by Laird Hunt
Still, you step on. You’re young. You were young once. You are far from your friends. You do. I got up slow, spit hard, ran my hands over my hair, walked fast down the winding lane, and came out into the Hales’ yard. Land grant and in their family for eighty-five years. Looking fine for it. The black-eyed Susans were wilty and the red and yellow rosebushes and about all the rest gave the impression they could have used a good long drink, but the grass was mowed neat and the hedges trimmed and the walkways swept clean.
Leander’s father had been a farmer of parts, at least for a while, and they had a big white house and a big white barn and other white things built up and fresh-painted all around. The father had had the reins on it right up until he had punched his own exit ticket by swallowing a cupful of carbolic acid, but you could see clear Leander and his mother weren’t doing too poorly in keeping it up. I walked fast around the edge of the yard, behind the grape arbor, under a well-loaded crab-apple tree Leander had climbed once and none too well to show off to me, and into the barn, amongst whose musty hays we had often strayed. Calliostro, Leander’s mule and a sweet old boy, gave out a snort when he saw me.
“You want to go on a walk?” I said to him. He snorted again, happy as a lark on its every day off, as I got him out of his stall and gave him a rub with the brush he liked so well then put his harness on. There was a bucket of carrots from the garden picked probably that morning and I gave him one, then another. It’s nice to watch a mule at his snack. There’s a balm to it. You watch a gentle mule eat what you’ve handed it and it’s like you’ve let your eyes shut down, like you’ve stayed awake but sneaked in a nap. Calliostro and I were friends. Leander had liked to “see the world a little” when we had our get-togethers, and we almost never took the Dictator, just Calliostro and the wagon Leander’s father had used around the farm and to take vegetables to sell in town. Leander had had Calliostro since he was young and there wasn’t much on that property he favored more. Many was the time I had hitched him up while Leander waited in the moonlit wagon, reins already in his hands.
I would have been out and away that evening in not much more than ten minutes, except that when I had gotten Calliostro about halfway hitched, Leander’s mother came tapping her cane around the corner of the barn. I had good strong teeth in those days but I’d been so sure she was somewhere down around the church that when she appeared, they just about all of them fell out of my mouth and onto the dusty barn floor. She didn’t seem a bit surprised to see me, though, standing there handling her son’s mule and her dead husband’s wagon. She gave me a smile, asked me if I was thirsty, and lifted up a glass of something looked nice and cold.
“Ma’am?” I said.
“I got iced blackberry tea here. Would you care for some? Wet your whistle? You look like you could use some refreshment. I just made it fresh. Even in some good shade, it’s hot out as burned chili beef today.”
I didn’t know what to say to any of it and waited for whatever trick it was she had in mind to expose itself. She wasn’t tall, but she was about as hard-looking as Leander was soft. She had great big blue eyes lurking like holds full of treasure in a wrinkle ship. Her apron sat as crooked as Leander’s hairpiece. I didn’t like the look of the wiry muscles in her forearms but she was almost as old to look at as that Erastus Fellows’s mother and cane-bound on top of it.
“I can just set it down if you don’t want it now,” she said. “Drink it up when you get Calliostro ready to roll. He’s a good boy, ain’t he? He can pull all day. As big a load as you like. My old husband got him for my Homer when he wasn’t much more than ten years old.”
“Are you Mrs. Hale, Mr. Hale’s mother?” I said. I said it like it was a question but of course it wasn’t one, even if I had never seen her up close outside of a picture Leander had shown me a few times. The picture was in a locket he kept on him. Even when we were in the hay. I bet he had had it in the ditch. It was an old picture, and she had been wearing her Sunday clothes and a little hat about covered up in grapes, but setting the wrinkles aside, she hadn’t changed much.
“Yes, he is my foolish and lazy son, the only one I got. He sent you over here, didn’t he? Lazy like a lord as he is.”
“Ma’am?” I said.
“He sends all kinds over to bring back his conveyance. What did he give you, a nickel?” She got a kind of squinty look in her eye when she said this. Like she was counting the change in his and her pockets both.
“He gave me a quarter,” I said.
“He never did! A whole quarter!” she said.
“Well, anyway, he said he would give me a quarter when I came back with his mule and cart.”
She smiled and nodded. This arrangement seemed to suit her better.
“Do you want this drink or don’t you? I expect he had you cut through the fields to get here. I saw you come up from the pond. He likes that pond and knows all the shortcuts, that boy. He wants to rise up on out of here, but he’ll never forget this place, that’s sure. Place like this glues itself to your bones; you don’t scrape it off. He is sharp as a tack but too lazy by a long mile. He needs to work on that. Don’t you think he’s lazy?”
“He had a hundred people listen to his speech.”
“Did you listen to his speech?”
“Not much. Some.”
“I hear he gives a good speech. I don’t listen to any of them, though. I make him practice out here in the barn. This mule has heard it all. My heart don’t tick right and I can’t afford to get riled up. He riles them up, don’t he?”
“They were all cheering.”
She nodded. “You’ve got a scratch on your forehead. You want something for that?”
