by John Yount
He turned half around to face her. “Help me out?” he said.
“Sure,” she said. She propped a foot on the bottom step of the stile and seemed to strike some sort of pose. “What are you doing sitting out here anyway?”
He tilted his head to one side and didn’t answer, and she looked off toward the east, holding her fine-boned, somewhat haughty face in profile. As irrelevant as the thought seemed, he found himself conceding that she was pretty, and for all that it mattered, so was her sister. They were both blond and blue-eyed, and their figures often snared his attention.
“You are family after all,” Clara said, “and there isn’t any reason to let you make an ass of yourself without warning you.”
“I’m an ass because Lester is my friend?” he said and laughed. He thought she might laugh too, but she didn’t.
“Friends are important,” she said. “He’s goofy, that’s all. His whole family is. He’s my age, and he’s two grades behind me for goodness sake. Have you ever seen him in church, or his momma or poppa? No, and you won’t. They’re trashy.”
“No they’re not,” he said.
“Oh I don’t like this,” she said. “I don’t like the way it makes me feel. Grandmother sent me out here to apologize because she thought we acted like spoiled little snots, and maybe we did. But friends are important,” she said and turned back toward the house. “You do whatever you want.” As she rounded the flowering quince bushes by the porch, she called back significantly: “Birds of a feather….”
A sudden flash of anger warmed his temples until he realized he’d had almost the same thought before she’d come out. He just hadn’t put the same complexion on it; he hadn’t thought of Lester as goofy, or, by association, himself. He sat on the top step of the stile and pondered the matter until the chill of the evening drove him into the trailer where he lay on the couch, his hands behind his head.
It was true Lester Buck seemed to have no more friends than he did, although Lester had lived all his life in the same place, while he himself had just got there. But that didn’t mean Lester was goofy. He had just got off on the wrong foot somehow. Maybe because he was so shy, like Aunt Lily said, or maybe just because he’d gotten use to being on the wrong foot, it had stayed with him, become, somehow or other, who he was. Or maybe people like Virginia and Clara weren’t going to see him but one way, no matter that he’d gotten to be somebody else entirely. He didn’t know.
He understood, however, that his association with Lester Buck didn’t do him one bit of good in his cousins’ eyes. It was an embarrassment to his cousins to have him and his mother living in an ugly purple trailer in their cow pasture, never mind the reasons for it, which all by themselves were sleazy and embarrassing. And then there was Lester Buck’s house, which had neither bathroom nor running water nor electricity. It was the sort of house you didn’t see anymore, with an open dogtrot running down the middle, a kitchen and sitting room off one side, and two sleeping rooms off the other, so that when you went from the kitchen to one of the bedrooms, you had to cross this hallway, which was roofed over but open at both ends and cluttered with tools and washtubs and lanterns and clothes hung on pegs or nails driven in the walls. The house had never seen a coat of paint and had no foundation but was merely held off the hard-packed mud of its yard by large, stacked stones under its four corners. And there was Effie, Lester’s mother, her big chapped hands scrubbing out clothes over a washboard in a galvanized tub, or else boiling them in a big black iron pot out back and scooping them up with a wooden paddle and slopping them over a line until they were cool enough to wring out and hang properly. And Roy Buck, Lester’s father, with his asthma and weak heart and general poor health, and that terrible scar across his face that tugged down the corner of his right eye so that tears seemed always to leak out there—a scar James’s grandmother had told him came from a knife fight when Roy Buck was younger, and since it was his grandmother saying this and not Virginia or Clara, it would be the truth—and no education or job and only forty acres of steep, poor land to make a living on. And Lester himself, all bone and greenish freckles and bad teeth.
