A Far Piece to Canaan

by Sam Halpern

  “You figured he’ll be waitin’ next time around?” I asked.

  “They always come back. That’s one thing about a frog, he’ll always come back to th’ same spot, and we’ll get him if . . . Hey, looky there,” he said, changing to a whisper.

  “I don’t see nothin’,” I whispered back.

  “Right next t’ that clump of brush,” and he pointed to a dead limb that stuck out in the water and there next to a twig was the head of a frog. Fred took dead aim and let go. The frog let out a yurrkkk and flopped over on his back. He was a big one. Fred picked him up by the hind legs and walked over to a fence post and bam, bam, bam, he bashed its head against the wood until its tongue popped out and it quit wiggling, then dropped him in our gunnysack.

  “Hit’s your turn, hun’ney,” Fred said, and grinned.

  I felt a little scared because frogging idn’t like fishing. Fishing’s easy once you learn it because all you got to do is get a worm on a hook and wait, but if you’re frogging you got one shot and you got to hit or you got nothing. Two hours before, I missed a fence post two times out of three and now I had to hit something about four inches long and three inches wide and I figured wudn’t any chance. “You sure you want me to try now? I ain’t had any practice.”

  “You ain’t ever gonna get good if’n you don’t try. Hit don’t make no difference you miss, we got lots of time.”

  “All right, I’ll try, but I ain’t makin’ any promises,” I grumbled, and took off in front.

  Yurrkkk, ker-splot, splot, splot and a big old frog jumped before I moved five feet.

  “Hun’ney, you got t’ slow down. You ain’t a-drivin’ sheep.”

  “I was goin’ slow,” I said, kind of mad. “He heard me, is all.”

  “Well, keep low and sneak up.”

  “Why don’t you get another one and I’ll watch,” I said, straightening up.

  “You ain’t ever gonna learn watchin’. You got to get one or I don’t shoot another frog.”

  I knew he meant it, so I slumped low and started creeping along. We’d gone about ten feet and my back got a crick. I straightened up a little and something brown-green caught my eye about a foot away. It was a frog that made Fred’s look like a midget, just sitting on the mud, looking at a beetle crawling his way. I knew I had to shoot, but my arms felt weak, my heart pounded, and sweat broke out in my palms. Slowly, I raised the slingshot and pulled back on the rubber until my hand was quivering, then WHAM. The frog didn’t even yurrkkk. He just flattened and lay there, his whole head bashed in.

  “You got him, hun’ney!” Fred yelled.

  He was a whopper. Must’ve been king frog in the pond. I felt great, and rolled it up and down my arm feeling the cold, puffy belly, while Fred was telling me how I ought be ashamed of myself saying I couldn’t do something when I got the biggest frog in the pond.

  That evening, when we headed up the path around the foot of Cummings Hill we had enough frogs to feed the whole Mulligan family, even though I missed more than I hit. When Alfred saw them, he let out a yell. “Mamie, come here and look!” Wudn’t half a minute before all the Mulligans was pushed in around us. We laughed and talked for a while, then I took off home feeling great. I’d just started frogging and come up with the biggest frog in the pond. I couldn’t wait to tell Dad and Mom. Berman’s was really fun.

  9

  I pushed away from the gate and headed back to the car thinking about the joys of my youth, walking again through the area where the stock barn had been. The grass was ankle high and I stumbled over something and fell. When I got up I saw a round knob sticking out of the ground. It was green and worn, but there was no mistaking its identity to a 1940s farm boy. This was part of a workhorse’s hames. I grabbed the knob, pulled, and brought up a rotten, curved piece of wood attached to rusted metal. I wondered if I had geared Daisy or Gabe with this relic.

  I took a deep breath and tried to imagine the smell of the feed room where we kept the harnesses. A delicious odor, harness oil and cattle feed. Perhaps Fred and I had eaten sweet apples on this very spot, lying on feed sacks and dipping the apples in coarse cattle salt. My childhood friends were reborn nostalgically in my mind. Funny, Mom always worried I’d become like them. In retrospect, I had adopted many of their ways of thinking, especially their straitlaced view of what was expected of a man.

