"I was at the kitchen window when he jumped. By God, I didn't think he was going to do it, but I could tell he was going to do something. I just didn't think he was going to do that, jump like that.” The old man sucked wind between his teeth and looked at the nearby hills.
Paul watched the twisting waters of the stream. A clump of orange and brown leaves clogged one section and developed a natural dam about the size of a person's fist. He resisted the urge to toss a nearby pebble into the water to break it loose.
"What'd you do after he jumped? I mean what happened?"
John Harper fell into silence for nearly a full minute, weighted down by a conversation he never expected to have, had, in fact, never spoken of until this second.
"Your dad, David, he ran down the tipple ladder. I mean he might as well ran down. He hardly even bothered to grab on. He just dropped them rungs in big steps and was on the ground in no time. The others, I recognized your uncle Hill, the one who they say went on to law school or some such thing, were a little ways behind, but rushing pretty good too. The other boy took off running and was gone in no time across the field and I couldn't see him anymore. Hill started up to your dad and Larry and then turned around and, just like the other one, was gone across the field. He kept looking back, but he kept running.” The old man stopped and shifted from one foot to another. A cool wind carried the scent of manure, tossing it around in the valley. "Your dad wasn't a very big boy when he was that age. I remember he was really kind of underweight with these big ears that stuck out and caused him to look damn near top heavy. But he pulled that big rascal up from the ground.” Harper stopped again and lowered his head. He shivered through his shoulders and out through his arms and hands, which were stuffed deep into his pockets. "He pulled Larry up. Took him under the arms and lifted and when he did that boy's poor legs just hung there like bloody dish rags. Jesus and the way he hollered out. I can still hear him."
Paul seemed to jerk inside his own skin. "But you just sat there in that kitchen didn't you and watched him.” His nostrils flared, whistling sounds across the two or three feet of space between them.
"I did,” Harper said calmly. “I sit right there and watched him heft that boy onto his back and start dragging him. Is that what you want to hear, that I couldn't get myself to run out to that field to just lend a helping hand?"
Paul stood up and looked at Harper. "Yeah, I guess so."
Harper laughed. "Well, I didn't. Not just then. I didn't figure your dad could drag that big old boy more than ten feet without falling. But that wasn't the case. That wasn't the case at all."
Harper turned and walked away from the bridge. He could hear Paul trudging behind him, labored breathing and stomping across the ground. Too much time in the city, he figured, not enough time in the hills. Not enough time lately off-balance with his ankles turned over to call himself a hillbilly.
"Where we going, to your house?"
"Absolutely. I live just over that ridge there. You'll see when we get there that I can see the bridge from the front porch. Saw you get out of the taxi, in fact.."
“Not-taxi.”
“Pardon?”
“Nevermind,” Paul said, and when Harper went quiet added: “Well, can you talk and walk at the same time?”
At about that time Paul caught a small tree branch before stumbling. He threw his arms out in front of him and stopped to put his hands on his knees. "Shit I’m out of practice for hill-climbing.”
"You sure are if you think this is hill-climbing,” Harper said, and pointed up and to his left. “Here we are."
Topping off along the ridge was a squat house that looked to have about four or five rooms at best. The sides were peeling and flakes of brown, maybe red paint hung to porous boards and dirty white window sills. The highlight was a front porch, newly built, it seemed, new wood, a dramatic contrast to the dullness of the rest of the house. On the porch, sitting as still as the house itself, was a woman in a flower dress holding a cup in her hand. She didn't wave when she noticed them. Her eyes, obviously a very light color of blue, were noticeable even from the distance where Paul and Harper were making their way up the tiny hill. They seared across the distance between them, cutting down from where she sat like blue spotlights. If Paul would have been asked to describe her later, he would have talked about Indian squaws and portraits that seemed to have moving eyes that followed you across rooms. But just this minute, clutching the edge of the porch and hearing that sound like a band student bound for a failing grade seeping from his throat, Paul only cared for hearing Harper out and then getting back to the bridge. He wasn't sure how much time had passed since the bus had dropped him off and the sky was starting to turn the color of a week-old bruise.
