“Who’s this?” asked the Boss, squinting up. “Why, Leroy. How many fines Leroy got last month?”
“Only three, Boss.”
“Only three! Why, that’s like a miracle. Not going to church Sunday before last on there? I know he didn’t go; I asked.”
“It’s down here, Boss,” said JimBob.
“I’ll be damned. Give him his pay minus the dollar-fifty then, JimBob. When’s the last time he collected his full earnings?”
“April, 1925, Boss.”
“Keep getting better, Leroy, and you’re gonna break me at full pay. Hee-hee-hee.”
I was next.
“I suppose just because your mother worked for me for twenty-seven years you’ll be wanting another dollar-fifty this month to spend on ice cream, huh, Invictus Ovidius?”
“Yes, sir, Boss Eustis,” I said.
“Any fines on this one?”
“Romulus says he slammed the screen door twice last month.”
“Oh, Mr. Eustis. I been telling Romulus that door needs fixin’ for the longest time.”
“Well, why didn’t you fix it, then?”
“Nobody told me to, Mr. Eustis.”
“That’s the kinda help I got here. Let’s say the door slammed itself once, and you did the other. Give him his money minus a dime. And fix that damn screen door.”
“Yes, Mr. Boss Eustis.”
Houlka was behind me. He just stood there. Boss Eustis looked at him.
“Give the man his two dollars,” he said.
“Sure thing, Boss,” said JimBob.
* * *
That same afternoon the Boss sent us off up northwest in the hills. He wanted us to find out where that Horned Doe was. People had been seeing her for four years now. She had only one set of antlers—on the left side. Must have been damned uncomfortable, her head to one side all the time.
The Boss had said, “I want to know exactly where she is. Time somebody shot it. People must have expended more ammunition than was used in the Great War on that thing last year and nobody even hit close. I’m thinking of taking a little hunting trip. You show me exactly where she is, hear?”
We was given a ride out to the edge of the flat Woods. We got off the truck and it turned around and left.
Houlka sniffed the wind. “It’s going to snow,” he said.
“What?” I looked at him like he’d grown a turkey beak. “This is the 1st of December. The earliest Spunt County’s ever had snow is December 26th. We never had a white Christmas, or a white anything before then.”
“I hope your coat and shoes is plenty warm,” said Houlka, “because it’s going to snow.”
“Hah. ’Scuse my laughing. Y’all may get snow up around Corinth and Mt. Oatie in July for all I know, but we don’t here. Besides, it’s at least sixty degrees out here. I’m takin’ off my jacket already. Gets any hotter I’ll take off my shoes, too.”
We walked deeper into the wood. I unbuttoned the top button on my shirt.
* * *
An hour later, after the wind shifted and the clouds rolled up, and it thundered, and the temperature dropped like an anvil, the snow started falling. It was covering the bushes and trees and some of it wasn’t melting off the leaves on the woods’ floor.
“Godawmighty I’m cold!” I yelled. I stooped down and filled up my jacket with handfuls of leaves from way down under the snow. “Geez!”
Houlka was looking at some pine needles.
It started snowing so hard I had to take my glasses off. That meant I couldn’t see anything more than twenty feet away, if there’d been anything but snow twenty feet away.
Houlka was gone. “Hey! Mr. Lee? Where are you? Where are you?”
I started wandering around crashing into stuff. Finally I gave up and just sat down under a tree and watched the snow pile up two inches deep on the leaves, and the wind picked up more and the snow was like a big white flag in front of my face.
Through the wind, I heard a sound to the left.
“Mr. Houlka, is that you?”
* * *
We stood beside the truck that had given us a ride back into town. The driver was gunning the motor. We’d slipped and slided all the way back from the Flat Woods.
I’d seen Uncle Romulus at the window when we’d pulled up. As we’d gotten out, Mr. Eustis and his cronies filed out onto the snow-laden front porch.
“I figured you’d be back. You better know where that doe is, or was. I find out you two been drinkin’ coffee in a diner somewhere for six hours, I just don’t know what I’ll do.”
“I know exactly where she is,” said Houlka.
“Do you now?”
“I could take you there this very minute.”
“A man would have to go crazy and back to hunt in weather like this. I wouldn’t open the back window in the kitchen to shoot her if she was standing in the back yard eating Luvsey’s poinsiettas today.” All his friends laughed.
“You don’t want to hunt her today?”
“Hell, no,” said the Boss, lost for a second in a swirl of snow from the roof. “Damn! And you know you gonna have to go back and look again before I can hunt her, ’cause this damn freak weather’s gone make every deer in the county leave their usual lies. Just be ready to leave first thing in the morning. Write today off as experience.”
“Alright, Mr. Eustis. You don’t want to shoot her today, that’s fine with me.” Houlka went to the back of the truck with all the boxes and tarps there. He reached in, jerked off a rope from some canvas near the tailgate.