  Nora’s question about one of my colleagues came to mind when she urged me to make more friends. “What’s wrong with Jason Tilden as a friend, Samuel? He’s bright and humorous. His wife, Regina, is fun.”

  I didn’t answer that Jason’s lectures were canned, that his creative work peeled back at least three atoms of depth, and that while Regina Tilden was fun and nice, I had accidentally walked in on Jason servicing a coed.

  No, what I did was change the subject and use any excuse to bring back the bubbly Nora I loved so much. Why the hell hadn’t I told her that I couldn’t respect a guy who didn’t challenge his work and wasn’t faithful to his wife? I wondered if I would rat out Jason Tilden if I could call back those years. I doubted that Fred would have done it, or Lonnie. What Tilden did was unacceptable to them. A man did his best at work and was faithful to his friends and his woman or he wasn’t a man.

  Thoughts of Fred had ricocheted through my mind for several days following Nora’s comment. I wondered where he was, and how he was doing. He had wanted to see me again and I hadn’t responded. Had he needed me? I didn’t know, but I had found excuses why I couldn’t make the time. I had lived most of my adult existence by the creed of these hill people, but I sure as hell hadn’t followed it that time. Now I had to face them, face Fred, and it bothered me.

  I pitched the hames into the grass and walked to the car thinking about the first time the old barn had made a difference in my life. It was 1945 and . . .

  . . . I was having a great summer. It turned out to be an even better summer than I thought it would because the war ended. The day it was over, I was standing by the chicken house and heard Dad yell, “Liz! Liz! It’s over, Liz! It’s over!” and I went running up to the house and busted through the screen door. There was Mom, crying and clapping her hands and Dad just staring off in the distance with his eyes wet and Lowell Thomas talking on the radio. The war was over and my brother Bob would be coming home safe, and that meant more than anything in the world to Mom and Dad. Me too!

  We got a call from Bob a few weeks later, and he said his ship had just got into San Francisco, but he didn’t know when he would be getting home. We didn’t hear from him for quite a while, then one Sunday morning he come walking up the lane, just walking through the ruts in his sailor suit, carrying his duffel bag over his shoulder with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I was in the yard, gave a yell, run and flung my arms and legs around his middle, yelling and yelling and him laughing and trying to hold me and the duffel bag at the same time. Soon everybody was there, crying and laughing and having a great time.

  Just a couple hours after Bob got home it seemed everybody in the hills knew about us having a boy home from the war and neighbors started dropping in. First the MacWerters; then Rags Wallace; Bess Clark and his wife with Buster their boy; Pers Shanks and his wife, Bea; Mr. Lamb and their boy who had been in the navy; Mr. and Mrs. Shackelford, who was Rosemary’s mom and dad; a man and woman who didn’t even live around us, who lost their son at a place called Tulage and put their arms around Bob and cried and nobody said nothing for a while; a woman from Middletown and her boy who lost his legs at Normandy; Mr. and Mrs. Langley who lived where the bus turned around on the Dry Branch Road; Mr. Carl Budkins who was also from Middletown and was the best banjo player in the parts and had been on the radio once; Mr. Dillard and his boy JR who had got shot two, three times in France; and lots of others.

  Everyone was milling around in the yard, talking and laughing and telling Bob how great it was he was home and what a great thing he had done for his country. Bob just kind of acted sheepish. A couple minutes after Bess Clark got there,
he went out to his pickup and brought back a quart mason jar filled with white mule and all the men took some drinks and kept passing it around and suddenly Mr. Mac yelled, “We gonna have us a hoedown, by God,” and everybody yelled, “Yeah!” and Dad said all right, he’d clean out the center of the stock barn, throw down some straw, set some planks on sawhorses to put stuff to eat on, and we’d sure as hell have one and for everybody to come back about seven o’clock and tell everybody around they were invited. The women said they’d bring food and get other neighbor women to do the same. Bess Clark, who was short but had a big pair of shoulders, kind of laughed and said he thought he’d just bring something to drink. Several people said they’d bring their music, including Mr. Budkins, so we knew we were gonna have great music because Mr. Mac was a fiddling fool hisself and most everybody played something in our parts.

