The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  Karl Swinnerton had hunted with Al and Rog for a season or two because they had a good tidy camp up near Goon Mountain’s ridgeline, where some big bucks bedded down for the night or else retreated from the next morning’s gunfire down in the valley. On Opening Day, these might scramble right past the porch, having grown used to its presence near their deer trail during the year since last fall. Al, Rog, and Karl, who were not friends now, had regarded themselves as a raffish tribe, not just Logger teammates, but all high-school grads: Rog, a horse trader’s son making a more steady go of cattle dealing; Al, a budding rolling stone who had lucked into the dry-cleaning business; and Karl, born a farmer, who was trying to support himself as a trapper, selling pelts, and guiding tourists to good fishing holes in the summer. Al was a fly-off-the-handle, seven o’clock drunk, however, who would snap off a shot up a deer’s flag end, ruin half the best meat, and make it drag itself, suffering, instead of waiting another second for a side shot, or maybe frontal, to kill it; then for supper forget a pot and burn the bottom through; and, as they used to kid him, needed a woman to pick up after him.

  Al was a demon fireman on Athol’s trusty pumper, though, putting out blazes with the “Cellar Savers,” as they called their crew. He had more public spirit than Rog or Karl in that sense, volunteering for longer than the customary stint of three to five years, and was less tardy or crabby in showing up when he’d grabbed no sleep after a trip. He wasn’t fire captain material, but was often the first man in. As a trucker—even only a short-run man who seldom ventured south of Massachusetts or west of Syracuse with his trailer loads of cows—he affected a sort of a man-of-the-world air, as if he was just back from Louisiana or L.A., and full of truck-stop hokum. Like Randy Curley—who delivered furniture manufactured at the mill in Chelsea on longer runs to department-store warehouses in the Midwest or South, as a substitute for the company’s regular drivers, but didn’t own his own truck—Al had been falling in with the Hippies on Ten Mile Road. He smoked pot more than he used liquor, which was a departure for Athol men of his age, although he hadn’t tried LSD, he claimed, or transported the stuff, as Randy was rumored to do.

  Stillwater Swamp, which edged his and Dorothy’s land on the east side, and stretched about ten or twelve miles, north to south, and five to seven or eight across in its width, was what Karl had known his whole lifetime, in fact. The full-furred otters, foxes, and bobcats, the cedar trees limbed and dragged out for post-and-rail fencing and patio furniture, the cat spruce and balsam fir pulpwood cut for the paper mill, the black ash that he split into splints that Dorothy made baskets out of, the cherry wood, and sawlog yellow birch, and bird’s-eye maple in the high spots, and tamaracle, and pickerel, perch, and stewing-turtles in the sloughs. Plenty of deer bounding about, plus a dozen or two dozen moose, so you’d never starve. And now the Japs—some Japs—had bought the whole swamp as an investment from the Wall Streeters, who themselves had bought it only a year or two ago from the original lumbering company that had been working it from when Karl was a boy. And the bulk of Goon Mountain, overhanging the swamp from his western side, he didn’t even know who owned. Just its ledges, springs and dimples, going up two thousand feet, where the hawks nested.

