The Devil's Tub

by Edward Hoagland

  For a minute the loudest sounds were the steady bleating of the week-old, frightened calves—sixty, seventy of them now—and the old cows’ anxious lowing, wild in timbre like a zoo animal’s.

  Rog’s “Yes! Yes!” sharply interrupted their distress, as the bidding on a wicker sofa rose to fifty-five dollars and he scrutinized his customers to judge how interested they were. “You lunk, you! You stay with him!” he shouted, when one of his nephews quit staring at a man who’d bid just as Rog rapped the gavel and gave the sofa to another.

  He also sold a second-hand living-room organ, five bags of 5-10-10 fertilizer, a roll of linoleum, and then pulled a clutch of New Hampshire Reds out of a bran sack which, being more barnyardy than the Plymouth Rocks, flapped their wings frantically when he swung them high. Dorothy could picture them inhabiting the dirt flat behind her back porch and had Karl bid a dollar-and-a-quarter, dollar-fifty, two dollars apiece, at which point—just bidding against the soup pot—they did get them, and Karl cut more air holes for them to breathe in the bag. He never tried to buy anything else immediately after winning a round for fear the whole thing would get going too fast and he might lose his head. And whereas most people leaned forward, Karl leaned back when he bid, turning sideways so Rog and the nephews wouldn’t think he was eager to bid again. Besides, he already had three house cats at home, and a pig to eat, a wheezy ram named Samson, two ewes, each with a grown lamb, a leftover tom turkey named Emcee, and a woods turtle they’d picked up on the road a year ago, with the numerals 1939 carved on its bottom shell, though they had argued about whether to believe such a date. Dorothy claimed no.

  Clarence and Helen Clark bought twelve turkey pullets, and for thirty-four bucks, a naked-looking ten-pound pig as pink as flesh, held up by Rog by its trotters, shrieking in terror and blinking after the darkness of being tied inside its bag, though its ears stuck forward like a cap’s bill, shading its eyes from the spotlight. They stopped beside the Swinnertons in collecting it, and Helen, in her churchy manner, asked, “How’s it going?” of Press, and whether he wanted to go to the midweek service at Solid Rock Gospel with them tomorrow. He wasn’t stone-blind, and smiled at her; said, probably next time. He’d been a stockbroker, had some money. Dorothy’s parents had sometimes entertained summer boarders from the city, fattening the undernourished ones on butter, cream and syrup, and quieting the jittery ones with hay-wagon rides, taffy pulls, horseback trails, and outdoor barbeques with cocoa and marshmallows roasted on a stick at the end in the firelight. Through this sideline, she had met interesting people as a child, who were briefly friends during July and August, and a few of the kinder ones had tweaked her, as she got older, with the idea of going to college, like the girls of her own age in their cashmere sweaters and riding boots and helmets that they brought from home, until she’d tease them into riding the old farm Dobbins bareback (“and don’t you dare whip him”). The boys were easy to fend off, compared with the locals, and she rarely envied the girls when they went home to different lives. But several of the sympathetic grownups had instilled some carbonation in her (as she thought of it, watching bubbles rise in soda pop) that may have led to her newspaper columns later on, and her attempt to start a mail-order candle-making business at another point, and probably, she thought, her tolerance for the endearing but irregular means of breadwinning her husband would put together. The kind of people who came up from the city to spend a spell on an ordinary family farm like theirs—spinsters of both sexes, or sickly people after an operation, or clerical help with two weeks off, or vaguely impoverished artists who might write songs or draw Christmas cards for a living, or professionals “taking a break”—were eccentrically assorted. You would witness the visible recovery of people who had been “flattened,” as they said, by a death in the family, of neurotics who used the scary term “nervous breakdown” to describe how they felt. They rocked on the porch, blinked in the sun, took short “constitutionals” with that comical, arm-swinging gait that city folk used, until they’d go breathless, and then might help feed the animals in order to relax. One even brought her own cats. Anyhow, collectively they’d proven easier to manage than her parents had expected, mostly because they were so “eager to learn,” as they might put it if they thought they’d been living wrong. They wanted to be shown how to relax, and pitched hay, stacked wood, kneaded bread, kindled the kitchen stove, to get the hang of it.

