“Goin home’s the thing.”
Pops shifted; the wicker creaked.
Another long silence.
“I don’t think I can.” More silence. “He’s everywhere in that place… in the walls, the floors, the bricks an the blocks… then suddenly he ain’t. Tonight I think I hear him callin me downstairs, so I rush down… I rush down cause I swear I heard him”—his voice hushed—“but it’s all empty.”
Pops was leaning forward now, elbows on his knees. His eyes were red and moist. “I wish I could tell you that it gets better, Pait, but it don’t. It just gets less bad.”
Paitsel nodded with hard-bought understanding and finished his glass and stood. “I don’t know where this chill come from. Feels like September instead a July.”
“They say it’s the jet stream, dipping down from Canada.”
He turned, hands in his pockets, and looked out over the night, then slowly took the steps down to the walkway and off into the darkness.
He stood half in Paul’s closet, brought two shirtsleeves to his face, and breathed in slowly, deeply. When his lungs were filled, he closed his eyes so that the essence would take him back to the archive of their life together. He held the scent like he was holding Paul one last time, afraid that if he let him go, let his essence go, he would never capture this moment again. This and the moment Paul exited his car on Highway 81 with a smile that obliterated flat-tire frustration; or the first time he thrashed violently in his sleep against the old tormentors until Paitsel slayed them by simply holding him tight and whispering into his ear; or the moment Paitsel’s brother surprised them at the Kaymore place and Paul covered, sleeping the weekend at the Notion Shop. And town hall, the moment ten days fresh, when he had never been so proud. Never been so proud.
Finally he exhaled slowly, closed the doors, and went down to the kitchen to start coffee for one.
Chapter 17
THE SECRET LIFE OF THE EMPTY PACKHORSE
Pops and I drove up the Mitchell farm road in the morning to spend the day examining and certifying Grubby’s animals for sale. Bubba Boyd had increased his offer to eighty-seven thousand dollars and all auction proceeds. Grubby signed the papers without consulting Mayna. Now it was a matter of inspecting the beasts, cataloging the equipment, and readying everything for public sale the next day at noon.
Grubby was with the Went & Went Auctions man in the cul-de-sac, tagging three generations of gear as it was brought out from the barns—a sprayer, manure spreader, bed tiller, three drag harrows, bale wrappers, hay rakes, front loader and backhoe attachments, an ancient mechanical scythe, a rusted reaper-binder with broken tines—all of it power washed and prepped and laid out like casualties of a lost battle.
We parked and exited the truck. Grubby had herded his animals into various pens at barn side and in the back. Sheep and goats in one, steer in another, the single stud bull tied to a tree.
Pops introduced himself to George Went but didn’t linger. “We’ve got a full day, so best get at it. Anything I need to know, Grubby?”
“Gotta bit a hard bag on one a the ewes. You’ll see.”
Pops nodded and we went to the sheep pen. I set up the squeeze chute to the stocks and a return chute to an empty holding pen. By lunch the sheep had been inspected, vaccinated, and turned out.
Pops and I ate on the open bed gate of his truck and watched silently as piece after piece of Grubby’s equipment inventory was brought out from the barns or up from the outfields. It seemed as if the entire history and evolution of farming apparatus in eastern Kentucky was located, cleaned, tagged, and ledgered—waiting expectantly for new employment. I told Pops I had to pee and he pointed to the house. I knocked on the side kitchen door and after no answer I pushed in.
Mayna Mitchell’s kitchen was old and childless. A small table of red-speckled Formica and shining chrome legs. A butcher block by the stove, scooped and pitted from generations of Mitchell carvings. Heavy oak cabinets on the walls, so thick it appeared as if the rest of the house had been built around them.
A crowded knickknack shelf hung by the stove holding Mayna Mitchell’s life in miniature. A black speckled cow with a tiny blue ribbon; a pewter church; a carved farmer and his wife bending over to kiss; a tiny lock-top box for her mother’s wedding ring; a ceramic Magic Kingdom from their trip to Florida; the silver medal from the Tri-County Spelling Championship in 1955; a miniature Bible with words too small to read; carved letter blocks spelling Bless This Kitchen; Ray Jr.’s combat ribbons; next to it a photo of him in his dress whites and an army-issue scowl; another of him on a mountain somewhere, dogtagged and shirtless.
