by Chad Leito
“Saul Higgins,” he replied, and their thick hands met and shook.
“Good, good,” said Burl. “It’s nice to meet yer.” Burl picked up his cane and limped over to the table. “Yer places are already set, just come and sit down.”
I looked at the kitchen table and saw that there were already three plates out; each filled with a slab of beef, mashed potatoes, and bread. Glasses of milk sat behind the plates and napkins and silverware were laid out appropriately. A thick candle sat at the center of the table casting a flickering yellow hue over the wood. His preparations broke my heart. The man had been so excited about having company. He probably didn’t see too many people, living out in the woods. It upset me to think that we almost hadn’t shown up.
“This looks great,” Saul said as we sat down.
Burl didn’t answer, but only nodded. He was busy forking away at his meal, throwing potatoes and beef into his mouth with a passion. Saul looked at me with a huge smile on his face, and then looked back at the eating wild man. It was like watching a dog eat. Saul and I didn’t say anything, and Burl finished his plate before we had even taken bites of ours. When he was done he picked up his plate and licked his tongue over it. He licked all of the juices off and then looked at us curiously. “What are ye’ waitin’ for, dig in.”
Saul and I obeyed. We began to eat our food while Burl got up and dished himself seconds from hot pots and pans that sat on the stove. The food was great, it was the best meal that I had had since I had eaten Pitri’s cooking; maybe even better. The beef was tender and seasoned with various greens and herbs; the mashed potatoes still had the skin in them with cheeses mixed in.
Burl sat down and began to eat his second plate. After eating his first helping of mashed potatoes, beef, and bread, he ate slow enough to allow him to talk. “How do you like it?” he asked.
“Very good,” I said.
Saul just gave Burl a thumbs up and a smile.
“Great,” Burl said. “Not many people try my cooking but me and Snuggles.”
“Who’s snuggles?” Saul asked.
Burl’s eyes lit up. “Snuggles is my pride and joy. She’s my little puppy.”
My eyebrows furrowed. I thought of the dog’s angry eyes and the way its black hair spiked up on the back of its neck when it saw me. That wasn’t a puppy.
Burl turned to us. “So, Walt told me some of your story, but tell me the rest. How did you guys end up on that farm? What happened there? How did ye’ escape?”
Saul took the lead and began to tell the story through a mouthful of mashed potatoes. He didn’t spare any details.
“He put a gun in your mouth?” said Burl in disbelieve.
Saul nodded. “Yeah, he did! He even kicked me in the face!”
Burl clenched his fist. “Damned them!” he said. “They are the most selfish people!”
“Do you want to see where they whipped me?” Saul asked.
“They whipped ye’? For what?”
“One of the guards was hitting me and I tried to block his punches. I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, lemme’ see.”
Saul stood up, turned around, and pulled up the back of his shirt. I hadn’t seen his back in days. Thick red lines of scar tissue ran down his torso. He was going to have scars there for the rest of his life.
“I’m so sorry, Saul. Those people disgust me.”
Saul continued to tell the story up until our escape. Since I was the one who killed Glen, he let me take over. I talked slow, trying to be deliberate with my words. I wanted Burl to understand that I had no choice. I talked about how Lauren’s son had died and how she had picked me because I resembled her son.
Burl busted out laughing through a mouth full of bread and milk. “You kind of do look like a little Salyer,” he said.
I told about how I was scared that Glen would kill Saul, and then about how Glen had come in from the fields that night and said that he had killed someone. The house grew quiet and by the time that I got to the climax of the story my words were nearly as quiet as a whisper. Burl and Saul’s faces grew solemn as they watched me talk. Slow words came from my mouth. “And then, I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the gun went off in my hand.”
The night was late and the wax was running off of the candle stand and onto the wooden table. The flicker of the flame had grown low.
“And ‘e died?” Burl whispered. He was immersed in my story and had forgotten about the food in front of him.
I nodded my head.
