“It’s his mule, his gun, and his property,” Pops replied. “I don’t have much say in how Sen Budget lives his life, but I can’t respect any man who’s careless with a firearm.”
The shock of the incident made my throat feel crowded with cotton. And today, as I think about that morning in Beaver Hollow and lay it alongside the rest of the summer, it accords to a deeper and necessary understanding of the whys and hows of everything that came after.
Chapter 10
THE PARADOX OF PENNING CATS
We rode out to Route 27 and back toward town. “All five of the Budget brothers were laid off from the mines,” Pop explained. They’ve been getting by cutting wood, doing odd jobs, and taking charity. Sen wasn’t prepared to carry a lame mule on the family income. Besides, that mule will feed them for a month. I don’t spite him for killing the animal; I just objected to him endangering you and subjecting his family to it. Tilroy raised that mule from a colt. It was like a family pet.”
I thought about how the mule seemed to take death in a plodding, deliberate way; how the shot broke the window across the yard; how Pops confronted Budget with a rage I’d never seen in him; and how the dying man in the room looked at me, pleading for something to interrupt his own plodding, deliberate death. I shook my head, like the shot mule, to rid my mind of death thoughts. “Is mule meat any good?” I asked.
“Let’s hope we never have to find out.”
We followed the road around Medgar toward the opposing line of mountains on the eastern side of town. Abandoned mine shafts spotted the hill grades, and the rusted remains of the underground economy were laid out in front like the rejected toys from a family of giants—a four-foot-high electric locomotive attached to a line of low-slung hopper cars, its tracks worming down into a mine shaft; ventilating fans the size of jet engines next to two thick iron hoops of a rotary dumper; a dead Joy loader with one arm missing; idled conveyors running to rusted corrugated structures, then snaking up to the hillside shafts like felled dominoes.
After a while Pops broke the silence. “Next stop, Fink’s Hollow.”
“Fink’s Hollow? I know a kid named Buzzy Fink. Think he lives up there?”
“I know he does. Buzzy’s grandfather is who we’re seeing. We’ve got to vaccinate some animals against rabies. A rabid fox attacked a cat and the cat tried to bring down a horse at full trot. The cat’s dead, but the horse and the rest of the barn animals need shots. How do you know Buzzy Fink?” He glanced from the road.
“I met him in the woods couple weeks ago. I got bit by a spider and he made me a poultice.”
“Really?” Pops said, looking at me with bemused eyebrows.
We rumbled along Route 27, then turned right, then left on Route 32. Soon after, Pops took a sudden left onto an unmarked dirt road that disappeared into the thick woods.
We followed the slow grade up the hollow, occasionally crossing the bolting creek that split the middle. Unlike in Beaver Hollow, the woods and gullies were clean of hillbilly garbage. I asked Pops about it.
“The Finks are poor, but they’re proud poor. Esmer runs the hollow hard. Kids stay in school; they truck their garbage out once a week. These are solid people.”
We pulled into a semicircle of twelve trim, self-built houses, some with siding, some with plywood, set around a large old log cabin as points are placed around a compass. Behind the log cabin was a rank of barns, pens, and miscellaneous farm equipment. An idle pig nursed an old corn husk, claiming acceptable shade under an old piece of plywood stacked against the side of the house. In the corner of the low-ceilinged porch, smoking a cob pipe and rocking in his homemade rocker, was Esmer Fink, patriarch of the hollow, pushing onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels.
Pops and I got out of the truck. He pulled his leather case from behind the cab. “Afternoon, Esmer,” he said as we climbed the worn wooden steps, fitting our feet into the scooped runners.
“Taint afternoon yet,” Esmer said.
“Morning, then.”
“Mornin back,” Esmer responded, rocking onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels. His face was pleated and pinched from eighty-three years in Fink’s Hollow. According to Pops, he was born in one of the ruined cabins on the hill, lived for most of his life in one of the hollow’s plywood houses, then moved to the main cabin—“Giggins Hoo,” the Finks called it—fifteen years ago after his uncle Thurlow died of lung and he became patriarch of the family.
