Wigford Rememberies

by Kyp Harness

  Harley slams down in his chair and looks about with glazed uncomprehending eyes.

  “You want some porridge?” Momma Simpson asks.

  “No goddamn time!” Daddy Jack snaps. “We gotta get those chores done!”

  Bud and Daddy Jack pull themselves up from the table. “C’mon Harley!”

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Harley groans, his face buried in his hands.

  “You come out now!” Daddy Jack shouts.

  Bud adds, “You got outta doin’ chores yesterday!”

  “Fuck,” moans Harley.

  “Jack he just got UP!” Momma Simpson implores.

  “Shit!” exclaims Daddy Jack, but he and Bud bend and pull their big black barn boots on by the door, caked with clumps of mud and shit. My brother and I follow them down the steps and out the back door.

  “I’ll give that kid a tin ear one a’ these days,” mutters Daddy Jack as he hits the screen door open and it goes vibrating, jangling, springing back and forth on its hinges slamming against the wall and away and we step out to the cold sun rising over the cornfields in the grey, misty sky, the cold dew shining, the cold world sleeping, the cold warmth creeping over every breathing leaf. We walk through the tall grass of the yard past discarded automobile parts, farm equipment, a long unused plough, a big charred oil barrel they use to burn their garbage in. The grass is rustling and twinkling with the dew, the sun shining into the curls and corners of Daddy Jack’s leathery face.

  “Best goddamned time a’ the day,” he says, squinting. He throws back his head and horks a big green blob that splatters onto an old, rusty hubcap on the ground, dribbling down and shining in the sun. The earth is frozen and smeared with snot, everything is speckled with dew. Even dreary pieces of lumber and cardboard garbage shine, and the swift breeze bites us all the more for the wiry warmth of the sun behind us. Make no mistake about it, the harsh elements sting the things of this world into awakening.

  The clouds tremble in the sky above and we look over to the side and see Lady the Dog hopping her way through the wet grass. My brother and I, we run to greet her—and with a quick move she recoils from our touch and pads disinterestedly away.

  “Hey! Don’t bother Lady,” Daddy Jack shouts. “Lady don’t wanna play no more.”

  “What? How come?” we ask.

  “Lady gettin’ old. She’s an old dog.” Lady walks away. Her eyes flash back, blinking, irritated—her grizzled black dog lips in a frazzled frown.

  “So?” we ask.

  “So! Old dogs don’t like to play. Try and she’s likely to bite ya. Old dogs just like to be off by themselves. They don’t like to piss around.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause they wanna be alone; they’re tired and sick, they’re sick of it all.” As if hearing us, Lady hobbles over and creeps underneath a truck in the green dewy grass—puts her head down on her paws, her eyebrows twitching. “Yup—ol’ dogs, they just like to be off by themself—they get mean, cranky. Ya leave ’em alone—they don’t like to chase rabbits and they don’t like kids. They just wanna go off, off by themself, then one day… they go off and they don’t come back no more and that’s it.”

  “Where do they go?” we ask.

  “They go off and die is where they go. They know they’re gonna die, so they go off so they can die all alone.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause that’s just the way they wanna do it; they go off because they wanna die all by themself.”

  “Why?”

  “Jesus Christ, how ’n hell do I know? That’s just the way they do it!”

  “But Lady useta like to play with us,” we say.

  “That was before when she was young and nice—now she’s more ’n likely to bite ya. Don’t ask me why, that’s just the way it is—old dogs get mean,” says Daddy Jack.

  We look back at Lady sitting finicky like an old woman, holding her spindly bones together, not understanding how she has been transformed, remembering the old Lady, quick to run and eager to please—lost, but where?

  We advance to the barn, Daddy Jack unbolts the door and switches on the lights. There in the dust and the sweet smells of grain and straw and the heavy brown odour of shit so strong it makes you sneeze, wedged into their pens row upon row in the suddenly illuminated precincts the round-backed, swelling bellied, pink, hairy hogs nuzzle and complain.

  A cacophony of squeals and wails erupt and arise from the multitude of pigdom, long drawn-out issuances of irritation do they oink and blare, heads down low and scruffling the ground, phalanxes of big fat rumps almost like human asses wobbling from side to side as they stomp their hooves, their curly, whirly, squiggle-tails bobbing, their beady eyes blinking with forbearance, their slobbering and dripping, drooling mouths with little surprising shoots of sharp whiskers here and there about their snouts; they squeak and squeal at the sudden light.

