Backland Graces; Four Short Novels

by Hal Zina Bennett

  “How much?” Cutter asked, taking a seat at the foldout couch at the back of the camper.

  “A hundred fifty a month.”

  “We’ll barter. When I’m back on my feet, I mean.”

  “Okay. When you’re back on your feet.”

  “I got some money coming. Just need to get the wood down off the hill. We got seventeen cords up there, easy. Will bring us more’n a couple grand. I’ll cut and split, too.”

  Rocko reached into his back pocket, produced his wallet and handed Cutter a twenty dollar bill. “This’ll tide you over for food.”

  “I still say, what d’you get out of this?” Cutter turned the bill over and over in his hand, as if it might hold the answer.

  “Way I see it, you got no choice. Why even ask?” Rocko turned away and slipped silently out of the RV, easing the metal door closed behind him.

  Three days later Rocko gave in and drove Cutter up to the condemned cabin. The county had strung up yellow tape all around the area, woven through the trees and underbrush, from the highway all the way down to the lake. The tape had Danger Hazardous Area Do Not Enter printed on it over and over again. The two men ducked under the tape where it crossed the path, then walked down to what had been the front door, now boarded over with a large sheet of new plywood. Rocko addressed the plywood with a crowbar, prying it back and out of the way enough for Cutter to duck through with a flashlight.

  The building groaned and trembled as Cutter moved around inside. Rocko saw the corner of the cabin suddenly drop an inch or two as Cutter walked over to that side. He called a warning. Cutter called back saying he felt it. A few minutes later he emerged, dragging a soiled duffel bag filled with his junk and a small canister wrapped in brown paper tucked in the sling on top of his injured arm. Cutter stood back as Rocko set the plywood back in place over the door.

  Rocko did not know exactly why he’d agree to this chancy mission except for Cutter’s story about the ashes. He’d slept on the idea for two nights and pictured the canister of ashes in there when the building finally gave up its tenuous hold and tumbled down the hill. He hadn’t known Cutter’s father but it didn’t seem right his ashes were in there or that they’d go down, unceremoniously, with the cabin.

  On the way back home in the truck, Cutter kept the ashes in his lap, the duffel bag between his knees. He reached in, took out a frame holding some kind of document, wiping the face of it with a pair of jockey shorts pulled from the bag. He held up the document for Rocko to read. It was from some university back east. Cutter was grinning ear to ear, his big teeth reminding Rocko of a horse reaching out to bite. As the truck bounced along, Rocko couldn’t read the date or what the certificate was for but it looked significant and Rocko was impressed. All he could read was the name, printed in large letters: Charles Walter Doobey.

  “Your dad...” Rocko began, stopping mid-sentence since he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to ask.

  Cutter shook his head, sighed heavily, then looked down, patting the top of the canister like it was a whining puppy. “He did his best by me. Never quite got it.” After a second or two he looked up, grinning again like he’d made some great discovery. “Neither did I!”

  Weeks passed and Cutter was gaining the use of his hand, if not yet his whole arm. He hitchhiked down to the city, 65 miles away, to a hand specialist and physical therapist. He had money now. His partner had sold all the wood and Cutter was getting his piece of the action, whatever that was. He paid his hundred and fifty dollars rent and a month’s back rent, paid an extra thirty for utilities, and appeared to be eating right and regaining his strength. Rocko never saw him drunk, though the fact was he didn’t see much of him at all. Cutter stayed pretty much in the RV except for his appointments in the city and his brief forays to the convenience store a half mile away.

  In September, the cast came off and Cutter asked if he could borrow the rowboat. The physical therapist said the exercise would be good for his arm. At first he kept pretty close to the dock, having to lean toward his right when he rowed to compensate for the stiffness of atrophied muscles on that side. But within three weeks he was doing pretty well, rowing out to the center of the lake and back two or three times a day. As the days passed, he showed less and less tendency to favor his injured arm.