  Later that day, I saw Fred and asked him about inviting Lonnie and his pa because there was going to be drinking. Fred said we shouldn’t invite Lonnie and that he’d understand. As far as LD was concerned, his pa wouldn’t let him go because there was going to be music and dancing and drinking and LD’s pa didn’t believe in doing that because God didn’t like it.

  You should’ve seen the barn. Everything was spiffed up. Pretty soon folks started coming in. All the men were dressed in new Levi’s and their best colored shirts, and the women wore bright dresses that swung out when they turned around. Bob and JR and the other boys who had been in the war were wearing their uniforms, and everybody was helping get set up for the hoedown. Man, there was a lot to eat. Ham, roast beef, fried chicken, candied yams, Sunday potatoes, peas, corn, beans, squash, four, five different kinds of salads, eight, ten pies and cakes and biscuits with honey, and coffee and iced tea and beer and, of course, white mule.

  While people were eating, Mr. Mac began tuning his fiddle and sipped on some of Bess Clark’s stuff. It was funny watching him because he was kind of tall and old and skinny and his face was wrinkled and brown but he was rawboned and when he held the fiddle by the neck, about half of it was covered. Pretty soon all the musicians were tuning up while they were gnawing on chicken bones and plunking on guitars and banjos and every now and then tightening the little screws at the tops. It was starting to get dark and people fired up coal oil lanterns and hung them from the rafters or on pegs that stuck out from the big beams between the sheds. They really made a pretty light. Then Mr. Mac and the other players put down bales of straw kind of stacked like and started playing. They could really play, boy, beginning with “Old Joe Clark,” and a lot of people were clapping hands and stamping feet and one of them was Rosemary, who was there with her folks and dancing with JR and Bob, but mostly with Bob. I could tell she really liked him and that he liked her and my heart jumped up in my throat. He was my brother and this was his dance and wudn’t anything I could say. I kept trying to get up enough nerve to go over and ask her to dance when it hit me I didn’t know how to dance. Jeanette Dillard, who was my age, did, so I asked her to teach me and before I knew it I was out there with the rest of them. So was Fred and old Alfred and pretty soon everybody was on the floor dancing, Mom and Dad too, and Naomi with JR Dillard, and the music was playing louder and faster, then Bert Raney and his family come in and Bert yelled, “Yehoo!” and danced around and shook hands with all the soldiers and sailors. While he was dancing he picked up a jug and had a long pull and passed it along and people was yelling “Yehoo!” and dancing like fools and old Alfred was just stomping like mad and Fred was dancing part with Jenny Raney and part with Jeanette until I was laughing fit to be tied, and then Jake West come in with his family, one of which was Joy with her long black hair so pretty and I was dancing with her in a second and she looked like she loved it, but Jeanette didn’t so I’d dance with first one and then the other, and pretty soon Bob and the other boys was doing the Virginia reel and I run in and got to dance one reel with Rosemary. When our hands touched, I almost busted. Joy was really pretty with her long black hair but I loved Rosemary. She was a lot older than me, but if she would just wait! I wanted to tell her that so bad but somehow I just couldn’t. I come close though, because right after she finished dancing with Bob once and was near the barn door getting air I walked up and started to say something when she looked at me and said, “Hi Samuel. You havin’ a nice time?” My throat closed up and nothing come out. Most I could do was just nod, and she laughed and mussed my hair with her fingers and went back to dance.

  That was some barn dance. It lasted late and by midnight all the people making music were drunk and laughing. Matter of fact all the men were drunk and the women were trying to get them to come on home while they could still drive. I looked around for Bob but he was gone. I walked around the barn through the hog lot and there he was with JR Dillard, leaning up against the line post where the gate I met Fred on was hung. I could just make them out against the sky. Both of them were really drunk. I stayed low and got up close where I could hear. They were so liquored it was hard to tell sometime what they were saying.

  “Ever . . . ever think you’d make it back, JR?”

  JR’s head shook kind of slow. “Naw,” he said. “Shit . . . they don’t know, Bob,” and he staggered and caught himself and motioned toward the barn. “They don’t know . . . if they knowed how scared I been past two years they’d run me right outta here . . . almost shit my pants at Normandy . . . when . . . when we went over th’ cliff at Omaha . . . scared all th’ way t’ th’ Rhine . . .”