  “C’mon Bud!” Daddy Jack barks. “Git the shovels!”

  With haste the father and son wearily hoist the shovels from off the pegs on the wall and with resigned resolution they set upon their task, marching down the rows of stalls and scraping from the concrete the moist brown puddings of shit from beneath each squeaking pig’s ass. Their faces are set into expressions of grim practicality, their mouths downturned, their noses quivering, their eyes squinting as they look down at the poop they’re scraping up. It’s a hard smell to get used to—every so often Bud goes Phew! and shakes his head with distaste.

  My brother and I follow them with wheelbarrows into which every so often the big, slimy cakes of shit are shoved into, sliding off the shovels. At the end of each row we run the wheelbarrows outside and empty them onto the great big mountain of shit behind the barn, then go running back to follow behind Daddy Jack and Bud as they start the next row. Sometimes the pigs get in the way of the shovelling and Daddy Jack has to whack them on the ass with his shovel, crying, “Git on, ye!” and the pig trembling on his little, stubby legs shifts sideways squealing. And sometimes Daddy Jack whacks them for no reason.

  “I’d like to know where that lazy sonofabitch Harley is!” Bud shouts out above the thundering grunts and whines and screams and yelps of the hogs as he lifts a particularly heavy brown deposit on the end of his shovel.

  “Ah, it’s that mother a yers!” gripes Daddy Jack scraping, sweat streaming from beneath his John Deere tractor hat. “She gonna coddle and baby the little cocksucker till he’s an old man.”

  Scrape, scrape, scrape, plopping thick and stickily with a smacking quirlppkkk sound off the end of the shovels, wheeled around and loaded off into the big mountain of shit, the ultimate destination of everything, drying and hardening and blackening into an ossified crustiness, a moat of puddles and rivers of liquified shit surrounding it, breeding place of maggots, humming and vibrating with every conceivable type of fly, buzzing black speckles jiggling in the sky, flies in your eyes, on your face, in your food, big fat flies that bite and when you kill them leave red blotches on your arms. Flies swarming the eyes of the pigs, squirrelling into their nostrils, into the flaps of their ears, flies buzzing impatiently around the buttocks of the pigs, flies, flies, flies.

  And after many trips to the mountain of shit the last cakey, squishing dollop is consigned with the last plopping smack plastered into the overwhelming tingling stench. We go back and Daddy Jack and Bud sift the grain into the pigs’ feeders, the greedy, slopping big mouths of the hogs nuzzling and swilling it down their gorges, their squeals relenting and giving way to low, satisfied grunts and groans as they cram their heads into the steel feeders in pure orgiastic frenzy, gulp, gulp, gulp.

  Daddy Jack removes his cap and wipes his wet forehead, watching them expressionlessly. Afterwards, it’s breeding time for a choice boar and sow. Father and son lead the hogs out of their stalls and into an aisle between the rows. “Come on, c’mon, there, git on, ye!” shouts Daddy Jack,
slapping their rumps. The sow seems eager enough, but the boar hangs back, sniffing the ground, disinterested. “Bring ’im around here!” Daddy Jack orders Bud.

  Bud grabs the pig by the head with both hands and tries to get him into position, shoving his snout into the crotch of the sow. The swine shakes his head away and looks dumbly off in the other direction. “I’m tryin’, dad!” Bud exclaims. “He jes’ ain’t interested!”

  “Goddamn!” Daddy Jack yells, runs over and grabs the pig’s head and shoves it right up to the rump of the other pig. “Now, now, you check, Bud!” Daddy Jack gasps, his face red and sweating with the effort of holding the squirming pig’s face in the crotch of the sow.

  “Check what ’is cock’s doin’. HURRY UP now, goddamnit!”

  Bud bends down, squints his eyes, shakes his head. “Nothin’, Dad!”

  “Well God-DAMN!” cries Daddy Jack, shoving the hog away. “Whatta we got—the bastard’s a goddamn faggot or somethin!” He shakes his head and spits angrily. “Well, only one thing we can do,” he mutters and begins to remove his gloves.