I found the bathroom, peed, and returned to the yard. The auction van had left, and Pops and Grubby were standing alone in the driveway. Pops’ arms were crossed. Grubby’s hands were jammed into his back pockets.
“… gettin out from the bank’s the thing.”
“How behind are you?”
“Enough. It’s wearin on Mayna.”
“Where is she today?”
“Visitin Ray. This is the week when…”
“I know, Grub. Not an easy time.”
I could see Grubby begin to well up. “I think they mighta left the other sprayer in the barn.” He took off, head down.
“Let’s see to these steer and get out of here,” Pops said to me, hard edges of disappointment and disgust in his voice.
We set up the squeeze chute at the steer pen and began herding the animals into the stocks, including the recently castrated and dehorned yearling bulls, which were docile and compliant. By six o’clock we had finished and walked up to the Mitchell house.
Grubby was alone at the kitchen table. The screen door diffused the weak kitchen light into a gray halo that hung over him. We knocked, then eased into the room.
Grubby had taken Ray Jr.’s photo from the knickknack shelf. The table was empty except for the picture and a rounded plate of clay with a child’s handprint pushed into the middle. The clay had been kilned and shellacked to sienna, then painted Happy Father’s Day, Love Ray 6-17-59 at the bottom in blue.
Grubby held the hardened handprint like a holy tablet. Brushing the edges and brailling the indented fingers; feeling the young creases at each knuckle and outlining the innocent folds of his boy’s palm; tracing his lifeline as if drawing out memories of those first eight years, memories as raw and lush as if they had come in from morning.
“Um, Grubby, we’re heading out. I left all the paperwork on the workbench in the barn.”
Grubby was lost in the handprint and said nothing.
“Grub?”
We left him drowning in thoughts of his only son, the recollections flooding back in a levee break of sadness. He stood and walked slowly out of the kitchen, all the old rememberings stooping him like bagged sand.
When Bobby Clinch’s thumb began to throb, it was a sure barometer of coming weather. Usually, the boys at Hivey’s would spend a day tracking the regularity of the thumb twitches and vigorously debating their relationship to probable rain. But peculiarities of climate just seemed less important now. They ringed the cold woodstove, blowing down on fresh coffee, trying unsuccessfully to fill the morning with normal.
“She’s goin again,” Bobby offered and held his thumb to the light.
“Hmm,” Jesper said.
“Comin regular now,” Andy Teel assessed.
“Twice this hour,” someone else said.
“Nevmind, she done stop,” Bobby reported, lowering his hand.
The conversation hawed again.
They barely noticed Grubby Mitchell come in, freshly washed and shaved, with a press on his shirt. He paraded to the back by the stove, stood awkwardly with his new tool belt waisted, until the boys nodded. None of them were in the mood for Grubby Mitchell.
Grubby shifted foot to foot, waiting for a conversation thread with which to spool. Bump rearranged the Captain Earl’s Bug Buster display and moved it two aisles to the right. Andy Teel picked up a waywa
rd kernel of feed corn and tossed it into the open door of the stove.
“Way Uplander says he thinks his hip replacement wasn’t greased right or something,” Grubby finally offered. “Says that Indian doctor cut corners on him.”
“Hmm,” Jesper said.
“Doctors,” Bobby replied.
“Yup.”
Grubby and Mayna Mitchell bought one of the old houses on Kaymore Street for thirty-five thousand dollars cash. She soon adjusted to town living, walking to Dempsey’s, walking to Hilda Jensen’s and the Deal sisters’, walking to her women’s club meetings. Sometimes she missed the old place, but town living had so many advantages. There wasn’t that constant track of dirt throughout the house, for one, or that incessant farm smell, which she had only really noticed once they had moved and the smell went. It was Raymond who was having difficulty.