The whole thing made James’s stomach hurt somehow, and he stared at the dim ceiling of the trailer for a while before he found himself remembering the first time he and Lester had really had a conversation, rather than just raising a hand and nodding and speaking and then going on to keep a respectful distance between them while they fished. He had come down to the spot where Piney Creek flowed into Sugar Creek and was cheered to see Lester already there, but he hadn’t even had a chance to raise his hand in their usual formal greeting when Lester hooked a huge bass. James had never in his life had a fish on so large, and Lester didn’t have it long, since, after racing all over the long deep hole where the two streams met, it surged completely out of the water on James’s side and got free. He could see it afterward, no more than five feet from him, finning in the current and popping its mouth and gill covers open very wide. Finally it shook its head like someone who’d just caught a heavy punch, and for a second James could even see the red in its eye before it turned downstream and, with one, and then another, muscular twitch of its tail, glided out of sight. “Holy God,” James croaked, “what a fish!”
But Lester merely blushed and without a word brought in his line and inspected his hook.
“I was looking right down on his head,” James said. “I bet he weighed five pounds!”
“Maybe three,” Lester allowed, and then, as if those single-word greetings they had exchanged for nearly a week amounted to a conversation that, at last, could be continued, he added, “I’ve done lost him bout once a week all summer. Can’t do nothin with him.” He turned an even deeper shade of red. “Don’t have the line to give him, and he straightens my hooks out.”
James went up Sugar Creek, where the water wasn’t quite waist deep, and waded across. He had an extra one of his father’s snelled hooks with him, and when he got on Lester’s side, he worried it out of the fabric of his shirt pocket and offered it. “Try this one,” he said, “it’s as strong as you’d ever want.”
Lester glanced at the hook. “Ain’t got the money to buy it off you,” he said.
“Didn’t ask for any,” James said. “It’s way too big for hornyheads anyway.”
But Lester wouldn’t take it for free. He brought a matchbox out of his pocket with six or eight hooks in it that had been scraped free of rust but still looked as old as family heirlooms and told James even two or three of them wouldn’t be a good trade, but James took only one. It had been a little smaller than his father’s hooks, but it turned out to be so soft that even forcing it through the carapace of a grasshopper often bent it out of shape.
“They aren’t trashy,” James said aloud to the dim ceiling of the trailer. Lester wouldn’t even take a silly hook from him without offering something in return. And he’d never been to Lester’s house when Effie didn’t ask him to stay to supper or inquire about his mother. And Roy always inquired about his father, whom he didn’t even know, although out of some strange sense of propriety he never asked about his mother, whom he knew every bit as well as Effie did, having, like Effie, been a schoolmate. “They are not trashy,” he said; they just didn’t have any money or any luck.
But Lester’s father wasn’t off in Pittsburgh, was he? No. Roy Buck was home where he and Lester worked together worming tobacco, drenching cows, hoeing and weeding, splitting wood, and.… Phooey, he thought suddenly, what did that have to do with anything? The trouble with being around Virginia and Clara was that, pretty soon, you began to think like them.
He turned on his side, making up his mind to trouble himself no more about the silly attitude of his cousins. He adjusted himself comfortably on the couch. His mother would be home soon, and he found himself thinking about the ’39 Ford coupe she’d bought from the Kaizer-Fraizer dealer in Cedar Hill. It was gray and had a cream-colored steering wheel and gearshift knob, which looked expensive and reminded him
of mother-of-pearl, and he liked the gearshift on the floorboard rather than on the steering wheel where the later ’39 models had it. He hoped she would let him drive a little, but he doubted it, even though his father had sometimes let him drive the Packard. His father was far braver in such matters than his mother.
But then, as though his mind were strolling a beach and idly picking up pebbles and shells, he wasn’t thinking about the Ford coupe any longer, but about Lester’s collection of wild animals. His raccoon. His pet crow, Black Jack, tethered by one foot to the fence around the barnyard, cocking one outraged eye or the other toward the kernels of corn in his, James’s, palm before the beak came down like a chipping hammer. Lester’s pet fox, who lived mostly under the house and, for all the brains they were supposed to have, never quit trying to chew through the six-foot length of wire that attached his collar to the simple cotton rope. He might have chewed through the rope easily, but he kept gnawing and worrying the wire as close to his neck as he could reach. All these creatures, James thought, did they take the place of friends? Lester’s dog, a little black-and-white fice, was the only one of them who truly was a pet and showed any affection, or wanted any.