  Helen and Clarence Clark were too tidy a couple to want to look after sick New Yorkers, even if there was money involved. Yet they would make this little pullet project pay. It was never much, nothing grand, but they never had to explain themselves to the lady at the bank; just walked up to the teller’s window like anybody else, no appointments with somebody at a desk. And their boy, Bill, who’d smashed up Margie so bad on the motorcycle, had that same close-to-the-vest solvency—a rental-truck franchise run from right in the yard, and his planing mill nearby and picket-fence sales downcountry; plus his plans to refurbish the defunct railroad station for tourism purposes. He was small potatoes, next to Darryl Curley’s construction business, but because he was reaching out-of-state toward where the money was, people like Rog said he would grow bigger. A clean-faced boy, not a drinker like some, and yet he’d chopped Margie off right where she lived—telling her the medications for her seizures might deform a baby. It made Karl want to shoot him. Although a girl like Margie you couldn’t keep down. She was married, and with a baby in the oven that in the pictures they took at the medical center was already sucking its thumb, comfy as you please—her husband a nice decent man who worked for Darryl off and on at a gas station he had bought, or drove a school bus, as Margie had—a mechanic who enjoyed draining oil pans and changing mufflers in the garage, but was trying to get his act together. He seemed half a beat too fast, it seemed to Karl and Dorothy, as if agitated by anticipating Margie’s seizures that no longer came. So when they could find humor in it, they joked about the pair as being a match-up like Jack Spratt’s, who could eat no fat, and his wife no lean.

  A hay rake, a tangle of tire chains, and a case of root beer were sold. Then a brown goat Dorothy decided she wanted was lifted onto the block. Whenever she felt a sad swing in her mood she’d find herself looking for an animal to bring home. It was a buck, standing stock still, not trembling with fear but so insouciant that it tipped its head backwards and scratched its white-speckled rump with the tips of its horns. She and Karl were still arguing the merits of buying it (“Reminds me of a camel”), when she lost the animal to a Greek with bushy gray eyebrows, who owned a shoe store over in Chelsea and bought goats “for cultural reasons,” as he had once explained. Indeed, at the State Beach on the Fourth of July you’d notice the entire clan, with Greek music blaring from a stereo and charcoal reddening to coals under a flayed kid. People “kidded” them about whether the skin would end up later in shoes.

  Irritated, she bought the next sack a nephew held up: which contained two white Leghorns and a banty that “laid green eggs,” the farmer that had owned them yelled—giving a thumbs-up to Karl because they’d used to drink White Russians together at the Osborne Bar twenty years ago. He still drank and Karl didn’t, but Karl was the person with a killing cough. “In Heaven they’ve got no beer! That’s why we drink it here!” he sang.

  Dorothy bought a green-headed, red-legged duck for a couple of bucks as another addition, although they would eat him when the pond froze, if he didn’t turn out as personable as Emcee, the huge, bronze-plumaged tom gobbler that ought to have gone for Thanksgiving dinner years ago, when they’d still had enough cows for Karl to hum along with the radio when he milked. Emcee survived as a relic from when they had had practically as many cats as cows in the barn, but none more personable than Emcee, who swayed his head like a master of ceremonies to the talk shows, too.

  Tangled-up piglets muttered and squirmed in other bags, and jittery rabbits stamped their soft, forceful hind feet. Geese protested being pinioned, amidst the din of cows mooing, pigs of bu
tcherable age squealing as if in foreboding, a dog outside barking. Whenever birds or animals were sold, a slight wave of excitement swept the room, partly sympathetic, partly cruel, because anything living could be fun. Both fun and problematical, although a bachelor could buy a box of cockerels for hardly more than a buck apiece and feed them scraps and have his suppers for two or three weeks on almost no outlay.

