She stopped, smiled wanly at Lucille, and walked to the bottom of the porch steps.
“What can I do for you, Lucille?”
“You can do for me to say what the hell you’re doin here.”
“I’m doing the delivering for social services this week.”
“Lemme see what you got. Get on up here.”
I walked up the steps behind Audy Rae and Mom and set the bag at Lucille’s feet. She had one arm raised and tucked behind her head. Her armpit hair was slicked flat from sweat, giving it the appearance of a dirt stain. She began rummaging through the bag and pulled out a can of creamed corn and put it on the side table. Next came two cans of pumpkin pie filling, then a jar of pickles and two boxes of Tuna Helper. She removed a man’s white dress shirt and held it up by the shoulders, examining the workmanship like a master seamstress. Cigarette dangling from her mouth, a ten-minute ash dangling from the cigarette.
“Hello, Lucille, do you remember me? It’s Annie Peebles,” Mom said to her. “We went to high school together.”
Lucille kept at the shirt. “Yeah, I remember,” she said. The cigarette ash tumbled to her chest, mixing with flecks of morning scrapple.
“Well… I just wanted to say hello and tell you how sorry I am to hear about Tilroy.”
She checked the size of a child’s winter coat. “Well, now you done it.”
“Yes, I guess I have, haven’t I,” Mom replied. I watched her watch Lucille Budget sort through the clothing. Mom smiled but said nothing else.
After a minute I drifted over to Lucille’s son by the tree. He had exhausted his supply of dog stones and picked up a whippy green stick. The dog saw the boy approaching and ran to the other side of the tree. The boy chased it around the poplar until the leash was wound up and the hound immobilized. He raised the stick and the dog blenched. He brought it down hard on the dog’s snout to a piercing yelp from the animal and a frantic scramble to escape the beating. The boy raised his arm again and the dog hunkered for impact. He held the stick in the air, laughing as the dog cowered with eye whites watching the boy’s arm for any movement. He started to bring it down hard and I caught it in midair. The dog yelped on the expectation. The boy whirled to me with crazy eyes. “Give it.”
I took the switch from him and broke it.
Lucille was holding up a pair of polyester slacks, wondering if her sister Betty would fit into them. She heard the dog’s yelp and yelled through the slack assessment, “Rayful! Don’t be hittin on George no more; he’s gonna bite your ass again.”
Rayful pulled free and ran toward the barn at the back of the house. “An leave them goats be!” she yelled after him. I went to the dog, who was still cowering in the dirt. I stroked his head, then went to the porch.
“What else you got in the car?” Lucille asked Audy Rae.
“In the car? Oh, we have about three more parcels to deliver,” she replied pleasantly. “We’re heading up to Bonny Holler next, then over to the O’Shea place. The O’Shea brothers were both struck with the lung, as you know. Ernestine and Kendra are having a bad time of it.”
“Well, don’t jus stand here jowlin… go get what else you got.”
“Excuse me?”
Lucille noticed me kneeling next to George. “Hey,” she said to Mom. “Tell your boy don’t be pettin on someone else’s dog without permission.” Then she yelled over to me, “Hey, boy, don’t be pettin on that dog. He’s a known biter.”
I jerked away from the animal. At my sudden movement, George winced, steeling for a blow.
Lucille turned her attention back to Audy Rae. “Well, what you waitin on?… Go get the other stuff,” she said and held up a pair of men’s trousers for a quick look. “I can’t be usin no Tuna Helper if I ain’t got no tuna, now, can I?”
Audy Rae’s forehead crimped. She folded her arms against her chest but kept smiling. “I’m sorry, Lucille, but I can’t give you more… The O’Shea brothers are in a bad way and the Sletts up in Bonny are counting on this food to carry them til month end. I can’t be giving you their needfuls.”
Lucille put the pants back in the bag. “Let’s you an me get somethin straight right now. You ain’t givin me a goddamn thing. This is giveaway stuff. The O’Sheas or the Sletts ain’t claimed it. Now, go on an bring that other stuff up here.”
Audy Rae didn’t move.
