The Remnants

by Robert Hill

  A closed boast is a private suffering that everybody knows about yet keeps their hush about. It’s a Carnival Aspetuck unable to conceal his celebration of his sister Jubilee. And it’s certainly a Flummox raising Cain on Kennesaw in the game of Adam and Abel. A closed boast is right there on the table next to the peas at Sunday Sit Down, a mouth-watering temptation in a ladle-less china tureen that everyone seated has the phantom taste of on their tongue, but unlike the peas swimming in the butter of acceptability, not a one will risk asking for it to be passed. A closed boast is too close to the bone of human weakness, the raw matter of lust in unfettered free-for-all that courses deep and concealed within us all.

  A closed boast is a Hunko Minton, clandestine and pulsing behind a pond-side boulder, with his boyish love down around his ankles and his mannish heart in both hands, pining for Kennesaw, pining, pining. A boast more closed, so closed it had no name, was a Kennesaw and his own ongoing indulgence of Hunko’s clandestine curiosity down on that rocky shore of Grunts Pond, and his own clandestine curiosity about that curiosity that kept him coming back for more. Add to that the matter of clay, shovels full of it on a daily basis. With his father, the clay had an unexpectedly earthy air: there was a light dusting of pleasure in the uncertain doings for Kennesaw—a pleasure that he wished he could resist but couldn’t. It was to his relief, though, that the pleasure reached a quick, violent peak, and like an air-borne scent, dissipated just as soon as his father let him go. The curiosity with Hunko, however, was as different as a cyclone is to a sigh. That pleasure for Kennesaw wasn’t a dusting, that pleasure was a hole-filler, and as uncertain as he was about the air he shared with his father, his doings with Hunko blew onto him a pleasure that long clung to him like Hock Hackensack’s stink. And, oh how he wished he didn’t so completely enjoy that smell.

  The heel on the spade can only sink the spade so deep. Kennesaw’s father said clay was as normal as dirt, yet no one else ever iterated that aphorism at Sunday Sit Down, nor stitched it into a quilt, nor grunted it under the stars. A grunt here, a grunt there, a chorus of grunts in the moonlight air as far as Kennesaw could tell were not about clay at all—they were about pink velvet ribbons and skirts tumbled high and the farm-fresh smell of a girl’s slightly dirty wrist as she passed you the peas.

  Why Kennesaw refused entry to any possibility that there were others who staked the same claim to clay is as big a riddle as those cobra-headed colossi along the Euphrates. After all, right in front of his own nose was clay of the purest form. It was clay that didn’t parade itself as dirt, didn’t even try to sell you on any comparison at all, it just dropped its pants and said to the world: I’m clay—want to get dirty?

  The nakedness of a Hunko of clay both thrilled Kennesaw and unsettled him. The beaming willingness of the boy to wait out his own maturation until it could swim itself upstream, and then present the bounty of himself to Kennesaw as he would a cupped palmful of tadpoles fresh from the first spring run-off, was the single most nakedly pure act of humanity that Kennesaw had ever experienced. There on the pond shore for all the fluidity they shared until Kennesaw closed the tap of his heart, their daily play was everything his father’s game of Adam and Abel wasn’t. Now it was Kennesaw who was the older one, the larger one, the one more into his manhood. He could bend the rules of their play, bind them with his own belt to a post if it so disposed him, whenever he so wanted, and more to the point, if. He, Kennesaw, could take from Hunko as Flummox took from him, exert a captor’s power over his pulsing young admirer as his father did over him; take the boy, spend him, and always keep the boy guessing as to the next opportune moment he’d be able to get at him again.

  But Kennesaw wasn’t Flummox, and in Hunko he did not see what his father saw in him, whatever it was that his father saw in him. With Hunko, Kennesaw was one—a pound of iron on a farrier’s scale, no better, no bigger; ounce for ounce, no different than a pound of feathers. This little stub was his equal in ardor, if not in measure, and the delight they simultaneously showered upon one another should have been enough to overflow a china tureen for a lifetime of Sunday Sit Downs. Hunko happily would have been the bowl to Kennesaw’s ladle for the pleasure of a table ever set for two. He by himself would build them a foundation of clay by hand, build walls of clay, a roof of clay, and in such the solid structure clay would be as normal as clay and whoever did not like it could eat their own dirt. But it was Kennesaw, with his heel on the spade and the spade digging, digging, at some layer deep down who one day wouldn’t dig any deeper; he hit a rock or a root, and he left the shovel stuck there, and left Hunko stuck there, too.

