by Steve Vernon
I went to the cellar later that night and I placed those same papers in the furnace and broke the coals with the prod stick hammering them down into a light powdered ash. They made a sound like the breaking of soft bones as I worked them down hard.
I don’t ever remember her leaving me. I guess it was something that was easier to forget.
Tonight I stand out here in my back field talking to my Granddaddy. There is a lantern burning in the Frist House and I can see its reflection sheening in the upper window of my own home. It makes a bright dancing red light through the curtains my wife sewed so many years ago. I can hear her singing softly in the cellar, the furnace working hard and the smoke billowing up into the night sky.
Some folks will tell you that a man should learn how to grow from his past. Some of us stand rooted in it like old forest oaks. For myself, I stand here in the darkness, leaning on my walking stick and the memory of my Granddaddy’s sins.
Some night I’ll go on back into the house where my wife is waiting. She’s got a fire burning for me, I know. The stains and the shadows kindling in the embers of the old furnace seem to whisper secrets to me, words I cannot decipher and truths I have yet to understand.
But for now I’ll just talk awhile and listen to the memories of the evening wind rustling through the tall dead grass. There’s something I must remember but for now I’m happier to forget.
I have always been an admirer of a well-told joke. This next story was written a long time ago. It too sat in my filing cabinet, until one day I took it out and tore it into pieces and glued it back together into something that looks like what is here before you. I rewrote it and revised it and tucked it away for a collection that would undoubtedly surface. I figured that was pretty clever of me, but that collection never did surface and this is too good of a story to let sit there and remain unpublished.
Traveling Salesman Story
You stop me if you’ve heard this before.
My name is Darnell, Fred Darnell. You can call me Fred. I’m a salesman for the Knost and Justice Woodland Fertilizers. It’s a small company, not much more than a basement of a cottage industry. We sell a line of organic fertilizers. No chemicals that can burn your plants - only natural ingredients such as ground bone-meal, dried blood or wood ashes.
Natural ingredients make a natural fertilizer.
Unfortunately they don’t always make a natural profit.
That’s where I come in. My job is to travel out into the rural areas that our distributors cannot reach.
Which is where my story first starts.
I was on the road as usual. Deep in the foothills of half past nowhere. It was a new territory for me and according to my road map I was driving through a lake.
It must have been the dry season.
Being this lost didn’t bother me much. I figured on finding the nearest farmhouse and using my innate lack of direction as an excuse for a sales pitch.
That was the plan but so far there were no signs of life.
So I pulled my car off to the side of the road. I needed a break and I had to piss like a racehorse. So I squeezed out from behind the wheel of my big New Yorker. Even this car was a tight fit for my sprawling frame. Football when I was younger and too many truck stop breakfast specials since then. Someday, I constantly promised myself, I would be able to afford a big old Cadillac.
But not just yet.
I watered the woods with a little gentle yellow rain and I added a little stink to the mountain air.
I took the time to roll myself a cigarette, a simple ritual that always seemed to help me relax. I dug out a wooden match and scratched it alight with my fingernail. That little move always wowed the cheerleaders back in college. After the first few puffs the knots of tension in the back of my neck began to slowly unravel.
That was the magic of tobacco. Sure it was growing something in my lungs and my coughs had grown thicker with age and no doubt I would one day have to face up to the fact that they called these things cancer sticks and coffin nails for a very good reason but for now I was quite content to accept my poison.
Breathe in.
Exhale.
I could think of only two good reasons to be out on this deserted stretch of rural roadway today. My wife Annie and my daughter Peggy. Those two were reason enough. I had to make this job work out. It was my third in two years and had taken the favor of a friend of a friend to secure it.
I was in the foothills of fifty and walking toward sixty and there just wasn’t that many chances left.
I remembered the way that Annie and Peggy had both smiled at me as I drove away. I remember looking back to see them getting smaller and smaller and then vanishing as I turned my head back just in time to avoid running into a tree – which would have been a damn fool way to begin my new job.
Annie still had faith in me. She didn’t even mind all of the travelling I had to do. She knew I would come home to her. I was her ever-constant faithful Freddy. I had never cheated on Annie and I didn’t plan to start now.
No way.
My cigarette was done. I got back into my car and back on the road. I had the feeling that something big was coming up for me. I pressed my foot down on the accelerator just for the hell of it.
“Today’s going to be my lucky day,” I said.
As I rounded a sharp turn I saw him. He was magnificent. He looked as if he had been waiting here for me. A trophy, if I ever saw one. His antlers were impressive, three pointers at first guess. He weighed in at about three hundred pounds – a full grown mule deer standing directly in my path.
There was no time to stop.
Nowhere to turn.
I hit the buck with a sickening thud.
I sat there, badly shaken. Staring out of my rear view mirror was a face as pale as death. My scalp was laced with blood. I must have banged my head somehow. If it hadn’t been for my seatbelt I would be draped over my hood. As it was I had got away lucky. I shook my head slowly. I unbuckled and forced myself to stand.