"Let's go inside, have a seat,” John said. He might have picked up on Paul’s great urge to move along. “You'll want to take your time and hear this, Paul.”
Harper's wife was still in her rocking chair. She hadn't looked at the two of them since she spotted them coming up the hill. In her lap was a mess of beans. She was grabbing three at a time and breaking, each movement punctuated with the snap of cold vegetables that have been stored since growing season. She took no notice, only looked out over the field into the trees beyond.
Paul looked at her and for just an instant he thought he saw her move her eyes toward him, just briefly. "She know?” Paul asked.
"Sure. Augustine's my wife. A wife knows everything."
Her eyes had said just hang in there for a minute and listen, you'll want to hear this.
Paul made his way up the high set of steps and followed Harper into the house. Inside, the conditions the two were living in had to have been a stark contrast to the life John Harper must have grown used to being raised by the richest family in three counties. The living room was adequate enough with two couches and a fireplace. In the left corner of the room was a table with a very old lamp placed in its middle. A dusty brown cord connected it to an outlet in the wall that itself barely hung to its fixings. It looked like it had been gutted one too many times during a shoddy attempt to rewire the house.
The windows were open letting cool fall air move freely through the house, but it wasn't chilly inside. Instead, it was stuffy, like maybe the night before Harper and his wife had to light the fire to knock off the chill. Paul looked into the fireplace and saw gray ashes and caught the faint scent of smoke and dowsed wood.
Harper moved through the living room with ease, steps he had taken many times over the years. His walk was content, slow and deliberate, not so much with purpose as with a sense that there was no real place to be going and that that was perfectly fine.
Paul followed him into a very small kitchen area. A miniature stove sat inside a miniature two compartment sink. Above the sink was a plaque that read, May you be in Heaven a half hour before the Devil even knows you're dead. Harper took a seat at a table less than half the size of the one in the living room and plopped his elbows up. After a long breath, he started right in.
"When Larry jumped off that tipple and your daddy got down there and picked him up, I thought he wouldn't be able to drag that boy but about ten feet. When he disappeared out of sight, which was about a hundred feet, I actually went outside for a better look.” Harper stopped here, looked at Paul, and then examined his hands for a beat or two. They were shaking. "Well, anyway, I went outside. It was so bright, I remember, but I started across the field and then started going faster and faster. Before long I caught up with your dad, still dragging Fenner. That boy's legs was busted up horrible. His pants were just soaked and he wasn't hollering or groaning anymore. It looked like he'd just went on out, passed out there on his back. I stayed close, but not too close, and I know what you're sittin' over there figuring on, but just put it out of your mind. They wasn't a way in the world I could help that boy. Actually talking to somebody just couldn't happen, no matter what was going on. Stepping outside at all was some kind of miracle. Or adrenaline or some such thing."
&
nbsp; "Mr. Harper. John. I respect all that, I really do, and I thank you for talking with me, but I need to know what happened, so can we just--"
Harper stood up and put his hands on his sides, pushing his chest out just a bit. "That's exactly what I'm doing here, young man. There's things that ain't easy for people in this world and what happened to me that day saved my life. I felt it important enough to make mention of, don't you agree?”
Paul nodded. His head throbbed and a five-column front page feature picture from the Maysville News-Record kept floating in front of him, a picture of his dad with cops holding him up as he tried to walk. So skinny, his face a sunken crater of pain and, just beneath that, the exhausted joy of the near dead breathing again. The look of life renewed and misery completed. The image replaced in his memory the black and white image of his father sitting for his school picture, hair neatly parted with a bright smile, playful, probably joking with the photographer and laughing. A laughing smile.
Harper sat back down and looked across the small area of the kitchen. "Your dad dragged that boy all the way back to Joe Fenner's. I followed them all the way and tucked in behind the old barn out from that front yard dirt garden of Joe's. I ran up to the window after they went inside and saw Joe's face when your dad pulled Larry up from the floor and pointed at his legs. He was talking fast, that's for sure.” Harper stopped. Across the old wood of the table his hands lay one on top of another shaking.