  “Once poor, always prepared,” Rog reminded the crowd. “I’d have to stay home from school some days so Al could wear the shoes!” Al, who sat there sporting a stockman’s cane and five-gallon hat, waiting for the serious meat-cow bidding to start, grinned, not betraying whether it was true. Rumor had it that Rog had engineered his start by setting a few insurance fires, then sending a retarded brother to jail to take the fall. Even now it was said to be hard for him to get his buildings insured. But Al’s story was more curious. In the 1930s and 1940s the dry-cleaning store had belonged to an immigrant who gradually outlived his family and had no relatives to turn to when he grew old and sick. Most boys in town would probably not have worked for him as a presser after school and doing deliveries, or been allowed to by their parents because he was a Jew. But Al, with an adventurous, exotic streak even in adolescence, did, and when the man had a stroke, it was Al who drove him to his doctor’s appointments and to the hospital and saw to his needs. This developed into a friendship between opposites—youngster, old man; “Woodchuck” and European exile. He didn’t have a lot of last words, Al said, and most were in another language, but what he did come out with that Al, at the bedside, could decipher was not about being lonesome in a foreign land, but Don’t put it off, do what you want!

  The will was complicated but left Al the business, though the house went to somebody else, who sold it for nothing like a shot. And Al had husbanded what he’d got for half a dozen years before he started wheeling and dealing with beef on the hoof—Karl meanwhile out in the winter woods, running a six-hour trap line in Stillwater Swamp and another in a swamp adjoining Stillwater that he snuck into across the border in Canadian territory. It was certainly better fun than dry-cleaning would have been, or staying twenty years in the army, as the other Boyle brother had done. But you paid the piper eventually. He looked over at his drinking buddy from the Osborne Bar whose banty’s green eggs would now be theirs, but who was whittling a duck decoy from a chunk of basswood to pass the time. After he painted it up, he might get half a hundred for it from the tourists, as folk art, and Karl was wondering whether every other clown was finding some kind of a racket to exploit, except for him. He went and bummed a cigarette and got away with two drags on it before he began coughing. Then he simply held the thing until it burned to the end, while he and the whittler talked about the run of spawning rainbows at Skinflint Falls.

  During this lull, as three late balky cattle were being unloaded—underfed, underbred, dazed and dumb—Dorothy examined the collie that was tied under the grandstand, looking for the cloudiness of cataracts in her eyes, or abscessed teeth, and snapped her fingers softly to see if the dog turned at the sound, and if her response expressed more curiosity than fear.

  “Hey, hey, whoa.” Karl bustled over. “This isn’t adopt-orama.” But she said again, “Reminds me of a camel.”

  Rog, returning from the cattle pen, said that some pretend-farmers he had rented a place to over on May Mountain had abandoned her when they pulled up stakes, owing him money, and he hadn’t wanted to shoot her. Karl, instead of drawing Dorothy’s hands away, then repeated her check of the dog’s vital signs, and felt her throat and undercarriage for a tumor or a hernia, tested her side vision, looked at her gums for anemia, her ears for mites, and at her rear for the bloated appearance that worms produce. He decided she had some husky in her, a cross he approved of because the wider head would usually bring a calmer temperament and a better sense of smell. Carrying over the box of give-away kittens, he was pleased to see that she sniffed each one with separate interest, and offered her two pinches of sawdust with separate scents (goat pee and cow piss) to watch her react. He thumped her ribs to see whether her lungs were sore, felt her joints for the twinges of arthritis, and her individual toes, and succeeded in holding her attention for a full minute by conversation alone, which was one of his tests of a promising dog.

  Back at the cow chute, Rog was in a snit because one of the cows being unloaded couldn’t walk properly. Mad anyhow at the rough job his lamebrained half-brother Kiddo was doing with an electric prod, which caused the other animals, well or not, to bang themselves sideways hysterically on the ramp. He chewed out the farmer for bringing him a mink-farm specimen. “You know she can’t pass inspection, for Christ’s sake, for human consumption. You can’t park her here, dead at the door!”

  “She’s not sick! She stuck her fucking foot through the slats on the truck!” the other guy argued—his overalls smeared with fresh shit, his expression pained—hundreds of dollars he’d hoped for lost.

  “Meat for the mink. Won’t make Massachusetts,” Rog insisted, cold-shouldering him.

  “Dottie,” he said, turning and using his older brother’s pet name for Dorothy. “Do take the dog.” He also turned to Kiddo, softening his tone and touching him. “Put her back in his truck, but go easy on her.” Kiddo was illegitimate and had caught meningitis as a boy, which damaged his brain, but he had taken the fall for the family when the insurance investigators caught up with Rog’s last fire, and spent several years in jail. Rog—watching the cow collapse again, more patiently now—was said to have given Kiddo a collection of arrowheads when the boy’s prison term ended.