  He looked good. Shaved often, even got a haircut and wore clean clothes. Angelina told Rocko that Cutter was becoming a different man. If he found this of any interest, Rocko didn’t reveal his feelings. She’d been frightened of Cutter at first, having him so close to the house and all, but now it was something of a comfort knowing he was there. She knew if she gave a holler there’d be someone there to answer. Though she didn’t question Rocko’s judgment, she wondered what he’d had in mind, bringing Cutter there.

  One night, with Rocko at his monthly staff meeting at the field office, Angelina was alone after dark when she heard a knock at the front door. Cutter stood there on the porch. Under the yellow bug light he looked jaundiced and cadaverous. He had a manila envelope in his hand and smiled pleasantly when she greeted him.

  “Brought you the rent and utilities in advance,” he said, handing her a clump of rumpled bills. “I know it’s not due for a couple weeks but I’ll be heading out soon. I’m leaving you this, too, for your kindness to me. I appreciate it. It was my father’s.” He handed her the manila envelope. Taking it from him, she saw it was sealed.

  When he was gone and she’d locked the door, she pulled up a chair at the kitchen table, sat down, and opened the envelope. Tearing it open with her fingers she accidentally wrinkled the single sheet of paper that it contained. She slipped it out, smoothing out the corner she’d damaged with the heel of her palm. The writing was titled Lakeside Property and the paper was yellowed with age. It was dated 1967. For a moment she thought it might be an old real estate write-up, maybe for Cutter’s cabin across the lake. Then she saw that it was a poem, carefully handwritten with a ballpoint pen. She could tell it was a ballpoint because there were places the ball had skipped, leaving grooves in the paper where lines should have been, making some of the letters appear rather ghostly and incomplete. She wasn’t much for poetry but after reading it to herself a couple times, and feeling suddenly lonely in the house, she read it aloud:

  She inhabits the lake—not frog, fish or turtle

  but a being even less than water, less even than air,

  less even than Mayflies recently hatched.

  Taking flight with her sorrows, her keening

  wakens dragonflies; dark bi-wings carve cryptograms

  against a green, leafy backdrop. Her wings sculpt

  wisdom learned from air, learned from water,

  learned from her own blood, never spilt.

  I’m sad not knowing her language. Deaf to her message,

  straining to listen, I still long to taste life’s musk again,

  savoring love’s welcome for no good reason. Again.

  There’s a legend about this place...was a beautiful maiden,

  whose slain lover called her to his side, and she was willing.

  But jealous gods held her back, could not sacrifice their own

  pleasure for hers. In grief she was transformed, granted

  a wilder loveliness. A graceful white doe now, she stands

  each morning and drinks at my water’s edge, amidst dragonflies

  and voices. I wonder if, as a golden carp, she might have swum

  closer to her beloved and found him in this underworld.

  Angelina thought about going out to thank Cutter and ask him questions about the poem. She’d tell him that even though she didn’t halfway understand it, she thought it was beautiful. It was magic the way the words sounded like music. She wanted to know why Cutter’s father had written the poem. Was he a real poet who had a book in the library? She would be proud to go there, to the library, check out the book and take it home, maybe find the poem Cutter gave her, printed right there on one of the pages. But she knew she could no
t go out to talk with Cutter. Something about him still made her uneasy, too uneasy to be left alone with him in that intimate way her questions would make things.

  About nine, Cutter walked past the house and down to the dock. Angelina got up to take a look. Cutter was carrying something. It looked like a bait can and she wondered if he had taken to fishing at night. She hoped not. She had an idea it might be breaking a law and Rocko would certainly take him to task on that. Cutter got into the boat and rowed out. Near the center of the lake he stopped and did something with the can, apparently emptying its contents. Then he rowed back to the dock and locked up the boat as he’d been told to do from the first day he borrowed it. The key hung on a hook under the third step of the stairway back up to the house. She watched him kneel down, bend over and replace it.