  But just then we hear the barn door slam and turn to see Harley trudging sulkily up the aisle between the rows. Daddy Jack looks over at Bud and grins. “Hey! Harley! Git yer ass over here!” he shouts as Bud laughs. “We gotta JOB fer ya!”

  Harley looks up in surprise for a moment, then scowls. “Ah, fuck, how come I always get stuck with that shit?” he snorts, pouting, kicking his boot against the wall.

  “Git yer ass over here!” Daddy Jack shouts and chortles triumphantly with Bud as Harley strides over, angrily pulling off his gloves.

  Momma Simpson at the kitchen table stares blinking over her empty bowl with her tongue inside her mouth vacantly swishing milky remnants of porridge. Her large white forearms rest upon the table right at the point where her dimpled elbows swell up into the meaty, milky vastness of her upper arms, the fat seemingly powerful to have once caused my brother to remark admiringly upon her “big muscles.” These very arms are speckled with black-red scabs caused by her inability to refrain from scratching her mosquito bites until they bleed.

  Now Momma Simpson’s eyes narrow into squints as she stares in the quiet kitchen, the only sound being the white clock radio on top of the fridge humming country western music. She is cooking up a crisis—her particular philosophy being that since stumbling blocks are due to always come anyway, why the trick then is not to avoid them but to welcome them, in fact to perhaps create and foster them wherever possible, the idea being that once one has inured and reconciled oneself to the worst then there are really no problems in life (this not thought through in a conscious way in her mind but instinctively sought for at a lower subconscious level in her mechanism).

  Thus every molehill mutates inflating into a troublesome mountain beneath her gaze and touch, and she like a bee gathering pollen flits from deathbed to deathbed and ministers to the weary sickly organisms, collecting and distilling their feverish misery, the wicked, white blow of death deep within her gullet—all the better to steel herself for the unspeakable tragedy which is always on its way, inevitable.

  Likewise does she, with immaculate solicitude, shower care and compassion upon the mentally defective, the ones born simple, slow, their eyes set wide apart, innocent and uncomprehending, destined all alike to perish young and no further enlightened as to why this should be so—the utter explosive unfairness of this, it is, he is, you are, that’s all—all founded and predicated upon a reality which is unacceptable to mere mortal minds.

  To Momma Simpson this is the Ultimate Backdrop of Reality before which we play our foolish Punch and Judy show of life: disease and misery are not aberrations but rather well-being and happiness are, mere brief intervals in the ongoing rush of death and decay—and as such, are to be savoured and prized, transient though they may be.

  Never does she perceive a rose but that its oncoming blight and withering are immediately perceptible to her—and never even on the brightest day does the sun shine bright enough to erase the hungry black mist encroaching around its circumference—and never does the human form present itself but that she sees the oncoming ashiness of face, the grizzled limbs, the palsied hands, the hard bone of skeleton impatiently awaiting release.

  It is for this reason her bleeding mosquito bites and scabs, her jabbering mouth never ceasing to detail the latest catastrophe, crisis, hectoring on into the deep night when the mood takes her, causing poor old Daddy Jack to clasp his head with trembling hands (he is a great sufferer of migraines) and with an almost-weeping expression on his wincing face cry, “Grace. Please, just STOP it. JESUS!”

  For stumbling blocks must and will come with admirable efficiency and haste, while miracles are oft lost in the mail. It’s always something and if it isn’t it soon will be, and so it is in the grim comfort of imminent and utter devastation that Momma Simpson unreservedly and trustfully places the whole of her faith.

  Now Momma Simpson rises from the table with her empty bowl, turns and rinses it out in the sink. She stands before the sink and looks out the little window above it, sees the misty cornfields and the Jacksons’ barn a half-mile away, sees the desolate highway and the little black sparrows on the drooping hydro lines.

  Jack surely does ride that boy’s ass, she thinks in her mind—never gives him a moment’s peace at all, always on at him about something that means nothing from morning till night. Pickin’ on him and pickin’ at him, trying to break him down. Well, soon the tale will be told because it was the very same way for Bud when he reached Harley’s age, ’round the time of comin’ into high school.

