The Secret Wisdom of the Earth

by Christopher Scotton

  Everything erupted in thunder and death, shaking the thirty-two-thousand-ton carrier to its bolts. He left the gun to his partner and ran down three flights into the aircraft elevator, where the plane had struck the ship. Heat from the firestorm blistering his face. Screams and burning flesh. Into the hold and out with the first man. Black smoke. Up the stairs and onto the deck. Back again four times until the hold exploded, sending flames through the wooden deck, showering burning splinters and steel around them.

  For his bravery, Arthur was awarded the Navy Cross, the service’s highest honor. The ceremony in Washington, D.C., four months later was the proudest his mother had ever been. She took the bus to Lexington and bought a dress for the occasion—the first store dress she’d ever owned.

  There wasn’t much work in the county for war-hero philosophers, unless they happened to be miners, so Arthur took a full military scholarship to the veterinary college at Auburn. After three years he was in Ned Pike’s old barbershop in downtown Medgar listening to the palpitations of Mrs. Biddle’s nervous cat.

  Sarah was determined to bring Lexington zest to small-time Missiwatchiwie County. She started the Medgar Women’s Club and Literary Society, organized the county’s first-ever rendition of a Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gave up her Lexington bus seat to a pregnant colored woman, let their maid eat with the family.

  After years of trying, Sarah finally became pregnant and the trouble started. The difficult pregnancy became a harrowing birth, with the baby breeched and Sarah losing blood fast. The infant survived, but Sarah died three hours after delivery.

  Then weeks of darkness and garroted sobs. Months in smothered sadness. A year of black guilt and dimly lit rooms. And from it, in the ash of death and broken expectations, came a little girl on air and light with chestnut hair named Anna Ryder Peebles.

  My mother.

  Every morning that second week I rose early, shoveled in cereal, and lit out for Kinder Mountain and the tree house, determined to arrive before Buzzy Fink came and went. The prospect of actually finding a friend in this forsaken place began to wash the stain of anger and hopelessness that had attached itself to my recent past. I would wait for him there, in the tree-house porch rocker, looking out over the mountains and conjuring my own names for them from the future adventures we would have. Sometime after ten o’clock his head would pop up over the porch platform. “Ha… Indiana!” And off we would go.

  But back at Chisold, evenings slid into a routine of awkward dinners in the kitchen and strained conversation on the porch afterward. Pops in his worn wicker chair with his never-lit pipe and a glass of Clinch Mountain sour mash whiskey over ice. Mom in one of the wing chairs in the living room soundlessly replaying the horrifying memory loop of Josh’s last moments. Me lying on the edge of the porch, mute and brooding.

  To combat my numb boredom, I took up Pops’ copy of Treasure Island and found myself transported to a new world with Billy Bones, John Trelawney, and Long John Silver—a place of buried treasure and murderous pirates, of desert islands and mutinied ships, plunder and mendacity, adventure and deliverance. A world without the weight of judgment, the sting of reproach, the crush of blame.

  Some nights an old friend of Pops’ would wander by to sip mash and offer snips of argument that were either taken or not. Other nights Pops and I would just sit by ourselves, sometimes in silence, sometimes in one-way conversation, watching the evening fold over itself. Evenings so still, even small winds teasing the old hickory by the front porch sounded like brushfire. And the easy spinning of ice and sour mash whiskey in a low glass with SWP etched into it like a flower. He would hold the glass from the top and swirl the mash and ice until a random thought revealed itself like the white ball of a roulette wheel settling on a number.

  “Lead pipes… that’s why the Roman Empire collapsed… they all went insane from lead poisoning.”

  And so it would begin.

  “It jus ain’t fair is what I’m sayin. They dint invite us into this country, we jus took it,” Lo Gilvens argued one evening. Lothario Gilvens was a regular visitor to the porch at 22 Chisold Street, primarily due to sloth, since it was twice as far for him to walk into town as it was to sit on Arthur Bradley Peebles’ front porch drinking the man’s sour mash whiskey. Pops didn’t begrudge Lo the whiskey, although it was widely known that Lo Gilvens couldn’t carry his half of an interesting argument.

