Kind-Hearted Woman

by Spaeth, Janet

  George returned with two large buckets. “I’ve got the stuff in here to take care of the skunk stink. Take him to the old cattle tank.”

  The watering tank was empty, except for two grasshoppers and a rather bored-looking toad hiding in the scattering of leaves.

  “Come on, boy,” George said to the dog. “You know the routine. In.”

  The dog jumped into the tank, startling the grasshoppers and the toad into activity. He stopped his whimpering and watched them curiously before trying to catch them.

  Colin rescued the creatures from Bruno’s paws and set them free.

  “This isn’t the first time this has happened,” George said as he emptied the buckets of two large bottles, a box, and a carton of soap. He dumped the first bottle in one bucket and shook in the contents of the box and stirred it with his hand.

  Then he swished the bar of soap through the mixture until it was foamy. He repeated the entire process with the second bucket. “Bruno is a two-bucket dog,” he explained. “Now to get this smell out. This ought to do it.”

  “What goes into it?” Colin asked, leaning over to see.

  “It’s truly the kitchen sink potion, except that Lolly would never allow me to do this in the kitchen. Heinz white vinegar. Arm & Hammer baking soda. And good old Fels-Naptha soap.”

  “And it works?” Colin watched as Bruno sat in the tank, letting George wash him.

  “Sure. The key,” George said, as he scrubbed the dog with the concoction, “is to get to him right away, before the stink has a chance to set. Skunk’ll do that. If you don’t clean him up then and there. . .” George shook his head sadly at the thought.

  “Why do you do it in the tank? Why not just on the ground?” Colin asked. This was fascinating.

  “Because there’s a water connection here, and it usually works. It lets me rinse him—” George lifted his hand to point to the pipe, and Bruno seized the chance.

  With one leap, he slid free—his fur slicked with the soap—and ran away. Colin started to chase after him, but George called him back. “He’s just going to the river. He’ll swim in it for a while to get the soap out.” He chuckled. “Can’t say that he’ll smell much better, though. The river is a bit heady this time of year. And speaking of heady, we’d better lather up, too, or Lolly’ll have us eating by the barn for the next week or two.”

  The two of them used the rest of the compound and washed themselves off, even sudsing up their shirts and dungarees.

  “Better?” Colin asked, taking a whiff of his shirtsleeve. He couldn’t tell if the odor was gone or not.

  “Just in case, I think we’d better head down to the river and wash off. Lolly won’t want us in the house reeking like this. Of course, after being in the river we won’t smell like roses, but it’s better than this.”

  Plus they’d be able to check on Bud, Colin thought.

  Lolly was coming out of the house as they walked past, a load of laundry in her hands. “Where are you fellows going?”

  “The river,” George called back.

  “Did you get Bruno cleaned up?” she asked. “You know, I spend more on vinegar and soda and Fels-Naptha on that dog than I do on the rest of us. You’re going down to the river to rinse off, I hope, before you bring those clothes back in here. You going to go fishing, too?”

  George looked at Colin and for the first time that day, grinned. “What a great idea. Let’s grab the poles and see if we can’t catch us something.”

  “You know,” Colin said as they got the poles and a pail from the barn, “I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t done this before.”

  George chuckled. “If you’d seen Bud and me try to fish, you’d understand. We’re farmers, not fishermen. You asked if I ever take any time off. This is about as close as I get to not doing anything. The fish and I have a deal. I don’t bother them and they don’t bother me.”

  “You don’t bait your hook?”

  “Oh, it’s baited but the fish don’t care. They either ignore it or eat it right off the hook.”

  After a quick discussion about what kind of bait was best—George nixed the idea of worms, claiming that dough balls made from bread were just as good since they weren’t going to catch anything anyway, so why sacrifice a perfectly good worm’s life?—they made a trip into the house to get some bread. Lolly gave them the heel of the loaf from the day before, explaining she had a fresh loaf in the oven, and the two men headed down to the river.

