by Rick Bass
Sydney stared at his crooked hands, with the scars from the cuts, made over the years by the fencing tools. Silently, he cursed all the many things he did not know. He could lift bales of hay. He could string barbed-wire fences. He could lift things. That was all he knew. He wished he were a chemist, an electrician, a poet, or a preacher. The things he had—what little of them there were—wouldn’t help her.
She had never thought to ask how drunk Henry had been. Sydney thought that made a difference: whether you jumped off the bridge with one beer in you, or two, or a six-pack; or with a sea of purple Psychos rolling around in your stomach—but she never asked.
He admired her confidence, and doubted his ability to be as strong, as stubborn. She never considered that it might have been her fault, or Henry’s; that some little spat might have prompted it, or general disillusionment.
It was his fault, Sydney’s, square and simple, and she seemed comfortable, if not happy, with the fact.
Dr. Lynly treated horses, but he did not seem to love them, thought Karen.
“Stupid creatures,” he would grumble, when they would not do as he wanted, when he was trying to doctor them. “Utter idiots.” He and Buster and Karen would try to herd the horse into the trailer, or the corral, pulling on the reins and swatting the horse with green branches.
“Brickheads,” Dr. Lynly would growl, pulling the reins and then walking around and slapping, feebly, the horse’s flank. “Brickheads and fatheads.” He had been loading horses for fifty years, and Karen would giggle, because the horses’ stupidity always seemed to surprise, and then anger Dr. Lynly, and she thought it was sweet.
It was as if he had not yet really learned that that was how they always were.
But Karen had seen that right away. She knew that a lot of girls, and women, were infatuated with horses, in love with them even, for their great size and strength, and for their wildness—but Karen, as she saw more and more of the sick horses, the ailing ones, the ones most people did not see regularly, knew that all horses were dumb, simple and trusting, and that even the smartest ones could be made to do as they were told.
And they could be so dumb, so loyal, and so oblivious to pain. It was if—even if they could feel it—they could never, ever acknowledge it.
It was sweet, she thought, and dumb.
Karen let Sydney rub her temples and brush her hair. She would go into the bathroom, and wash it while he sat on the porch. He had taken up whittling; one of the stallions had broken Sydney’s leg by throwing him into a fence and then trampling him, and the leg was in a heavy cast. So Sydney had decided to take a break for a few days.
He had bought a whittling kit at the hardware store, and was going to try hard to learn how to do it. There were instructions. The kit had a square, light piece of balsa wood, almost the weight of nothing, and a plain curved whittling knife. There was a dotted outline in the shape of a duck’s head on the balsa wood that showed what the shape of his finished work would be.
After he learned to whittle, Sydney wanted to learn to play the harmonica. That was next, after whittling.
He would hear the water running, and hear Karen splashing, as she put her head under the faucet and rinsed.
She would come out in her robe, drying her hair, and then would let him sit in the hammock with her and brush her hair. It was September, and the cottonwoods were tinging, were making the skies hazy, soft and frozen. Nothing seemed to move.
Her hair came down to the middle of her back. She had stopped cutting it. The robe was old and worn, the color of an old blue dish. Something about the shampoo she used reminded him of apples. She wore moccasins that had a shearling lining in them, and Sydney and Karen would rock in the hammock, slightly. Sometimes Karen would get up and bring out two Cokes from the refrigerator, and they would drink those.
“Be sure to clean up those shavings when you go,” she told him. There were little balsa wood curls all over the porch. Her hair, almost dry, would be light and soft. “Be sure not to leave a mess when you go,” she would say.
It would be dark then, Venus out beyond them.
“Yes,” he said.
Before he left, she reached out from the hammock, and caught his hand. She squeezed it, and then let go.
He drove home slowly, thinking of Henry, and of how he had once taken Henry fishing for the first time. They had caught a catfish so large that it had scared Henry. They drank beers, and sat in the boat, and talked.
One of Sydney Bean’s headlights faltered, on the drive home, then went out, and it took him an hour and a half to get home.
