by Lloyd Zimpel
But what if I misread their look? And it is not hope that is in it, but only censure? And better it be censure than hope, here, under the parching sun, amidst the awful insects, their hope, their lack of it, their very hope of hope, matters not at all. What room is there for a child’s faith here? What expectation of joy reasonable in this heat, this blight?
I smolder, yes. Beidermann even at peace is not an easy man to swallow, and we have him here rampant; and it cannot be, we cannot have a wrathful neighbor, or else we look to another war across the fence lines—and of those this country has seen enough; lastly by the bellicose Krupp with his neighbor to the north, Bruntz; their dispute over a ditch that one of them dug—Krupp is the last man to make clear which—and thus distracted the limb of Skunk Creek that crosses each property: and who was right and who was wrong in that dispute remains unknown, although shots were fired in the night, fat-bellied Krupp told me while maintaining himself an unlikely innocent victim; although Bruntz, like the slop-bucket Dutchman he was, had not sense enough to make his side heard, and in short time was busted and gone—back to the wife’s folks in Wisconsin, no doubt; and from the poor look of his place he was headed there soon enough with or without Krupp’s vagrant ditches and skulking midnight pot-shots. . . .
Otto takes his hold off Harris’ shoulder but stands beside him close as a prison guard, and Beidermann sets one foot on a horizontal spoke of his wagon wheel and swings himself up to the bench. As one, the twins come up, as if they might wave him off down the lane and run behind in the dust for a little way, as they sometimes do. They wait, their faces desolate.
Stepping up, I lay one hand on the big rump of Beidermann’s mare, slapping grasshoppers off it, and take a bead up the reins to Beidermann’s face; but before I can offer any moderate word, Beidermann speaks: If you like the feel of my horse’s ass, old man, he says, maybe you would like mine, too. Well, I can make it available for kissing by that red-faced boy of yours.
For that one moment I am willing to give up on the insolent Beidermann: there are several of us here who in two minutes can render the smart fellow, for all his size and muscle, such a lesson for his sass as he will record in his memoirs. Should I be ashamed to say it? I could have set the boys on him like dogs, the twins alone holding back. . . . And then we are all barbarians again. . . . If I am a Christian man, as I am, then I know where I stand here: no case for turning the other cheek is ever better made, a school book example, quite as if the Almighty Himself has hand-fashioned it expressly as a test—should the drouth and grasshoppers be insufficient—by way of showing His floundering servant how fragile is the stitching of one’s faith, how near the surface, weakness. . . .
Beidermann, Beidermann, I call to him, haughty on his wagon seat, this is no good. I can see I am too hasty in my criticism of you. I know your intention is neighborly . . . But it is these damned bugs: they will kill everything alive, and friendship and neighborliness are included in the victims, and I cannot abide to see us taken in by the effect of them. Beidermann, we have all had a bad season—. But there I stop, for Beidermann has not had a bad season.
Now he hoists the reins above the swinging tails of his team and measures me with a coal-black eye.
Bugs are bugs, he says. The bugs will go, but I will still be here. It was not bugs that give me hard words. It was your boy there—. He pokes his bristled chin at Harris, who growls as if he is a damn dog. Our neighbor slaps the reins lightly on the horses’ backs, dislodging a few dozen grasshoppers, and the team steps out.
Harris bawls some last word—I am so disgusted with him I cannot listen—and Otto, much provoked, shoves him back; and Beidermann’s rig departs down the ruts of our road in an eddy of dust and grasshoppers, his contraption rattling loudly in the wagon bed. The twins try to look at me but cannot; and Ma shakes her head back and forth, pursing her lips and looking at me and shaking her head. . . .
Presently Otto retrieves the shovel, hands it to the boiling Harris, and turns away, saying: That son of a bitch might at least take his bugs with him. . . .
NOW, WITH TIME TO RECRUIT ourselves somewhat, well may we ask: When will we see our stalwart neighbor again? We have our grasshoppers still, but we do not have our Beidermann; and if we measure their ruinous stay against his bitter departure, which are we to lament the more?
