Point I guess I’m driving at is that it used to be when me and the other boys was working I always felt just fine and didnt give one iota about the broad not two hoots. Dont get me wrong I didnt treat her wrong or anything, just didnt pay her no nevermind. I come in in the morning and go on into the yard behind the stalls and talk with the other boys for a time over ours all coffee. When the boss comes in right after that we all go ahead and set to working. Now some people probably wouldnt want to work here at the plant but everybodys got to eat and somebodys got to break down the sheep and pigs. Otherwise you can forget your beefsteak your bacon and your rumproast.
Sure could do with a spread of your fine cooking right now, makes my mouth water just to think! So when they bring down the days stock laid out in the crutch, that’s when I go to town. Its honest work and hard work too. You got to be like a medical surgeon only stronger. Oh, I tire so easy just now, didnt quite get to my point in writing. I think I’ll just let my eyes rest awhile now, Sweetie, okay?
Johnson
April 1956
“WHAT BRAND HAWK is that?” queried Mr. Johnson, index finger pointed straight up at a big turkey vulture. “That’s no hawk,” I contended. “Sure, it is, Hannah. Look at the wingspan.”
“Not a hawk, not close. It’s a eagle.”
“An eagle?”
“Yeah. A eagle.”
I thought, It’s a big black turkey vulture and it’s up there just circling circling waiting for you to drop and then watch her corkscrew down pretty as you please
“An eagle! ” Mr. Johnson had caught on. Hannah was joking. “Ho, ho.”
perch and start up pecking your eyeballs out
“A eagle, or a redtail.”
Mr. Johnson smiled, self-congratulatory. “Your mama’s right to be proud over you. I grew up in the city, too. Bloomington’s not New York City, granted. But my, you do pick things up fast.”
first that one then the other
We had strolled so far away into the mild-rolling fields that the house, the barn, and uncle’s collection of broken-down tractors and rusted-out cars, tireless, perched on the half-sunk reddish rims of their wheels, engines hoisted away long since for replacement parts, were no longer visible. A flock of savannah sparrows trilled and chipped yards off to the south, invisible in the short grass that runs along the dry, eroded ravine.
A late April afternoon. The sky a pallid dome high overhead. Cloudless except for the whitish puff that formed itself into some recognizable shape, like an ocarina or a jawbone, before it disappeared again. The fields where the crumbly soil had gathered sun-heat were only now giving up their storage of warmth back into the air. It was so exquisitely subtle you could sense it spread upward from the shallow ground into the soles of your boots. It was good to be outdoors. The winter had been so long. I had done my best to stay out of uncle’s way, but when the snows came one after the other, piling in layers gray on top of gray, this was hard to do. He seemed to be angry with me all the time. It had to do with his brother, the one he killed by accident, the gun accident, the one that made mama Opal go away with her mother. The one where if it didn’t happen they wouldn’t have gone away, right, and Nicky’d never have come around and there wouldn’t have been a Hannah. Mama Opal and he talked about it. I know because I listened to them through a door. His temper seemed like a disease.
“Hear that?” I said, pulling the field glasses up by the tired leather strap.
“No,” Mr. Johnson squinted.
someday this strap’s gonna break and I pray it won’t be me that’s carrying the glasses when it happens
I scanned a stand of bushes but could not see it. We walked along. Mr. Johnson was talking, mostly about mama Opal. I watched his face. Crow’s-feet spread at the corner of his eye like a delta in a geology primer. His squint exaggerated these wrinkles so they furrowed deep into his skin; the bottom wrinkles of the crow’s-feet reached down in a curve until they looped back forward and joined the creases that trailed from his large mouth. His nose, creased too, was blotched as the back of a brown trout. Or the egg of a turkey vulture. It seemed to me by its shape that it had been broken once or twice. Those cobalt-blue eyes. I’ll bet they had as much to do with his success in life as anything else. So much can happen by fate, by a thing not to be fought, because it is not there to be fought—there before you are given fists to fight with.