  Sitting with Dorothy on the bottom rung of the auction house grandstand, he couldn’t help wondering why he was down on his uppers, while Rog, Clarence, and Al—to take three obvious examples—were not. Al didn’t own things except for his dry cleaning business and his blessed truck; no land, therefore less property tax. And Clarence was a hoarder, so well organized that you’d see him look at his handkerchief to see if it was clean before he blew his nose into it, and already drawing social security checks. Clarence was as comfortable with being faithful to Helen as Al was in tomcatting, though Karl figured that neither pose meant much. Clarence never had the nerve to flout any of the other norms either, and Al hadn’t beat his wife or brought home some doxy, just cheated on the sly. Clarence had surely saved enough money for Helen and him to go to Florida and visit friends of hers who had invited them for a month in the winter, leaving Bill with the farm, but, like a coward, he didn’t. Though he wouldn’t admit it, he seemed to be afraid of beaches, islands, the sea, or whatnot, never having crossed the Atlantic for two weeks on a troop ship, like Karl. He was a jittery man, like most solid citizens, if you scratched at all beneath their surfaces, Karl thought. The lawyer in town had been arrested for speeding, and pot found in his car; a doctor in Chelsea had lost his license temporarily for selling prescriptions to a drug peddler; and the richest local family, who owned the hardware and grocery stores, were skinflints. They drove Caddies and had cottages on the lake ten miles away that they moved to in the summer, and had Karl paint their houses instead of doing it themselves, like everybody else, but had never helped the poorhouse poor or the farmers being foreclosed on. Rog made more generous distinctions, as a matter of fact. He seemed still bitter, remembering his father and mother squeezed from pillar to post, and people avoiding him, snubbing him, as a schoolboy from a family pushed off their farm, until his mother’s uncle passed away with no living children and left them another, down the road. So when someone died and Rog went over and bought stuff to sell, he tended to treat them according to how their people had treated his people when he was a boy.

  Rog auctioned off some cowbells, monkey wrenches, a gooseneck lamp, a horse harness, and a job lot of plastic razors and ball point pens that he distributed practically free. Then boxes of china—“Chinese china, made in China”—and glassware, bags of lawn seed and of lime, a dozen banties cackling in a bag, a pair of snow tires, and some cans of barn paint. “We could use it on the walls but we can’t afford to, boys. Got to sell them in order to pay the bills.”

  About the tires, he said, “They’re not hot, boys, but they may have stood out in the sun long enough to feel a little bit warm,” because he had a reputation he liked to foster of maybe buying items that had been stolen at some distant point. With garage sales on every roadside killing you all summer long, you needed a gimmick besides trading in vealers and the “Antique Barn” that he maintained out on the highway. “A deal or a steal!” he proclaimed, although he’d never been convicted of anything. “Open those wallets, boys. Awful cheap. I just don’t want to get lonely in here. That’s why I do it, boys—charge you so little—to give you some fun and festivities.”

  Dorothy went over to a row of sacks that were squirming, set against the wall. Having gently palpated the occupants, she decided she wanted a pair of ducks, for those big, gamey eggs that they laid for pies or a breakfast to stick to your ribs. And Karl had suggested she ought to write a book on how to find duck nests in the grass, or institute a contest in hen-robbing at the county fair, she was so good at it. That was their vacation every year, parking their camper next to the carnival people’s at the fairgrounds, living amidst that hullabaloo for the week.

  “What you want, Dot?” Rog asked. His dead older brother had had a crush on her in high school. He sold a chainsaw, a used TV, a dirt bike, a car battery, a radio scanner, a trayful of tomato plants ready to go in the ground, a bedroom mirror, bush clippers, a tool box, three milking machines—yelling the prices bid, until somebody raised and closed the matter.

  “I’m overextended! You’ve got me over a barrel,” he told the cozy crowd, maybe sixty people watching. “That’s why I’m takin’ almost any offer.” When everybody knew he had two cars, one of which was a new Toronado, a cow truck, a camper top to clip onto his pickup, a couple of snowmobiles, a three-wheeler, and a four-wheeler, and a boat with an inboard motor sitting on a trailer in front of his house, not to mention the couple of farms he was currently speculating on. Sawdust was strewn across the dirt floor and the railings were painted white, but otherwise the big room was fly-specked and dingy, the air very bad. Leaking bags of insulation bulged downward between cracked beams, from which light bulbs and insect-zappers dangled.