AUG. 20. A sop chucked down to us: they go at last. At milking time, when I walk to the barn, it is without the dismal crunch underfoot. One by one, two by two, they have picked up and sailed away. Obeying what magical signal? What signal needed beyond the ravished landscape they have left? Holes in the dirt where onions grew; fork handles filigreed; barren box elders and cottonwoods; a half-dozen hens dead of gluttony and the eggs of the survivors too bug-laced for the taste of any but the stuffed and snorting hogs; a little of the garden is saved, under the hides: Ma’s geraniums wilted but living, under the holey quilts.
Look, says Henry, waving his hand. You can see for a half-mile before there is anything alive.
AUG. 21. But some hang back, so attached are they to our largesse: in the house, a few still. . . . One straggler now creeps toward my lamp—to fatten on the oil, perhaps, to consume the very flame, to bring us news of the unregenerate Beidermann; this specimen no less brash than our neighbor, choosing to rest saucily before my lamp, a hand’s breadth from my pen, unaware of the hatred mantling in me. By my page the creature stands unmoving, then quivers, coarsely adjusts his stiff and gauzy wings, and tucks in his drumstick legs as if readying them for use. For all his diminutive size he is not dainty, but crude, his aspect rank, his single adornment the pearls of light caught on the sawteeth on the backs of his legs. His buffalo head is all eye and jowl: he faces me straight on, undaunted by my moving pen, although his feelers poke up alert, twitching one way or another, eyes fixed. He does not see what I am, but senses it. If I turn my hand quickly to the side it will crush him—for the feeble plate of armor across his back protects him in his world, but not in mine. Or is that my mistake, and it is indeed his world?
INTER-LEAF
SOMETHING LIKE THE LITTLE fizz that Fourth of July root beer, cold as ice, would send up his nose, now buzzed through his whole damn head. It happened before and he didn’t always know why, but this time he did know.
He sat cross-legged, just barely hidden in the tall grass, north of Beidermann’s place. His sack and rifle—not his rifle exactly, but shared in use and upkeep with August and Henry, although they didn’t know he had taken it—lay in his lap, and he watched the big-mouth son of a bitch down there wait with pin in hand for the moment to set it into the windmill’s drawbar; a little slip and he could lose a joint or two or a fingernail, but no such luck; and for all the brisk breeze, the windmill slowed as it took up its pumping labor. Dust rising high, the cattle crowded to the trough.
All heifers, not a bad-looking herd even from this distance. The late sun angled down so as to put them partly in shadow, but he could tell they were yearlings, twenty or more, nearly as many as Pa had. That was a surprise.
The view Harris so carefully took of Beidermann and his livestock was from a growth of blue-stem on a gentle bluff a quarter-mile off. He considered himself not so much hidden as only obscured: looking hard and long enough, Beidermann could spot him if he wanted to. He gave the son of a bitch that chance.
Behind him, past the break of the bluff, stood the only damn thing he knew he owned for sure. Nobody else wanted it, a twenty-year-old gelding, nameless, called when necessary “Harris’ nag” or “the old bay,” waiting with hanging head, reins tucked needlessly under a rock: it was used to these hidden waits.
From his grassy seat Harris, with one eye on the hounds that lingered at the windmill with their boss, overlooked the pigpen, noting it was a safe distance from the doomed barn. No reason for the hogs to be harmed; among the animals he dealt with, hogs were not so bad, considering the slobbering, manure-laden cattle; and stubborn horses that would ruck you against a stall-side, or stomp on your f
oot, or bite you in the back with green-stained teeth the size of dominoes when you bent over to pick up a wagon tongue; and brainless chickens that would go any direction but the one you shooed them to.
In a snuff tin in his shirt pocket he had the dope, and in the sack the chopped-up chunks of mud-cats from the creek, their ugly heads with the poisonous barbs hacked off, wrapped in two thicknesses of oil skin filched from a pile of bits and pieces of just about anything that Ma had been saving for as long as he could remember. Even double-wrapped, they smelled like sin, being two days old—that was the one thing that made him anxious, that smell. He knew the wind here, but still he kept testing to make sure it was still coming at him. It would be trouble if the hounds caught the scent before he meant them to.
