You're not my daughter, you're not my daughter. And then he broke into his hands.
Linoleum Roses
SALLY got married like we knew she would, young and not ready but married just the same. She met a marshmallow salesman at a school bazaar, and she married him in another state where it's legal to get married before eighth grade. She has her husband and her house now, her pillowcases and her plates. She says she is in love, but I think she did it to escape.
Sally says she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money. She is happy, except sometimes her husband gets angry and once he broke the door where his foot went through, though most days he is okay. Except he won't let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn't let her look out the window. And he doesn't like her friends, so nobody gets to visit her unless he is working.
She sits at home because she is afraid to go outside without his permission. She looks at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet, the linoleum roses on the floor, the ceiling smooth as wedding cake.
A House of My Own
NOT a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man's house. Not a daddy's. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody's garbage to pick up after.
Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem.
PINCKNEY BENEDICT (1964- )
Born in Ronceverte, West Virginia, Pinckney Benedict grew up and continues to live on his family's dairy farm north of Lewisburg, West Virginia. He graduated from Princeton University magna cum laude in 1986 with a B.A. in English, and received his MFA in 1987 from The Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa. After an appointment to the Hill School, a prep school in Potts-town, Pennsylvania, Benedict spent two years on the Creative Writing Faculty of Oberlin College.
One of the most gifted of contemporary American writers of his generation, Pinckney Benedict writes almost exclusively of his West Virginia background. His carefully crafted stories have the air of being tales in the process of their very telling in Benedict's most characteristic work, as in "Town Smokes," included here, protagonist and landscape are deeply bonded. Like a number of other writers in this volume, including Eudora Welty, Bobbie Ann Mason, Leslie Silko, and Louise Erdrich, Benedict raises "regional" writing to a transcendental level.
Pinckney Benedict's first short story collection, Town Smokes, was published in 1987; his second, The Wrecking Yard, in 1992.
Town Smokes
MY daddy been in the ground a couple hours when it starts to rain. Hunter's up on the porch, strippen away at a chunk of soft pine wood with his Kaybar knife, and I'm setten out in the yard to get away from the sound, chip chip chip like some damn squirrel. Hunter moves in his seat as he whittles, can' sit still.
It's big drops that are comen down, and starten real quick, like you wouldn' of expected it at all. I look up when it comes on to rain, and what I see of sky's just as blue and clear. Happen like that up here sometimes, my daddy's told me, that you get your hard rain and your blue sky, and both together like that. First time I seen it though, that I recall.
You gonna drown out there Hunter says to me, and I can just hardly hear him over the rain pounden into the dirt of the yard and spangen off the tin roof.
What's that I say. He's not more'n ten yard from me but there's rain like a sheet between us, getten in my eyes and my ears and down my collar. I like the way the cool rain feels as it soaks my shirt. I catch a couple drops in my mouth, and they got no taste to them at all. The rain washes the sweat and the dirt off me.
Drown like a turkey in the rain Hunter says. Out there and mouth open. He gets up to go inside, drops the wood and the knife down into the chair. The heavy knife sticks in the seat, blade down. Hunter moves like an old man, older than my daddy, fat and tired. He ran the sweat like a hog when we was diggen before, because the dirt was hard and packed where we put the grave, out behind the house. I thought his heart might vapor-lock on him there for a while, all red and breathen through the mouth as he was.
Hunter slips the straps of his overalls as he goes inside and I know he will spend the rest of the day in his underwear sluggen bourbon and listenen to the radio.
Get in out the rain he says to me back over his shoulder. I stay out in the yard until the door swings shut behind him. The ground is getten soft under my sneakers but I know that is just the top dirt. It hasn' rained for a good long while and the clay dirt has got dry. The rain comes down too fast and hard to soak in. I know it will not get down deep at all.
I go to the door and I can smell the piece of wood Hunter's been cutten on, the sharp pine sap. It's a tooth he's carven out, like a big boar's tusk, all smooth and curved comen out of the rough wood. He carves a lot of things like that.
