“ ‘Chill out, dude,’ the kid says. I says, ‘Tie your goddamn shoe-laces.’ He was slopping along in these untied sneakers, it got on my nerves. ‘Don’t tell him what to do,’ says the girl. ‘You’re not his old man.’
“ ‘And a goddamn lucky thing for him I’m not,’ I said. ‘Or he’d have been fed to the pigs when his bones were soft.’
“ ‘Oh, like wow, what have we got here? Excellent rural humour? Reruns of Jed Clampett and “The Beverly Hillbillies?” That’s seriously droll,’ the kid says. ‘Melissa, did you catch what Jed said?’ And they start with the laughing again.
“I tell him the name’s King, not Jed. He says, ‘King? King of what? King Shit of Turd Island?’
“I warn him if he’s looking for trouble he’s come to the right place. ‘When I finish with you, sunshine,’ I says, ‘you won’t know if your ass’s been punched or bored.’ ‘What’s that,’ he says, ‘faggot talk?’ I show him my fist. He thinks this is funny. For kids like him, old people are just somebody you knock over getting on and off buses. I never took shit from anybody my whole life. I’m going to start now?”
“So you popped him.”
“Goddamn right I popped him.”
“With the putter.”
“No putter. I give him the knuckle sandwich.”
“From what I heard, the kid and his girlfriend claim you hit him with the putter.”
“Conflicting testimony. What’s he going to say, he gets laid out by a seventy-eight year old with a hip replacement? Lila seen it. She told the cops I punched him.”
“Lila also said he pushed you first. I didn’t hear you say that.”
“Lila’s a good girl. The fucking law is all technicalities. There’s no self-defence unless he pushes me first.”
“So she lied.”
“Lila saw what Lila saw.”
“His father threatened to sue, didn’t he? For chipping the kid’s tooth?”
“Jesus, can you believe it? I’m supposed to pay for the milk he didn’t buy the kid? I told the bastard if he bought the kid a little milk to drink, his teeth wouldn’t chip so easy.”
“You shouldn’t have done it, King. It’s a different world now.”
“You’re glad I done it. The story of my life. Guys like you waiting for me to do what you shit-eaters don’t dare.”
Those moods of King’s that Elsie and I feared would never lift, when they did, they lifted like spring comes to this part of the world, in a rush, ice to water. Saturday was the day he picked for thawing, the day the farmers came to town. “All work and no play makes King a dull boy,” he would say, signalling the change which was coming over him. When she heard that, Elsie would phone the hotel to let me know she believed her husband, my brother, was back. He wasn’t going in to work that Saturday.
King was a most particular man about his appearance, especially strutting Saturdays. Polishing shoes, brushing a hat, ironing a suit, dress shirt, and tie, occupied the morning. Then his shining self, new-made, a page out of Esquire, set off with Sonny to bless the afternoon. First stop, The China Lily Cafe, to buy two dozen cigars.
Rumours of King in pin-stripes rustles up a mob of kids. They swarm all over the steps of The Lily, elbow their way to the windows, peer in, whisper excitedly. The door swings open and they part like the Red Sea did for Moses, watch him pass in a hush. Silent as ghosts, they close ranks at his heels and trot down the hot sidewalks after him, a pack of hunting dogs. King doesn’t give them a glance.
He stops at a cluster of farmers braced against car fenders and hoods, riding their boots on bumpers. Cigars all around. King’s head tosses back with a stogie clenched in strong teeth, eye on the sky, prophesying the weather. There’s nothing the man isn’t expert on, women, livestock, cards, baseball, the grain exchange. Thumb in the ribs, hand clapped on the shoulder, sly wink to the sweet young thing in the sun-dress. And behind him the farmers’ kids shyly edge in. They’ve never seen anything like him before, these little ones that count themselves lucky if they get a suck on a Coke or a box of Lucky Elephant Popcorn once a week. Their daddies are nothing like this daddy, they squeeze a nickel until the beaver shits and pile chores on their skinny shoulders to make the point life isn’t cake and ice cream, not entirely.
King tips his hat, nods and smiles, asks after the missus and the crops in this heat. Life’s a bitch! Have a cigar! He’s on the move, there’s life in those legs now, he stretches them out and seems to drag everybody along with him. He bustles in and out of stores scattering money, buying articles of no earthly use, a cheap harmonica, a pen and pencil set, last Christmas’s artificial mistletoe, a rubber gorilla mask, chocolates, a water pistol, all this crazy spending driving up the excitement in the children the same way heat drives up mercury in a thermometer. Down one side of Main Street and up the other, more handshakes, winks, smiles, whistles. More stores, more everything. Then all at once, instead of more, there’s no more. No more room in Sonny’s arms for one more parcel, the last cigar gone.
