Men in the Making

by Bruce Machart

  For the next hour, Grandpa sat on the fender while I drove, teaching me how to stand hard on the clutch to shift gears, how to raise and lower the implement, coaching me as I drove slowly forward, plowing under the remains of the springtime garden while the chickens bobbed and weaved all around us. "You got it," he said. "Hot damn, son, you're shittin' fire and pissin' fuel now, ain't it? You're driving."

  Perched atop the tractor, with the night's rain steaming up from the ground and the musky-sweet smell of black soil washing around me, everything seemed under my power—the tractor, sputtering forward and jerking so hard when I shifted gears that it threw me forward into the steering wheel; my legs, too short and rubber-muscled though they were from standing hard on the clutch and the gas; the ground beneath me, turning over in my wake. Everything. Grandpa sat there beaming, wiping sweat from his forehead and nodding out toward the next plot of ground he wanted tilled.

  Straining against the wheel, I turned us around and steered toward the unbroken earth. In front of us, a sea of chickens parted in fluttering waves and I was thinking Moses couldn't have done it any better when I stood on the clutch and felt my boot start sliding.

  Either because of the shit on my soles or the wobbly way my legs were working, I slid clean off the clutch, coming down solid with my other foot on the gas. What happened next was fast and black and smelled of fuel. The engine screamed, shooting us forward while diesel-black swirled from the smokestack and the chickens came alive, taking to the air, leaving feathers aloft behind them. Grandpa grabbed the wheel and got a boot on the brake, and as he brought us to a stop it was all I could do to hang on. I clamped my eyes tight against the smoke and the sun and the world rolling by, and I wanted like hell to be anywhere but here, anywhere but on this machine with an old man I hardly knew and the father I'd come here to find just as absent as he'd always been in Oklahoma.

  For years I'd been trying to force him into existence, to think of him and imagine his reaction to the skinny and timid boy I'd become. I'd tell myself he was looking down, taking note of how clumsy I was. I'd paint disapproval onto his face, convincing myself that failure and fear were what he'd come to expect from me. After all, surely he'd been watching all my life, watching me run to the school washroom to puke whenever a fight broke out, when just standing there, watching in a crowd while two boys flattened each other's noses could turn my body against me. I'd try to imagine him looking down with a frown while I shut myself up in my room on bright Oklahoma afternoons when the neighborhood was alive with baseball games and swimming pool parties. He can see you, I thought, but I never convinced myself it was true, never got phantom whiffs of his aftershave or felt him leaning over my shoulder while I played.

  Instead, he'd come to me in my sleep, or I'd go to him, skimming over a dreamscape of treetops and diving into the shadows, where I'd find him flat on his back, blood bubbling from the jagged hole at his hairline. This was my father, mud-caked and silent in a swampy jungle somewhere, staring up empty-eyed at the sky. I'd slosh through the muck to find his helmet, now flecked with bone and flesh and filling with green water twenty yards away from him, carried across the swamp by the bullet some buddy of his had put through his head. This was the father I'd grown up with. A man too far gone to look down on me and frown. A man too dead, even in dreams, to be brought back to life.

  Now Grandpa killed the engine and looked over his shoulder at the damage I'd done. "Looks like you just plowed us some lunch," he said.

  We climbed down, walked back around the implement, and there in the broken rows of dirt was a hen with its head caved in. Grandpa took hold of its feet and held it up so I could see. It surprised me that I felt nothing inside, no bitter swirl of bile in my stomach, no desire to run until I was breathless somewhere and well hidden. No nothing. Instead, I reached out and plucked a feather from the bird, twirled it between my fingers, and let it fall to the ground. "I'm sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to."

  Grandpa shoved the bird my way. He snorted and coughed and spat a wad of phlegm into the soil. "We don't talk that way in Texas," he said, "and if we gotta kill chickens all day long until that sticks in your head, we'll do it. You can't apologize for killing, boy, or for dying either. There's no sense in it. You're either too dead to say the words or too dead to hear them."

  Grandpa handed me the bird and I held it away from my body while he spread the legs and plucked the feathers between them. "Get your knife out," he said.