The car was a mess. Three hundred pounds of mule deer hit at seventy miles per hour had cracked my radiator wide open. The car wasn’t going anywhere.
Neither was the deer.
The things a guy has to go through for a buck.
It was a stupid thought but it jiggled out a giggle and then I started to laugh so hard I wasn’t exactly sure if I could stop.
“Funny, isn’t it?” someone said from behind me.
I turned around.
There he was.
Have you ever rolled up a sheet of paper into a ball and tried to smooth it out? You never could get the wrinkles out. That was his face. Time and the elements had plowed deep furrows across his features.
“Hot day,” he said, speaking like a man with all the time in the world.
“It sure is.”
“Have an accident?”
“I already had one,” I said, shaking my head. “Have you ever seen the like?”
“I expect even a deer gets tired of living,” the old guy said. “Let’s have a look at that head of yours. I’ve got a first aid kit in the glove compartment.”
Which he got.
“It looks harmless enough,” he said. “Shouldn’t be any problem. I’ll wrap a bit of gauze around your old gourd.”
He washed the cut off with some iodine.
I related his family tree to him in some detail.
He grinned and wrapped my head while I introduced myself.
“Just call me Lon,” he said. “You got any rope?”
“Rope?”
“We need to dress this deer, if you don’t mind.”
I did mind but didn’t argue. I popped the trunk and got the rope. Lon dragged the deer back into the woods. I hung onto the rope every now and then but mostly was in the way. We stopped in the shade of an oak.
“The shade will keep it cool,” Lon said.
He drew a machete-sized skinning knife, gutted the beast and let it lay belly down to drain the blood f
rom the open cavity. He used the rope to construct a makeshift windlass which he used to raise the carcass up into the oak tree.
Then he slit the deer’s throat.
The blood rolled out in thick red gouts.
“That’ll do it,” he said.
“Are you just going to leave it hang there?”
“It’s the only way. As long as a bear don’t find it we’ll have venison for breakfast. If I had a deer bag or even a bed sheet, I’d skin it, but it needs the hide to protect it from bugs and such.”
Bear?
I looked nervously out into the woods.
I swore I could see something moving out there.
I kept looking over my shoulder as he lead me back to the road.
“I’ve got a jug back at the house,” he said. “If you’d like a snort of something cool and wet. You can spend the night at my place and I’ll drive you to town in the morning.”
I stared at my car. It wasn’t going anywhere and if anybody wanted to steal my fertilizer samples they were welcome to them. I took my catalogue and my order book.
You never know.
We walked until the road became a trail. The trees seemed to close in around us. Their branches reached out and caught at my clothing. There was no way a farmer could use this as an access road.
I stuck close to Lon. There were no forks in the trail but I had the feeling it would be very easy to get lost along the way. And besides, I felt there was still something out there, watching in the woods.
And then I saw something move.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“Deer,” Lon said.
I wasn’t so sure about that.
The truth was, I had never seen a deer that could run on two legs.
Only I kept my mouth shut. I did not trust my senses after being rattled around the way I was.
We walked on.
The dirt beneath our feet was parched and dry.
“Been this dry for long?” I asked.
“For a while,” Lon allowed. “It might rain soon.”
“I imagine your crops could use it.”
“Some could.”
“Crops need all the help they can get,” I said.
“Some do.”
I didn’t ask which crops didn’t.
The trees made room for a small stretch of cleared land. Squatting in the heart of the clearing was a trailer. One of those long ones you find planted in neat little trailer park rows. It seemed out of place out here in the middle of nowhere like it was. “Here she is,” Lon said.
The land looked dead and gray, like something that a swarm of locusts had chewed up and spit out. Standing apart from the trailer was an old weathered barn, stoop shouldered with age.
“Come on in,” Lon said, holding the trailer door open.
Which I did.
“Grab a seat and set,” he told me.
I did that too.
“Nice place,” I said, but it wasn’t.
It was cold here. Cold and gray as the barren soil it lay in. The air was stale. It felt lifeless and dry as dust. The whole clearing felt empty and alone. We sat there on a pair of folding chairs in front of a heavily painted kitchen table. Oak, I think. The wood was cold to the touch. The walls were bare, save for a single photograph showing a middle aged woman and two young men in uniforms. Both of the young men held battered suitcases.
“Have a snort,” Lon said, handing me a jug. “It’ll loosen your jawbone.”
It was raw stuff that burnt going down. I wondered if he’d bought it or made it himself. He looked like an old moonshiner, but I didn’t want to ask.
“You grow much around here?” I asked, still choking from the shine.
“Oh this and that,” he said. “Whatever the signs say to plant, I grow.”
“What sort of signs?”
“Signs of power. Water signs. Plant when the signs are in the loins, when Scorpio runs high.”
I nodded as if I understood.
Which I didn’t.
“Much of a crop this year?”