Until weariness stole his wits, he pondered Lester’s menagerie, how the fox would tolerate no one’s touch but Lester’s, and even Lester was often bitten. “Just had his eyes open too long by the time I dug him outten his den,” Lester explained. He’d gotten the crow before it could fly and split its tongue with his pocketknife in order to help it talk, but it still had no interest in conversation, although it would call the cows down from the field, call Lester’s dog Skipper, and even call Lester himself, crying, “Lesser? Lesser?” with exactly Effie’s intonation. Maybe, James thought, the raccoon had some affection for Lester, but that was an even bigger shame, since tomorrow Lester was going to have to put it down. It had been too much trouble for too long, killing laying hens, stealing eggs, spoiling the milk the Bucks kept in their springhouse, and eating nearly every ear of sweet corn from the kitchen garden the day before the Bucks might have picked it for their own use, so that Roy had told Lester that very afternoon: “I got to get rid of that animal, son, or you do.”
A moment later, when Osceola appeared to hold a silent counsel with Lester’s animals, James was not surprised. Osceola was dressed in white buckskins, a single eagle feather bound to the ends of each braid of hair lying across his broad chest and down his back, and he was full of a strange, stern compassion. For their part, the animals paid serious attention. The crow blinked and stared at Osceola one eye at a time. The fox pricked its ears forward and tested the breeze with small movements of its nose. And the raccoon watched with its intelligent, glittering eyes, now and again rising off its front feet as though to listen better. When he was through with the animals, Osceola had the same strange, wordless conversation with Lester, only Lester began to shiver violently until, all at once, he wasn’t Lester any longer, but a young, spike-horned buck, who suddenly snorted and leapt out of the company of those animals he had claimed as pets.
“What are you doing lying there in the dark?” James’s mother asked, although he wasn’t in the dark and she was in a nimbus of electric light so bright that he could not look at her. He didn’t know what he was doing there. “It’s nearly eleven o’clock. Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I was thinking,” he told her, his voice full of the burrs of sleep.
“Look at your feet!” she said. “They’re black as pitch. Have you brushed your teeth?” When he shook his head groggily that he hadn’t, she marched off into her bedroom to leave her purse and take off her jacket. “And what do you propose to do when your teeth rot out of your head, and how am I supposed to pay the dentist bill?” She came back into the kitchen, lit the stove, and plopped the teakettle over the eye. “Well I won’t have you waking everybody in the house in the middle of the night.”
She took a saucer from the cupboard, mixed salt and baking soda in it, and set it beside him on the couch. He had swung his feet to the floor and held his head in his hands. “Scrub your teeth with that. Good and hard. Use your finger.”
Still more asleep than awake, he dipped his finger in the mixture and began to rub his teeth and gums with it. It tasted horrible, and he got up to use the kitchen sink.
“No you don’t, young man,” she told him. “You know better than to spit in the sink. Go outside.” She gave him a glass of water. “Why can’t I count on you to look after yourself?” she asked as he went out the door. “I just can’t be around to mother you every minute, to make sure you brush your teeth and clean …”
Holding the glass of water against his chest with his forearm, he shut the door on her harangue and sat down on the step of the trailer. It was cold outside. As blinded by the darkness as he had been by the light, it was a while before he could make out the saucer he was holding, if not the hand that held it; and he set his water down, dipped his finger in, and began to scrub his teeth and gums with the revolting mixture until the pressure in his bladder became unbearable, and he set the saucer aside too, and went off by the fence to relieve himself. Shivering beneath the cold glitter of the stars, he hoped she would not catch him urinating so close to the trailer. He dreaded going back inside, but after he’d rinsed his mouth until the water was gone, there was nothing else to do. Besides, it was so cold his skin had shrunk and felt way too small for him.
“Wash your face and hands and those filthy feet before you go to bed,” she told him and pointed out a pan of warm water and a soapy washcloth sitting by the couch. She was in her nightgown and bathrobe, and he was aware of her studying him while he scrubbed his face and neck. When he started on his feet, the washcloth and the water in the pan turned grayish black.