Grubby Mitchell was a man who needed to be doing, and for forty-five years of his life, doing is exactly what he did. Now, with some money in the bank and time on his hands, he kicked around the county like an empty packhorse. Paid cash for a new Ford truck with a chrome step bar and double tires at the back and drove proudly up and down Main Street to break the engine in ahead of schedule; he accomplished that in two weeks and was idle again.
He raked all the leftover leaves in the deserted yards on Kaymore, then was idle again. He went out to Bobby Buford’s to talk farming, but Bobby had never taken Grubby’s advice before and certainly wasn’t going to now. He visited other farms around the county, but his suggestions were met with polite silence. Now that he was a town man, his farming experience, regardless of its length and quality, just wasn’t valued.
He soon settled into a plodding existence that made even the long summer days seem perpetual. He would lie in bed each dawn searching for any subtle change in the ceiling as everything about the morning glaciered to another interminable afternoon.
Chapter 18
STONES OF A RUINED CASTLE
Each day for the next week, after my morning calls with Pops, I went up to the tree house expecting to see Buzzy rocking on the porch, reading a dirty magazine or planning some other dangerous adventure—we still hadn’t been to the Telling Cave, and any diversion from thinking about Mr. Paul’s murder would have been welcome.
However, the rocker stayed empty and the tree house remained deserted. Finally, on a hazy, torpid Saturday, I decided to walk over Kinder Mountain into Fink’s Hollow to find him.
I left Chisold Street after lunch, passed through town, and paused at the alley behind Miss Janey’s. It had been scrubbed clean, as if the town wanted to remove all traces of what had happened there only a week ago. The old rack of empty hangers had been hauled away; the desk with missing drawers had been taken to a dump. Mr. Paul’s blood had been sprayed off the cement, his teeth swept into the gutter to be taken by the next rain.
I continued down Green Street, across the railroad tracks, and up the hill toward the tree house. “Hey, Buzzy,” I called when I got within shouting range. No reply. “Hey, tree house.” Nothing. This time I decided to climb up to the porch in case he had left a message or some sign for me. The front door was locked up tight and the porch was covered with a week of acorns and squirrel droppings, a spiderweb in the seat of the rocker. I cleared the web and sat down to ponder Buzzy’s whereabouts. Was he busy helping out in the hollow? Was he angry at me for accusing him of lying? It had been so long since I’d had a real friendship, the idea of it slipping away made me feel more alone than ever. I had to find out why he was avoiding me. I worked my way down the tree and followed the slight trail up the ridge of Kinder Mountain. A half hour later I was inching my way down the steep track that led into Fink’s Hollow.
The place was quiet as the collection of barnyard animals lazed in the early afternoon heat. Two cats were languidly batting paws; the big pig was eating the tongue out of an abandoned shoe. On the porch of Giggins Hoo sat Esmer Fink rocking back and forth in his hand-hewn rocker. His one tooth glistening white against his darkened gums and the darker porch shade.
“Excuse me, sir, I’m—”
“I know who y’are, I ain’t senile yet,” he said, not breaking stride on his rocking.
“Is Buzzy here? I just came by to say hi.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Is he out of town or something?”
“He’s there,” Esmer said, pointing at Buzzy’s father’s house on the other side of the compound. He grinned at his ready wit and kept on rocking.
I walked over to the house, a simple one-story rectangular structure with gray siding chipped and patched in places. It was the second-largest of the twelve houses in the hollow and appeared as old as Giggins Hoo itself. The front porch was poured concrete with a wrought-iron railing.
I knocked and Mrs. Fink emerged from the darkened room, peering suspiciously through the screen door. The silvery haze of the screen seemed to smooth her hard years in the hollow. She opened the door and aged a generation before my eyes, her face reading like old newsprint: sideways quotations around her eyes, double parentheses enclosing her mouth, and an exclamation point in the folds of her forehead.
“You’re the Peebles boy,” she said in her hollow clip. “Come on in… Buzzy’s in the bedroom with his daddy. You go on back.” She returned to the kitchen.