Uncle thinks this Johnson owns more than just the theater and slaughterhouse. He says that he secretly owns most of the businesses in town and half its citizens, too. Uncle ….
Mr. Johnson is pointing out the direction where the sparrow song came from again. His brown hair jostled.
“Out over there.”
“Prairie dog town.”
“No, there, over there.”
I handed Mr. Johnson uncle’s field glasses.
when this strap breaks the lenses of the binoculars will shatter and it better not be me carrying them
The sun was lowering in the sky; it always, I noticed, seemed to move faster when it was setting, or rising. You can see it rise by degrees, swelling from a flat sliver until its entire orange body is squatting like a fat old lady on the horizon. It slows down as it climbs higher in the sky, then speeds up when it wants to set. I’ve watched this happen. I have a theory about it, too. I think it is an illusion and that it seems to move faster because you can see its movement relative to things on the earth, trees, a hillside. I told mama Opal about this. She said it was a sign of growing up I’d figure things like that out. For example, the song of the vesper sparrow? It is almost the same as that of the song sparrow. It’s much easier to distinguish them from their markings. The vesper sparrow? She’s got a set of white feathers along the outside of her notched tail. No other brown sparrow’s got that. Some things in life are easy.
Mr. Johnson trained the glasses on the bird. “There’t is. Song sparrow. To be young and have such good eyes.”
It was a vesper sparrow.
Mr. Johnson was very kind to me; tonight was the first time he and his wife had ever come out to uncle’s place for a visit. Uncle had said it was not proper for mama Opal to invite her boss and his wife for supper, but here they were. We left mama Opal and Mrs. Johnson back at the house. Mr. Johnson suggested he and I take a walk in the fields before dinner; he wanted to see the land. Uncle LeRoy was at his Utopian Club meeting in town.
“You like it at your uncle’s?” he asked.
“It’s all right.”
“Don’t sound so enthusiastic.”
As he spoke he ran the binoculars over a treeless ridge behind which lay the county-line road that chased out into the great plains straight as an arrow until it reached its vanishing point. Killy killy killy, came the brisk call of the hawk overhead. It bickered with the vulture, chased it away. Then it hovered low, picked out a fencepost where it landed, raising its broad wings before bringing them in to its side. That was unusual, hawks don’t act like that. Its back was rust, same color exactly as uncle’s old harrow; I could see its dull yellow claws grip at the pole and its two-whiskered neck ruffle above that white throat. Mr. Johnson let me look at it through the glasses.
“What do you do out here in the days?”
“Lots.”
“I mean besides chores. What do you do?”
“I don’t know, lots.”
“I see,” he said. “Hannah, I have a proposition t’make you. I haven’t talked about this with your mother, or your uncle yet. Before I did, I wanted to see whether it would interest you. You know I run the Bluebird in town. Well, I need somebody to work weekends, ticket taking, this sort of thing. Of course, you’ll get paid, start a little savings of your own that way, maybe even start your own account at the bank. That’d be fun, wouldn’t it? Maybe you’ll meet some kids your age plus you’ll get to see all the movies you want, for free.”
what’s he want?
“Shall I put the proposition before the powers-that-be?”
he wants something f
rom me
I shrugged, and said: “If you want.”
Mr. Johnson frowned. “But what do you want, Hannah?”
folks own folks that was something Nicky always said
“I doubt uncle’s going to let me.”
“But you, would you like to? You’d meet some of the kids in town and so forth, have you ever seen the movies even?”
“No,” I admitted.
“You leave it up to me. We’ll see what we can do.”
tell him no right now
We had reached the top of the rise and the lights were already burning in the windows of the farmhouse. A red-winged blackbird now called, kong-koree, and flew up over our heads, with three-four others, out toward the night part of the sky.
Sun was easing down. Mr. Johnson, for all his movie houses, didn’t know that the sun was a god and was putting his horses in for the night. Four immortal restless winged horses whose breaths were flames. And the sun himself, his rays still working their clear and golden streams out over the plains, reddened a bit in the evening dust, he too was tired, and would go now into his princely palace built high on burnished pillars.