“I hate to ask when you last took a bath,” she said.
He said nothing, rinsed the washcloth the best he could, and got up to empty the pan of water outside.
“I’ll do that,” she told him. “You get ready for bed.”
While she was gone he stripped down to his shorts, tipped up the couch, got out his folded sheet and blanket and his pillow, and arranged them much more neatly than usual. She was gone so long, he figured she’d walked all the way to the end of the cow pasture merely to dash out the water; and when she came back, it was true, her house slippers and the hem of her bathrobe were soaked with dew, and he felt a familiar, painful tug of guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to go to sleep. I only lay down to think a minute.”
“I just expect you to look after yourself a little,” she said. “You’re nearly grown, and I’m working like a nigger and can’t look after you every single minute. Is that too much to ask?”
“No,” he said.
She went off into her bedroom and slid the thin partition shut behind her. It was as though her disappointment and anger had left an odor in his part of the trailer like spent gunpowder.
After many minutes, he said, “Good night,” across the darkness; and after an undetermined length of time during which he hardly dared to breathe, she said, “Good night,” in return.
MADELINE TALLY
Anger, like a low-grade fever, stayed with her through her prayers. Still, she patiently named the members of her family and asked that they be blessed, and she asked a special blessing for herself and her son, and, out of habit or guilt or hope or some martyred effort to be fair—she didn’t herself know precisely why—her husband. But when she had finished, she was astonished to find herself thinking immediately about Leslie Johnson with whom she’d had dinner for the second time that week. Leslie’s starched white cuffs, his three-piece suits, and his charming manners popped into her head so easily, they had to have been there all along, hidden behind her anger at James and even behind her prayers. She’d barely known there was a Leslie Johnson when she’d been a schoolgirl because he was two years younger, and he still seemed boyish to her in spite of his prematurely gray hair. But he’d become a lawyer, for goodness sake, and was quite successful
in a small-town sort of way. And since his wife had died of cancer and he was childless, he was utterly free. While she, on the other hand.… She lay perfectly still, looking up at the ceiling for a moment before she got abruptly out of bed, snatched back the partition, and made her way to James’s couch where she knelt and gathered him into her arms.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she told him. “Momma is just tired and cranky.” She wished with all her heart that it were true, and she squeezed him hard as though to make it true. But a stubborn resentment had taken up residence in her and couldn’t be dislodged, and it frightened her and made her sad to think she felt it in James too. But maybe she only imagined it. Maybe he was responding as well as his small boy’s shocked dignity and confusion would allow.
JAMES TALLY
James carried the little falling block, single-shot .22 rifle and a spade, and Lester carried the raccoon. Or rather, it rode his shoulders, its clever black hands sometimes braced against the slope of Lester’s chest or back, sometimes holding him about the neck.
It was a long climb to the top of the ridge behind the Bucks’ house, but the moment they got there, Lester tilted his shoulders so the raccoon dropped softly to the earth; and then, as though it were all one motion, he took the rifle out of James’s hands, chambered a shell, and shot the raccoon just behind the eye. The rifle didn’t make much noise, just a flat crack, not loud, but the raccoon went down on its side, shivering as though it were cold before it began to kick aimlessly and endlessly, it seemed, although probably only seconds passed. “There, you son of a bitch,” Lester said, “I hope you’re satisfied,” and he sat down on the ground with his long bony hands drooping between his knees and the rifle abandoned beside him.
Somehow James hadn’t believed any of this would happen. He’d showed up with the fine idea that they could take the raccoon a long way off somewhere and just leave it, but it turned out that Lester had already tried that more than once that summer, and the raccoon always got back. Even when they’d started climbing the mountain, James had been convinced something would come along to keep them from doing what they had clearly set out to do. But now he found himself staring at the tiny but irreparable hole just behind the raccoon’s eye and the dark stain leaking into the earth under its head, and he sank down to the ground too.