  The sows in the pens were squealing, and the aging cows waiting to be auc
tioned and butchered groaned, flinched, and hooked at one another nervously because they were from different herds, where by seniority they might each have become prima donnas, but now were crammed with strangers into a claustrophobic enclosure and in some pain because they hadn’t been milked for at least one cycle, if they hadn’t missed more. The fifty or sixty calves, penned at the other side of the auction ring, meanwhile were bleating in fear and hunger—none had known their mothers for more than a day or two—the little Jerseys as slim and tan as fawns, but wobbling tremendously, and the Holsteins still more ungainly and misconstructed because they had been overbred lately with artificial insemination for maximum milking: at least so the Swinnertons thought. Money problems had made Karl and Dorothy edgy, but they were similar enough that they managed to blame themselves more than one another. They knew that being interested in money generated money, at least over a lifetime, and that if you weren’t, then you would have to scrimp in the last few years of your fifties and sixties, before the government began giving you health insurance and sending you monthly checks. It was almost a bargain you made with God, Dorothy thought. Hard times for good intentions. But many people who made money weren’t greedy as much as full of nervous energy, like Rog, who didn’t know what else to do. Always looking for something to buy that he could sell—dry goods, a backhoe, an emu, a consignment of canned pears. In a little black doctor’s bag—joking about “good medicine”—he carried wrapped cash, in instances where that was appropriate, and liked land in particular, now that so many dairy businesses were folding, drowned in debt.

  Rog’s wife, Juliette, was French in origin—that is, her parents had emigrated from Quebec during the Depression—and possessed the French virtues of frugality with money and classy middle-age looks: hair brushed and tucked, clean clothes that fit. She sat on a bookkeeper’s stool at the auctions and never lost track of the math or who bid what, even when Rog and his ringmen—the nephews—were momentarily confused. She had black hair and white skin that she didn’t let tan, and had kept a Catholic rein on her kids so they all got through school without police trouble or pregnancies, ready to go away to college. Juliette was proving canny now, too, Rog said when he dropped by the Swinnerton’s house once every month or two in order to chat, because when you’re nosing around for defunct farms with old people clinging on under a load of debt ready to throw in the sponge—and who might rather be somewheres else anyway, whether back in Canada or retired down South—they were as likely to be French as Yankees. They spoke some English, of course, but for a real heart-to-heart over coffee and White Roses at the kitchen table, with Rog’s doctor’s bag full of greenbacks lying open on the floor close by, Juliette’s emoting sympathetically with them in French was better—was invaluable.

  One of the gunnysacks jerked like a jumping bean. “Wonder what’s in there! Wanna bid for it sight unseen?” suggested Rog, turning from a set of truck tires that his nephews had rolled out for the auction. Dorothy and Karl had only seven chickens left at home, having lost two slow hens and their fine brave tall rooster with the cream-colored cape. Dorothy happened to see him ride off, lying heavily across a fox’s red back, with his head right next to the fox’s black face, although upside down. His neck had been gripped in the fox’s teeth, the feathers wet and disarranged. Still alive, he gazed desolately at the sky. Though Karl would spot the fox eventually and be able to shoot him, to have only seven layers seemed a dreary, scant, precarious number, on the verge of having none. It was plenty for their present needs, even allowing for the baking she sometimes did, but since her earliest memories Dorothy had never known a yard with so few chickens in it. Suppose she was asked to bake cakes for a birthday, a funeral, a church supper? All the fuss and to-do of thirty fowlish, feathery personalities was part of the home life of everybody she had grown up with—maybe as poor as church mice, but always eating three or four eggs for breakfast. And for the social cooking she’d done—the potlucks with deviled eggs, custards, angelfood, eggy salads, tarts—it had been essential she have numberless chickens scratching in the dirt, under the leaves, for bugs and sprigs that turned their yolks orange with good woods vitamins for children or sick older people. She’d peddled fryers too, and cottage cheese and home-baked pies to the summer people, when her children lived at home and none of her aches and pains had counted for anything, and she would gad about in the car, bringing the kids along if she needed to or she thought they would benefit from meeting somebody who struck her as interesting—or if Karl was painting there—often on the lookout at that time also for possible articles for the weekly paper, whose editor was encouraging Dorothy to try topics like “How to Dig a Stock Pond,” or “What Marriage Means,” or “Athol’s Earliest Settlers,” or “The Marsh Mallow: Where the Candy Came From.” She dreamed up two for every one that she actually wrote, and wrote two for every one he ever published. Darryl Curley had dug them a stock pond with his earth mover, and Mae, his wife and Dorothy’s best friend in those days, had shocked her by telling her how she, Mae, once had to jump out of Darryl’s car while it was moving and scraped herself pretty badly on the pavement. But you couldn’t write that.