I let Mr. Johnson in on this but I don’t think he believed me. When I looked up into his eyes I could see he was waiting for me to say something further about his offer, but I thought, Let him do the talking.
“I don’t mean to be pushy or prying, Hannah. You know, your mama she worries about you, worries for your happiness. And, of course, if it worries her it naturally concerns me, being that she works side by side with me every day at the plant.”
I could picture mama as she worked in the small office next to Mr. Johnson’s, deciphering bills of lading, or making out payroll. Her fine, good, wide-set eyes going through the figures.
“Did she ask you to talk to me?”
I hadn’t meant to sound suspicious.
“No,” he answered. Mr. Johnson was rolling a cigarette as we walked. “I like you, Hannah. And I like your mama. I want you to be happy in your new surroundings, that’s all. No crime in that, right?”
“Guess not.”
“Guesses not, right. Well, so. Appears your uncle’s home.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Uncle was drunk. (Mama Opal would say it like this: “Uncle was drunk drunk drunk.”) We walked in the door he came right up, face flushed, and took Mr. Johnson’s hand: “Hallo there, Johnson.”
“Evening, Roy, your niece here and I have had a nice walk down into the fields. A wonderful girl too, you’re lucky to have her around to help.”
Uncle looked the other away. Mr. Johnson winked at me. I winked at him.
He must not have thought I ought to have winked at him, because he frowned. Uncle pushed forward into the breakfront and backed away. Then he seemed to get undrunk, just like that.
In the dining room was the steamy smell of sauerkraut and caraway. Mama Opal told me to wash up. Uncle was already at the head of the table honing a carving knife over his long whetstone. We congregated around the table and sat where mama Opal told us to, uncle at the head, facing Mrs. Johnson at the other end, Mr. Johnson between them on the far side, because he said he needed elbow room to eat good food, me between uncle and mama across from him. Uncle said grace. The bowl of mashed potatoes, the kraut and peas, and the gravy boat filled with brown gravy from the drippings were all passed around. Uncle speared slices of roast beef, put them on the plates that were handed him.
“The snakes’s quite a problem last year,” announced uncle.
“This cabbage is just marvelous,” Mrs. Johnson told mama Opal.
“Thank you.”
“Quite a problem yes. You have any trouble with rattlers down at the slaughterhouse, Johnson?” he continued; he was chewing with his mouth open, and I was dying to say something but I saw mama Opal send me a look. “Give me some pepper.”
salt your tail, birdie
“Not with snakes, no.”
“Come haying time the snakes’s so damn—”
“Roy,” she sent him a look now.
It was comical but it was not meant to be comical it was meant to be tragical—
“So prevalent the prairie’s literally crawling with snakes.”
“Don’t say.”
“Crawling snake, that is correct, crawling snake, diamondhead snakes, you can take it put it in the bank and draw interest on it. I used to hire what, six, seven boys for mowing, sent ’em out, and by noon three of them’d be bitten.”
“Three.”
“Three, at least, sometimes more.”
“Heavens,” exclaimed Mrs. Johnson.
“Hannah, chew fifty times,” mama Opal said to me.
fifty? usually she says a hundred
“It’s true,” uncle reiterated. “I had me a pair of boots made of bull’s hide double-thick like, still have ’em I believe, don’t I, Opal?”
Mama didn’t know.
“That’s right. I believe I do. Want to see them?”
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself, Roy,” said Mr. Johnson.
“I heard a snake the other day,” I began. No one listened heard a snake the size of a train
“Well, fine. But as I was relating I had these good boots and I put them on that same afternoon that these three boys come in snake-bit, and I took a scythe out into the meadow and started up mowing along the fenceline, and these here snakes come at me a dozen at a whack, coming and coming. But whenever they’d strike see, why then their fangs’d get caught up in that tough leather of the boots, and it held ’em, hanging. I didn’t pay no attention to ’em at all until the weight of the animals, and there must have been dozens hanging on, started up to bothering me, so I’d stop mowing and cut them off with my scythe. Pass me the spuds, would you, sis.”