She stood up then, in the falling snow. She was a tawny gold color like old money and she had an antler with twelve points on the left side of her head. She was five feet high at the shoulder and built like a ten year old buck. I was close enough to her to see the reflection of the snow falling in her big brown eyes. Steamy breath came out of her nostrils. She looked directly at Boss Eustis for what seemed like a full twenty seconds. Then she was gone.
It must have looked like magic from the porch. One second she was standing stock still in the back of the truck, the next the spot was empty.
From my side of the truck I saw her clear the bed, take the distance between the truck and the nearest tree in three jumps, change direction, clear the fence and sail past the road, and turn into the woods.
Boss Eustis and his pals all stood there slack-jawed and with eyes wide as Miz Luvsey’s blue-willow china saucers.
“I’ll be goddamned,” said somebody.
* * *
For Christmas I got a Ralston-Purina checkerboard giveaway knife and a pair of socks and a shirt and a new pair of pants, some apples, tangerines, filberts and almonds. I thought I was king of the world.
There was a New Year’s shindig at the place. I was hoping 1927 would be a better year than 1926 had been. While the white folks was whooping it up in the big house, we was having a barn dance in the barn and shooting off skyrockets and Roman candles. I had been dancing with Emzee Dacy and she was dressed in her new Christmas stuff, and we were cutting a rug, if there’d of been a rug. Then her mother took her away early, and the fun sort of went out of everything for me.
I went back to my cabin while they were still dancing and blowing themselves up with fireworks. Up at the big house, I could see the thoroughbred horses of Mr. Ness’s bunch tied up at the front, but all the people were inside. There was lots of yelling and lights and whooping, and occasionally someone would come out of the house onto the drive to pee or shoot off a pistol or throw up; old Southern white customs. They scared the horses.
It must have been after about the fifteenth chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” from the big house that I heard footsteps and a knock on the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s Houlk
a.”
I opened the door.
“I just wanted to wish you a happy new year 1927,” he said.
“Thank you, Mr. Houlka. The same to you.”
He went on over to his place.
I went to bed feeling better about myself.
* * *
We spent most of January getting rid of the crows at Mr. Staempfel’s farms. Old people said they were as thick as passenger pigeons had been forty years ago. All that month you could hear limbs breaking like thunder when they roosted at night. What they were eating, or why they were just roosting on Staempfel’s land I don’t know.
But we finally got rid of them after a solid week of hard work, and they didn’t come back. Even the game warden and the county agent came out to see how Houlka did it.
We all wondered why Boss Eustis had taken such a special interest in Staempfel’s problems, until I heard Mr. JimBob and the others talking, and it came out that Mr. Eustis was buying an undivided Half-interest in the place for what was considered a very low sum in these parts.
Figures involving more than two dollars give me a headache, so I don’t worry about what white folks do with their money.
V
It was February and still cold. It had been the wettest winter in my fourteen years; not freezing stuff, just rainy and cold after that first snow back in December.
Boss Eustis had called for Houlka in the morning. Mr. Eustis was in a bad mood. He’d gotten a phone call from Senator Bilbo or somebody like that that had caused him not to be able to finish his breakfast. Him and the boys must have thought a long time on things these past weeks, because the Boss told Houlka to go over to Mr. Augie’s place and see about a little job he had for him.
It was about six miles and we didn’t get there till close to eleven in the morning. I was getting really hungry by then.
Mr. Augie lived in a falling-down old place that had once been a big plantation house like the Boss’s, only three of the rooms had caved in and half the roof on that side was leaning on the ground.
The closer to the house we got the more horses you could hear neighing and whinnying from the back of the place. It sounded like there was fixing to be a cavalry charge back there or something.
A bunch of no-neck kids played in their coats on a busted-down divan on the front porch. The house looked like it had once been painted purple.
A kid ran in the door hollering daddydaddy.
A one-eyed fat man came out, hands on his hips. He had on a gray workshirt, gray workpants and a gray hat he looked like he’d been born in.
“I’m Houlka Lee. Mr. Eustis sent me.”
“He tell you what it’s about?”
“No,” said Houlka.
“That one o’ Boss Eustis’s nigger boys or one o’ yourn?” asked one of the kids.
Without looking, Mr. Augie slapped him sideways.
“This is business talk; you shut up,” he said to the boy. Then to Houlka, “You might call it in the nature of a sporting proposition between me and Eldridge.” I had to keep telling myself that was Boss Eustis’s name. “See, he was bragging on how you could do any kind of work, real P.D.Q., so we got to debating that. I wagered as how I had a job you couldn’t do, and he philosophized as to how you could, and it got to be a matter of five hundred dollars.”
Houlka just leaned on his big club and listened.
Mr. Augie turned to his kids. “Y’all get back there and put them animals in the back pasture.”
“Aw, gee, dad,” said one. Mr. Augie turned and looked at him. As one, the kids all filed inside the house where they made a lot of thumping noises.