“Not much for the last few years. This land used to be good but lately it’s been drying up. Getting mean and spiteful.”
He swallowed another gullet-full and I followed suit.
The stuff sort of grew on you.
“I’ve got something that could help,” I told him, wading into my sales talk.
When I was done he nodded like he’d understood.
“That sure sounds alright,” he said. “I’ll sleep on it, I guess.”
“You do that, Lon,” I said, using his name like a handle. “You take all the time you need, once you drive me to town, if it’s no trouble.”
“No trouble,” Lon allowed. “No car, is all.”
“Well maybe I could phone for a tow truck?”
“No phone either.”
I thought about that long walk into town. Two or three hours – maybe more given the shape I was in. Still, did I really want to spend the night in this battered old trailer?
“We’d be having venison for breakfast,” Lon said.
Who was I kidding? I had to get to back into a town and phone somebody.
“One for the road,” I said.
I had my glass tilted to my lips when she walked in.
I choked.
Hard.
She was dressed in dungarees, work boots and a plaid work shirt – threadbare in all of the intriguing places. Two dead rabbits dangled from her dainty clenched fist, their heads hanging at an impossible angle.
I choked even harder.
“Easy there, Fred,” Lon said. “Don’t die on us.”
I nodded weakly, struggling to stitch together what ever strands of dignity remained to me.
“This is my daughter Sheba,” Lon said.
Beautiful just wasn’t a big enough word.
“Pleased to meet you, miss,” I said, standing up and trying hard to conceal just how pleased I truly was. Her eyes showed that my attempt at concealment had failed badly.
At least she smiled.
“Sheba doesn’t say much,” Lon explained. “She hasn’t spoken since her mother helped give birth to her.”
Helped?
“My wife died when Sheba was born,” Lon went on.
There was something in his voice.
Something left unsaid.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered.
“Wasn’t your fault,” Lon said dryly.
“Was that her?” I asked, pointing to the snapshot on the wall.
“That was her. We had two fine sons. Then the damn government got them killed in some damn fool war. So we tried again. We had to have another child.”
My thoughts turned to my wife and daughter.
I couldn’t imagine life without them.
“I understand,” I said.
“Stella knew the risk of birthing as late as she did. It was my idea, mostly.”
There it was again.
Something left unsaid.
I stared at the photograph of the sad looking woman.
She couldn’t have been more than forty-five years old.
Which was when I said something stupid.
“How about if I stay for supper?”
I spoke to Lon but my eyes were on Sheba.
“It is awful late,” I said, although it was only six o’clock.
In a short while Sheba had transformed the rabbits into a stew with all the fixings. The meat was undercooked but I wolfed it down. Lon and I passed the jug throughout supper. During the meal Sheba eyed me boldly. Her foot, now bare, ran up and down my leg. No matter how many times I shifted she hunted me down.
I forced myself to remember my wife.
Annie.
And Peggy.
Sheba’s foot stalked higher up my leg.
“Getting warm Fred?” Lon asked.
“I’m fine,” I lied.
“Your face is redder than a fresh stuck pig.”
After Sheba cleared the table Lo
n and I talked of farming. I rolled cigarettes for both of us. We passed the jug a few more times. I became less interested in talking fertilizer. Lon had me spellbound. The man was more in touch with the earth than any farmer I had ever met.
“Up here in the hills we live close to the dirt,” Lon said. “The soil has a pulse that you can feel in the dirt. The earth is full of spirits. The Indian knew about them. Folks back in bible times knew about them. It’s only you city folk who have forgotten.”
The conversation was growing way too deep for me.
A couple of more drinks and Mother Goose would be too deep for me.
Lon picked up the jug. He walked out the screen door. Cracked it open and let it swing. I saw the flicker of a mosquito dancing into the heat of the room. Lon tipped the jug over. The last few drops splashed to the earth.
“To the spirits,” he said.
“Amen,” I muttered, too stupefied to say anything more sensible.
Lon returned the jug to the table.
“Time for bed,” he said, with a yawn.
And then I was alone.
I shook my head sadly at the empty jug.
Dawn was going to come up like thunder.
I closed my eyes for just an instant, leaning back against the wall.
When I opened them Sheba was there. Her shirt hung open and the tops of her dungarees were undone.
I rose to my feet.
Her eyes were deep and hungry.
A man could wander lost in eyes like those.
I backed up.
She grabbed my wrist.
I kissed her.
Salt stung my dry lips. The room spun around. I either lunged or fell on top of her. Maybe I was pulled.
The night flickered like heat lightning.
Afterwards I looked up for love in those hungry eyes of hers.
I saw nothing, save myself.
My last thoughts before sleep swallowed me whole were of Anna and Peggy.
I had lost something here tonight.
Something irreplaceable.
*
I woke up with a pounding headache. My mouth tasted of cotton and sand. Something prehistoric had crawled inside my gut and died. I felt unclean. I was stiff and sore and could barely move.