I noticed how often Mr. Johnson would glance at mama Opal across the table, and smile. It was a closed-mouth kind of smile. It was not good. I drank down the water in my glass.
“Uh-uhm. I had to stop at least once every hour after that to cut them rattlers off my boots, and when I was done and come up to home for supper the boys picked off enough heads to fill a peck measure brimming full. After about a week of that, I can tell you that them rattlers become quite a scarce commodity down there in that hay field.”
After the table was cleared and coffee brewed, the custard pies were brought out from the kitchen. Having concluded his story about the snakes, uncle had eaten his meal in silence. But with the arrival of the pies, he began singing to himself:
“Come all young men
and my warning take,
Don’t ye never get bit
by no pizenous snake.
You know that song, Johnson?”
“Well, can’t say as I do.”
“Roy,” said mama Opal. “You don’t look too good.”
“Aw fooey:
Carse a pizenous snake
is a … horrible beast,
’Twas poor Adam’s …fall
and ’twas … Eden’s decease—”
“You do look a little peaked, Roy,” just as uncle collapsed face forward into his slice of pie.
Mrs. Johnson shrieked. Mr. Johnson leapt up and held him steady in his chair by locking his hands under uncle’s arms. Mama Opal cleaned the custard off his face with her napkin. His head slumped, rolled in an arc above his chest, humming, groaning. He pushed Mr. Johnson away, jumped up, walked a few steps to the front room, crumpled straight down in a heap, beneath the carved crossbeam of the alcove.
“Help me get him upstairs,” said mama Opal. “Hannah, keep Mrs. Johnson company. I apologize, Mrs. Johnson. This isn’t like Roy at all.”
“Here we go, now,” Mr. Johnson urged.
Mr. Johnson and mama Opal got uncle upstairs.
“Isn’t that a shame,” Mrs. Johnson offered.
A racket upstairs preceded silence. Mrs. Johnson didn’t listen to me; she was staring at the ceiling.
“Do you think he’s going to be all right?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
maybe he’ll crack his head open and out would run black gunk
We sat in quiet for a bit. “I’ll go up and check,” I said, finally, not waiting for her to say yes or no.
“Why don’t you, Hannah.”
The house had narrowed into noiselessness, like when a person is swimming in a pond underwater. Wheeling around the smooth banister at the head of the stairs I walked down the corridor. The door of uncle’s bedroom was ajar and a yellow glow gathered in a narrow strip on the opposite wall. For a moment I stood, listening.
A man was mumbling. It was Mr. Johnson. Through the crack along the doorsill I could see uncle LeRoy on his bed passed out. I saw mama Opal, in profile, standing with her face looking down at the Navajo blanket. Mr. Johnson stood close behind, his chin resting on mama Opal’s shoulder, arms twined around her, gathering in his palms her breasts which were nearly as ungrown as mine. Neither of them saw me in the blackness of the hallway. Mama Opal closed her eyes as he ran his hand down the front of her belly and let it come to her hip. He pressed his fingers into the folds of her dress. Their skins were yellow in the yellow light. There were pinpricks in between my legs as I saw this but they made me mad at myself.
Suddenly, Mr. Johnson dropped his head back, eyes closed, the front of his hips pressed firmly into mama Opal. His face was strained, as if he were in pain. His jaw gnawed like a goat nibbling sorghum or at a tin can, and the crow’s-feet fought like an accordion against his cheek. I almost burst out laughing he looked so silly.
I could’ve screamed.
Then mama told him something in a voice so soft I couldn’t make out what she said.
A sound, below. The scrape of a chair against the floorboards. Mr. Johnson let her go. He whispered. Mama Opal kept on looking at the rug. Quickly I moved, and quietly, back along the hall and downstairs. Mrs. Johnson was sitting at the table.
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