A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  Suddenly Landrieu achieved his full height on the chair seat, gave the lighter wheel a nervous flick, producing a large yellow flame which he aimed into the spindle of newspapers, and promptly rammed the quick-catching torch into the crux between the house and the pylon that held it up.

  And all at once a great flurry of activity got centered on the area of the torch. In foisting his baton so ruthlessly into the hole, which no one could precisely see, Landrieu managed to disrupt his balance and propel himself backward off the chair, directly onto the ground, making an ugly whump sound like a bundle of newspapers dropped off the gate of a truck. And just as quickly the air around the joining got thick with flying insects, dropping out of various secondary holes and buzzing angrily, looking for the cause of all the heat. Mr. Lamb started yelling for Landrieu to clear out before the insects connected him with the fire and lit on him with a vengeance, but Landrieu was momentarily incapacitated. He had hit square on his tail bone and was lying with his arms stretched palms down, staring straight at the sky as if he were waiting for someone to ask him how he felt. Almost as many wasps were tumbling out of the area of the flames as were zizzing the air, and it seemed like considerable clumps were falling directly on Landrieu’s stomach. One fat rust-colored wasp took a low pass by his face, but Landrieu seemed not to see him and the wasp flew back into the higher atmosphere.

  Mr. Lamb had begun yelling, shouting profanities and threats at Landrieu as if he thought that could devil Landrieu into recovering faster. Above him, the burning paper torch was still creviced between the house and the piling. A small feather of flame had blossomed on the wood facing, and several small curls of gray smoke began to cloud through the worm holes, making more wasps fall out.

  Landrieu apparently discovered the wasps on his stomach at the very moment of partially reclaiming his senses, and scrambled up and began slapping his chest, grabbing his neck, and punching in his hair as if he had discovered stinging wasps everywhere and couldn’t get in touch with any of them.

  “Looka there, son,” Mr. Lamb said, removing his attention from Landrieu and pointing out the little scroll of smoke. “You done set my house afire.”

  Landrieu stopped slapping himself and stared upward at the involved portion of the house, as if he knew it was impossible for the house to be burning.

  Mr. Lamb, however, was satisfied. He leaned against the fender of the Willys, twiddling with the latch on the hood, taking in the progress of the fire.

  Robard suddenly appeared, sprinting down the steps of the house hauling Landrieu’s metal pail, slopping water in fat gouts. He rushed past, eyes intent on the smoke, arrived at the bottom of the piling, drew back the bucket, and threw it in the middle of the flames, engrossing everything in a great sizzling expenditure of green smoke. Water began trickling back immediately and raining drops off the bottom of the house, and Robard stood back and scrutinized the nexus of smoke for any flames that might survive, and for a moment everyone was held in thrall.

  All at once all attention was drawn irresistibly upward from the segment of blacked siding to the square window just above it, where Mrs. Lamb stood, frowning. She watched them all a moment, her PBX set clamped to her head like a medieval caliper compass, focusing immense private displeasure squarely on Mr. Lamb, who was utterly stunned. And then she was gone, as unpredictably as she’d appeared, and the window was returned to the dull, murky green color that showed a fragile, watery reflection of the trees.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb observed, a childish smile broadening his face. “We almost burnt up Mrs. Lamb.”

  Robard started around the house looking disagreeable. He set the bucket on the bottom step and started to the Gin Den. Landrieu commenced dragging his chair toward his little house, walking in a broken side-thrown limp understood to be the result of the fall. Mr. Lamb stood beside the jeep, observing everything, his little hands nested on the fender, the same witless smile on his lips as though there was something funny happening but he couldn’t tell what it was.

  Mr. Lamb turned the little smile around, and he knew the old man was just before bringing up the fishing trip. He took a fast look at the Gin Den, but Robard had disappeared, and the old man had him trapped. He wanted to let the moment slip away. He walked over beside Elinor, seated in the passenger’s seat, gave her a tap on the head, and looked up at the still-smoking facet of outside wallboard.