  Fathers. These men whose biology turns them brute and who repent for nothing—why does our blood compel us to love them? In the privacy of their individual confusions, Kennesaw and True asked of themselves this same question for the many remaining years of their lives, and for the many remaining years of their lives conclusions eluded them.

  Kennesaw let slip his uncertainty to her one afternoon, one winter’s day one foot at a time on brittle ice. He hadn’t called it a name yet, in his heart it did not answer to “shame,” but in his head—happy as he was—the moniker stuck, and stuck as sharp as a spade’s honed edge. He couldn’t align his bluer-than-blues on True’s browns when he told her what was happening in his own home, no more so than he could look her in the browns when he told her what was happiness on the shore’s edge. But her browns had a way of piercing his blues with an honesty as sure as her name. She told him a story that she had heard at a Sunday Sit Down not too long after Mawz Engersol had been turned out, and Bull Engersol had been turned under, and her mother Cozy had turned her own disenchantment with life into a decanter of sweet venom from which she filled her glass nightly until she was ready to turn in.

  That Flummox, Cozy said between heaving gulps, like father, like son. His old man, Congress, was bad weather blowing south, and that Flummox turns his weathervane the same direction, too. I’d watch out for that Kennesaw if he ever has a son.

  To Kennesaw, True uttered this rebuttal: you’re no more Flummox than Hunko is you, she told him, and although her words reeked of logic and clarity, Kennesaw nearly puked from confusion. That one thing could be two things was not a plateau of reason Kennesaw had ever himself ascended to. The result was a teeter-totter of mind and heart, one up, one down, one down, one up, with his life, he felt, hinged on a swivel.

  Kennesaw never figured need to watch out for what old winds blew. It was hard to imagine any other son in town set upon by the man who begot him, but here it was in his own family, a closed boast with its own history of shame. How far back a hush was kept is another poser for those cobra-headed colossi. Here was his father, Flummox, doing to his son, Kennesaw, what he knew to do because it was done to him. And here was his father, Congress, doing to his son, Flummox, what he knew to do no doubt because it was done to him. And here’s his father, Plato, no doubt doing to his son, Congress, what he knew to do because it was no doubt done to him … a closed boast that, for all Kennesaw knew, went all the way back to Noah, to Lamech, to Methuselah, to Enoch, to Cain, to Adam, to clay, to air.

  If clay was as normal as dirt, was clay as normal as clay as Hunko would have him believe? Was there no relationship to dirt at all? Was what existed between him and Hunko as different from his doings with his father as clay is from mulch? Was there such a finely tilled soil where good and bad could grow from the same seed? He had wanted to believe it. Hunko had pressed him to believe it. Even True in her own brown-eyed honesty had given him the wink of her approval. Believe it. But he couldn’t. Hunko was like a son to him. And if Hunko was like a son, what did that make him?

  Delight too often is turned soil that loses its sweetness if nothing is planted in it to grow. From seeing his young stub as his equal to seeing himself as the lad’s abuser was all in a day’s plowing. Kennesaw turned his back on clay then and there. Shut himself off from dirt, too. Scraped his heels clean of anything that might cling.

&nbs
p; 11: True

  True was upstairs with a pink velvet ribbon that would weave a veil of white and a lilt in her throat humming love songs. Cozy was downstairs in a snit that her daughter was in a pet about a half-brother she thought was a cousin. And Mawz? He was coming up the walk coming up the steps stepping to the front door to call on a girl with an abundance of jack-in-the-pulpits he had picked for her, his arms overflowing with pinks and purples bowing shyly in their sheaths of green, he would give them to her and she would love him for them and they would dance and they would wed and they would bed.