The kids stand staring at him, biting their lips. King looks back at them in amazement, as if he has never laid eyes on them before. Who are they? And he turns to Sonny and asks in a loud, surprised voice, “Why, Sonny, I never knew you were so popular. Who are all your friends?”
Sonny, who hardly knows any of them from Adam because most of them are country kids, shrugs and shifts from foot to foot, awkward and embarrassed. For the others, everything hangs in the balance, like when Peter was asked whether he knew this Christ fellow. They hold their breath and their eyes flit from son to father, father to son. King’s got his wallet out and is studying its insides. He looks in the wallet and looks at them, looks at them and looks in the wallet. A slow smile creases his face and he says, “Ice cream floats on Sonny! Floats on Sonny Walsh, the farmers’ friend!”
That’s the signal for all hell to break loose. They go stampeding up the street yelping and whooping, pushing and shoving each other in the race to get to the Chinaman’s first. Ambling along in the rear comes King, lord of the manor. In The Lily he buys five dollars’ worth of floats and french fries, enough to keep them eating until they puke, and distributes some of that cheap treasure he collected on Main Street to his admirers. This gets the noise level somewhere close to where he requires it but not all the way to the top so he feeds a few quarters into the juke box and cuts the rug with the waitresses while Lee cooks him an order of rare steak and mushroom fried rice. The mushroom fried rice is stomach liner for what comes next. Because what comes next is one rip of a blind drunk.
It generally fell to me to escort him home after one of these twelve-hour-long escapades, toting whichever of his parcels he hadn’t lost or given away, steering him up the darkened street to patient Elsie. I remember one night when I got him to his door and he wouldn’t go in. King had something to say to me. “I make mistakes,” he confessed in a thick mutter. “Sometimes I’m not sure who I am. I ain’t smart and I ain’t rich. But I am big. Wasn’t I the biggest thing in the street today? Nobody’s bigger than King Walsh. Am I right or am I wrong?”
I said he was right. It was one o’clock in the morning and I had a headache.
King called. Myra had parked the car outside Putt ’N’ Fun Town the other day and spied him going in there. Sonny got hot to trot, laid down an ultimatum. “Act your age. Shape up or ship out,” he told King. I think King’s the shape he is and it’s too late to change him. I don’t know how this is going to end.
Nobody in the city knows King. He is not used to streets so long and wide. He’s an old man and we old men grow smaller, not bigger, before we die. King prefers a street he can fill, a narrow little street where he can look out over the roofs into the distance to an admiring woman calling and waving to him. He’s running after the life he had. So toll that bell in the steeple, King. Ring it, brother, make a big noise. We’re all of us going to be quiet a long, long time.
Man on Horseback
FOLLOWING HIS FATHER’S DEATH, Joseph Ke
lsey discovered, in his bereavement, a passion for horses. Joseph’s passion for horses was not of the same character as the old man’s had been; Joseph’s was searching, secretive, concerned with lore, confined to books. It was not love. When his wife asked him what he was doing, staying up so late night after night, he said he was working on an article. Joseph was a professor of history.
The article was a lie. He was reading about horses.
A good horse sholde have three propyrtees of a man, three of a woman, three of a foxe, three of a hare, and three of an asse.
Joseph was born in a poor, backward town to a couple reckoned to be one of the poorest and most backward. It was a world of outhouses, chicken coops in backyards, eyeglasses purchased from Woolworth’s, bad teeth that never got fixed. On the afternoon of October 29, 1949, when his mother’s water broke his father ran down the lane to get Pepper Carmichael to drive them to the hospital. Rupert Kelsey didn’t own an automobile, not even a rusted collection of rattles like Pepper’s.
What Rupert Kelsey owned was seven horses. Horses slipped and slid through his fingers like quicksilver. When he was flush he bought more, when funds ran low he sold off one or two. Horses came and horses went in a continual parade, bays and sorrels, blacks and greys, chestnuts and roans, pintos and piebalds. His wife was jealous of them.
There was trouble with Joseph’s birth right from the start. The hospital, staffed mostly by nuns, was tiny and antiquated, as backward as the town. Rupert Kelsey sat in the waiting room for an hour, and then a sister came out and told him they had telephoned everywhere but the doctor couldn’t be found. It was understood what that meant. The doctor was either drunk – not an uncommon occurrence – or was off playing poker somewhere without having left a number where he could be reached. Rupert nodded solemnly and the nun left, face as starchy as her wimple.
The duty nurse behind the reception desk, a gossip, watched him closely, intrigued to see how he would take the news. He could sense her curiosity clear across the room and he was careful not to give away anything he was feeling. He had a country boy’s wilful, adamant sense of what was private, the conviction that people in towns had no notion of what was their business and what wasn’t.