  “Landroo, you know,” Mr. Lamb said thoughtfully, gazing at the ruined hoardings and sighing, “Landroo’s the kind of man’d stand in a storm with a teaspoon to get a drink of water.”

  “I don’t much like wasps myself,” he said, keeping his eyes someplace else.

  “Hell, no,” the old man argued. “Nobody does in their right brain. But most of us can keep from getting stung without rupturing ourselves.”

  Mr. Lamb was counting Landrieu’s misfortune as an incalculable pleasure, fostering a real withered admiration for Landrieu, who in all the years of slandering and threats had been tricky enough to stay put. It was a measure of his intelligence that he was still there to accept the abuse, since it wasn’t so much abuse as an inverted form of sympathy, which Landrieu was savvy enough to recognize. And he himself didn’t feel at all sure that he owned an intelligence half equal to it.

  “Look here,” Mr. Lamb said, very businesslike. “Ain’t you and me supposed to go fishin?” His face was very alert, and full of purposes all having to do with the business of fishing.

  It caught him off guard. The old man knew very well he didn’t want to go and had tricked him and sprung it on him just at the moment he was thinking he wouldn’t have to.

  “I guess so,” he said, turning back to the Willys.

  “Then get your big ass in. If you can’t go huntin turkeys, then you might as well catch a fish.”

  The old man started working the snake pedal with his toe until the motor concussed and the jeep broke forward abruptly without ever seeming to actually start, but just to be in motion spontaneously.

  He flung his arm at Elinor, who climbed out, and he wedged himself in the skimpy little iron seat while the jeep was moving, and got his legs stuffed inside the well.

  “What about poles?” he said, looking wretchedly toward the underside of the house, where the poles were strung.

  “The what?” the old man bellowed, the motor whanging intensely.

  “Poles!”

  “Shit on poles,” the old man shouted, careening off toward the outhouse, getting both hands on either side of the wheel and seeming to lose control.

  He grabbed onto the frame of the windshield to keep from being jarred loose.

  “I like to telephone the fish,” the old man said craftily, and motioned with his thumb to the back of the jeep at a little black metal box with a smooth wood-handled crank and two long half-stripped copper leads fastened to gold thumbscrews at either end.

  “What is that?” he said. The road had reached the line of ashes and was quickly diving off the bank over a series of long narrow rain defiles that reached down a short bluff into a bottom. The jeep was pitching violently and the old man’s eyes were intent.

  “That there’s my telephone,” the old man yelled, and broke out in a raucous laugh, and the jeep almost went over on its side and he could actually feel the wheels leave the ground. The old man looked at him wide-eyed and laughed again.

  The jeep ducked below the rim of the bank, and he looked back disconsolately at the house and saw Robard kneeling out in the dooryard to the Gin Den, changed into his green whipcord pants and his silk shirt with the arrow pockets, nuzzling Elinor’s head and holding her collar to prevent her from running after the jeep. He had a feeling that when he got back from wherever he was going, some inexplicable place where you caught fish by telephone, Robard would be long gone, and it made him feel queer and almost angry. And he had the sudden insignificant urge to signal him somehow, to wave his hand up, but the jeep straggled down beneath the flat marly rim of the bluff, and he was gone, and there
was no time even to get his hand off the frame of the glass and into the air.

  At the foot of the bluff the road commenced out through a tall shadowy bottom where most of the big trees were dead or in a state of corruption, except for sprigs of green isolated in the barren crowns where the sunlight kept them alive. The roots had elbowed through the oaty ground, and the trunks had a pale brownish veneer banding the bark three feet off the ground, and there were no limbs on the larger trees nearer than thirty feet from the ground.

  There was, too, an unanticipated air change in the bottom, a cool insularity and practically a solemnity, he felt, the high interlock of dead branches and higher foliage tangled and interwoven and causing the underneath to be protected and sequestered from the island proper.