It is always strange going to a friend’s house for the first time, as if you are invading a secret world they try to keep apart from you. Buzzy’s world was simple and clean. Three old, handmade coil rugs covered the unvarnished pinewood floor. Two tattered sofas, one covered with a patch quilt, the other naked and thin, squared the room. Black-and-white photos of the family and the hollow storied the off-white walls. A large stuffed buck head with a crown of antlers watched the room from its position over the cast-iron woodstove; under it hung a large rifle with a black scope. The buck’s dead eyes seemed to follow me across the room.
Next to the woodstove was an old brown La-Z-Boy recliner. I followed voices into the back room. Buzzy’s father was sitting on the edge of the bed, back straight, collarbones at attention. His skin hung on him like someone else’s suit, as if the pith and marrow of his once powerful frame had been sucked out, leaving a haggard, poorly fitted husk. His blond hair was striped with occasional gray, which made his miner-white skin seem almost transparent. His breathing was ragged, urgent. He looked up at me with miner’s eyes.
Buzzy was clearly taken aback by my arrival. “What are you doin here?” he asked. His usual friendly tone was suspicious, questioning.
“I haven’t seen you around and I was up at the tree house, so I thought I’d just walk over the mountain and see how you are doing.”
“I’m helpin my daddy to his sick chair is how I’m doin,” he said and carefully held his father’s thin upper arms as he tried to stand. Mr. Fink was wearing worn-out blue pajamas; on his long, thin feet were dirty white hospital slippers. He shuffled one foot forward, then another. Buzzy grabbed the handle of an oxygen trolley and pulled it forward—one wheel squealed and shuddered like a bad shopping cart.
I backed out of the room to give them space. Isak Fink’s condition stunned me to silence. I imagined the way he must have been before—the way Buzzy surely would be. Tall and thick; jagged face, powerful arms and shoulders; sturdy legs and a purposeful stride. I saw it all in that single instant the way you can sometimes see the past in the stones of a ruined castle—the glorious battles, the inexhaustible feasts, the confident knights. Now he just seemed old and rubbled. His hands were chiseled and cracked as if years in the dim mines had layered on a translucent yellow film, like old surgical gloves, over his white bones.
Mr. Fink watched each foot slide forward as if walking was some new form of transport requiring extreme powers of concentration. “We’re almost there, Daddy,” Buzzy said gently. “Jus a few more steps is all.”
He paused after every other step and breathed in long and slow through the hose attached to his nostrils. Buzzy attended his father pa
tiently, mirroring his small steps and waiting as he caught his breath. Finally they arrived at the La-Z-Boy. Buzzy positioned the oxygen bottle at the side of his chair, then held both arms as Isak eased his back to the seat. Slowly, with Buzzy guiding him, he lowered himself into the recliner and let out a long, labored breath as he settled into it.
Buzzy’s brother, Cleo, came out of another bedroom holding a football. “Hey, Peebles kid,” he said when he saw me.
“His name is Kevin,” Buzzy said with a splash of anger.
Cleo laughed. “Easy, my man, I’m jus jokin. How are you this fine mornin, Kevin?” he said with an exaggerated bow.
“Good. Just came over to see Buzzy.” For some reason I felt like an intruder who needed to explain his presence.
“Hey, Buzz,” Cleo said and tossed the football to him. “Shag some balls for me?”
“Can’t, man. Kevin an me are doin somethin.”
“Come on, Buzz, I need you to shag. I’ll let you throw some.”
“Why don’t you get Tilroy to shag. Looks like you an him is tight now.”
Cleo stood silent for a moment, looking at his brother quizzically.
Suddenly from the chair came a raspy voice, almost a whisper. “Buzz, you be helpin your brother train, now.” A wheezing cough. “Only thirteen days to camp.”
Buzzy’s face hardened and he followed Cleo wordlessly out to the yard.
In a forty-yard space behind the house, Cleo had set up a makeshift football training ground with white spray-painted lines, old tires hanging from trees, a single lashed sapling goal post. He had fashioned a zip line across the end zone with a pulley system that whizzed an old tire along the line like a crossing receiver. He positioned me on the sideline and put a rope in my hand. “Kevin,” he said. “You pull the line in quick an Buzz’ll shag. You ready?”
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth Page 17