He's my daddy's brother that lives with us at the camp up on Tree Mountain. He's a big man, has this small head that sits on his body like a busted chimney on a house. He don' talk much. Old Hunter'll surprise you, how good he is with whittlen. He's sold some things in town.
Water rollen off the roof runs deep around the edges of the porch. Out of the rain, my wet clothes are heavy on me. Against my leg, cold in my pocket, I feel the arrowhead I found in my daddy's grave. Flint hunten point with the edges still sharp. It wasn' very far down, only mebbe five inches. I didn' know this's a good place to find arrowheads. I'll dig again later in other spots to look for some more. I lick my lips, want a smoke, a Camel mebbe.
You got a cigarette I say, goen into the house.
Get your fucken shoes off, bringen wet in the house Hunter says. He's standen in the front room in his shorts, and his hair stands up like he's been runnen his hands through it. The radio he keeps back in his room is on to a news station. What's a fourteen-year-old boy want with a cigarette anyway he says.
Fifteen I say. My shoes come off my feet with a wet noise. I got no socks on, and the wood floor is rough. I know to be careful in bare feet or get a sliver.
I ain' got a cigarette he says.
You got a pinch then I say. I know he's got no snuff but I ask anyway.
Hunter sits down. He's got the bottle in his hand. Christ Jesus he says. You visit whores too?
These are things a man does I say. I guess I just feel like a smoke.
I laugh but Hunter don' join in. He looks at me. When I keep my eyes on him he looks away, out the window. The hard rain throws up a spray of mist and you can' see for more than a couple yards. The roof of the camp is fairly new and tight and it don' leak at all. Hunter and my daddy put it on just the last summer before this one and they did a good job. I carried tacks and tin sheets for them, always scared of slippen and fallen off the roof.
Real gulley-washer Hunter says. They got to watch for them flash floods down to the valley. Farms goen to lose a lot of dirt to the river, this don' let up.
He keeps on looken out the window and all the time the rain is getten harder. It's finally dark out there, clouds coveren the sun. We are high up and it is strange to see it dark in the middle of day. Generally we get hard bright mountain light that makes you squint to look at it.
Your daddy used to make his own smokes Hunter says.
I say I know.
Mebbe you look through his traps, you find you the fixens he says.
That's a thought I say. I don' make any move to the room my daddy and I share, did share. I stand and drip on the floor and listen to the rain. Hunter looks at me like watchen a snake or mebbe a dog that you ain' sure of. The rain outside the windows makes it look like it ain' any place in the world but the camp and us in it. We're alone here. I think mebbe the rain won' let up for a while yet.
Hunter says You do what you want. Always done it that way anyhow didn' you.
He stands, works his shoulders back and forth. He is sore from the
diggen and would like his muscles rubbed I know. Rain throbs him some these days.
I'm gonna listen to the radio for a time he says.
I make a bet with myself he will be asleep before long.
The door to Hunter's room don' shut just right, so when he closes it I can still get the sound from the radio in his room. It is a station from in the valley. The announcer says to watch for flash floods in the narrow, high-banked creeks comen down off the mountain. He says it like it is the mountain's fault.
The tower of the radio is on top of a ridge not far from the camp. The place where they put it is a couple hunnerd feet higher than where we are and you can see it from the porch of the camp on a good day. They took out a whole big stand of blue spruce to get it in.
From where we are, the clearen looks smooth and clean and well took care of, like a yard, but I have been up there a couple time—it ain' such a hard climb as it looks, just a couple hours scramble—and it is a mess around the base of that tower. Vines and creepers around the base and grass to your knees. The blue spruce are comen back too and they are fast-growen trees.
Hunter snaps off the radio and I hear him stretch out on to his bed. He keeps moven around like he will never get to sleep.
My daddy's things is all over the room in no particular order. It is like he is still there, in all them traps, though I know that he is cold and dead and under the earth not a dozen yards away.