  He sold a welder’s helmet, a kitchen sink, and a second-hand possum-fur cape, as the row of regulars sipping beer waited for the meat bids to begin.

  “More chickens. Mutt chickens,” said Rog, pulling the Clarks’ blue-tailed red rooster and hen-pecked brown hen out of another live-looking bag—both of them gasping for a breath of air and blindly blinking in the light—and revolved them to make them flap and squawk and get the lumps out. “Here’s your alarm clock, boys. A young fella. This one ain’t got the staggers yet. He’ll wake you up no matter what kind of rotgut you drank last night or how late you got back from catching the clap in Montreal. And here’s his wife to go with him and lay you an egg every morning.”

  Karl, going after that rooster, bid a dollar for the pair, telling Dorothy he was sorry now they hadn’t bought that billy, because you could stake him down at the end of the field to draw in the deer. “Keep your goat meat and shoot venison.”

  “Yes!” yelled Kiddo, a lug with a short mustache, staring straight at Karl as if they were partners, when a widow woman made him go to two dollars.

  “Yes!” yelled Rog, when the widow, who managed a meager operation on sixty acres with her deaf daughter, went a quarter higher. She pursed her lips, knowing she was being made fun of.

  “Awful cheap at that price. You only live once. Going to be a butter-and-egg man?” Rog asked Karl. But Karl could take a joke and soon had the sacked birds huddled trembling between his legs. His father had liked birds; had had a swan at one time, orphaned or broken-winged, and even a peacock once, picked up at a flea market. Karl himself had raised pheasants a dozen years ago as an attempt at a business proposition, for training bird dogs or selling to a sporting club for field trials. And geese, with their white hind ends, gray wings flapping vigorously, and peremptory heads, appealed to him—like the wild ones clearing out in October and returning in April. As a young man at the time of World War II, he had yearned to learn to fly for the Army Air Force, but not been accepted, and settled for the infantry. And in the swamp, cutting cedars or tending his trapline, or playing softball on the town team on the diamond behind the drugstore, he would later cock a wistful ear when the regularly scheduled airliners or some private plane flew over.

  As Dorothy collected the collie dog, just tied with a string around her neck, Rog—sly and fiery but dumpy-tummied—got rid of the last of the pigs, plus a night stand, a bed frame, so
me shovels, and a crateful of toys from a bankruptcy sale, before the kids who were lying across their parents’ laps fell completely asleep. A black, confident-horned, fed-up-sounding cow, which in her home herd had no doubt led the others out to pasture and back again, began to bellow, as if protesting for all the rest of the animals that her udder ached and her legs were exhausted from having no place to lie down, and that they all were hungry and scared.

  “Live cows,” Rog exclaimed, rubbing his hands, scratching an itch, as people laughed because last year the local meat-locker man had suffered a suspension for selling steaks from a dead one after somebody, probably Al, his competition, turned him in.

  “Buy you a ladylove that will earn her grain,” Rog said, as the first Holstein was prodded into the ring. The big spenders pulled out their clipboards, and the Welfare parents who had come for the entertainment hoisted their children and began to leave.

  • • •

  After dropping the blind man off at his house—he joked that darkness was the same as daylight to him—Dorothy and Karl examined each creature by flashlight before they went to bed. Already the blue-tailed rooster, hardly out of the stifling bag, had started to interrogate the silent barn to learn if he would need to fight another rooster for supremacy at dawn. The nameless collie was ravenous and, after feeding her leftovers and bread, they put her in an empty horse stall, deciding not to collar, leash, license, name, or tie her up until she had proven that she wanted to stay. But during some pillow talk, they settled on Sheila, after a gentle spotted setter that Dorothy’s family had once owned. By daylight Sheila looked like a winner, however, a stately, quite trusting dog, her muzzle whitening, in the last third of her life. She didn’t bark to be let out of the stall but, when she was, toured the property in the balmy morning air quite independently, and at the house’s four corners found where the previous house dogs had buried their bones; also, in the gully beside the stream, the spot where Karl’s trailing hounds and bird dogs used to be chained. Nothing displeased her, and she remained around, lying in the sun, and later in the shade, in the same places that previous dogs had chosen, and peaceably introduced herself to Dorothy’s sheep, cats, and fowl with an air of already understanding whatever she saw.