  For a year there he would not let the boy alone, always gripin’ and bitchin’ at him about something until finally, suddenly one night he was drunk as a skunk and came on at Bud about his missing hammer, yes the missing hammer, always something stupid like that. Jack came at him drunk and red-faced and screaming, spit comin’ out of his mouth, and he pushed Bud back on the couch and Bud’s feet came up at Jack and he kicked at him. “Did you see that? Did you see that little cocksucker take a kick at me?” Jack shouted.

  “Leave the boy alone!” Momma Simpson said but Jack reached down to grab him by the collar and Bud rose up and hit Jack in the face and Jack staggered back and fell crashing so that the floor and walls of the house all shook and clattered and his head hit the wall and the dishes rattled in the china cabinet. Jack just lay there on the floor for the rest of the night, stinking of the booze. Momma Simpson could tell Bud had not wanted to do it and felt bad, but Jack never did bother him again that way from that time on.

  And now Harley’s comin’ up to that age and Bud and Jack both gang up on him, but it won’t be long now. Harley’s fillin’ out, those arms of his are gettin’ bigger, likely he’ll grow half a foot in the next year, and if he won’t be able to beat Jack sober then he’ll surely be able to beat Jack drunk. Momma Simpson lays down the dishrag and clears up the table—feeling a certain pity for her husband, a certain apprehension for the beating he’ll take, but knowing there’s nothing she can do about it. Might as well try and stop the sun coming up. Oh well, just more proof that this life is a struggle and a heavy yoke to be borne and endured.

  There is a stumbling and a clambering at the back door as Daddy Jack, Bud, Harley, my brother and I come in from the barn stamping our big black barn boots at the door, all caked with mud and shit. Daddy Jack’s gravelly voice rumbles on about the axle on the grain wagon: “Gotta go to town to get the axle on the grain wagon fixed since Bud didn’t git it done yesserday.”

  “Ah shit, I said I’d take it in tomorrow!” grumbles Bud but Daddy Jack says he wants to git ’er done today, and he’ll need Harley and Bud to hoist it in and out of the pickup—the Ole Clunker they call it, an ol’ truck from 1957.

  “There goes my fuckin’ day,” moans Harley.

  “Stop yer bitchin’,” Daddy Jack snaps and grunts as he strains upon a chair cha
nging from his barn boots into his town boots.

  “Oh,” Momma Simpson says, “I gotta go into town to take a casserole to the Henderson’s funeral.”

  “Well hurry the hell up!” mutters Daddy Jack as he changes his hat. My brother and I are excited because we’re all going into TOWN and Momma Simpson pulls the pan from the fridge and Harley and Bud go out to get the axle and we all stamp out to the Ole Clunker.

  Daddy Jack leaps in the front and fires up a smoke, Bud and Harley come struggling across the yard with the axle (“Slow the fuck down!” shouts Harley, “Keep yer fuckin’ end up!” yells Bud) and Daddy Jack guns the engine which comes clanking, quivering, revving, shaking, grinding, turning over with a chugging sound and then with a blast like the world splitting in half, the Ole Clunker starts pounding and vibrating, voluminous clouds of exhaust in the back.

  Daddy Jack reaches under the seat and pulls out a bottle with a mouthful of warm beer left in the bottom which he sucks back with a smacking sound then pitches it out the window. Momma Simpson jogs out with her casserole covered over in cellophane, her whole body flapping and flopping, going on about something about the Henderson’s funeral, but Daddy Jack just yells out with a sharp shake of his head, “Git in the truck, woman. Jesus ye give a dog’s ass a heartburn!” and guns the truck again as Bud and Harley hoist the axle into the back and then jump in after it.

  Momma Simpson crawls in the front with us, and all is a big thrill and a calamity and a commotion because we’re all going into town, and though nobody even smiles there is a special thing about going into town but only if you have a reason to do so, and as we do in this particular case then everything is all set, this is a special day, and with a roar the Ole Clunker backs across the grass and vrooms down the driveway, clouds of exhaust and dust and gravel crackling and flying up everywhere.

  We swerve out onto the highway, Daddy Jack’s tiny eyes watching the road expressionlessly as he taps his cigarette at the window, Momma Simpson going on about the funeral: “Never sick a day in his life till the cancer, started out a bump on his back, dumb doctor didn’t know nothin’.” But there’d be a good lunch at the reception.