I shook my head. She made a remark about the paint smears and splatter I had on me, said she expected they had come from the festivities, and I went over to her and took the glass. It was sweating in the heat but as cool inside as the bottom of the pond. I drank down what was in there in one good, long gulp. When I was done I went to set the glass down beside the door, but she gave me a glare and said to hand it back to her. It wasn’t every cornsilk woman in the world would take a glass a cornflower or any other had sipped from and I looked at her a little carefully before I put it in her hand.
“You think it strange, do you?” she said.
“A little.”
“I don’t blame you. Who wouldn’t?”
I nodded. We stood there looking at the glass in her hands. It looked like a piece of a life you could live in. Place cool and small and sweet-smelling that had opened itself up.
“You better get on,” she said.
“All right.”
“There’s a pump you can clean yourself up at.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Anyways, take that water jug with you, it’s hot out.” She pointed at a jug sitting next to a rusted hoe and a feed cart. “I got Homer to fill that up this morning. Might even still be cool. He didn’t want to take the wagon into town so he left it sit here. Didn’t think anyone ought to see he didn’t have anything but a wagon to ride in.”
She chuckled. “Guess he has changed his mind. You bring it with you, now.”
“He’s taking folks to Marvel, Mr. Hale is,” I said as I hefted up the jug and set it in the back of the wagon.
“I know it,” she said. “I know about the buses too. Since I paid for them out of money we don’t have. I would go if I could. Don’t make any mistake about that. Don’t mean I don’t offer blackberry tea to strangers doing paid favors for my only son.”
We both looked at each other. She pursed her lips. “Especially if they aren’t strangers. Especially if I’ve seen them before.”
“All right,” I said. I said it slowly, trying to puzzle from the look on her face whether this was the trap after all and it had just been slow in closing its jaws.
But she just said “All right” too, then said that at least her big lazy boy had good taste in the look of his ladies even if they were too young and good taste was about
all he had.
“You tell him to knock on my door when he gets home, doesn’t matter how late it is. I won’t be asleep,” she said.
“He doesn’t know I’m taking his wagon,” I said.
“It’s his mule but it’s not his wagon and never you mind. These things work themselves out. All of it works itself out. I’ve been around the field a few times. My man’s sleeping in his bone suit and I haven’t been young in many a long year but I remember. There’s nights plenty I lay myself down and my heart starts to hammering like I was a girl again. Like he wasn’t gone. Like we still had the whole row to hoe.”
She had let her eyes go drifty when she said this but they didn’t stay drifty for long.
“That goddamned row,” she said. “Wear gloves if you’ve got them. Working it’ll blister you up.”
She laughed and I laughed some with her.
Then I stopped laughing and said, “I had a thing I wanted to tell him.”
“And did you?”
“I think so.”
“Well, then, that’s a start.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You don’t need to ma’am me. My name is Leona.”
“Mrs. Hale.”
“That works just fine too.”
“My name is Calla. Calla Destry.”
“I’ve been pleased to meet you, Miss Destry.”
“Do you want to keep the water jug here, Mrs. Hale?”
“No, I do not. There is nothing special about it and I reckon you’ll be just as thirsty wherever it is you’re going as he will.”
I cried some more then. I didn’t like to do it there in front of her, but she didn’t seem to mind and just nodded and looked me in the eye when I said I didn’t know what it was I was crying about.
“I don’t cry,” I said when I had myself back under control.
“I expect that’s true,” she said.
“It must be the heat.”
“You think it’s the heat?”
“No. Not the heat.”
I might of kept talking and who knows what I would have come up with—mop doll, wrecked buses, the gun in my basket—but she held up her hand to stop me, and I expect we were both grateful that I did.
“You be nice to that mule,” she said. “He’s a sweet old thing.”
“I know it,” I said.
“If you don’t want to ride out through town, you better take the back lane. But you probably already had that figured.”
I nodded. With her cane hooked over her wiry forearm, she helped me finish getting Calliostro hitched, pulled the barn doors wide, then stood watching as I climbed up and took the reins in hand.
I had to jump down off the wagon twice to open and close gates as I left the Hale property. Some ache had set in and each time I climbed back up my wrist hollered and my head called out for help. The lane along the back of their land was grassy and smooth, but the road it gave out onto wasn’t, and the sun, low as it was getting, was still beating hard and heavy. I kept a good watch on the surrounds but didn’t see a soul the whole time I rode. There were turkey vultures wheeling on whatever sick gusts and breezes might be haunting the heights, and I saw some deer standing still in an empty cow pasture. Pigs there were aplenty, all of them on their sides in the mud like they had been knocked down and hadn’t yet been given leave to get back up.
A cloud of gnats came along for some of the ride. They gave out their screams and tried their luck at worrying at my scrapes. I had a thick streak of green paint up near my elbow and one of them landed in its middle and got stuck. Calliostro had some flies and gnats of his own at his ears but he seemed happier than ever to be out in the air and cruising the countryside. Floating brisk across the quiet fields. The wagon was big but built light, and its wheels rolled smooth and true. I tried to work out if I was happy or mad or something else in between that my try at stealing from Leander had ended up the way it had. And how had it even ended up? There I rode out of Ryansville with the leave of the property’s mistress; that’s about all that was clear. The jug of water sloshed heavy behind me. Made me wonder after a floaty while whether they got enough to drink in the big beyond.