Esmer Fink was a man of simple desires. His only vanity was his teeth, which he had proudly kept until age seventy-six (a record in Fink’s Hollow). Since then he had been losing them at a precipitous rate, and with every lost cuspid, the entire hollow walked on eggshells.
“Giiaaddaaamnmmisserabblesonsabitches,” it would start from the bowels of Giggins Hoo. Esmer would storm for a week in a black funk, kicking chickens and treating the goats unnecessarily rough, until he settled back to his old self.
By now, Esmer was down to a few molars and a single incisor, which gave his cheeks extraordinary height and his chin unusual prominence.
“Esmer, this is my grandson, Kevin, says he knows Buzzy.”
Esmer raised his eyes slightly to look me over and exhaled wispy pipe smoke. “I suppose he does.”
“Is Buzzy here today?” I asked.
“He’s here.” Rocking onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels.
“Well, I guess we’ll get started,” Pops said.
“Cleo an the boys herded the propriate beasts into pens at the back. Let em loose when you’re done. Couldn’t round the cats, though. Cats is hard to pen.”
“That was thoughtful, Esmer. We’ll do our best with the cats.”
Esmer nodded.
“How is Cleo doing?” Pops asked. “Gonna be hard to have another year like last year.”
“He’s workin it ever day. Makes me tired jus watchin. Coach from Ohio State come up last week. Dint impress me.” Esmer sniffed. “Cle’s got his heart set on Notre Dame, anyway.”
“Notre Dame’s a fine choice. I’d like to talk more about it after we inoculate your herd.”
We walked down the steps and around the side of the house. The two pens held five ragged dogs of suspicious pedigree, one about to give birth. Four were sleeping, and the nervous yelp of the pregnant one brought them to their feet, barking excitedly. The other pen held miscellaneous farm animals of varying social order. Four goats, seven sheep, an old swayback horse, and assorted lower barn life. The sheep tufted like lint, eyeing the goats and us with equal mistrust. Other than the cats, the only animal not penned was the pig in the shade out front. Penning him would have seemed redundant.
“Kevin, I’ll handle the dogs, you see if you can round up the cats, then we’ll do the others together.”
I was off to the front of the house, where a large mottled tabby lazed on the porch. I brought him to Pops, and after a quick shot he was back in the only sunny spot on the porch, annoyed at the intrusion. I spied two more on the hood of an early sixties Rambler station wagon that some years ago had suffered an arc welder conversion to pickup. They came peacefully and I replaced them on the hood in the sun. “How many cats do they have, Pops?” I asked as he was finishing the last of the dogs.
“Eighteen,” he said, loading a new syringe. I stood for a moment, unsure if he was joking. “You’re fifteen short.” He wasn’t joking.
The barn. Had to be cats in the barn. I walked toward the gray and red barn, which sat on the slight hill behind the houses. I crept into the darkened door but didn’t see any cats. Suddenly, from the top of the haystack in the corner, a six-foot blue-yellow flame, like the blast from a hot-air balloon, lit up the barn. I could see someone’s profile in the flame. It switched off abruptly, leaving the echo burning in my retina. “What was that?” I said to anybody, still blinded. I heard the haystack person jump to the ground and walk toward me, silhouetted against streaming sunlight through the barn slats. A lighter flicked and the flame returned,
swallowing air in a whoosh, licking inches from my face. I fell back into a hay bale, then scrambled up to run. Buzzy Fink walked into the sunlight, laughing. A can of hair spray in one hand, a lighter in the other.
“Hope you brought more hair spray,” he said. “This can’s bout beat.”
“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded, still frazzled from my close encounter with the hair spray flame.
“Fryin spiders. What the hell you doin?”
“My grandfather’s here to give your animals rabies shots and I’m trying to find all your cats.”
“The cats are gonna have to wait: I got two more spiders left and they’re gettin nervous. Come on.”