  The road the old man took was a road only in the sense that several other sets of cleated tires had passed on the ground and worked triangular gauge troughs in the mud, bearing straight off through the woods out farther than he could see at any one place.

  The jeep was producing a lot of smoke and terrible strangling sounds that filled the bottom, and Mr. Lamb had retreated into the clamor and begun to look a little debilitated. In the mossy light his skin was pale and the blood pounded the artery in his forehead, percolating hotly back into his brain. His frame was bent over the wheel and his suspenders had luffed forward away from his chest as if nothing were inside them to hold on to.

  All at once the old man hacked up a pocket of phlegm and spat it and gave him a tricky look as if something were tempting him to speak but he was intent on keeping it a secret until precisely the right moment when he’d spring it and startle everybody.

  A woodpecker swooped out on one of the oaks and went walloping down the glimmer of trail, having a difficult time keeping its fat body aloft. Mr. Lamb watched the bird keenly as if he were making a mental note of it, then glanced at him again craftily as though there had been some import to the bird’s flying the way it had that shouldn’t have been missed. He went back to staring at the tracks when he got no response.

  “Did you ever hear the story of the slaughterhouse goat?” Mr. Lamb said, as if he were tired of his own moodiness and wanted to supplant it with some sort of scurrility.

  “No,” he said, wondering if there was some indignity waiting to be sprung on him in the old man’s upcoming account.

  The old man looked at him suspiciously to see if he could detect a trace of insincerity in his attitude toward the story he proposed to unfurl. He smiled back with as much earnestness as he could, and the old man lolled forward and seemed satisfied.

  “This is true,” the old man assured him over the gurgling of the jeep. He brought up another freightload of spit and loosed it out the side. “There was this here goat, you see, a handsome big billy with a fat white chinny beard.” The old man motioned toward his own chin. “And they kept this old goat, you see, at the abattoir, to lead the sheeps and cows down the chutes to where they had stationed a big burly nigger with a sledge to hit ’em on the head and knock the shit out of them.” He regarded him again keenly, his old wet eyes glistening in the flicker of sunlight, to see if he was appreciating everything the way it should be appreciated. “Sometimes, you see,” he said, “one old sheep would commence to be suspicious when he started down the chute and take a notion he wasn’t going. Maybe he had an inkling what was waiting for him. So right away the whole damn chute would pig up with a lot of noisy sheep or Hereford cows, and everything would be topsy-turvy, and somebody’d have to wade down in there amongst them to get ’em straightened out and flowing again. But if they had that goat there a-leading them, then everything just went out smooth as shit through a tin funnel, and sheep commenced dropping like ducks at a shooting gallery, and everybody was happy, including the goat, cause just before he got to the spot where the nigger did the braining, a little Houdini gate opened up on the side and the goat trotted off one direction, and the gate closed back real quick, and the sheep just went on another couple steps, and boom! the lights went out all over town. And the goat went back around to the garbage and had him a couple of soup cans before he had to be to work again. And you see, he was a feisty goat,” the old man said. “He’d hike up on his hind legs and eat the phone directory right off the stock manager’s desk, eat up his fountain pens and his Dictaphone wires, paper clips, and everything. And then he’d turn right around and go lead another bunch of sheep down the chute to get poleaxed.”

  The character of the woods had gradually begun to shift lower, allowing some speckles of undiverted light to accumulate, The dead trees had begun to disappear and shumard saplings were clustered together, tightening the trail. He smelled the aroma of stagnation from no one place, though out ahead, where he couldn’t see among the mesh of branches.