Christ the carpenter had been thirsty and they had given him vinegar to drink. Held it up to his mouth with a long stick. What was it about cornsilks gave them the idea they needed to lift people up into the air to kill them? Their saints and their sinners both. Cornflowers did their killing on the ground. The killings I had heard about, anyway. What would those boys feel later when they went to their ends? Probably just fear. Fear and evil all around and up with them into the air. Would they still be awake? Or would they rise unconscious? Scared into their long dreaming. I hadn’t read the paper yet, hadn’t heard any accounts to turn the sky of my memories black and send me drifting forward through the dark. That would be during the days to come. I had ascension and my own troubles and not much more on my mind when I rolled into the evening and down the shabby lane that would lead to Big Bob’s fishing spot.
I saw it first, small fires scattered through a wide stand of trees, almost a woods, and then heard it, through crickets and katydids, a murmuring and a crackling and the little sounds of people shifting on stumps and branches and seats of grass and earth. I counted more than a dozen neat fires as Calliostro took me down the smooth tracks, though some of them may have been doubled up by the surface of the wide, reedy pond. Out of which many a line had pulled fish if the smell everywhere now of sweet, wet roasting was any indication. They had sticks over their fires and whole fish or heavy chunks of fish meat set to scorch, the cornflowers that had gathered under those trees, and there was smoke in the air, smoke and fish steam both.
The lane doubled back on itself and went over a little stone bridge, then widened out and I saw a meadow where I could leave Calliostro. He snorted and flicked his ears when I told him I would be back soon. I took my basket, gave him some carrot to chew, then left him to rest in shadow and stepped into the cool of the woods, dusk come early inside them. I passed small fires as I went, and at each fire tired faces, slick with sweat but breathing slow, food in hand and the storm at least for the minute a way off behind them.
It was Bob’s bright little snaggletoothed dog that let me know after I had wandered awhile that Bob was there. She gave out some loud barks and came running over and spun around and jumped up against my leg and wagged her tail like we were old friends. I followed her and found Big Bob grilling chunks of fish on a stick he was holding out over his own neat fire. It was a pretty picture. I can call it up clear, right here, right now, and only its own dark, natural dark, good clean dark of settling dusk. Man with food to eat and a fire to cook it over. Close to the others but not too close. Each at their own flame. Prettier all of it by far than Christ and his cross and scared-to-death boys and all that vinegar.
“Ho there, Calla Destry,” Bob said. Said it quiet. Like the only right way you could talk in these woods by this water was to whisper.
“Ho there, Big Bob,” I said nice and quiet back.
Bob patted his leg and Myrtle jumped up and curled into his lap.
“How’s your finger?” I asked.
“Not much better.”
“You sitting over here at your fire thinking about your oranges?”
“Care for another taste?” He held out the hand wasn’t holding a stick, held it out empty, and there by some magic of the evening a sliced orange sat.
“You could eat on those all day,” I said, putting down my basket and pretending to take a piece and chew.
“I’m telling you,” he said.
We sat awhile. I asked him how he had made out with the boys had come looking for me and Bob spit and asked me the same thing back. “All right,” I said. He asked me if I had lost them. Or used my fists on them. “Neither one,” I said. He said it looked like I’d got in a fight with some paint cans. I told him I had tried to wipe some of it off. He asked if it was really, truly me had rigged that mop to look like a girl. Hung it from the
courthouse. Indiana sweetheart. He smiled some when he said that last and there was a little cracked tooth gleaming at the corner of his smile and in that little cracked tooth I reckoned I could read just about all the whole story of both our days. I asked him what he had done to get himself locked up for sixteen hours in a tin shed in Georgia and he said that like me he had stood up when he was supposed to stay sat down. “That’s why I like you,” he said. I gave him some more of my answers. And funny thing, they all seemed for a while to go swooping in and around Ben Able and Robert True riding along on my running boards. Bob said speaking of which he saw I wasn’t riding in the Dictator. I said that that was right, I wasn’t, I didn’t have it anymore.
I think we were both too tired to talk but we talked and at the same time sat somehow quiet and Bob said it wasn’t just imaginary oranges he had to offer and handed me over his stick stuck heavy with fish. I pulled off a hot, slippery piece. I was worried in the low light he might be handing me catfish and I’d have to chew and think the whole time about Leander and the church folk and my plate tossed into the rose of Shar-on, but it was bass or some fat bluegill and goddamn if it didn’t taste almost too good. We ate, Bob setting down the stick and slipping half his share to Myrtle, who whined and fussed while she chewed. When we were finished and had sat still awhile and gathered some more dusk and quiet up around us, Bob squinted his eyes and said, “I wasn’t thinking about oranges till you came over here.”
“I didn’t think you were. I hope I didn’t break your train of thought.”
“Leastways not beyond repair.”
“Nothing like a broken thought.”
“When you don’t have the right tools.”
“Don’t you wish sometimes all it took was a wrench?”
“I like that notion.”