  The pond still steamed beautifully in the chill of the morning, but hadn’t had ducks on it recently because of a snapper living in the depths that had been big enough to grab them from below. Last summer, however, Dorothy spotted her climbing out to lay her eggs in a sandbank. Karl grabbed her, they cooked her, and not two days later a wild mallard landed and began eating duckweed; then a blue heron. Later a white egret appeared (she looked it up in her bird book) and, like the heron, stalked around eating pollywogs, salamanders, crayfish, or whatever for half an hour before flapping off. This was unusual, but also signaled that the coast was clear for Dorothy to buy Muscovys for the pond. Starting from when she was barely of school age, she’d been in charge of finding eggs for her family, not just hidden in the water grass, but up in the hayloft, where the banties burrowed holes to brood a clutch. She told Press, the blind summer person, about that and about her articles. He was a nice guy, and good for five dollars a day, at lunch.

  Karl was behind on cutting next winter’s firewood because of his emphysema, and hadn’t dug a new garbage pit, although the one they were using was full, and the garden fence that the deer got through wasn’t fixed, and squirrels ran up and down in the attic because neither of them quite felt like climbing the ladder to lay out poison or nail up the holes. So although twenty-three Plymouth Rock chickens were offered for twenty-five bucks, she didn’t bid; the commitment would be too much. They knew an old bachelor who had no other company except his chickens and, lonely in the winter, brought them into the house. Rog would think she was getting soft in the head if she bought too many. His brother, Boyle, three years older, who had made major before retiring to play golf in San Antonio, had delivered fuel oil around here before enlisting in the army, after she and he broke up. But he’d thrown snowballs at her, pulled her pigtails, or thrown mud on her as early as primary school to flirt. It was funny how distant you grew from certain people—a person who looked just like he had in tenth grade except for the pudge in his neck and gray in his hair—in spite of probably forgiving him more nowadays for the dumbbell he’d been than you ever did then. What happened was that as you grew more patient you also got less interested, more understanding but less sympathetic. Karl’s estranged brother, Marty—now a produce manager in a supermarket downstate—and this Boyle brother had cracked up cars together to impress each other and the girls, while Rog and Karl himself had scarcely registered on Dorothy, being too young. Now, when Karl would go to the veteran’s hospital for his cough, Rog—balding but vain about his good teeth—might actually wink at her, and she would wish Juliette were there to take the heat. Juliette, impassively keeping the records straight at her auction desk, with pricey earrings on and her raven hair highly coiffed, would not be rattled by a wink. Although their marriage was a long one, she had changed her tastes in cars, clothes, and adornments lately.
They ate out quite a lot, and Rog claimed she wanted him to buy her a condo on Cocoa Beach in Florida, where she thought she knew somebody. Though a fine mother, she stayed out of community activities unless her own fractious French family got into a dispute. The two of them sometimes did engage in noisy fights, when the word divorce was heard, but you wouldn’t believe it, looking at how unflappable she was on the dais. Pretty women married Don Juans, and Don Juans married pretty women.

  The nephews held up four grain sacks, each with a goose’s orange-billed head protruding out, elegant, wriggly, but angry. “Just like a watchdog for your dooryard, they’ll be,” hollered Rog. When Karl was tempted to bid, Dorothy reminded him of how independent-minded geese are, and liable to bite anybody. Karl had served in North Africa and whispered with a smile that they reminded him of camels, who could be bad-tempered too. But they lost the geese to a woman, whose mother and daughter Dorothy knew, for $8.80 apiece. With farmers, you couldn’t tell from their clothes how well off they were—who was here to truck home nine thousand dollars’ worth of milking cows and who to acquire a magnetic key ring for a jalopy’s dashboard. But these people were well off.