The days got cold and brittle. It was hard, working with the horses: Sydney’s leg hurt all the time. Sometimes the horse would leap, and come down with all four hooves bunched in close together, and the pain and shock of it would travel all the way up Sydney’s leg and into his shoulder, and down into his wrists: the break was in his ankle.
He was sleeping past sun-up, some days, and was being thrown, now, nearly every day; sometimes several times in the same day.
There was always a strong wind. Rains began to blow in. It was cool, getting cold, crisp as apples, and it was the weather that in the summer everyone said they would be looking forward to. One night there was a frost, and a full moon.
On her back porch, sitting in the hammock by herself with a heavy blanket around her, Karen saw a stray balsa shaving caught between the cracks of her porch floor. It was white, in the moonlight—the whole porch was—and the field was blue—the cattle stood out in the moonlight like blue statues—and she almost called Sydney.
She even went as far as to get up and call information, to find out his number; it was that close.
But then the silence and absence of a thing—she presumed it was Henry, but did not know for sure what it was—closed in around her, and the field beyond her porch, like the inside of her heart, seemed to be deathly still—and she did not call.
She thought angrily, I can love who I want to love. But she was angry at Sydney Bean, for having tried to pull her so far out, into a place where she did not want to go.
She fell asleep in the hammock, and dreamed that Dr. Lynly was trying to wake her up, and was taking her blood pressure, feeling her forehead, and, craziest of all, swatting at her with green branches.
She awoke from the dream, and decided to call him after all. Sydney answered the phone as if he, too, had been awake.
“Hello?” he said. She could tell by the true questioning in his voice that he did not get many phone calls.
“Hello,” said Karen. “I just—wanted to call, and tell you hello.” She paused; almost a falter. “And that I feel better. That I feel good, I mean. That’s all.”
“Well,” said Sydney Bean, “well, good. I mean, great.”
“That’s all,” said Karen. “Bye,” she said.
“Good-bye,” said Sydney.
On Thanksgiving Day, Karen and Dr. Lynly headed back out to the swamp, to check up on the loggers’ mule. It was the hardest cold of the year, and there was bright ice on the bridges, and it was not thawing, even in the sun. The inside of Dr. Lynly’s old truck was no warmer than the air outside. Buster, in his wooliness, lay across Karen to keep her warm.
They turned onto a gravel road, and started down into the swamp. Smoke, low and spreading, was all in the woods, like a fog. The men had little fires going all throughout the woods; they were each working on a different tree, and had small warming fires where they stood and shivered when resting.
Karen found herself looking for the pale ugly logger.
He was swinging the ax, but he only had one arm, he was swinging at the tree with one arm. The left arm was gone, and there was a sort of a sleeve over it, like a sock. The man was sweating, and a small boy stepped up and quickly toweled him dry each time the pale man stepped back to take a rest.
They stopped the truck and got out and walked up to him, and he stepped back—wet, already, again; the boy toweled him off, standing on a low stool and startin
g with the man’s neck and shoulders, and then going down the great back—and the man told them that the mule was better but that if they wanted to see him, he was lower in the swamp.
They followed the little path towards the river. All around them were downed trees, and stumps, and stacks of logs, but the woods looked no different. The haze from the fires made it seem colder. Acorns popped under their feet.
About halfway down the road, they met the mule. He was coming back up towards them, and he was pulling a good load. A small boy was in front of him, holding out a carrot, only partially eaten. The mule’s knee looked much better, though it was still a little swollen, and probably always would be.
The boy stopped, and let the mule take another bite of carrot, making him lean far forward in the trace. His great rubbery lips stretched and quavered, and then flapped, as he tried to get it, and then there was the crunch when he did.
They could smell the carrot as the mule ground it with his old teeth. It was a wild carrot, dug from the woods, and not very big: but it smelled good.
Karen had brought an apple and some sugar cubes, and she started forward to give them to the mule, but instead, handed them to the little boy, who ate the sugar cubes himself, and put the apple in his pocket.