  “Shit, man,” said Bob, “you don’t have t’ apologize. We took a kamikaze on th’ flight deck. I was handlin’ a quad 40 . . . had th’ firing mechanism down and was so scared I couldn’t let up . . . almost melted th’ barrel. Talk about scared . . . shit . . . I . . . shit . . . once when a torpedo was runnin’ at us I don’t remember what I done . . . couple minutes my life I don’t even remember. We done our jobs, though, buddy. We done our fuckin’ jobs.”

  “Yeah . . . we done them . . . and we got back. Different now . . . don’t wanta crop like Dad. Gonna use th’ G.I. Bill ’n’ get me an education. Not gonna bust that fuckin’ sod out there rest of my fuckin’ life.”

  “Me neither. Not th’ same now. Somehow, everything has cha . . . changed . . . uhh, I’m gonna be sick JR . . .” and he puked and JR put his arm around him and held his shoulders until finally he quit puking and the smell of whiskey come my way. Bob wiped his mouth and spit a few times. “Thanks,” he said.

  “That’s okay.” JR laughed. “Hey man, you better sober up some. That little honey you been dancin’ with has th’ hots for you.”

  “Rosemary?” said Bob, and I almost screamed. “Naw, buddy.” Bob laughed. “That’s San Quentin quail. She’s sixteen. Don’t need any shotgun weddin’s,” and they both laughed and I calmed down and went back inside before they could see me.

  In the barn, things were petering out and people were either leaving or standing and talking. Alfred was telling Dad about how much he appreciated the show he was getting and how nobody else ever done that for him and how he wouldn’t ever forget it.

  Fred was standing next to Alfred. When he saw me he yelled, “Hey, where you been?”

  “Just went outside for a minute,” I answered.

  Fred grinned at me. “I seen Joy West watchin’ you. She’s sweet on you.”

  “She is not, Fred Cody,” I shot back, and Fred run off laughing like a fool and me chasing after him.

  10

  It was great having Bob home, especially when he and Alfred decided to run a trot line down on the Big Bend bottoms and include Fred and me in. We got started in October. It would’ve been perfect except I had to be in school. You’re supposed to run your lines twice a day, but since I couldn’t help on school days Bob just put them out on Wednesdays during the week, then Saturdays and Sundays. He had gotten the use of a skiff from Ben Begley, who lent it to him because Bob was a veteran. That was something because Mr. Begley never had much to do with anybody, and people were a little scared of
him. I’d never even seen him.

  Our first time trot lining was a Saturday. It was Indian summer and the leaves on the trees were yellow and green and red with a fall smell in the air. We picked up Fred and Alfred in Dad’s old Ford, then drove to the edge of Mr. Begley’s melon and pumpkin patch and parked. From there, we circled his cabin, not wanting to get close to his dogs. Everybody talked about how mean the dogs were and they come out at us like wolves, snarling and barking and rattling their chains. There was no other sign of life, and if the dogs hadn’t been there you’d have sworn the place was empty.

  The river was low and hardly moving. It looked like glass until the leaves setting on it would jiggle. A couple hundred foot below Begley’s cabin we found the skiff tied to a young sycamore that hung out over the stream. It was a good-sized boat, and held the four of us easy. Fred already knew how to use it, but I had to learn from the start, and it ain’t as simple as it looks. To make it worse, the oars was heavy, and everybody could see I wudn’t too strong. I got it going, though, and later on I could do a tolerable job of rowing.

  We strung the line from the sycamore about a hundred foot across the stream to a willow trunk. Every five foot or so, we lashed on a jingle line and baited its hook with chicken guts or worms. We caught fish, boy. I mean like you never seen! What the four of us caught that time above the Blue Hole wudn’t nothing to what we were catching now. There was this one old channel cat I couldn’t believe. We were just starting the run and Alfred was handling the boat when the line started swinging about. Bob was taking off fish and rebaiting the hooks.

  “Hold her steady, Alfred,” Bob said. “I can’t bait if th’ line’s movin’ this much.”

  “We ain’t movin’,” Alfred said. “Drop th’ line ’fore you get hooked, Bob. We’re on t’ somethin’ big! Drop hit quick!”