  Cozy’s fury opened the vestibule door before Mawz had a chance to tap on the opaque glass (and before he even withdrew his knocking knuckle), her heat was enough to blast his blue eye brown and his brown eye straight. She said to him in a killing whisper, You’re not going to see her, stay away from her, and she gave him a moment to let the threat absorb. He had a smile on his face that was a fresh peach turning, and as soon as the fuzz of him darkened, she drew her knife to peel the spoiling skin. Ask your father, she said, if he hasn’t already told you, she hissed, it’s time that he told you, she said, the rumor is true.

  If Mawz was in a saddle, say, and the horse stopped abruptly, his body would continue forward an extra split second and then the pommel would crotch him. A split second before he was a boy with an armful of flowers for a girl he was taking to a dance and a split second later still in motion he was on the threshold of not breathing, ever again. The jack-in-the-pulpits in his arm were all the sweeter to Cozy in their wasted, wilting way. Leave now, she told him then, stealing the air and taking it back inside behind the closing door. What Mawz did on the other side of that opaque glass Cozy wasn’t concerned with. She was waiting now for her daughter to come downstairs, her sensible daughter who needed to come to her senses where boys were concerned.

  True bounded down the stairs two at a hop, her braid with its pink velvet ribbon clippety-clop on her back. She hadn’t heard the door, the exchange, the air sucking into a void; it was the double ting-ting of the clock’s 8:15 that brought her excitement down to ground level. He’s late, she said to her mother, and Cozy shook her head in mute oh well. True got herself a glass of water, she smoothed her braid over her right shoulder then her left, she sat down, she stood up, she pulled back the lace curtain on the parlor’s front oriel and peered out to the gate for a sign in the dark. She perched on the edge of a hassock and smoothed her skirt and smoothed it again. Cozy took up her knitting on the davenport in silence; the only commentary she’d let loose was the click of her needles. She could see on True’s face, around her mouth, around her eyes, what True had seen in the looking glass upstairs when she allowed herself that bit of annoyance: the tight skin, the pinch of disappointment—men do that to a woman’s face, Cozy’s smile seemed to say. The clock’s ting-tong said it was 8:30 and ting-ting at 8:45 and nine times tong-tong it was nine.

  Was it a ghost, a riff of effluvium in the breeze, a moth against the opaque glass of the front vestibule door that caught True’s attention at that moment and said to her go to the door, girl, your boy’s been here? Whatever came over her, her sensible self knew to obey, and to Cozy’s silent thrill True flew to the front vestibule door and rattled its opaque glass as she pulled it open in a rush. There was no one there, there was no air, no moth, no Mawz, nothing to grab hold of in the dark, nothing she thought, until she looked down at her feet and saw a mound of jack-in-the-pulpits on the porch, he had dropped them in a heap, a heap as high as her boots, and they were curling in the summer night, hundreds of them, rotting to slime. So, True slammed the door shut. She slammed it shut for good. Cozy never said a word. And True was left to hate the only boy she might have loved.

  12: Carnival

  Take an ax and chop his life into two uneven stacks: the years of split britches and the years when it all fell loose.

  In his split britches years, everything about him was bursting. His strength and his sweat, his shoulder caps and slab back and thighs, the robustness of his youth and axmanship that he wasn’t ashamed to show. Unabashed of all, the burst he wouldn’t keep down for manners or modesty, was the thrust of his feelings for Jubilee. In another town with another girl—or a cow or a goat or a horse—Carnival would be the stallion to lay your bets on, who’d fill every stall and paddock and crib with the abundance swelling inside him. That his nostrils happened to flare for his own sister—you don’t need a talk-to about animal husbandry to know what that’s about. The scent was in the air and the air was at home.

  People whispered. Some, like True, frowned out loud and often. Mawz, more than anyone, had a real sense of brotherhood with Carnival, inadvertent as it was, and having suffered for it, was much against it.