These things are mine now I say but it is not like they belong to me at all. Some of them should go to Hunter. I ain' sure that I want that Hunter should have them, though I would be hard put to say why not.
I move the rifle that is layen on my daddy's bed, the heavy lever-action Marlin, and the cartridge belt that is layen there too. My fingers touch the cool blued metal of the barrel and I know I will have to clean the metal where I touched it, rub it down with a patch of oiled cloth. There is nothen that is worse for any good piece of metal than the touch of a man's hand my daddy would always be sayen.
It is two guns that are in my family, both my daddy's, his old Marlin and the single-action Colt .38 that his grandaddy used sometime way back in the Philippine Insurrection. I put the Colt down on the bed next the rifle, fish out a box of rounds for it as well. From the feel, there ain' too many cartridges left to the box, which is tore up and very old. Beside the guns and his clothes, there is not much else of his in the room.
In the top of the old chifferobe I find his little sack for tobacco. There is not much that is left in the sack, and I can bet that it is pretty old and dry. He was not much for a smoker and a sack of tobacco had a long life around him. There is a paper book of matches next the tobacco with all but two of the matches gone. It is from the Pioneer, which is a bar I have seen down to the valley. There is also a couple bills, a five and a one. I pocket the money.
I scratch through the rest of his stuff in the drawer—a dog whistle and a couple loose .410 rounds for a gun that we ain' even got; needles and thread in a sewen kit; some Vietnamese money that he used to keep around for a laugh—and come up with his old Barlow clasp knife and his Gideon's. The clasp knife I toss down with the rest of the pieces that I figure I might take with me. It clicks off the barrel of the Colt and leaves a mark on the metal. That is one mark that I won' get a hiden for.
The Gideon's is old and slippery in my hand and missen many pages. My daddy has used it for a lot of years. The paper is thin and fine for rollen your own; if you are good you can get two smokes to the page. As I say, he was not a heavy smoker and he is not even gotten up to the New Testament yet, just somewhere in Jeremiah.
I pull out the next page and crease it with my middle finger, tap tobacco onto the paper. The tobacco is crumbly with age and breaks into small pieces; it is very dark brown and cheap-looken. Some of it sticks to my skin. I lay down on the bed and put the home-rolled cigarette in my mouth. Pieces of tobacco stick to my tongue. I spit out, light the smoke.
Christ I say. The cigarette don' taste good at all, like the tobacco has rotted. I flick it out onto the floor and sparks fly off from the lit end. They stick to the wood floor and smolder there, and one by one the sparks burn themselves out.
I figure I will go into town for a time I say to Hunter's back.
He is face down on the narrow cot in his room and I figure him for asleep. The bottle is by the bed and it is several fingers down from where it was earlier. Hunter's back is pale and wide, and there is a mole I never took notice of before in the deep track that his backbone makes.
He says Goen where? and rolls over so sudden it startles me. His face is wet with tears and it surprises me that this old man has been cryen. For a minute I can' remember why. The bed sags under him.
Down the mountain I say. Get me some smokes mebbe.
He is wipen at his face with his arm, drunk and embarrassed that I seen him cry. You can cry for your brother I want to say.
You ain' comen back are you Hunter says.
He puts a foot on the floor and the bottle goes over. I pick it up for him, set it back where it was. It is all but empty with haven been dumped out. The floor is damp and the room smells of bourbon. I look out the little window in Hunter's bedroom and the rain has slacked off some. That is a help.
The rifle's in on the bed I say. He would of wanted for you to have it.
I walk out into the front room and Hunter comes after me, walken in his underwear and bare feet. I got the .38 and the clasp knife and all in my kit with me, ready to go.
Why is it that you're goen now Hunter says. With the rain and all. It's a bad day to be goen down to the valley.
I think about that. It is not somethen I have thought about much before this. I look at him.