  “I’m not defending it, Lo. All I’m saying is what the whites did to the Indians was no different than what the Indians had been doing to each other for five thousand years before we came. Coveting is one of the three basic human emotions, right behind love and fear.”

  “You left out hate,” Lo corrected.

  Pops shook his head. “Hate is overrated. People only hate if they can’t attain what they covet.” I could tell Pops felt the conversation unchallenging so he changed the subject.

  “Kevin, I’m going out on calls Monday morning to dehorn and castrate some yearlings and inoculate some pigs. I’d like your help.”

  Pops was still a practicing large animal veterinarian, usually making several calls a day around the county. Recently, however, he had turned over much of the office business, the dog and cat stuff, to Mrs. Quell’s nephew, whom he held in slight regard. “Couldn’t pull the prick off a parrot,” he said when Lo asked why he wouldn’t bring Dr. Quell instead.

  “Dint know parrots had pricks,” Lo said.

  “Well, Lo, I confess that parrots are not my area of speciality, but I can assure you that they do indeed have penises, albeit not particularly large ones.”

  That seemed to satisfy Lo, who knew better than to test an argument with Pops on anything related to the veterinary sciences.

  I was secretly excited about going on a call with him, but the last four years of my father’s missed ball games and broken promises had left me expecting little.

  “So, how about it Kevin?” Pops asked.

  “I guess,” I said sullenly and looked off at the abandoned house across the street and studied how it seemed to be brushed in alternating shades of black.

  Two gray forms accumulated from the vapors of the evening and took the porch steps. “Kevin, could you please get Mr. Skill and Mr. Meadows a glass of sour mash with no ice?”

  I had graduated to official bartender on the porch, which didn’t require much expertise since the only thing Pops and his friends ever drank was sour mash whiskey. I poured the drinks and brought them to the men on a tray.

  “Thank you, son,” they said.

  “Arthur, the standard of service on this porch has improved substantially since Kevin arrived—I commend you,” Chester said and raised the mash. Pops grunted agreement and began spinning his mash and ice in the low glass with the SWP monogram.

  Chester Skill and Pops had been friends for most of their lives. They attended the University of Kentucky together, and after a thirty-year career in newspapers in New York and Chicago, Chester retired back home to Medgar. For him, investigation and argument were as essential as air and water, so after a year of penetrating boredom, he acquired the Missiwatchiwie County Register and was now its publisher and editor in chief.

  “You boys hear about Simp Dodger?”

  Pops and Lo shook their heads.

  “Killed by flyrock this afternoon. That’s why I’m late. Wanted to get it into tomorrow’s paper. Everybody’s talking about it.”

  Pops sat up in his chair. “Where did this happen?”

  “In his own damn backyard,” Paitsel said, measuring out the syllables like they were bitter medicine.

  “What’s flyrock?”

  Pops looked over at me. “Flyrock is what comes off the mountain when they’re blasting.”

  “I heard this huge explosion last week.”

  “We are becoming a regular war zone the way they are blowing up everything.” He frowned and shook his head. “Back when the mines were underground they would use just a bit of explosives to loosen things up; y
ou could barely hear it. With this new way, they blast through four hundred feet of rock and dirt to get to the seam from the top. That takes some ordnance, let me tell you.”

  “Why don’t they just do it the old way?”

  “Greed, mostly. They can get twice as much coal out with half as many men by coming in from the top. Plus, some of the seams are thin or unstable; on those you really can’t be tunneling.”

  “I saw three mountains the other day when I was exploring that had the entire tops taken off. It looked weird.”

  Pops harrumphed. “It’s a crime, if you ask me.”

  We were all silent with our thoughts until Pops took a sip and shifted. “How’s Betty? I’ll go on up tomorrow.”

