, Daddy always says, like anything else alive. So they bury a new luck jar and get rid of the old one every time after burning the canebrake.
He tosses the jar into the river and watches it bob and jerk with the current, disappearing downstream, wishing the water good luck as it goes. Time to make and bury a new one.
He walks back around the barn to the doors.
The barn interior is more visible now with light stealing in between wallboards. Smoky with sunlight and brown shadow, flecked with swimming dust and yellow grit. He walks to the soap table and, kneeling, reaches under. Only four empties left. He picks the smallest of the four, an oblong jar with a greenish stain on the surface of the carved bearded face, wipes it clean of hay dust, and takes the fire tongs from a hook on the wall and sets them on the table. He looks around at the floor of the barn until he spies a mushroom lump of cow dung. With his blade he slices and lifts a small piece. Then he presses and maneuvers the piece into the open mouth of the jar, ridding his blade of cow dung like butter from a knife. He looks back and forth, side to side, in the barn.
Feathers.
He reaches over the chicken fence, takes hold of a hen, and pulls a grab of feathers from her back while she squawks and kicks out her feet. He drops the hen and bunches the feathers, slipping them easily in the mouth of the jar. The jar is warm in his hands and a plume of stink wafts upward, the dung cooking some on the bottom surface. He wipes sweat from his brow, spits into the jar, and sets it beside the tongs on the table.
A long wooden shelf hangs above.
He pulls over a crate and climbs up onto the table. From here the ceiling joists are that much closer. Chickens hop on the hard, packed dirt showing through a thinning layer of hay grass. Need to lay more hay grass. The black sow is asleep, her broad back rising in breath. The sun bursts between the roof boards, and he covers his eyes.
He takes a wooden box and a shallow clay bowl from the shelf, and climbs down.
The bowl is filled with calcified nail shavings, glass-sharp hoof cuttings, the remnants of a dead horse’s tail. In the box are the remains of a King James Bible, a spilling bag of corks and bungs, and a pile of modest handmade crucifixes. The Montgomery boy showed him how to make them. He chooses one of the smaller ones, no taller than his thumb. A crude dying Christ hangs from the cross like a loose frayed ribbon. He opens the Bible at random, and points his finger on the page. He reads the verse out loud like his daddy taught him: “Be not righteous over much. Neither make thyself over wise. Why shouldest thou destroy thyself?”
He tears the page from the binding.
He spreads the page on the table and places the wooden Christ in its center. Chooses two large crescentlike hoof cuttings, and pulls a long black hair from the horse’s tail. He scatters the cuttings over the Christ, folds the paper over its contents. He carefully ties the bundle with the hair strand. He then works the small bundle into the open mouth and drops it into the jar’s clay belly. Chooses a leather cork, takes the fire tongs from the table, and leaves the barn.
Around back, he sets the jar on the ground and removes the top cover of a barrel. It’s half full, and a cloud stink of urine opens upward, hot and metallic. The lean smell of cow piss rides on the rich rot of aged, wet wood, filling his nostrils with a sting and making him nauseated. He spits. The barrel’s been full for weeks and the urine is dark, taking on the color of the wood like a whiskey. A crucifix floats there, sacralizing the urine aged and now turned to lant. He grabs the jar in the grip of the tongs, pressing the neck of the bottle up against the hinging pivot of the tongs, and he immerses it. The clay bearded face goes under. He pulls the jar from the barrel, made new, full and baptized in the sacred lant.
; He stuffs the cork into the brimming mouth and it spits warm spume along the sides. He hammers the cork in with the butt of his fist, and then against the barrel. He wipes the sweat from his face and leans against the barn, feeling woozy. Walking back to the hole by the river, he allows himself some real satisfaction in his work, thinking of sitting down soon in the cool summer grass and the breeze drying his cold wet back, thinking of his mother, of the fine morning, and the good luck piss jars bring.
* * *
Orr takes a piece of hard bread and dips it in the ham grease his father left out for him. He stuffs his mouth, crumbs falling. It’s well past noon, closer to evening, and his father should’ve been home by now. From outside there comes a nervous barking. It’s the red dog on its belly. Beside the door, the fire in the pot stove shrivels inward, its blue leaves going cooler. Chewing on the bread, he goes outside and sees a wagon coming from the wood. He shushes the dog, kicks its haunches, and it runs. It’s a large covered carriage, white-tented, and the horses are slowly moving. He picks up a stone from the ground, cocks back his arm. The dog darts toward the path, barking, yipping.
The wheels of the wagon are large and white, spokes blue and red. The finest wagon he’s ever seen. He throws his body forward with the stone, but misses hitting the dog. He picks another from the grass. The wagon comes closer and the driver wears a hat tipped low, blocking his face. The horses have silver blinkers on their eyes, rebounding bursts of sunlight. Orr squints, walking closer to the dog. He throws the stone, and immediately wishes he hadn’t. The dog cries out and turns toward Orr, tongue hanging, before running back to the river.
“Why’d you hurt your dog?” the driver shouts.
The wagon has pulled off the stone path, and moves quietly now in the grass. Not yet looking at the man, he stares at the wagon, at this rude turn. The horses are close now, slowing the rumble of their breathing, fume and spit fogging from their dark nostrils. On the side of the tent in large red and blue letters: “Langley’s Daring Circus Show.”
High as the Horses' Bridles: A Novel Page 25