"What?”
"This ain't something's gonna be easy to hear, probably."
"I figured about as much."
"Joe Fenner hit your daddy with a closed fist in the face harder than I've ever seen anybody hit to this day."
The air squeezed from Paul's chest and little to nothing moved through his throat. He heard himself sputtering conversational vowel sounds, grunts and affirmatives, but he couldn't get hold of them and put them together to make any sense.
Harper sat still as stone, sometimes looking at Paul, other times looking away. He didn't' look surprised; he looked like he didn’t know what to do with his eyes.
"He hit Dad? I don't understand."
"Does anybody? You knew about Joe Fenner. Does anybody ever understand anything about a man like that? He raped his wife more times than he kissed her, beat a stable of horses to death and made his boy work in their place. He hit your daddy, and that's not all. I left after he put him in the back tool shed."
22
By the time Dave made it down the ladder to Larry laying crumpled at the foot of the tipple, his hands were scalded from the blasting heat of the metal rungs.
He had watched a boy get his teeth busted out playing basketball two years before. The boy, a freshman at the high school named Barry, was known for fighting and known for hunting for a good one from time to time. One day during lunch Barry trotted with his chest stuck out onto the court where the seniors were playing, skinny and a foot shorter than any one of them. They laughed and then shot for teams. Barry was last and got stuck with Simon Cook, the senior pack leader, the Alpha and Omega of the high school world.
First possession Barry barked at Simon for having girl hands when the big boy dropped a looping pass along the sideline. Simon didn't' waste time. He hadn't said a thing to Barry. After the comment, he took off after the ball that had started rolling toward the school building, grabbing it up quickly and stalking back to where Barry stood with his hands on his hips. Two boys who had been standing behind Barry hooked his arms and pulled backwards onto the ground. There on the hot blacktop of the court, they took Barry's head in their hands and pulled it back onto the ground while Simon, smiling, pulled up over top of him with the ball held in both hands. He then raised it into the air, blotting out the sun and shading Barry's face, and brought it down into Barry's mouth. There was a wet crunch and choking. Somebody ran for the teachers and Barry's face was shooting blood like a fountain. When the teachers came, one of the first things they did, before even picking Barry up from the ground, was to pluck two small teeth from the side of his face. They were hanging on, stuck in the thick red blood gushing from Barry's mouth. Barry lost all his teeth that day with one well-placed hit. Dave had thought it would be the most blood he would ever see.
Larry was so much worse. He lay face down in the grass less than three feet from the pile of coal, breathing in strange fits against the ground. His back and legs shook and jerked radically, as if seizing. At the end of one outstretched arm, Dave could see he had grabbed the grass and some wild flowers were in his left hand and clutched hard, hard enough that the knuckles of his hand were white. He wasn't moving otherwise, and, other than the breathing, made no other sounds.
"Larry, Larry. Hey, Larry.” Dave rushed up to him and took him under the arms. The weight was incredible. He had heard stories from an older cousin about training to be a state trooper. He said the worst thing during boot camp was something he called the "dummy drag" where the trainees would have to run an obstacle course carrying a dummy that was fixed up with the same proportions of a real person, two-hundred pounds plus. Larry Fenner easily weighed as much, and with him limp and completely helpless it was more burdened weight than anything else. That's what his cousin said it was called, burdened weight. It's how much something weighs that's basically not helping you along at all. Like a dead person, or somebody who just jumped off a tipple on to a pile of coal.
Dave thought Larry might scream when he lifted him up, but he only breathed and choked more. Larry closed his eyes when Dave turned a one-eighty and started in the opposite direction. His bones snapped under the skin and he smelled piss and shit and the coppery scent of blood. He tried not to breathe except in large gulps through his mouth while he dragged Larry across the field and along the side of the road leading to Fenner's farm. If he could just make it to the farm and get Larry to his folks, they could get him to a hospital.
Joe Fenner leaned across the railing of his front porch. The sunlight caught in his eyes and he squinted. When he did, the skin that had been stretched tight and slick across his forehead crumpled up and created deep grooves. He saw two figures at the end of the garden and rapped his cane on the flooring of his porch.