We climbed up hay bale steps to the sweltering top of the barn. In the corner, strung between a wood beam and the siding, was a perfectly formed spiderweb, a huge brown-and-black spider in the middle. The height, the spider, and the potential for an explosion made me tingle nervously.
“Lighter, flamethrower,” he yelled and handed me the can and the Bic. “Sergeant, take out that gook bunker—now.” I hesitated, not knowing whether to start the spray first or the lighter or whether the whole thing would combust in my face. “Sergeant, what is the delay? The enemy will be on us; burn em—now.” I lit the lighter and pointed the can at the web and pressed. A thick flame rushed out, engulfing the spider. It tried frantically to escape Armageddon, making it only an inch before curling and dropping twenty feet to the floor. Very cool.
“Aren’t you afraid of catching the barn on fire?” I asked, breathing heavily from the excitement.
“Yep, but if I wasn’t, this wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. An I figure the only way the barn’ll catch fire is if the can blows up, which’ll kill me so I won’t get into any trouble for burnin down the barn.” It made sense.
We crawled over the tower of hay to a Vietcong safe house on the other side of the barn. Buzzy slaughtered them all with a wide swath of the aerosol flame.
“Kevin!” Pops called from the house.
I looked at Buzzy and we jumped off the hay and ran out of the barn to Giggins Hoo, where Pops and Esmer were talking.
“You’re still fifteen cats short and making little progress.”
“I found Buzzy. He was in the barn.”
“Hello, Buzzy. How are you at herding cats?”
“Cats is hard to pen,” he said. Esmer nodded agreement and pushed up onto his toes and back down gently onto his heels. Buzzy went into the house and came out with a jug of milk and a discarded tuna-fish tin.
“That’s quick thinking, Buzz,” Pops said and grabbed his bag as Buzzy led us back to the barn. He poured the milk into an upside-down pail lid and offered the tuna to an immense cat with a tattered left ear. Soon the trough had eleven cats drinking.
Pops loaded a syringe. We looked for the remaining four cats but gave up after about ten minutes, all agreeing that the stragglers would have to risk rabies.
“Them others ain’t barn cats,” Esmer instructed later on the porch. “They come an go as they please.” Pops and Esmer rocked and talked for half an hour about Cleo’s college prospects while Buzzy and I built a fort in the hay bales. Pops finally called me down and we walked back to the house slowly.
“Can Buzzy sleep over tonight?” I was craving some younger conversation and companionship.
“Not this weekend; your dad is visiting. Maybe Monday. Esmer?”
Esmer shrugged. Buzzy and I swapped excited grins.
“Monday it is. Esmer, you take care of yourself, call me if you need me,” Pops said. I nodded good-bye and walked to the truck with Buzzy.
“See you up at the tree house tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there,” he replied.
I climbed into the cab and Pops turned the truck around. As we pulled away, Cleo Fink was jogging up the road, turning sideways every twenty feet, then jogging backward, then to the front. I looked back at him as we passed with Giggins Hoo shrinking in the distance—Esmer Fink on the porch watching his pride work the Fink’s Hollow Road.
My father arrived with evening, and after dinner I walked to Smith’s Ice Cream with a fist of quarters he had given me Judasing my pocket. It was dark when I returned, and I could see him and Pops on the porch. I hid in the shadow of the hickory and listened to the anger in Pops’ voice seething and popping like fresh fire, dressing the air with disgust, disappointment.
“I don’t think this is the time to be placing blame, Edward.” The words came slow and measured. “In fact, what you just said may qualify as the most asinine statement ever uttered on this porch. No, I take that back; it’s the second-most asinine statement. You probably remember the first.”
“I’m not blaming the boy, Arthur. I’m just saying that this whole thing could’ve been prevented if he’d just done as I taught him.”
The words came to me as a blistering spear. A picket-fence post driven into my chest by a hurricane. I knew that my father blamed me for Josh, but actually hearing him say the words to Pops bludgeoned me, making my knees so weak I had to brace myself against the back of the old hickory in a half squat. My hands were shaking and I think at that moment I actually felt my heart tear.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Edward, when has a kid always done what his parents taught him? If Annie did what I taught her, she never would have married you.”