The mule was wearing an old straw hat, and looked casual, out-of-place. The boy switched him, and he shut his eyes and started up: his chest swelled, tight and sweaty, to fit the dark soft stained leather harness, and the big load behind him started in motion, too.
Buster whined, as the mule went by.
It was spring again then, the month in which Henry had left them, and they were on the back porch. Karen had purchased a Clydesdale yearling, a great and huge animal, whose mane and fur she had shaved to keep it cool in the warming weather, and she had asked a little boy from a nearby farm with time on his hands to train it, in the afternoons. The horse was already gentled, but needed to be stronger. She was having the boy walk him around in the fields, pulling a makeshift sled of stones and tree stumps and old rotten bales of hay.
In the fall, when the Clydesdale was strong enough, she and Dr. Lynly were going to trailer it out to the swamp, and trade it for the mule.
Sydney Bean’s leg had healed, been broken again, and was now healing once more. The stallion he was trying to break was showing signs of weakening. There was something in the whites of his eyes, Sydney thought, when he reared up, and he was not slamming himself into the barn—so it seemed to Sydney, anyway— with quite as much anger. Sydney thought that perhaps this coming summer would be the one in which he broke all of his horses, day after day, week after week.
They sat in the hammock and drank Cokes and nibbled radishes, celery, which Karen had washed and put on a little tray. They watched the boy, or one of his friends, his blue shirt a tiny spot against the treeline, as he followed the big dark form of the Clydesdale. The sky was a wide spread of crimson, all along the western trees, towards the river. They couldn’t tell which of the local children it was, behind the big horse; it could have been any of them.
“I really miss him,” said Sydney Bean. “I really hurt.”
“I know,” Karen said. She put her hand on Sydney’s, and rested it there. “I will help you,” she said.
Out in the field, a few cattle egrets fluttered and hopped behind the horse and and boy. The great young draft horse lifted his thick legs high and free of the mud with each step, free from the mud made soft by the rains of spring, and slowly—they could tell—he was skidding the sled forward.
The egrets hopped and danced, following at a slight distance, but neither the boy nor the horse seemed to notice. They kept their heads down, and moved forward.
THE GOVERNMENT BEARS
My name is D. W. Pitts, and I am nearing sixty years old. I was fifty-nine in last October. I shot a deer for my people the day we were to have a full moon that month. I cleaned him right before dusk, and then the wind changed that night and opened all the clouds up to crystal stars and we had the first frost, not melting but freezing even harder and like snow in the morning: a bright sun, and the shock of another year, even to the young ones. There are three of them, and my son, Ray, and his woman, Becca. I try as hard as I can to keep everyone fed and to make sure the young ones notice dandelions, dockweed, owls, and horses. There is no greater joy than children.
The little girl, Alice, is four and blonde, already with glasses. I sold the Jeep to buy her the glasses. The twins are six, and mean, and stubblesouled. Nothing will ever hurt them. They will demolish this state. With the twins around me, there is no harshness in the world. Not anymore. Ray’s a drunkard. I chuckle when I think of the twins, and unleashing them. I hate this state sometimes. I must not let them be changed.
When I was twenty-seven I was hit in the head by a man wielding a fourteen-inch pipe wrench. He was about a hundred pounds heavier than I was. Sometimes when I throw two fifty-pound sacks of feed out of the truck and listen to them hit I think about that. He was much larger than I was but I killed him.
It wasn’t even over some woman, or a horse or a dog, or our mothers’ names: it was just plain bad blood, that odd thing, right from the very start. I had worked with him about a week, and one day he said he didn’t like me because my clothes were always too clean and because he said he had seen me looking down the creek like a crazy man, just watching it, when there was nothing there, in the middle of the summer. We were working up on the Big Black, drilling Tinsley Field: cotton everywhere, and the magic in flat sky. Honeysuckle crept and smelled good right on down and into the creek: the water was muddy, and alligators lived in there. If you watched, you could see one every now and then.