"Who is it!”
Dave tried to push out a response, but only managed a small whisper, lost against Larry's slumped shoulder.
"I said who the hell's there!” Joe Fenner looked closer and made out Larry through the early twilight. “Goddamn. Larry."
"He's hurt, Mr. Fenner," Dave was able to say after meeting Joe at the foot of the steps.
With an incredible and hidden strength, Joe Fenner grabbed his boy under the arms, his own arms bulging with small but hard muscles and rope-thick veins, and tossed him onto the porch with a thud that shook the porch railings. Larry, who hadn't made a sound since yelling after the fall, now groaned and started crying, quietly, almost to himself.
"Mr. Fenner, Larry fell off the tipple out at—"
His fist felt good hitting the Shannon boy's cheek. The punch knocked him right out; he could tell by the way the boy’s legs went out from under him and how his body curved to the side on the way down. He craned his leathered neck around and searched the doorway. "Clara, come out here and get this boy. Splint up his legs. He's broke 'em all to shit. Maybe his hips too."
Stepping around a puddle of blood collecting at the cuff of Larry's pants, Joe scooped Dave easily onto his shoulder and started around the side of the house, spitting absently on the horse as he did. It whined and turned its big glossy eyes, tossed its head and backed up into its makeshift stall. The Shannon boy didn't weigh more than a hundred and thirty pounds at the most, Joe figured. He could hardly even feel him on his shoulder as he turned the corner of the house and started toward the tool shed. It was a squat shack about six feet by five feet just off from the garden and not used much during the hottest part of summer. When he tossed the latch and let the door swing outward on its hinges, a wall of heat washed over him and he could feel the boy take a deep pitiful breath.
&
nbsp; "In you go, you little prick.” And then with timed heaves: "In...you...go!"
Dave hit the cracked dirt of the shed floor flat on his back. The air pushed out of him as he opened his eyes. The skin along the side of his face became tight the way the skin on his shoulders felt after a good sunburn had set in. The hot air inside the shed was making his lungs feel swollen and bloated, scorched and ready to collapse. And the pain from the left side of his face was getting worse as he came to more and more.
Dave couldn't tell when he was fully aware of things around him. His head throbbed and ached as if it was filled with spurred ball bearings and his mouth felt thick. Carefully he pushed himself to a sitting position in the middle of the shed and tried to examine the darkness around him. Through the clapboard sides of the shed there was the purple light of early evening spearing into the shed giving him just enough light to make out a storage shelf. Beside that a saw hung from a nail and then below that a can of what must have been gasoline. Other than this, he couldn’t make out much else. He jumped to his feet, staggered against the side of the building, and felt pain shoot through his face and into his neck. He threw himself against what he figured to be the door of the shed.
"Hey!” His voice sounded foreign, like someone else's, like the voices of the people being chased in the movies he and Hill sometimes watched at Plaza Movies. The people who were about to be knifed and buried in the garden. "Hey! Hey! Hey!” He slammed the palms of his hands against the rough lumber door until they were sore and bleeding just enough to make his hands slick and stinging from the sweat. And then, very faintly, he heard someone say Joe Fenner's name.
"Hey! Let me out!” He fell to his knees, listening for the voice again, the voice of a woman he was almost sure, maybe Larry's mother. Where was Larry? "Please let me out...Larry needs to go to the hospital. Larry's legs are gone...Larry needs legs...” He shifted back onto his hands and felt the hard wood of the shed cut him off from falling. The purple spears of light were quickly vanishing and he felt sick. His body was covered in sweat and blood that ran from a large cut across his swollen cheekbone. He blinked sweat away and in that second, in the time it took him to shutter his eyelid, the shed was completely dark, encased in a darkness so vast and so absent of hope that he slid down the wall and landed in a heap on the ground. He could smell the gas just to his left. He could hear footsteps in the house outside and he could hear his heart beating hard inside his chest. He could hear his fear moving inside him like mercury, deadening him to thought and emotion, making him slip into a scorched, painful sleep.
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