  Bud was indeed at the riverside. He’d been in the water already, swimming and working off a head of steam appar-ently, for he was now sprawled at the shoreline, his shirt and pants still a bit damp. Bruno was splashing happily in the river.

  Bud scrambled to his feet when he saw them. “The dog found himself a skunk, huh? When I saw him tearing through the trees, lathered up like that, I figured he’d either finally gone entirely mad or met himself a skunk.”

  George looked at him steadily before speaking. “You ran away from us.”

  Bud shook his head and studied his bare toes that dug into the wet ground at the edge of the river. “I ran away from myself.”

  “Did it work?” George asked him.

  Colin began to step back from them, to move out of this very personal conversation, but George touched his arm. “Stay. You have a stake in this, too.”

  “No,” Bud said. “No matter where I went, I was there. I wasn’t getting away from anything. Not that I went anywhere anyway. Just here. But I thought about going somewhere, like Colin did. But I’d still be with me. So I decided to stay. I mean, I was here anyway.”

  George nodded seriously, but Colin thought he saw a twinkle in the older brother’s eyes. “I can’t believe it, but I think that made sense in a Bud sort of way.”

  “Yup,” Bud said. “I swam for a while, prayed a little bit, and then I sort of drowsed off.”

  “Well, we came here to go fishing,” Colin said.

  “Did you bring me a pole, too?” Bud asked.

  George tossed him one, and soon the three of them were sitting on the ramshackle pier, lines in the water. Overhead in the trees, a cluster of birds chatted with each other, and the leaves rustled in the faint breeze against a cloudless sky.

  The river made little splashing noises when it spilled onto the shore, and Bruno crashed through the underbrush in search of something interesting.

  Sometimes, Colin thought, there was nothing as com-panionable as silence. It was when people chose not to speak that was telling. He’d known men who would have been unable to tolerate this stillness, who would have found it necessary to fill it up with words.

  But silence wasn’t a void, not always, and definitely not now. Bud and George’s acceptance—and apparent appreciation—of the hush identified them as two who were in touch with their environment and who were able to find harmony in nature.

  It was, Colin knew, a rare gift.

  Nobody spoke of the thing that Bud had done. Perhaps this was the best way to manage it, Colin thought. Repent in silence, and forgive in silence. Bud certainly seemed a bit more sedate in his behavior. Perhaps he had learned something.

  “I should fix this pier,” George said, “but for as little as we use it, it seems like such a waste of time.”

  “It’s beautiful down here,” Colin said, “so peaceful.”

  Lolly scrambled down the incline to the shore and stopped suddenly. “Oh, you’re all here.” She had a fishing pole in her hand, and she stood stock-still, her eyes locked on Bud. “I didn’t know—”

  The moment hung awkwardly, the pain the family felt spread open and revealed in front of Colin.

  Without saying more, she sat beside Colin. She pinched her nose as Bruno joyfully came over to see her, and snuffled around her. “Oh, I can still smell skunk on you! Get away from me.”

  “Here, boy.” George threw a stick into the
river and Bruno raced after it. “Sorry, Lolly. I’ll keep him out of the house until he’s not so awful-smelling.”

  “You do that. That mongrel’s never going to learn about skunks, I’m afraid.”

  “He had this one in his mouth, and he brought it over to us,” Colin explained.

  “Wonderful. I gather it was still alive?”

  “Quite.”

  He watched as she rolled a piece of bread into a ball and stuck it on her hook.

  “You fish, too?” he asked.

  “She’s the best of all of us,” Bud declared, and Colin breathed easier as she smiled at her brother. Forgiveness came easily to this family, but then, he thought, with a brother like Bud, she probably got a lot of practice.

  Bruno came out of the water and settled in the shade—upwind, Colin noted with some amusement.

  There was something about fishing that brought people together, he thought. They sat, quietly, letting their hooks sit in the water until whatever bait was on it had surely gone, but not caring. It was being together that mattered.