“Come on!” Lucille yelled and clapped her hands together. “I can’t be waitin all day.”
“Let’s go get in the car,” Audy Rae said to us and turned to walk off the porch.
Just then, a brown El Camino pulled into the driveway behind Pops’ truck. Sen Budget got out and walked toward the house, eyeing the truck in his driveway. My mind immediately went to the cold killing of the family mule six weeks ago. I swallowed. He sauntered up the steps, looked to Mom and Audy Rae. “What the hell are they doin here?” he said to Lucille under his breath.
The skin on my neck went to goose bumps as he said it, and I found myself clenching fists.
Lucille was solicitous. “Nothin, Sen, honey; she was jus droppin off some needfuls.”
“Where’s Daddy’s medicine?”
“Right here, Bunny.” She held up a medicine bottle.
He looked down at the bag of clothes at her feet. “What’s all this stuff?”
“Just some extra clothes from my family and social services,” Audy Rae said. “I thought you could use them.”
Sen smiled at her from a canted facade. “You thought I could use them?” He slowly took the food from the bag and placed it on the side table and walked over to Audy Rae and held out the bag. He was standing as tall as he could, which was only eye to eye with Audy Rae, his thin frame blown up like a puffer fish. Audy Rae took the bag.
“The day I take charity from a nigger is the day I put a bullet in my brain.”
Audy Rae said nothing but kept her gaze locked onto his.
“I beg your pardon… what did you call her?” came an incredulous voice from Mom. She stormed up to Sen Budget and stood a half head taller in front of him. “How dare you speak to her that way.” She jabbed a finger into his chest. “Came all the way out here to help you. You’ve got a lot of nerve.” I was taken aback at the fury in her voice. Her face was flushed and her left hand was planted on her hip—finger still in the air.
Sen stood with his mouth agape. Lucille was hiding her thoughts somewhere behind all that flesh. My goose bumps became the size of ball bearings. Rayful and the girls were shrubbed together on the other side of the screen door, displaying a rare solidarity that only an outside threat could convey.
Sen looked at the ground and smiled, then opened his mouth to reply, but Lucille beat him to it. “Who the hell you think you are, comin into a body’s porch an tellin them how to behave? Y’all take your bag a shit an git the hell off our propty, you hear?” She pushed up from the chair and lurched forward so the heaving appendage that was her belly touched Mom, adding an exclamation point to the command.
Mom took the bag from Audy Rae and we marched off the porch and into the truck. Sen’s El Camino had blocked our exit, so Audy Rae drove off the driveway onto the dirt yard and up to the road. George regained a jot of confidence and offered a decisive yap.
Chapter 43
JUKES HOLLOW
Each day the next week Pops became stronger, moved around better. On the Friday before school started, we walked down to Biddle’s for lunch. He was on a cane now, moving slowly, arm and chest still trussed. We stopped into Hivey’s to say hello before the meal. Paitsel, Jesper, Bobby, Grubby, and the rest of the crew were loafing earnestly at the back by the cold woodstove.
“Mornin, ladies,” Pops said.
“Look who’s found his legs,” Paitsel said.
“You goin to the big meetin tonight, Arthur?” Jesper asked.
“Don’t know anything about it. Is it yours, Paitsel?”
“Not one a my meetins. Billy Boyd called it. Says he wants to lay out his plans for the Company. Say
s when the Mitchell farm permit goes through he’s gonna need eighty more workers. Plus about forty temps for the construction.”
Pops shook his head.
Paitsel took a sip of coffee. “Wars ain’t won on a single battle, Arthur. We gotta take the long view. Mitchell’s gonna happen. We gotta focus on preventing future permits.”
“How do they know Mose Bleeker actually ate human flesh?” I asked Buzzy later that afternoon, referring to the likely source of his prized toenail.
“He spent three weeks down the mine with nothin but a canteen a water an come out fatter than when he went in. They found three a the bodies unspoilt, but they never found the other two.”
“That doesn’t prove he ate them.”