  She ducked out of sight as he came slowly up the walkway, past the house and back to the RV. Angelina went to bed after that, watching a rerun of Friends as she waited for Rocko to return. She intended to maybe tell him about the poem and Cutter’s night trip out to the center of the lake. But she fell asleep and it was the volunteer fire siren up the hill that awakened her, long before Rocko came back.

  The room glowed with the bright orange of undulating flames as she looked out the window. Flames rose fifty or sixty feet into the sky, directly across the lake. Flashing red lights of the pumper strobed eerily through the trees. It almost looked like the light was slicing through branches and foliage, dodging in and out of the woods as the penetrating beam spun around atop the cab of the big truck. Rocko would be over there fighting the fire. She prayed it would not spread to the trees and dry underbrush. The forests were littered with dry tinder, a disaster waiting to happen. She saw the structure that had been Cutter’s cabin standing out like a giant torch amongst the trees and then, suddenly, the whole thing dropped, scattering burning rubble down the hill, all the way to the water’s edge. The drama ended, as abruptly as a firework display on the Fourth of July.

  Rocko returned smelling of smoke and sweat. His face was drawn with exhaustion and maybe pain, though he would never complain. He showered and came out with a towel wrapped around his waist.

  “Was it bad?” she asked.

  “One less nuisance,” he answered. “You seen Cutter tonight?” He dropped the towel to the floor and stood naked for a moment in the dim light before slipping on the clean boxer shorts she’d put out for him. She’d find the towel there in the morning, exactly where he dropped it. She’d carry it still wet into the laundry room and toss it in the hamper. As he crawled into bed she braced herself against rolling over to his side, his weight momentarily causing the mattress to tilt. She sometimes longed for him to hold her but tonight the thought of touching him pained her.

  “He brought by the rent,” she answered. “Aren’t his lights on?”

  “Place is empty,” he said with a sigh, laying back on the pillow and pulling the covers up around his neck. “He’s gone. Did a good job cleaning up. Got to give him that.”

  In the morning Angelina rose early to scrub the little bathroom, the kitchen area, the refrigerator, and the floor of the RV. When she came back to the house, Rocko was still sleeping. She picked up the poem Cutter had given her, folded the paper in half and tucked it into the back of her accounts book.

  Angelina plucked the poem from the book and read it from time to time in the years after that. She wondered where Cutter had gone, and wondered if other men, maybe even her own husband, carried around treasures like this in their hobnail hearts. ~

  Throwaways

  The letter was short and barely literate:

  “Dear Serra, I am very sorrey for the pain and mizry I have cause yr life,” the letter began. “Im hopping when I git to Harbortun witch well be 2 or 3 wks you can find it in your hart that we can set down and talk like 2 adults that loved one another as sheer as the blu moon rizes in a evning sky…”

  It was written on letterhead stationery from a place in Wyoming called the Roundup Motel. Beside the name of the place was the silhouette of a reared up pony pawing the air. The address had been inked out with a ballpoint pen that had gouged a small hole in the paper from going back and forth across it too many times.

  Sarah stared at the scrawled signature a little ways up from the bottom of the paper. She couldn’t be exactly sure what the signature said—maybe Jed or Ted, maybe neither. As for the last name, it was just swirls and loops. It might have said just about anything. After studying the signature for a long time, she decided what it said wasn’t a person’s name at all. It was a place or maybe the description of a place—Ten Barns—except Barns seemed to be spelled with an “e,” like Barnes, the name. She didn’t know what to think of that.

  Who had she loved whose names matched up with that scrawl, she wondered. At 41 she hadn’t been a raging slut, as Mitch, her stepbrother, called her when he learned she had sex with his best friend Billy Myers, way back in high school. But neither had she been what Aunt Melda called a goody-good. With her stepbrother long gone, working the pipeline up in Alaska or maybe Canada, and aunt Melda dead and gone for seven years, Sarah no longer had those battles to fight.