After I was finished telling that part, Saul continued on with the story. Burl lingered on every word. He was interested and I guessed that he probably didn’t get to have conversations like that very much. Saul told about the bartender in town and about getting captured by the huboons. To my surprise, Burl believed the story of the huboons. Apparently other people had had similar encounters, or so Burl told us. He had never heard of anyone getting captured before, thought. As Saul spoke I began to look around at the little cabin and grew curious about Burl’s past. I wanted to know where he came from, what he was doing out here. So, when Saul was done telling his story I took the opportunity to find out more about Burl.
“So how did you end up here?” I asked.
“What do yer’ mean?”
“Out here in the woods, on your own, a cabin built. How did you get to this place in your life?”
“Well,” Burl began, “I’ve been here for a long time. Twenty years, since I was about thirty five years old. A much younger man, that’s for sure. I don’t get much company out here. A drifter here and there. And that’s okay. I enjoy company, but I also enjoy being alone.” Burl reached into the pocket on the front of his shirt and asked, “do you two mind if I smoke? It helps my stomach after dinner.” He procured a pipe and a baggy of tobacco.
Saul and I both shook our heads.
Burl loaded his pipe, lit it with a match and began to puff. The aroma filled the air and the smoke wafted around the man’s head. “I wanted to stay on the ship.” He sucked more smoke from the pipe and then bent over coughing. He wiped his mouth and then continued, “I never really had much interest in going down to Mungus. It was the ship that I was born on. It became known as the Beardsley ship, after Andrew Beardsley, you know, the president of the World Union when the ship left earth. When we arrived, we were offered contracts for living on the Salyer’s land. Ye’ could work for seven years and become a free person, or at least that’s what they said. Then ye’ could live in what they described as a ‘paradise of liberty.’ Huh! Yeah right! I’m one of the only Beardsleys that didn’t ever work for a Salyer, not a day in my life. In fact, I haven’t heard of another Beardsley that ever got completely out of working for a Salyer in one way or another.
“I decided not to sign the contract. In my mind, we Beardsleys could have a society set up and running in half the time it would take for me to work all the way through that contract. We would have too, if it weren’t for that damned drug, you know?”
“No,” I answered. “I don’t know.”
Burl scratched his chin as if pondering this. “No, I guess that you wouldn’t know. It wouldn’t be good for that story to still be circulating. It’s probably treason to tell it, or something like that.
“To tell you the truth, I don’t like tea, and that’s what saved my life. Sounds silly, but it’s what happened. The Salyers sent up a care package to the Beardsleys who decided not to sign the contract. Attached to it was a little note that basically said, ‘even though ye’ don’t wanna come down and join our nation, there’s no hard feelings between us.’ If they didn’t want hard feelings between us, then they wouldn’t have done what they did! Bunch of liars, that government. I don’t think that all Salyers are bad, but the ones in charge are rotten down to the core. They will lie right in between their teeth, like they did to you that day outside the Theatre. Like they did inside of the Theatre. ‘prisoners are subject to a trial,’ Ha! Not in a millennia! So, anyways, they sent up this g
reat care package full of all sorts of stuff. Chicken, beef, noodles. And it was good, too! But the thing that got everyone ravin’ was the tea. It was tea sweetened by swanness juice. Swannesses are good, and they are a fruit that only grows on Mungus. They have a unique taste and grow in trees.”
“We’ve had some,” Saul said. He described the fruit that he found up in the tree that day.
“Yes, those are the ones!” Burl said. “So this tea was supposedly very very good. Too good. People begged me to taste it, said it was wonderful. I bet it was, but I just weren’t interested. Then, whenever the supply started to run down, people began to fight over the remaining tea. It was gone in three days, and ten people were injured in a brawl over the last drops. I knew something was wrong then. The Beardsleys wrote letters, begging for more of the tea. The Salyers sent back contracts. We could work for 20 years then we get all the tea we want. That was the deal. Everyone signed a contract, including me. Even though I didn’t want the tea, there were nothin’ I could do at that point. If I didn’t sign it and go down, I would have been left on the Beardsley ship all to my lonesome self.” Burl looked at the candle with a sad smile. “I guess that that ended up happening anyways.” He shook his head and took another drag from his pipe. “Anyways, they had all of the Beardsleys out chopping down trees. They made the entire grasslands; they didn’t used to be there. It used to be all forest. And they are still chopping. Probably hoping to make the whole planet a giant field.”