“You ain’t a gimp, are you?” asked Mr. Augie, nodding toward Houlka’s stick. “This job’ll kill a strong man—but it would be just like Eldridge to send a spung to try to do it.”
“No, I’m not,” said Houlka.
The kids came back out dressed like they were going for a long trip to the planet Mars—heavy coats, Boss Mule work gloves up to their elbows, rubber boots to their butts. Two carried ropes and one a whip.
They went around the fallen-down part of the house. Directly we heard yelling and yipping and screams, fenceposts getting torn up, whinnying and the wet sounds of hooves in mud.
“Sarey,” yelled Mr. Augie. “Bring out three cups of mocha joe.”
He went to the door. three steaming cups were handed out. He gave two to Houlka, who handed one to me.
“Thank you, sir,” I said. Mr. Augie didn’t say anything. We drank the bitter coffee. One by one the kids staggered back around the house. The sound of horses was further away now. Mr. Augie threw the grounds from his cup out into the yard.
Two of the larger boys carried a third between them. All the kids were covered with mud and horse manure.
“What happened to that ’un?” asked Mr. Augie.
“One of them stepped on him, Daddy.”
“Well, put him on the couch there and have your mama give him some coffee.” He turned to us. “Let’s go look this proposition over.”
We went out back of the house. What was left of the barn—no roof, two walls, some timbers where the other ones had been—stood like a wet gray owl with broken wings in the middle of what had been a feed lot 2 acres in size.
Everything, everywhere you looked was covered with horse shit three feet deep. It was piled in drifts like black snow, grey and green snow, against the fenceline and the barn. It was broken only by hoofprints, a metal water trough, the signs of recent struggle with the kids. The place stank to the heavens, and that was on a cold wet day in February. How they stood it in the summer I don’t know.
That there’s what were talking about,” said Mr. Augie. “See, I bet Eldridge you couldn’t move all that out past the fenceline in twenty-four hours. Being as how it’s already noon, I’ll give you a break and let you start seven a.m. tomorrow morning.”
* * *
“I’ll need to look around,” said Houlka.
Mr. Augie lost his demeanor. “You mean,” he said, looking at Houlka with his one good eye, “that you’re damnfool enough to try? Why, man, they’s been horses in there for nigh onto five years. We put ’em in one day, sorta forgot about them but to feed and water ’em. Whole generations been born and died in there. And you gonna try? I thought this was gonna be the easiest five hundred dollars I ever made.
“Shit,” he said then. “Look all you want. You can stare at it till seven in the morning for all I care. It ain’t gonna get any smaller.”
“I have to move it all past the fenceline?” asked Houlka.
“Every bit of it.”
“Well, I’ll look around then, and be back tomorrow morning at seven, if that’s when you want me to start.”
“Just you. One man. One job. The nigger boy can’t help, not that even that would give you a Chinaman’s chance.”
“Very good, Mr. Augie.”
* * *
“Mr. Houlka,” I said. “He’s right. You might’s well give up. I know you’re big and strong, but you couldn’t get the top six inches off that stuff in a solid week. They ain’t no use you killing yourself for the Boss’s five hundred dollars. It’s as good as Mr. Augie’s right now.
Houlka was studying the farm, if you could call it that. We couldn’t see a single horse, though it sounded like there was a thousand just beyond the trees. We walked by the back side of the lot. We passed a pond like one of Mr. Hyder’s we’d cleaned of snakes back in October.
We stepped through a gully, still trying to get a look at the horses, and came out on a little rise. It sounded like horses were going crazy, or playing football or something off to both sides of the farm. Hooves were thundering just like Zane Grey says.
“How much taller are you than me?” asked Houlka.
“Half a head, Mr. Houlka. What the hell kind of question is that?”
He took the old rolled up Lion Feed cap out of his pocket and put it on my head. “Okay, I.O., we’re going to play a little game.” He looked back to where Augie’s kids were watching us; they’d followed us since we left the front yard. “I want you to walk all over this place where I tell you to. Every time I tell you to stop, I want you to jump in the air, turn around three times clockwise and put your hand on top of the cap with your little finger straight up in the air.”
I looked at him like he had lizards up his nose.
“Just do it,” he said.
We walked all over that place, and Mr. Houlka would send me off and yell and I’d jump up and turn and put my hand up, and then he’d send me somewhere else, and I’d do it again. Well you could imagine what all those kids were thinking, and one of them ran off and got the gray woman, and she left and came back with Mr. Augie, and he watched us till he got tired, and he left, then the woman left, and two or three of the kids drifted away, and the rest just sat down in what little grass there was at the back of the house, and would only look at us occasionally.
Because we was still doing exactly the same damn thing. We went up through the woods and by the ponds and through the woods and under the outer fence and over the rise and across the gully and across the rise and beside the house and over to the other side and across the road and in the pasture and back to the horse lot and back to the ponds where we started. Every damn time Houlka would send me off and holler and I’d stop and jump and turn and hold up my hand.
Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003 Page 4