What he waited for was a little less light, and for Beidermann to go into his house or barn and the hounds to be out of sight. It might take a while, but he knew how to wait for what he wanted—or to simply wait for whatever happened. More than once he had scrunched himself in tall grass just about everywhere hereabouts, and he had seen himself some things, sure enough: Blauser with a halter rope, whaling at his old woman by the barn door while their half-dozen kids bawled and tried to hide behind the outhouse; the Faust boy throwing rocks at the shypoke in his old man’s swamp, stringing out his dinger and trying to wrestle his dog into licking it; one of the Krupp boys, trolling along well north of the family property, snicking off one of Rylander’s straggling bull calves, neat as you please, and hazing it back onto his old man’s land; and big Clarence Schneider scooting like an over-grown shit-house rat across the Widow Jenssen’s yard in early evening, to duck out of sight into a ravine by the river where a horse might well be tied, and if he wasn’t pulling up his britches as he ran he might as well have been; and then soon enough, her hair down, the Widow strolls out to collect the eggs.
And always more . . . old lady Blauser tip-toeing into the creek’s reedy washes to give herself a good bath with a chunk of lye soap the size of a brick, not letting it touch the red welts across her shoulders. . . .
Just so did he watch Beidermann as he came and went, with pails, with a fork, with a basket of corn, in the fading light. Mostly, the hounds lay quietly in the dust, and when their boss came near raised their heads to see if anything of interest offered itself. Now Beidermann strode purposefully from the barn to the corncrib and knelt to look under. For this, the hounds hurried along. What was he looking for? Rats? The hounds didn’t think so; they sniffed the boss’s upraised rear end and strolled away. Maybe some old biddy had laid a clutch under there. That tickled Harris—Beidermann coddling his setting hens. . . . But then he thought, Well, wouldn’t that be a good place to stash a jug? Even though Beidermann was hardly required to hide his hooch—unless, maybe, the Widow had got to him with her talk. And in fact, he remembered that winter when Beidermann was laid up at the Widow’s, and they had gone through his place, his jug out in the open on the shelf by the fancy plates. . . . Harris had got himself a good taste of it too, until Pa put his foot down.
About enough light was left for him to put together his baits. He took out the oilskin packet and unfolded it with some care. The day’s heat had worked on the fish, and he was reluctant to put that much smell into the open air, but if he worked quickly, and the wind didn’t get tricky. . . .
With a stick he poked holes in the yielding flesh, working it around to enlarge the base within, and into these he forced as much of the dope from the snoose can as would fit. He made sure to use it all, spilling some, but he had plenty, not knowing how reliable it was, although old Schneider, in whose machine shed he had snooped out an open sack of it, claimed he had put down more coyotes with it than anyone around, and a couple of wolves too, although no one had seen the wolves.
When he had six soft nuggets, each the size of a baby’s fist, he gave up, throwing the rest of the rotting fish as far away as he could, way past the ragged bay, who didn’t like the smell any more than he did.
Around him the grass had collected the beginning of the evening dew, and Harris wiped his hands in this, not much diminishing the smell; but now he had his baits at hand. And he had the sling, from out of the spider webs in the barn—at least he thought it was his, he’d had one like it once, and damn well knew how to use it too. He’d knocked down a good number of squirrels years ago and proudly tacked their tails to the barn door, but rats or the cats always eventually made off with them.
It was nearly dark now. He could still see the shapes of the hounds, and to someone who didn’t know dogs, they might look asleep. It was simple enough, Harris saw: if he moved ten or twelve rods to the west, the barn would be between him and the dogs. He’d sling those baits to the barn’s offside so that where they came from was hidden, and the baits themselves unseen. . . . Unseen but, by God, smelled! And once the hounds had gobbled down their goodies, well, then Beidermann would get a treat of his own.
There was a crack or two in the canvas of the sling, but nothing serious. This would work fine. With each swing, he flung out two pieces of fish.Whoop, whoop! His horse stirred at the sound, or maybe the smell.