“Very funny.”
Pops didn’t respond.
“It didn’t have to happen, is all I’m saying.”
The comment caused an immediate stir in Pops. “But it did… it did happen,” he urged. “You can’t get yesterday back, and all the could’ves, should’ves, and would’ves aren’t gonna make your boy heal and your wife whole again. You’ve got a woman almost broken from what she saw and a boy carrying enough guilt for five religions and all you can do is point a finger and say, ‘This is who caused it; this is who we’ll blame.’ For once in your life, Edward, put the needs of your family before your own goddamn self-centered desires.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“I don’t know what you’ve been through? You idiot, for the last four weeks I’ve been living with what you’ve been through.”
My father was quiet, then ventured a new line of discussion. “She seems better.”
Pops calmed himself. “She’s eating now. Audy Rae took her to Paul’s for a new hairdo, but it’s like she’s on horse tranquilizer. Comes in and out of touch. I’m still looking for that one spark that will bring her back to us, that one hook that will start to make her heal. I know it’s there somewhere. Audy Rae’s been a big help, doting on her and talking with her until she’s talked out. We need that spark, though.”
“How’s Kevin doing?”
“Ask him yourself.”
“I’m planning to, but I wanted to talk to you first. How is he dealing with it?”
From the hickory I could hear the sour mash spinning in the glass. The quicker cadence of the ice matched the piercing sarcasm in Pops’ voice. “Well, let’s see, he saw his brother die in a terrible accident, he’s watched his mother go crazy, and his father blames him for it all. Just the kind of character-building exercise every fourteen-year-old should experience. But, in spite of your every effort to separate his head from his shoulders, he’s doing great, making me real proud.” They were silent for a moment; then my father changed the subject again.
“I’ve tried to talk with her, but she just looks at me like one of those Stepford wives.”
“It’s gonna take her some more time to heal, but fortunately time’s something we have in abundance around here.”
I had to quit, had to get away from there. I traced the tree’s shadow toward the street, well past the possibility of detection, and ran around to the back kitchen door. The light from the kitchen’s single bulb spilled insolently into the backyard, broken by the slow turning of the ceiling fan. Up the steps and into the kitchen. I let the screen door slam to announce my return. Mom was at the table worrying a cup of t
ea, and the sound of the door made her jump.
“You startled me,” she said. The words drew out of her slowly, as if they were the last water in an old well.
“Sorry, Mom. I’m going to bed, good night.” All I wanted was my room and the quiet cocoon of Pops’ books, where I could lose myself for hours on end and not think about the past three months—or the last five minutes.
I was halfway up the steps when my father called. “Kevin, how was the ice cream?”
“Fine,” I said, continuing to the top.
“Come on out here, son. We’d like to talk to you.”
“I’m real tired. I’m going to bed.”
“Won’t take a minute.”
“I said I’m going to bed.”
Pops interjected, “Kevin, your father wants to talk to you. Please come out to the porch… now.”
I shuffled down the steps and poked my face against the screen door.
“What?”
“Come on out here, son.”
I pushed open the door.
“Pops tells me that you’re his assistant now. How are you liking it?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
“Well, have you made any friends since you’ve been here?”
“No.” Didn’t look at him, couldn’t look at him. “Can I go to bed now? I’m really tired,” I said to Pops.
“Sure, Kevin,” he replied after a moment.
My father was fixed on me, and I could feel him scowling into my soul, searching for fodder to criticize. I looked up and scowled right back into his lies and selfishness and blame. I turned and pushed back through the screen. Halfway up the steps, I heard him say in muffled tones, “He doesn’t seem normal like you say.”
I crawled into bed, shelled and numb.
I had run through Treasure Island, Lord of the Flies, Last of the Mohicans, and took up the ancient copy of Gulliver’s Travels that Pops had given me from his bookcase full of first and second editions. The leather spine rasped as I opened the thick cover. The brittle pages smelled like cellar and the leather was warm to the touch.
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 11