  “Not good,” said Paitsel. “She was home when it happened. Rock was the size of a basketball an took off most a Simp’s skull. Paul says he’s going up Frankfort to meet with the regulators.”

  Pops sat back in his chair. “We’ve got to put a stop to this.”

  “Now you’re soundin like Paul,” Lo said. “He’s a regular one-man ruction. Says he’s gonna chain hisself to the dragline.” He chuckled and shook his head.

  Paitsel unwrapped a long, powerful arm and chopped the air with his hand. “Don’t underestimate him, Lo. The man’s got no back-down.”

  “An Bubba Boyd don’t neither.”

  “That’s a fact.”

  “His boys been sayin some things bout Paul. Disgustin things.”

  Paitsel opened his mouth to reply, but Pops beat him to it. “That’s when I knew Paul was onto something.” He pointed his pipe end at Lo. “Bubba wouldn’t be spreading all these rumors if Paul wasn’t a threat.”

  “Heard Bubba’s pushin hard for the Mitchell place,” said Lo. “Next, he’ll be comin here to buy Jukes.”

  I sat up on the mention of Pops’ boyhood home in the mountains. Mom had told me so many stories about Jukes Hollow—the unimaginable beauty, the waterfall, the natural swimming pool, the centuries-old trees—I felt possessive of the place even though I’d never seen it.

  “Who’s this Bubba Boyd man?”

  “He’s the one taking the tops off all these mountains. He owns the mines and most of the town,” Paitsel said. “Not a man I want in my foxhole.”

  “And he wants to buy Jukes Hollow?”

  “He’ll have to pry the deed from my cold, dead hands,” Pops replied, staring out into the darkness.

  In the bountiful plenty, when the mines were fat with fuel and the soil gave back its best, they passed with shoulders set high and arms working like pistons pushed and pulled by the rods of their legs. Always forward. Relentlessly forward, hard hewn to task and actualized on effort. The talk, when had, was tricked trucks and new ATVs; rear-projection televisions and football prognostications; animal husbandry triumphs and county fair ribbons. In the bountiful plenty, usefulness was their province, their simple singularity.

  But now, in the staggering lean, they lay by on make-work and unrequired errands; they passed to no place in particular with shoulders slumped and eyes averted, with a discourse that ran to foreclosures and fully played-out seams, meager harvests and disappearing trout streams. It was as if everything they had set store by—the fields, the mines, the consistent means—was all turned about, leaving truck repossessions and canceled Florida vacations; idle squeeze chutes and farm store credit; questioning wives and hard kitchen table talk.

  Chapter 5

  BULL TESTICLES

  I was up Monday morning before Pops, just as the sky was beginning its run to purple and blue. I put on a full pot of coffee for him and sat at the kitchen table until he woke—coffeepot dripping and spitting as the first yellow light from the east fired the tops of the Medgar mountains. Then stirrings from upstairs and the creaking of floorboards under weight.

  “Morning, Kevin,” he said as he entered the kitchen. “Are you early for work or late to bed?”

  “Early. I wanted to get a head start on things.”

  “That’s a fine habit. We won’t be leaving for about a half hour, but better to be ahead of schedule than behind, I say.”

  “I made you coffee.”

  “I see that. Thank you.” He poured two cups, sat at the table opposite me, and pushed the extra cup across the white painted wood. “Anyone gets up this early is deserving of a cup.”

  “Thanks. Mom lets me sometimes when my dad is away.”

  “How’s your dad doing? He and I didn’t get to talk much when he was here.”

  I shrugged. Watched an air bubble sail across the brown sea of coffee. After a while I said, “He thinks it’s my fault, you know.”

  “That’s ridiculous. What makes you say that?”

  “Because he told me.”

  Pops’ lips became a single line and he dropped his chin as he stared into me. “When did he tell you this?”