“How did you escape? How did you get passed the guards?” I asked.
“I didn’t have too. There weren’t guards watching us. The workers were so addicted to whatever drug they put into that tea that no one dared to leave as long as they got tea once a day. They would work all day for a small portion. So they had people watching them during the day, threatening to take away their nights serving of tea if they didn’t work, but no one guarding them at night. I left the first night. I took an axe, found water, and built my house. I farm, I trade, and I live out here alone.”
“Do you trade in town.”
“Oh, yeah. Nowhere else to trade.”
“How do you know that they won’t take you away?”
“They wouldn’t do that. I cook big meals of hog for all of the government officials every Christmas.” Burl laughed. “They like their hog more then they’d like to see an old man with a cane fightin’ in the Theatre.”
“Are you afraid they will take your farm away?”
“No one knows where it is, how could they?”
He was right, he was miles away from the town and in the middle of the wilderness. “So how are there not more free Beardsleys? I mean, the ones who went off the ship initially and signed a seven year contract, why are they not free?”
“Because the government doesn’t want them to be free, and because the government can do whatever it wants. If there are too many free Beardsleys, they kill a few hundred in the theatres. Or, charge them for something like libel and sentence them to a lifetime of free labor or else they will kill them. It’s very easy.”
Saul yawned. I looked over to see that his eyes had drooped down. He looked tired.
“Would you two like to stay here with me?” asked Burl. “Like, live here?”
Saul and I shared a glance.
“Ye’ can eat and get a roof over your head if you will only help me out around here in the daytimes. Its not easy work, but I won’t whip ye’.” Again, his eyes droop back down to the candle. “And besides, it gets mighty lonely out here.”
“We would love to,” I said.
“Really?” Burl asked. His eyes lit up with joy.
“Really,” Saul said. Burl stood up, came around the table and hugged us both.
We cleared the dishes and then he led Saul and me to a bedroom that he had set up for guests. “You two don’t mind sharing a bed, do you?”
“Not at all.”
Burl told us that he will be in to wake us up early. Then he retired to his bedroom. The bedroom was nice. A hand sown quilt lay on the bed and pictures of a young Beardsley man who I guessed was Burl sat up on the walls.
I lay in bed thinking about Burl. Can I trust him? He does know that there is a bounty on our heads. He is a little odd. But I think I can. He seems kind, we will help him as much as we can, and my biggest reason for believing that he will not hurt us is that he is lonely. I thought of this as I lay in his guest bedroom. He had more than one bedroom built into his house and he has lived alone here for 20 years.
Burl wasn’t joking when he said that he would wake us up early. When it was still dark outside of the window, Burl came into the bedroom and shook us awake. The first thing that I saw that morning was his long red beard and smiling face in the dim light.
“Good mornin’, sleepy heads. It’s time to get up.”
Breakfast was good. We had eggs and biscuits. Burl and I talked about the farm work and what we would be doing that day as the sun rose. Saul just sat looking numbly out the kitchen window, his bed head sticking out in every direction.
Before talking with Burl about his land and occupation, I had no idea how much work he did every day. He owned twenty heads of cattle that he kept in a big pen wrapped in barbed wire. They ate off of the grass and drank from a pond that sat in the middle of their pin. He also had a chicken coup that he had been out to earlier in the morning to get the eggs.
“How early did you get up?” I asked, putting an arm out towards the window to show how early it was.
Burl laughed, “I don’t sleep much.”
He also had a garden that he grew fruits, vegetables, and grain in. He even had a swanness tree. On the back of his land he had a big pond for fishing. “How would you two like to have fish for dinner? We’ll fish today.”
Saul’s eyes lit up and he said his first words of the morning, “Really! We can fish today?”