It was his first day in a wheelchair and he was testing its workings back and forth across the hospital room. He stopped and spun to me. “They asked him how he stayed alive down there, an he jus smiled crazy an said over and over, ‘Ain’t kilt nothin, won’t nothin die; ain’t kilt nothin, won’t nothin die.’ Mr. Mose couldn’t walk the streets without people starin an kids throwin stones. They all took him for a man-eater, so he started drinkin and become the town drunk. My grandaddy says he was a terrible miner, but he was a first-rate town drunk.”
“I think I’d let myself starve before I’d eat human flesh.”
“Not me. I’d cut a chunk a leg meat an roast it whole over an open flame an make me a sauce outta blood an kidney. That’s the best part, the kidney.”
“I thought the best part is the liver—baked in a piecrust.”
We both laughed.
Buzzy thought about that for a moment, then said, “What if you got your arm chopped off an it was the only thing left to eat; would you eat it?”
“I’d probably bleed to death.”
“Naw, you tied the blood off with your shoelace an lived.”
“I guess I’d rather eat my own arm than someone else’s.”
“Druther lose an arm than a leg.”
“I’d rather lose neither.” I gripped them both.
“Suppose you was a prisoner a war and they was gonna chop off an arm or a leg but they was gonna let you choose; which would you choose?”
“They couldn’t do that; it’s against the Geneva Convention. I saw it on an old movie.”
“Okay, you was stolen by aliens; they ain’t got no conventions… which would you choose?”
“Where on the leg would they chop it?”
“At the knee.”
“Definitely the leg then.”
“Not me.”
“Imagine having to scratch with no arms.”
“Or havin to pick your nose.” He did.
“Back in the Middle Ages in Persia they used to chop off people’s hands for stealing—Pops told me.”
“What’d they chop off if you lied?”
“Dunno, your tongue, I guess.”
“I’d like to be a king back then. Wouldn’t have to listen to nobody. What would you want to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could go back in time an be someone else anywhere, what would you want to be?”
“Maybe a pirate on a ship in the 1600s, exploring the islands and plundering stuff.”
“I’d like that too. I’m gonna change my time to that time.”
We talked for hours that day of the ships we would skipper and storms we would breach; the sails we would unfurl and the crews we would captain. The precise place on the horizon where the ocean becomes the sky; the exact spot on the chest to run through a rival with a sword; the configuration of the southern stars. We talked of the islands we would visit and the suns we would set; the mountains we would scale and the beaches we would take; the pillage we would covet and the beautiful girls who would fall in love; the hearts we would break.
That night, the last hot of August air settled onto the porch despite the darkness. Lo and Chester were at the town hall meeting Billy Boyd had called, and Paitsel was in Frankfort lobbying mining regulators.
I poured Pops mash on ice and settled into the wicker chair next to him.
“You know, Thomas Edison only had three months of formal education—made his way on hard work.”
And so it began.
“What are you gonna do on your last weekend of freedom?”
“Dunno. I’m thinking about going up to Jukes. Maybe spend the night up there.”
“Good idea. You’re rooted deep in that hollow.”
“I’m thinking about clearing out all those little trees around the cabin. Maybe get rid of some of the junk in the ruins. Clean the place up a bit.”
“That’s a great respect, son. See if Audy Rae can drive you—I’m not ready for the highway just yet.”
“I think I’m going to ask Mom.”
Pops began to spin his mash slowly. He nodded and gave me the satisfied look of a man cataloging the well-completed segments of a work in progress.
Mom stared down at the car keys as if they were found pieces from a forgotten puzzle. “Audy Rae can take you, or Pops,” she said quietly.
“Pops can’t drive and Audy Rae is shopping in Glassville. I need you to take me.”
“No, I can’t. My mind sometimes… sometimes it…”
“I’ll keep you focused.”
“We’ll get into an accident. If you got hurt I couldn’t forgive myself.”
“You’ll drive slow.”
“Pops has to come.”
“He can’t. He’s resting.”
She exhaled. “I don’t even think I can remember how.”
“I’ll show you.”
“How do you know?”
“Pops taught me.”