  “About a month after it happened. He was driving me to band practice. We were in the car, not talking or playing the radio or anything; just riding, me and him silent. After Josh died it was like that—never talking.” I took a sip of coffee and pushed the cup around in a circle. “We come to this stoplight and he turns to me and says, ‘None of this would have happened if you’d just done as you were told.’ Then the light goes green and he turns back to the road and goes all silent again and we just keep driving as if we had been talking about a school project.”

  Pops exhaled slowly and brought his right hand up to his eyes, rubbed the sleep from them, then ran his fingers down across his cheek to his chin in time with the last remnant of air expelling from his lungs.

  “What happened was not your fault. You know that, right?”

  I nodded. Could feel approaching tears.

  “But being blamed for a tragedy like this by someone you count on is about as hard a thing as a man can handle.”

  I blinked into my coffee until I could swallow again. “I just don’t know why he blames me. He never told me to—”

  Pops cut me off. “Kevin, people deal with grief in different ways. Some folks turn inside themselves like your mom, and others need to blame like your dad is doing. He’ll come around—in the meantime, you stick with me.” He put his hand on my arm and squeezed. His grip was strong and warm. I looked up and he smiled.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said again, softly this time.

  “I’m afraid she’s always gonna be like this.”

  “Unlikely, but I suspect it’ll take her a while. What you both saw would rip the head from the shoulders of most people. I’m real proud of the way you’ve handled it. You’ve acted like a man and you’ve been a big help to me and Audy Rae—and to your mom.”

  We were silent for what seemed like a quarter hour, Pops with his hand on my arm, eyes into me; me moving my coffee cup around the table, drawing circular patterns with the drippings.

  “Let’s start thinking about breakfast.”

  After dishes, I followed Pops out to the shed where he kept his veterinary supplies. The outside of the structure was weathered gray wood—thick of the grain brought out by the elements—topped with a corrugated tin ceiling and a weather vane stuck on west. Inside was immaculate and organized, with row upon row of polished wooden drawers, brass knobbed and wearing unrecognizable names: Amitraz, Bacitracin, Clindamycin, Dexamethasone, and on.

  The ceiling was stocked with gleaming metal veterinary accessories—several sizes of forceps, polished spreader bars, clippers, clamps, shears, syringe guns—all dangling from overhead racks the way a chef hangs pots and pans.

  “Castration is usually a simple cut-and-snip affair, but dehorning adult bulls is a bloody business. Usually we do it when they’re a few weeks old, but Grubby Mitchell waited too long, so we’ll give them a quick anesthetic. Let’s see…” He opened and closed several drawers. “Here we go.” He pulled out a small glass bottle that read Lidocaine HCL. “This will take the sting out.”

  He loaded his satchel with several other veterinary accessories, latched it, and locked t
he shed. In the kitchen he poured us each another cup of coffee in travel mugs. Mine read:

  Bacitracin

  for Ulcerative Posthitis

  Merck Animal Health

  “What’s ulcerative posthitis?” I asked. I figured any additional knowledge would serve me well as Junior Veterinarian.

  Pops laughed. “Something you don’t want to get.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pizzle rot.”

  “Pizzle rot?”

  “A nasty fungus that affects ram penises. A ram with pizzle rot is an unhappy ram, let me tell you. For that matter, a man with pizzle rot is pretty unhappy too.”

  “We can catch pizzle rot?”

  “We can, but not from sheep.” He winked and put his hand on the back of my neck to direct me toward the door. A fragment of a smile tried to find its way up from the last two months.

  Pops’ truck was a twenty-year-old green Ford F-150 with thick tires at the back and a history of dents and dings from a generation of calls around the county. He put the satchel in the back and I slid onto the passenger-side bench seat. He reversed out to Chisold and took a right on Watford.

  We headed through the west side of town to Route 17, passing storefronts abandoned like October cornstalks—Xs taped across windows, a crack in one. Edwina’s Discount Apparel. Diffley’s Taxidermy. Kathy’s Kustom Kurtains. A deserted gas station on the corner—naked islands stripped of pump hardware, weeds breeding in the pavement fissures. A still-open liquor store.