  With their parents in their box and their box in the ground, the flirting accelerated unfettered. Jubilee swatted away Carnival’s attentions with a tut-tut and a blush, yet when his hot blood climbed the Fahrenheits, her hands stopped being so prissy. To say that makes her sound like a temptress, which no one ever accused her of being. Her high bust sat high with no boning to boost it and her knees knocked on their own and her cowlick and her long thumbs and her buckteeth were as the good Lord saw fit to outfit her with. She had what she had and what she did with it she’d have done, brother or no. She wasn’t one to get all girly and gussy for any other, and surely not for a brother, but if, through no efforts on her part, built-in girlishness and guss happened to draw the slobber out of a male who just happened to be her brother, there must have been sound reasoning in the divine plan or why would He have made her enticements so tempting?

  She wasn’t one to take it to town, nor one to hide it in a tin on a top shelf in a pantry. She went about her ways the way she did day after day, and if things stirred, things stirred. She watched her brother strip down at the end of every day on the back porch and pile his mendables before her. She stooped to pick them up, took a peek, turned to go, gandered back for anything overlooked, looked again, then got gone to get down to her sewing. That was just the way it was.

  Every night pieced together like this: she sat in the corner chair between the woodstove and the window, framed in a moody glow by the day’s waning light and the night’s fire building. She’d position her heck box in front of her with her knock-knees locking it in place. She’d mound her brother’s mendables in her lap, they were often still steaming with the smell of him, and always she’d arrange them to have the rear split facing up to fix first. She’d pull a bobbin from her box, a different color for each waiting tear—brown for a shoulder, blue for the rear, red for the rest. She’d unspool a length of blue thread long enough to double and bind, and when she had it, she’d pull it broken with a mighty snap. She’d examine both ends of thread to determine which end was less the ragged for threading, then put the better end in her mouth and run her tongue around it to lick it smooth, and slowly pull it out and grind her buckteeth down on it and chew it fine for feeding. She’d pluck a needle from a red felt ball of nothing but needles and eye its eye for the opening it would yield. She’d pinch the needle between two fingers and steady it for the piercing. And then that fine thread end she’d slip through the eye like nothing else mattered, let go of it and regrip it on the other side and pull it all the way through as long as she wanted it until she was ready to stop and tie the knot.

  The process had such delicateness to it that Carnival could barely contain himself. His days were big broad swings of a big broad ax blade gashing and gouging and ravaging the land. Huge trunks fell to his rhythms, and logs rolled over and took his hacking swings. Thick wood chips and splinters long as silverware mounded at his feet, chip dust clouded the air around him and wood shards stuck sweated to his skin, and no one took notice. It was all muscle in motion, nothing thoughtful to it, no refined precision, just swing and hack and swing and hack, and sweat and split and hurry home. And here she was with delicate fingers doing delicate deeds for him, the only moistness about her on the tip of her licking tongue, and her attentions
so focused on that thread feeding into that needle’s eye that he ached to throw over his own labors for hers and be that thread between her fingers feeding into that needle’s eye.

  He’d watch her stitch: under and out and over and in, and under and out and over and in. His heart was pulled in with every plunge of her needle, and every time the tip of it came back up the veins in his bulky neck pulsed with longing. He could watch her sew for hours; he could go all night.

  Some nights she used a thimble; some nights her finger went bare. The decision to cap came from the rent mendables themselves: were the day’s splits the same old tear along the same old line, or did her brother burst a new seam in a way she’d need to learn? New splits always were tougher to master; they always tore along the edge of a double-dart that seemed indestructible but wasn’t. She had to press down harder on the needle to plunge it in to doubled-fabric, and brace it firmer to push it back up. It led to a kind of unwieldiness of action—the struggle to force the needle through had the potential to do harm, maybe cause a new tear, maybe prick skin and draw blood. Sometimes, she misjudged the night’s needs, went unprotected when she should have shown more care. Those were the nights when she was too far along in the rhythm of her stitches to stop and thimble up, when her own motions of stitch and plunge were as coarse as her brother’s hack and swing. Carnival hoped it was the mending she liked best. Her whole body on these nights was engaged in the struggle. Her knock-knees clamped the heck box tighter between them. Her high bust heaved higher with every forced under and out and over and in. The tip of her tongue oozed out of her mouth and seeped over her buckteeth like hot fruit from a piecrust. She even sweated. Once she burst a seam of her own and Carnival nearly exploded.