  I reached into my pocket, feigning surprise when I came up empty. Early on, my mother had laid down the law about Grandpa's gifts, and I'd never taken one of the knives he'd sent me any farther from the house than the backyard. "I must of left it in my other jeans," I said.

  "Is that a fact," he said, pulling a silver lockblade from his back pocket. "Then use this one. Cut her right down there by the vent, just slit an inch or thereabouts so you can get a couple fingers in there and sweep the guts out."

  I took the knife and pulled out the blade and the sun threw sparks of light from the steel. I held it in my hand, and there, etched in the knife's silver casing, was my father's name. Something flared in me, some hot desire to do harm. I thought about the schoolyard back home, the cracked dirt playground where boys would circle each other, wiping blood from the corners of their mouths while a ring of spectators egged them on, and now the thought didn't make my stomach churn, didn't send me running, holding puke in my mouth, toward the washroom. I wanted to fight. I wanted to hear my fist crack against someone's nose, to feel the tightening ring of onlookers flex around me while I drew blood. I looked at the knife in my hand. This was what I'd been waiting for, half expecting year after year when I'd unwrapped my birthday gifts from Grandpa. The knife with Billy H. etched deep in its silver. The knife that belonged to me, that was mine. The knife that never came.

  I ran my thumb over the etching, and when I looked up Grandpa was holding the chicken's legs apart, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Go on," he said. "Cut."

  I gripped the knife, sliding the blade into the bird's skin, inhaling as the sour and animal smell of it filled the air. Stepping back, I looked down at the slight smear of blood on the blade, then back at Grandpa. His eyes were tired, unblinking, shifting up and down from my face to the knife. He held his hand out, flexing his fingers.

  I hesitated, pulling the knife close to my chest.

  "You got something to say?" he said.

  I wiped the blade on my jeans, snapped it closed, and handed it over.

  "You sure?" he said, sliding it into his back pocket. "Texans don't mince words, you know."

  What Texans did do, apparently, was put loaded shotguns in the hands of hung-over nine-year-olds. The morning after the beer, Grandpa woke me with a shake of the shoulders before dawn. "This is going to be beautiful," he said. "Get your boots on."

  In the kitchen, Grandpa stood in a wide-legged stance at the stove, whistling while he fried potatoes and bacon. When I sat down at the table, he turned, nodding at the cup of coffee in front of me. "Drink it," he said. "Texans ain't ever slow with a cup of joe."

  After breakfast, he took me into the den, pulled open a drawer under the gun case, and this time, when he spoke, he wasn't talking about Texans. He was talking about my father, and there was something rough and hushed in his voice. "This here was your daddy's," he said, handing me a leather hunting vest that, when I put it on, came clear down to my knees. He opened a box of shells and dumped the contents into one of the vest pockets. My head was throbbing and all that weight in one pocket threw my balance out of whack. "Don't worry about that," he said, watching me sway on my feet. "Fill the other side up with birds and you'll straighten up just fine."

  Then he gave me the gun, a single-shot.28, and showed me how to break it open, how to load it, how to hold it up tight against my cheek when I fired. "It was your daddy's first gun," he said, shaking his head. "He'd of wanted you to have it, but it stays right here with me till you're sixteen, got it? There's something else, too."
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  I nodded, feeling the cold weight of the gun in my hands while Grandpa rifled around in the drawer. "This ain't for wearing," he said, pushing a velvet-covered box at me. Now his eyes were cast down at his boots. He cracked his knuckles one by one. I gave the thing a shake, and I must have had an uneasy smile on my face. This was the kind of box my mother kept her pearls in.

  I flipped the box open and Grandpa looked hard at me. "I'm serious, now," he said. "It's bad luck to wear a dead man's medal."

  It was shining, the purple ribbons smooth and unfrayed, the emblem bright with the gold profile of a man any first-grader would know, and as I stood there tracing Washington's face with my thumb, I couldn't imagine what a man from my history books could possibly have to do with my father. "This is it?" I asked. "The real one? I thought you gave it back."

  Grandpa pulled his gun from the cabinet and busied himself checking the action, breaking it open and blowing into the receiver and flipping the safety on and off. "I should have," he said. "I wanted to. Couldn't bring myself to do it, is all. Couldn't bring myself to part with it at all until now." He leaned his gun against the wall and put his callused hand against my cheek. "I'm sorry, kiddo. I am, okay? Tell your mother I said so."