  “Lolly, I’m sorry. I really am,” Bud said at last in a low voice. “I act without thinking a lot, and I say things without thinking, too. Actually sometimes I think that I don’t think much.”

  They laughed.

  “Bud, I do wish that you wouldn’t be so impetuous, but that’s part of what makes you who you are,” she said. “Some-day, I think you’ll find a way to harness all that energy you have, and it’ll be wonderful; but right now, there are days when I could throttle you.”

  “There are days when I could throttle myself,” Bud said.

  This was the right place for him to be, Colin thought as his line floated in the water—at this very moment, in this very spot, with these very people. God was good.

  He knew he should think about returning to New York City, to take his place back in the world of commerce; but now, sitting on a pier, dangling a line in the Minnesota River on a late summer afternoon seemed much more important. The broken links in his memory were almost all mended now, and the spiritual quest that had sent him on his way was nearly complete.

  Yet he couldn’t bear to leave. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

  “This is one of the grand days of summer,” Lolly said. “I can feel it in the air off the water. It’s like the river is telling us to enjoy this, to store up this warmth, because it’s getting to the end. Too soon it’ll be September.”

  September! How long had he been there?

  As if reading his mind, she mused, “And to think that it’s been just three months, hasn’t it, since Colin arrived at our doorstep.”

  Bud snorted. “Arrived at our fence post, you mean.”

  Colin shifted uneasily. This conversation had to happen eventually, but he was not looking forward to it at all. He led into it as obliquely as he could. Maybe that would make it easier, although he doubted it.

  He took a piece of bread and kneaded it into a ball to be used for bait. He dropped it into the pail and began another one. That one joined the first, and then another and another, and soon the small pail began to fill up.

  This was not something he wanted to discuss, but this was as good a time as any, with all of them sitting in the sunlight on the river, fishing poles in their hands.

  “You three saved my life.”

  Bruno left his spot in the shade and trotted over and plopped at his side, dropping a soggy offering of some kind of lake weed at Colin’s feet. The smell of the skunk was dissipating a bit, so maybe the dog hadn’t received a direct hit after all. Colin reached over and patted the dog’s side. “Sorry. You four. Without you, I’d have probably died back there on the road behind your farm.”

  “It was an honor,” George said.

  “An honor?” Colin stopped rubbing Bruno’s stomach and faced George. “Hardly! I’ve been a dreadful inconvenience. We all know that these times are making everyone’s pocketbook thinner by the day, and yet you took me in, and if you’ve complained, you haven’t done it where I’ve heard you.”

  Lolly jiggled her fishing line in the sunlit water. “There’s no point in complaining. We don’t much believe in it.”

  Bud snorted. “Remember that the next time you whine about my leaving my socks on the kitchen floor.”

  “Well, socks on the kitchen floor would make anyone complain. That’s unsanitary,” Lolly responded.

  “Like someone’s going to eat off the floor. Even Bruno doesn’t do that, do you, big boy?” Bud nudged the dog, who opened one eye slightly before going back to sleep.

  “Bruno would eat anything, anywhere, and you know it,” George interjected. “The only thing the mutt won’t eat is rocks, and even that’s just a matter of time. He chewed the handle right off my toolbox last week. And today I had to pull one of your socks out of his mouth. I don’t know where he found it.”

  “On the kitchen floor! I told you. It’s disgusting. They smell, for one thing; and for another thing, if you don’t pick them up, I have to. And that’s nasty. I have to touch your stinky socks with the hands I use to make our dinner, and—”

  “Enough!” George thundered. Bruno scrambled to his feet, nearly knocking over the makeshift bait can, and barked. “Bud, just put your socks in the laundry like any other human being. Lolly isn’t your servant. And Lolly, don’t pick them up any more. Just leave them there until he takes care of them.”

  “But he won’t. And I need to be in the kitchen to cook.”

  “Then kick them out of the way. . .”