“We sure can.”
When breakfast was done we cleared the table, got on our shoes, and went outside. Morning dew was still out over the grass. We had a few jobs to do before we could go fish for the day. Burl brought with him a bowl with six whole eggs inside of it.
“What are those for?” I asked.
“Snuggles got to eat too,” Burl said. We walked to the side of the house where the dog cage was. The huge black dog was sleeping inside of the bars and we snuck up on him. Burl was holding the eggs in one hand and his cane in the other. His eyes admired the dog. “Isn’t he cute?” Burl asked.
The beast was startled by Burl’s words and it jumped to his feet, threw its body into the side of the cage, and began to bark and snarl like a madman. Burl’s face looked as though he was gazing upon a swaddled newborn baby. He put the bowl of eggs down on the ground and kicked it through an opening at the bottom of the cage. The dog tore through the eggs, shell and all, and in a few moment the bowl was clean and the dog began to chew that up, flinging it around its cage.
“Why did you name it Snuggles?” Saul asked.
“Just look at ‘em! How could something like that not be named Snuggles?”
Saul and I shared a look and held back our laughter. The dog tore up Burl’s wooden bowl until its cage was scattered with wood chips.
“Have you ever tried to snuggle with Snuggles?” I asked.
“Yeah, I have.”
“What happened?”
Burl pulled up his pants to show his right leg, or where his right leg should have been. A wooden peg ran from bellow his knee and was covered by a sock and then his work shoe. The leg was a piece of handiwork, carved to resemble a human calve. Burl tapped his wooden leg with his cane and laughed. “Took my leg. It was my fault though, I kind of startled him. He was too young, and I thought that I could just walk into his cage. Well, he showed me!”
Next, we went to Burl’s garden and we helped him pick out ripe vegetables. His garden was huge, spanning several acres with carefully marked wooden signs indicating what everything was. Carrots, potatoes, onions. In the middle was a great tree that
looked just like the one that Saul and I had slept in after we left the farm. For the next hour we walked around filling baskets to the top with fruits and vegetables to be either eaten or canned for the winter. When we were done it was the middle of the day and the sun was high and hot.
“Ready to fish?” Burl asked.
We followed him as he limped throughout his grassy land to a huge lake in the middle of the woods. “Wow,” said Saul.
“It’s pretty, aren’t it?”
The water gleamed blue and white with gentle waves chopping up and down across the surface. Burl coughed and then limped off on his cane to a wooden shed fifty yards off of the water. He undid the top latch and opened it. “This is where I keep my poles.” He pushed the door open and we entered.
The shed smelled of must and sawdust. Dim light leaked in through a crooked window yellow from dirt and spider webs. The place was full of stuff. Bags of dirt, canned fruits and vegetables, hoes, shovels, fishing poles, a metal tackle box and…
Saul gasped and pointed. “Are those baseball bats?”
“Sure are,” said Burl. “I love the game. I’ve got some balls too.”
I hadn’t ever seen Saul so happy. The rest of the day was full of laughter and relaxation. Burl sat fishing and Saul and I went off and pitched baseballs to each other. The fish were biting well and Burl didn’t really need our help. The bats were made of smoothed wood that Burl had carved out of tree branches and he had stitched the balls with yarn and cow hide. We found a wide rock out in the woods and made that home plate. Saul then counted off the steps to the pitcher’s mound and turned and pitched me balls. I had never swung a bat before and the first hour or so was filled with hard swings where we struck nothing but air. Saul and I alternated between pitcher and batter, the pitcher almost always winning the battle. Then we began to make contact, nothing solid but a few grounders and pop ups here and there. Burl laughed and seemed to enjoy watching us. “Choke up!” he called. “Keep your eye on it.” “Stop turning yer’ darned foot!”
We played long until after the sun went down with the baseballs. Burl occasionally called us over to help him reel in a fish and by the time the sun was going down we had seven big fish on a line, their gills moving up and down in the summer air. Burl skinned the fish and got them ready to cook while I pitched the last few balls of the evening.