  “So,” the old man said, “it got to where there was some at the abattoir didn’t particularly care for the goat, whose name was Newel, coincidentally.” Mr. Lamb stole a mutinous look at him and quickly returned his eyes to the road. “Some thought that ole Newel was considerably too big for his britches by the way he acted, eating and chewing everything his eye fell on, then turning right around as calm as you please, and leading a whole passel of friendly sheep—who was, in some ways, kin to him in God’s eye—to their eventual doom at the hands of that unerring nigger. So they gave some thought to letting him go on through the chute one day and having that colored gentleman poleax him along with the rest of the disposable livestock, figuring it would teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. Except they couldn’t get around the fact that they sorely needed the old bastard and didn’t want to have to go to the pain of training up another goat to do what this goat already did just fine—if he hadn’t been so disagreeable.” Two tiny wads of spit had begun waging a war for space in the corners of the old man’s mouth, and had begun to interfere some with the way he opened his mouth. “So,” he said, “they decided they’d play a trick on old Newel, thinking that that would cure him of being so uppity. So they went and got him and set him down in the chute in front of a whole big drove of sheep and opened the gate, and there, of course, old Newel went, with them sheep took in following him, like Moses leading the Jews. Except that when they all got to the little Houdini gate that usually opened up so old Newel could weasel out at the last minute, the little gate didn’t open, and the force of them sheep coming down the incline shoved old Newel right into the face of that big sweaty nigger holding the bleeding sledge hammer. And quick as a flash he raised up that hammer and made like he was going to poleax Newel the same as he was any other sheep, and what do you think happened?” The old man’s voice was hoarse from shouting and he peered out with his lips everted and his eyes illuminated while the jeep wallowed on out into the full sunlight.

  “I don’t know,” he said, trying not to think about it at all, since he already knew it would have him as the brunt of it.

  The old man looked at him intently, suds forming two prominent white anchors in the wedges of his mouth. “He had a heart attack and died,” he shouted, a great sweeping grin overcoming his face and showcasing his teeth, waggling precariously out of his gums like a cracked porch beam. “Haw haw haw haw.” The old man couldn’t restrain himself any longer.

  The jeep had suddenly lumbered out of the shumard saplings into the clear, and the old man had to stand straight up on the brake pedal to keep them from driving right on out into the water that opened all at once in either direction for a quarter of a mile, and stretched two hundred yards across into a plain of dead timber where the water simply phased out into the woods and spatterdocks, rather than coming to an end at the edge of an identifiable dirt bank.

  Mr. Lamb looked completely bewildered. He was breathing forcefully and staring over the heeled nose of the Willys, his skinny brows clamped together, trying to factor out how it was he had almost run his jeep right into his own water and drowned himself in the process. For some reason, when he had started to drive, Mr. Lamb had removed his spectacles, and his eyes now looked flat and wat
ery, and the little blisters where the pincers had fastened on his nose looked vile and scarlet as if he’d finally had to remove the glasses at the behest of a gigantic pain.

  He looked and could see the old man’s mind backtracking systematically toward whatever it was he had been involved in recounting before both of them were almost pitched off in the water for good.

  “Oh, yeah,” the old man said, the smile reviving. “So what do you think the morale of that story is about the goat named Newel?”

  “I don’t know,” he said gloomily, resenting the old man for the whole story.

  “The morale is,” Mr. Lamb said, transforming his eyes into tiny peepholes of unrivaled significance, “a smart goat will always outrun a dead one.” The old man’s eyes suddenly snapped wide open, in imitation of the response he expected to see but didn’t get. He just gazed at the old man expressionlessly to record his disapproval, and Mr. Lamb began to look suspicious and flare his nostrils hotly, irritated at not being congratulated for having brought his story to an instructive end.

  “Grab the box,” the old man snapped suddenly, clambering out the side of the jeep and marching off down the shingle toward where a green Traveler was beached on the baked dirt, harnessed to another red stump up from the edge of the water.

  The sun, which was just sinking below a thick cusp of cloud, banked the surface of the lake and caught light in the fine spiderwebs hung on the water beyond where the old man was headed. The lake smelled hot and sweet, and there was no movement at all on the water, only the sound of a woodpecker back up the path, an empty plock that carried over the lake and dissipated into the floating woods beyond it.