  Colin let the argument flow around him like the waters of the river. He knew that they weren’t really angry. In fact, it was satisfying, being in a family—

  He broke off the thought before it could go any further. This wasn’t his family, not really.

  He wanted them to be.

  The idea struck him with the force of a locomotive. He wanted to be part of this family.

  He looked at them, one by one.

  Bud’s energy. George’s stalwartness. Lolly’s—Lolly’s loveliness.

  She was beautiful, but not in a big city sort of way. She wasn’t the kind to go smearing on makeup or dolling up her hair with fake waves or color. What she had came from within.

  Was it the result of her unshakable faith? Was it the magic that made her eyes sparkle, far beyond what any cosmetic could supply?

  And that was one of the reasons he didn’t want to leave Valley Junction. He’d wanted to make his life matter, to have meaning, and now, as he watched the sunlight play across Lolly’s hair like dappled gold, he wondered how much further he’d have to go.

  Maybe he’d already found it, and he was so jaded he didn’t really see it?

  “Pull it in! Pull it in! You’ve got something! Oh, for crying out loud, let me have it!” Bud reached across him and snatched the fishing pole and began reeling like mad. “Oh, this has got to be a big one. It’s really fighting.”

  “A big boot, probably.” Colin stood and cheered as Bud fought with whatever was on the other end.

  Bud’s face grew red with the effort, as he walked backward, trying to work the line, until the pole dipped almost to the water’s surface. Suddenly it sprang back, nearly knocking Bud into a startled Bruno, who barked furiously at the empty fishing line and the water.

  “Well, that was fun,” Bud said as he got back to his feet.

  “Fun to watch, too,” George said. “If I were a wagering man, I’d say that you were snared on a log in there. The lower the water gets, the more debris we’ll be catching.”

  “We won’t think about that,” Colin declared. “For the record, that was the biggest fish ever caught in Minnesota, and it merely broke free at the last moment.”

  “A log fish,” Lolly said.

  He grinned at her. “I never said what kind of record it was, did I?”

  Bruno spied someth
ing in the river. His nose quivered, his front paw lifted, and his tail raised like a flag. For a moment he was motionless, and then he shot off, splashing into the water and flailing and spattering until Colin tensed, getting ready to go in after him.

  Suddenly the dog emerged and trotted victoriously over to George. A catfish almost as long as he was flapped wildly in his jaws and then fell silent.

  “Crazy dog caught a fish!” Bud said. “We can’t catch any-thing with fishing lines and hooks and baits, and this mutt dives in and catches a giant fish with his teeth. Where’s the fairness in that?”

  “Come on,” George said, taking the fish from the dog. “This was your fish, Bud. It’s still got the hook in its mouth. Bruno just brought it in for you. I guess we’re having catfish for dinner. Lolly, we’ll see you and Colin later.”

  “Who’s going to clean this stupid fish? I’m not going to,” Bud began as they headed toward the house. “How come I always have to do the dirty jobs around here? Why don’t Lolly and Colin have to—”

  His voice faded away as they walked through the trees lining the river.

  “There’s that complaining thing again,” Lolly said. “That boy’s mouth goes all the time.”

  “He’s a good kid. Energetic.” He picked up the fishing pole with the broken line and rewound it.

  Lolly laughed. “Definitely energetic. I wish I had even a particle of his liveliness. I feel like a slug around him sometimes.”

  “I feel like a slug today, that’s for sure. Hey, Lolly. Look over there, toward the west. Doesn’t it look like there might be some weather coming our way?”

  “Could be. Oh, some rain would be so nice. Maybe this heat would break then.”

  “Well, until then, I’m going into the water.” He slid off the pier and, bending his knees, let himself sink up to his chin. George was right. The river was quite shallow there. Now that he wasn’t on the platform any more, he could see the watermarks on pilings. They were mute testimony to the falling levels.

  He pulled himself back out and sprawled on the pier, letting the sun dry his clothes on him. “I could stay here forever.”

  “Then do.”