  But she had to wonder, “Who has loved me as sure as the blue moon rises in the evening sky?” That much she knew for sure. Nobody. There had been five men in her life. Three of them she’d taken to her bed. Only Barret, or “Bear,” as he preferred to be called, ever gave her any indication that she meant a damn thing to him, other than to get what he wanted or needed, and since Bear was still around there was no need for him to write a letter though she doubted he’d ever be so inclined anyway. “Sex buddies,” he called their relationship. When they did it, he also said he loved her and took her out for breakfast the next day.

  When she showed Kelly the letter at the Eagle’s Nest that night, her friend said, “It’s your old man.”

  “What old man? I never been married.”

  “Not that kind. Your old man old man.”

  “Aw, shit!”

  “Oh, yeah, that one.”

  “I never think about having that kind of old man at all,” Sarah said, “except I must have. Nobody ever said nothing about him, not even Aunty. Can’t imagine what he’d want.”

  Kelly shrugged, reached across the bar and picked up Sarah’s empty glass. “You want another?”

  Sarah shook her head. “I’m thinking, what if he showed up around town? I wouldn’t even know him, or him me.”

  “Unless you’re the spittin’ image.”

  “Unlikely.” Sarah gave this some thought. “Wouldn’t you think?”

  “How many years it’s been?”

  “Ladies don’t tell their ages,” Sarah said, grinning.

  “That long, huh?”

  A week passed, then another and another. Sarah pretty much forgot about the letter, figuring it for just another love lie. Why not? That old song was a broken record, repeating the same old lines until you wished someone would reach up and change the groove.

  In July the tourists came in droves. Sarah worked the desk at Pine Acres from 7 AM until three in the afternoon, when John Bell came in with his wife Ella to take over. With the afternoon off like that, Sarah got a dollar’s worth of bait out of the cooler, went down to the fishing dock and usually brought in a couple of trout for dinner. She gutted and cleaned them down there and walked up the hill to her cabin. She cooked the two fish in a buttered cast iron skillet shoved under the broiler with plenty of salt and sometimes a dash of cider vinegar. She’d learned to do it that way three years before, helping the cook at the lodge before it burned down.

  Arvin, who managed the Eagle’s Nest in the summer, asked Sarah to come in Thursdays through Saturdays to help out, which she did. When she got there at 8:30 p.m. on the money, just as she’d been asked to do, the place was packed. People were already drunk or well on the way to it.

  There was a new guy singing when she came in that night, him and two others—one guy on fender base and another on guitar. They we
re all pretty old to be still on the road like that, looking like they should be at home, setting in front of the TV. But they were good. The guy singing sat at the piano, silvery-gray-haired and semi-handsome in a rugged, road-weary sort of way, singing blues like she’d never heard before. His husky voice came from down in his chest, hollow sounding, like it was echoing up from a stone cavern. He looked at no-one when he sang, at least not that you could tell through the narrow slits of his eyes. His silvery-gray hair was pulled back tight over the sides of his head, tied in back with an age-blackened leather thong and hanging down in a pony tail that reached a foot below his collar.

  The guy was damn good. They all were, playing blues in a Western Swing style that she’d heard only a couple times before. His music had a rhythm that she associated with old style country. Ordinarily, she didn’t like it much but she liked how the piano player made it bluesy. As she put on her apron and took her place bussing dishes behind the bar, she started feeling the rhythms of the fender base and the piano player’s deep voice all through her body, moving her inside but not outside so that you’d notice much.

  “When’d he get here?” she asked Kelly, who was clearing the foam from a new keg she’d just hooked up.

  “Came in this morning,” Kelly said. “He’s staying with Arvin up to the house, him and the other two. They got an old Winnebago parked up there. Seem like decent sorts.”

  “He say anything to you?”

  “Say anything?”

  “He’s the right age and all. You notice any semblance?”