  Outside, the wind had blown its way by overnight. The cotton stalks stood stiff in the fields and the sun was just hinting over the horizon. Already it was hot. Grandpa let Alamo out of his kennel and leashed him up on the end of a rope. The dog looked up at us, raised his haunches high, stretching his forelegs out in front of him as if to give us a better view of the chocolate brown splotches on his hindquarters. His ears twitched forward and Grandpa said, "That's right, Allie. We're going to work." Handing me his gun, he bent forward with a groan and gave Alamo a two-handed scratching around the neck. The dog yawned and licked Grandpa's wrists, then rolled his head around to make sure Grandpa didn't miss a spot. "Best gun dog there is," Grandpa said. "English pointers, they call 'em, but just look at that dog. Ain't he a beauty? English, my ass. He was whelped just down the highway a stretch in Yoakum."

  In the southern pasture, we walked until we met the barbed-wire fence that separated Grandpa's land from the neighbor's cornfield. "We'll work the fence line until an hour after sunup," Grandpa said, spitting between his teeth. "They're hiding out here, but when the day breaks they're gonna want to eat, and boy, let me tell you, we're gonna feed them something no living thing ever gets hungry enough to swallow."

  Alamo kept lurching against the rope, and when Grandpa let him go, I knew I'd been told the truth about him. This was a dog that knew what to do with some acreage. He worked the field just the way Grandpa had said he would. While we walked straight along the fence, the dog ran, quartering back and forth, working fifty yards or so out before turning back toward the fence line, zigzagging in a set pattern just ahead of us. For every yard we covered, he covered twenty, and when he turned, stopping suddenly and leaning into a point maybe forty yards from us, his tail gone rigid and curved and held high in the air, Grandpa made a clicking sound with his tongue and began walking toward him.

  Grandpa whoaed the dog and kicked around in the pasture grass, and the birds—two of them—flushed fast and loud and low toward the glare of daybreak in the east. Grandpa let out a little laugh, like he'd seen this trick before, then peppered the horizon with shot.

  I turned, leaning forward into the gun, and in that instant I imagined what it must have been like to be my father. A man with mud on his boots and the tickle of ragweed in his nose, the smooth and solid cool of a walnut stock against his cheek. A man comfortable with a gun in his hands, here at home or anywhere else, by damn. A man, through and through, dead or alive, and here I was, his son, but something was locked tight inside, rusted shut, and when that bird quartered south and out of range, there was nothing I could do but stand there looking down the barrel, my finger limp on the trigger.

  Grandpa broke his gun open, ejecting the spent shell. He looked down at Alamo, who was holding point, head held high to mark the fallen bird.

  "Dead bird," Grandpa said. Alamo turned to me with what seemed a look of contempt in his tired bird-dog eyes, then broke out to retrieve the kill. Grandpa let out a sad whistle, a note held long and sliding low. The sound of a make-believe bomb dropping from the sky. He traded guns with me, broke mine open, and held the shell maybe four inches from my face.

  "What the hell is this?" he said, making the same disgusted face he had the day before when I'd looked at my beer too long before tilting it back. "Boy, no matter how many times you load this thing in that gun, it ain't ever gonna shoot itself." He slid the shell back into my gun. "What happened?"

  I could tell by the abrupt way he handed the gun over to me that he knew the answer, knew it even before I did. I'd been scared. Scared to shoot, sure, but mostly scared to miss. But when he frowned and narrowed his eyes in on me, I knew he still expected an answer, and fear, I realized, wasn't half as bad as what I felt now—small and fumbling and not at all like the son Grandpa must have remembered.

  "I've never shot one before," I said.

  "Well hell, boy, it's not any harder than pissing in a pond. Just point and shoot, that's all. Go on, then. Give it a try so you get the feel of it."

  I don't know what I expected, but when I raised that gun to my shoulder and pressed my cheek up tight to its smooth, finished stock, I felt almost at home with myself. I imagined some invisible enemy in the sky, some war I'd never been a part of before. I saw my daddy beside me, sighting in his weapon, and I swung the gun through the morning air, tracing a cloud with the barrel.