I was on my lunch break, and when I finished my sandwich and came back up on the rig floor, he said that stuff to me and then picked up the wrench and came down on top of my head as if trying to cleave me in two. We were circulating out a little peeing mud and he and I were the only ones up there on the floor and there was all this blood in my eyes all of a sudden. It was in my face and mouth too. It was sticky and I thought it was my brain—I could smell this odor like fried or burned okra: I thought that was my mind, exposed to the sunlight. I grabbed the coffeepot and shorted it out and skittered it across the derrick floor, across the mud, and into the trip gas. It blew the rig to kingdom come and I woke up in the brush down by the creek with a broken cheek and collarbone and twisted ankles and some rig metal in my chest and thigh. No one knew much about the field back in those days. They said it would just pee a little; they said it wouldn’t blow.
Now I live down near Laurel. There may not be enough good I can do the rest of my life to make up for killing that man.
I still limp. My state will always limp. I keep the kids here, truthfully, because I have no say in it; Ray will not move. The people here will eat them up, or try. But above all I would rather that than the children merge with them, and take on their rampant nastiness, hatred of self, love of disaster. Above all I must keep the children above this.
When Ray was little the children called him the Killer’s Son. This was before we moved to Laurel. Then God took his mother: we were driving, all of us, west of Vicksburg in this old Ford and the axle broke and we went into some trees. In school, after we were both out of the hospital, the children told him I had killed his mother too. Shortly after he was married, his first woman caught this disease from another man and hanged herself in this other man’s kitchen.
My family’s snake-bit. Since I got struck by the pipe wrench and blew up the rig in anger, this state’s never given me any trouble directly but it’s sure taken it out on my kin.
I must prepare the boys well.
Very few nations have had a war fought in their very own backyard, and certainly no other American states, not like us, not like Mississippi. I don’t care if it was a hundred and twenty years ago, these things still last and that is really no time at all, not for a real war like that one, with screaming and pain. The trees absorb the echoes of the screams and cries
and humiliations. Their bark is only an inch thick between the time then and now: the distance between your thumb and forefinger. The sun beating down on us now saw the flames and troops’ campfires then, and in fact the warmth from those flames is still not entirely through traveling to the sun. The fear of the women: you can still feel it, in places where it was strong.
I give it at least another hundred to wash out entirely. You can get on a raft on the Big Black River and float down the chocolate milk color of it in the middle of summer with the cicadas’ mad screaming, and there is no difference between then and now. Not yet. We were men, humans, countrymen, fighting among our own unlike selves. I can feel a crease in my head, down the center, like the mail slot in a door. Sometimes I will hear a sizzling sound, like a power line, or live wire: it comes from inside my head. I can hear it (sometimes) when all else is silent. Some foods have no taste. Others taste like rotting, garlicky flesh: and yet I steal looks around, and everyone else is eating normally. I do need to stay alive to see the twins make it through all right.
I move fairly carefully, and do not jump from wagons, or from the back of the truck. This is the state that invented hacking somebody up and putting them in little bags in the freezer: this sort of mess is always going on down around Columbia and the coast, in the weekend papers. They pure and simply hate everything down here. Not any great remorse or shame at having been wrong, but the plain ugly embarrassment of having been beaten at something. A biological reaction. The knowledge is in our genes.
There are bears in our woods, down around the blue ridges and forests of Laurel, not Faulkner’s bears, but postdepression government bears, little thirty- and forty-pound dwarf things the government put in there, genetically trapped in their sorrowful size forever, to deal with the pigs. Because there is a lot of government pulpwood and timber down there and the scores of wild pigs were running through the woods tusking and ripping basically at everything in sight, cutting trails through the woods in their natural and musky continuous anger. These little government bears were going to do the trick. They were bred to not get large enough to attack the pigs, most of which were three or four times their size. The bears’ strong point, said the government, was their quickness, and that they would follow the mother pigs forever and then eat all the little young pigs out of the nest.