In the dark he couldn’t be certain, but the baits looked to have gone where he’d intended. He wiped his hands again, the grass wetter now.
He waited. The smell surely had blossomed fully across the yard. Even now, as they dozed, the dogs’ noses would be furiously atwitch.
He sat quietly, hearing nothing, as the night chill descended.
. . .
A STAR POPPED OUT. He saw it. It wasn’t there and then it was; then more and it was dark around him.
Only silence from below, no movement, nothing to be seen. The lamp that had burned for a half-hour in Beidermann’s window was long out. Surely he was asleep . . . though not so deeply as his dogs.
Harris stood, carefully stretching his cramped legs, and turned his head to catch a sound—a faint convulsive coughing whine, from past the barn and barely heard. Nothing to fear. Through the wet grass, he walked to his stoic gelding and retrieved the lard can hung by its bale from the pommel. This smelled too, but he would take the smell of kerosene over rotten fish any day.
In many ways this night was no different from any other; the wind died considerably but would be back tomorrow, the dew so heavy he felt it against his face, and the silence of the grave all around.
With half an eye on the house he moved around to the northeast corner of the barn, hurrying—with the kerosene sloshing out as he ran—and heard a heavy, thick sound within the straw-chinked wall. All them cats, he thought; no, a big animal. Too late now. He was at the corner of the barn with his match ready and, scratching it across his pant leg, touched it delicately down.
And there she goes, he thought, looking back. No big, sky-high conflagration—he didn’t want that—but just those little flicks all along the bottom of the barn, like a rough and brightly drawn line. There was nowhere for it to go but up . . . and then out, and across, and turn a corner, and around and about and up higher still, and then the tarpaper on the roof. . . . There she goes. . . .
Harris, his bay gelding moving at a nice trot, didn’t look back again.
CLOSE TO MIDNIGHT; he had never been in town this late. Only a couple of lights shone, one small yellow one in Schwantz’s window. Harris tangled his horse’s reins in the sunflower stalks that grew in the lot south of the Mercantile—an even weedier lot was to the north of the narrow building. Fingering the coins in his pocket, he opened the crooked screen door, considering what sort of traveling eats he would need. Some crackers, some beans, a can of peaches if he had the money.
A small lamp with an untrimmed wick that sent up strings of black smoke cast a meager light on Schwantz and the man he was talking to at the table he used for a counter. Harris didn’t know the customer and couldn’t quite tell in the near-darkness, but he might have been redheaded. He had a stoop-shouldered slouch to him.
Schwantz said, “Howdy, my boy.” Harris figured he didn’t know his name,
but he knew the family. “How’s your daddy getting on? Don’t believe I seen him since the Fourth.”
He hated this sort of exchange; it was always happening. He mumbled something and walked past the possible redhead to a barrel holding a jumble of packaged hard crackers.
The stranger pulled his head back as Harris passed, and gave a low whistle. “Wowee, you got some powerful perfume there, my friend. You been rolling with your dogs in rotten fish, or what?” He chuckled, looking to Schwantz, who only wiped his hands on his apron.
Harris made no reply; he laid out three dimes on the table for the crackers and beans, and then another nickel for the sack of tobacco he pointed to Schwantz to give him. The storekeeper took the coins and slipped them somewhere under the table. “Gettin’ colder,” he said.
Harris nodded. Schwantz and his store had been there from the first he could remember; he had heard that his wife had died long ago and a couple of children had fled forever to Saint Paul and Chicago. Harris didn’t mind that the old man had more than once called him “Otto.”
Purchases in hand, Harris turned to go; the redhead had closed in as if to get a closer whiff of the fishy perfume—or to get a look at the wine-stain mark on Harris’ neck. He was a lumbering fellow, bent over at his big shoulders as if to pay close attention to small men, and he had a smell of his own, from the saloon. He peered down at Harris, wrinkling his nose, saying, “Now, that is some stink my friend. I ain’t smelt nothin’ like that since that old whore in Zimmerman ast me to check her crotch to see what that rash was.”