  With the bird gripped softly in his mouth, Alamo came busting back through the brush.

  "Go on," Grandpa told me, and when I squeezed the trigger, in my mind, I was strong and meant to be that way and I was killing nothing and everything all at once. I was killing, and there wasn't anything that could stop me. Not the recoil slamming my shoulder, not the blast ringing sharp in my ears. When Grandpa pulled his bird from Alamo's mouth, I broke the gun open, shoved another shell into the receiver, and when I looked up Grandpa was nodding, casting the dog back out to hunt, making that sound with his tongue before giving me a wink.

  He reloaded and fell in behind the dog. I followed, taking note of the slight bulge of my daddy's knife in his back pocket. I knew then that there were things that would always be kept from me, things I'd never know. Still I walked on, determined now that the hollow twinge of loss in my chest was something I could learn to carry, and bear, a medal of manhood I'd make myself strong enough to wear.

  Today when I think of that morning, of the scrub grass crunching beneath my boots and the weight of my father's vest heavy on my shoulders, of the worn, gamy smell of dried blood and leather, I know that as I walked that field I began to imagine myself as a man. I know it as surely as I know now I was fooling myself, propping myself up against the wide field of emptiness I'd found in place of all the answers I'd expected Texas would hold. But still, there I was, nine years old and proud, beer bile and coffee swirling in my nerve-cinched stomach. Nine years old and about to lay waste to some bobwhite quail. Nine years old and sweating just after dawn and long of nine-year-old stride, and strong. I imagined stepping off that bus in a few weeks, the recognition on my mother's face when she saw me in that vest, the Purple Heart pinned to my chest. She'd wear an open-lipped look of surprise, put her hands on my shoulders as she marveled at who and what I'd become. She'd smile a smile I'd never seen before except in photographs of her with my father. I would be a man. A man, by damn, and that was the hope I was holding on to the next time I pulled the trigger.

  When Alamo went staunch with point, Grandpa approached from the side, said, "Whoa, there. Whoa, boy. Whoa, that's right," and when he kicked in front of the dog, a whole covey came shooting and screeching and in all directions from the grass. A half dozen of them, at least. Grandpa said, "Lord a-mighty," and got off a shot. Alamo broke point and gave chase, and when I swung my gun I was alive with adrenaline, my toes
curling in my boots, and the pair of birds I'd sighted in were skimming only a couple feet off the ground with Alamo running right in their wake. Too close, too close, I knew, but then I saw that dog's face, the accusing look he'd given me earlier. I imagined the whistling sound that Grandpa had made, and when the bomb hit the ground in my mind, I squeezed the trigger.

  It happened just like that, that fast, no slow motion like you see at the movies when something dies. The dog, by the time we got up to it, was bleeding and lying still and breathing, but not from its mouth. I stood back while Grandpa knelt beside him. I stood and listened to the whisper-slick sound of a dying dog sucking air through a hole in its lung.

  "Mercy," Grandpa said, clamping his hand over the wound. "He's in shock. Jesus, boy. Give me that vest."

  I took a step back, jammed my hands into the vest pockets. "I can't," I said, "I'm sorry," because in a way I was, and because there wasn't anything else I could think of to say.

  Grandpa leaned close to the dog, pressing down, blood rising up between his fingers. "We don't talk that way here," he said, looking up. His eyes were electric, flashing with sunlit tears. Pulling a hand from the dog, he punched the hard ground with his fist. "I already told you that, boy. Now give me that goddamn vest."

  "I'm sorry," I said again, because my feet had gone numb in my boots and the dog wouldn't stop dying and I suddenly didn't care how Texans talked. Besides, he wasn't talking about Texans. I knew he wasn't. He was talking about my daddy. He was talking about my daddy and he was talking about me, and I wasn't sorry just for killing his dog. I was sorry because I couldn't do what he asked, what he thought a man should do, couldn't bring myself to take off that vest. I didn't want him to wrap it around that dog. I didn't want the dog bleeding on it. I wanted to wear it home and see that bright look of recognition in my mother's eyes. I wanted to take it to school and show my friends and tell them who once had worn it.