She backed slowly out of the driveway onto Chisold, then took an arcing, deliberate turn onto Watford. Once on Main, we picked up speed to low double digits and crept to the stoplight at Green. The streets were nearly empty of cars, which made for easy passage through town—we crawled past Biddle’s, Hivey’s, Smith’s. The lights were on at Miss Janey’s; a cheery Come In! We’re Open! in the door glass. I looked into the big front window at the barren cutting stations, then through to the empty washing department, then over to the reception area.
And there he was, leaning against the desk, arms crossed, smiling proudly from his bright-blue eyes, head cocked slightly to the right, a set of black combs in his white barber’s jacket pocket. Tilroy’s deft pencil and pastel strokes forming a precise rendering of the blade thin and the posture perfect—glassed and framed and hanging in reception as promised.
We turned onto Route 32, the urinal-mint factory dark and empty on the hill cut-in. Mom seemed to be gaining confidence now, speed increasing to thirty, me pulling threads of conversation from everything that had happened.
“Buzzy seems lonely in the hospital. I don’t think he gets many visitors.”
“His family doesn’t come out of the hollow much.”
“He just looks so sad in there.”
“He’s been through a lot.”
“We’ve all been through a lot,” I said with a tired laugh.
“But we’ve got each other.”
“He’s got his family,” I protested.
“True. But those kids are expected to make their own way in the world. They don’t get much support.”
“That sucks for him.”
“It’s just their way. The kids do okay, so maybe there’s a wisdom to it.”
It was the longest and most lucid conversation I’d had with my mother since Josh.
I stowed the saw and hatchet in the porch corner, next to Pops’ walking stick, left behind in the rush to the hospital, then went down to the waterfall. Grass had grown shin tall at his and Sarah’s picnic spot, so I found a rusted scythe from the old shed, sharpened it, then took the long off the grass. I finished the job with the old push mower, cutting it close the way it was kept back then.
After raking the clippings, I cut saplings near the cabin, sawing them out one by one at grass level. By the
time evening spread, I had cleared the entire side yard of trees.
At full dark I gathered the tools, laid them on the porch, and took a meatball sandwich and a Mountain Dew from the cooler Audy Rae had packed. I lit the kerosene lamp and sat on the porch, back against the cabin wall, walking stick across my legs, just listening to the night sounds—the same night sounds Pops heard as a boy so many years ago.
After an hour of night listening, I took the pack and the cooler and the lantern inside to the second bedroom with the triple bunks cut into the wall.
I put my sleeping bag on the top bunk, Pops’ bunk, and climbed up the ladder and settled into his old bed.
Buzzy and I are working beaverlike to dam up a creek. He lays the fresh-cut bamboo measuring rod down on a fallen log and notches two cuts to mark the measure. We’re at a two-handled saw, pulling and pushing the blade in opposition across the face of the tree. We cut through the base and hoist the log onto our shoulders—me at the front, him at the rear. This should be the last; then we’ll be swimming, he says. We place it on top of the logs already in the creek and fit it to the notches we had dug into the bank. A cliff materializes on the edge of the dream. I’m first, he says and climbs the rocks. It’s too shallow, I yell. But he ignores me and dives off. Don’t, I yell as he floats in the air. He spreads his arms and executes a perfect swan dive into the water. After a few seconds, he breaks the surface as a wholly different boy—a smaller, thin boy with brown hair. His face is deeply familiar, but I just can’t place him. This new boy exits the water and smiles to me. Jeb taught me that, you gonna go? I shake my head and he climbs to the top of the rocks. He dives again, another perfect swan, and comes to the surface as a young man. He cuts through the water with powerful, efficient strokes and climbs out to a waiting towel held by a beautiful woman with long chestnut hair. “You gonna go?” he says to her. She smiles, kisses him, then shakes her head. He climbs back up the cliff and dives in again, this time surfacing as the Pops I know. The beautiful woman on the bank has disappeared. Pops winks at me and climbs the rock for a fourth try. Arms out in front, then at the side to steady himself. He does a perfect swan dive into clear water. I wait for a moment, but he doesn’t surface. I call out over the water but get no response. Panicking, I strip to my shorts and dive under, but he’s already slipped away from me.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 36