Because I am tired I say. Tired of the mountain and smoken shitty tobacco. Mebbe I just want to smoke a real cigarette for a change.
Want you some town smokes I guess Hunter says.
I say I guess.
Mebbe want to kiss all them pretty girls down to the valley too Hunter says. I don' say anythen.
Yeah he says. Bring me back a bottle when you come.
I'll do that I say. You bet.
I go outside and the air is cool for a day in the middle of summer. The rain has turned the dust to mud, and water runs in streams in the yard, has bit into the dirt. A hard rain for just a couple hours I know can raise the creeks and cut right through the banks and dirt levels down below. I wonder what they are doen with all the water down in the town. The air feels damp but the rain is mostly stopped.
Hunter has followed me out into the yard and his feet are all over mud. How you goen down? he says.
Railroad right of way I say. It's the quickest way.
Hunter follows me the next couple of steps and I cut from the yard into the underbrush so he will stop followen. The leaves on the bushes are wet and soak my shirt, my kit. I know the damp will be hard on the gun.
Ought not to of happened to your daddy that way Hunter says. He is looken in the bushes like he can' see where I am at, but he wants me to hear him.
When the tree falls I say best the man that cut it should be out the way.
That is hard Hunter says to the bushes. That a boy should say that about his daddy that brought him up and fed him.
I know that Hunter will see me if I keep on talken. I don' want that he should see me. I turn and go, headen toward the right of way down the mountain.
We should of had someone to say the words Hunter calls after me. It ain' right that there wasn' nobody to say the words for him.
I keep goen through the brush. I guess I would of said the words if I knew them. I ain' got the least idee what words he would of wanted though.
The last time I seen my daddy he tells me a story. He has the old two-stroke loggen saw over his shoulder and is headed out to where he known there's some trees that has come down, or are ready to come down anyhow. You want some help daddy I ask and he says no.
Then he looks over at where Hunter is sitten on the porch and this time Hunte
r is carven a great horned owl out of a big piece of oak that would have gone well in the fire in the winter.
Hunter wasn' always so fat and lazy he says loud enough that he knows Hunter can hear him. Hunter don' stir from his carven, usen a chisel instead of the Kaybar knife. That's how he works on the ones he figures to sell.
Nawsir my daddy says, was a time when he and I used to run and raise some hell in these parts. When we was about your age. I member one time down to Seldomridge's place, little shorthorn farm next the river. You recall that Hunter?
Hunter keeps quiet, just gouges a long chunk of wood out the owl's back. It kind of ruins how the owl looks I think.
The river was froze over, couple three feet thick out near the banks my daddy says. Ice got all thin and black out toward the middle though where the water's deep and fast.
He shifts the chain saw from one shoulder to the other and I see where a little gas mixed with oil has leaked onto his shirt. He don' seem to mind.
So Hunter here riles up Seldomridge's cattle and about a dozen shorthorns go plowen out onto the ice my daddy says.
My daddy's starten to laugh and there are these tears formen in the corners of his eyes. I can hardly stand to look at him because he thinks the story is so funny and I don' get it at all yet.
And they're shiveren out there my daddy keeps on. Can hardly stand, all spraddle-legged and tryen to stay up on the ice, blowen and snorten, scared and full of snot and droolen, them whiteface. Hunter's yellen and holleren at them from the bank, just to keep them on the move, keep them up and off from the shore. Hunter's voice sounds loud out there with everthen else so quiet and covered in snow.
Then the first one goes through my daddy says and he can hardly keep the saw on his shoulders for laughen.
It sounds like a pistol shot when the ice gives and the steer disappears down and it's just black black water shooten up through the hole in the ice like a geyser. That sets them off, stompen and bellowen and the next goes through the ice, skitteren and scrabblen, and the next after that one. Prob'ly half a dozen, one after the other, they get out on the thin ice in the middle and don' have time to look surprised 'fore they go down.
The Oxford Book of American Short Stories Page 87