Because this was his wife’s first baby he knew that labour would likely be prolonged and hard. For three hours he sat, alternately studying the scuffed toes of his boots and the clock on the wall, his face held gravely polite against the duty nurse’s inspection. The nurse was working a double shift because the woman who was to relieve her had called in at the last minute sick. She was bored and Rupert Kelsey was the only item of even mild interest in what was going to be a very long night. To the nurse he looked thirty, but seemed much older. Maybe it was the old-fashioned haircut which made his ears stand out like jug handles, maybe it was the way he shyly hid his dirty hands and cracked nails underneath the cap lying in his lap, maybe it was the bleak rawness of a face shaved with a blade sharpened that morning in a water glass, maybe it was the sum of all of these things or maybe it was none of these things which lent him that air of steadfast dignity she associated with men her father’s age. He appeared to have nothing to do with her generation.
No one came out from the ward to tell Rupert Kelsey how matters stood. The Kelseys were not the sort of people that those in authority felt it necessary to make reports and explanations to. When the hands of the clock swung around to eleven he found it impossible to sustain a pose of calm any longer. Rupert got abruptly to his feet and started for the entrance.
The young nurse behind the desk spoke sharply to him. “Mr. Kelsey, Mr. Kelsey, where are you going?” In her opinion this was not the way a father-to-be with a wife in the pangs of childbirth ought to behave.
“I’ll be back,” he said, shouldering through the door.
It was cold, unusually cold for the end of October. The little town was dark, only its main street boasted streetlamps. Scarcely a window showed a light at this hour; in the days before television arrived, people here retired early, to sleep or entertain themselves in bed.
The barn where Kelsey stabled his horses was on the other side of town, but the other side of town was less than a ten-minute walk away. Just stepping into the heavy, crowded warmth of jostling bodies and freshly dropped dung, the ammoniac reek of horse piss, the dusty smell of hay and oats, the tang of sweat-drenched leather, made him hate that lifeless, sinister waiting room all the more.
He saddled the mare, led her into the yard, swung up on her back, and trotted through the town. The dirt roads were dry and packed and thudded crisply under the iron shoes. Like strings of firecrackers, dogs began to go off, one after another, along the streets he and his horse travelled. The mare carried her head high, neck twisted to the dogs howling out of the blackness, answering them with startled, fearful snorts. Easy and straight as a chair on a front porch, Rupert Kelsey rode her through the uproar and beyond the town limits.
It was a clear night, the sky pitilessly high, strewn faintly with bright sugary stars. Where the curtain of sky brushed the line of the horizon, poplar bluffs bristled. Beneath this cold sky Rupert Kelsey released his horse, let her fear of dogs and night bear human fear wild down the empty road, reins slack along her neck, hands knotted in the mane, braced for the headlong crash, the capsize into darkness. Her belly groaned hollowly between his legs, her breath tore in her chest. For three miles she fled, a runaway panicked.
At the bridge, the sudden glide of water, the broken shimmer unexpectedly intersecting the road caused the mare to shy, and as she broke stride he fought to turn her, striking back ruthlessly on the left rein, dragging her around open-mouthed like a hooked fish, swinging her back in the direction from which she had come, his heels drumming her through the turn, urging her, stretching her out flat down the road, back to the hospital.
By the time they reached the town the mare galloped on her last legs. On the planked railway crossing she stumbled, plunged, but kept her feet. Rupert whipped her the last five hundred yards to the hospital, reining her back on her haunches before the glass doors through which he could see the nurse as he had left her, at the desk. The nurse looked at him from where she sat and he looked at her. The mare trembled with exhaustion, a faint steam rising from wet flanks and neck. The nurse, finally realizing he was not about to dismount, got to her feet, came to the door, and pushed out into the night.
“Anything yet?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“The doctor come?”
She shook her head again.
He wheeled the horse around and was gone. For several moments the nurse stood straining for a glimpse of him, pink sweater draped over her shoulders, arms wrapped around herself against the piercing cold. Everything was swallowed up in darkness but the tattoo of hooves. She turned and went inside.
Back at the barn Kelsey pulled the bridle, blanket, and saddle off the mare and flung them on a four-year-old gelding, leaving the winded horse where she stood. Once again unseen dogs gave tongue, their wavering voices lifting along the streets. He rode hard into the countryside, the taste of a cold dark wind in his mouth.
The story was a favourite of the nurse’s for a long time. “Three times he rode up to the hospital and asked after his wife and then rode away again. Different horse every time. Looked drunker every time too. They usually are. Last time it was just after the sun came up, around eight in the morning that I told him she had finally delivered a boy. You know what he said? Said, ‘Tell the wife I’ll be up to see her as soon as I can. I got some horses to look after.’ Imagine. And that woman came near dying too. It was a near thing if she’d lost any more blood.”
Joseph’s mother always said to him. “You, you little bastard, you wore out three horses and one woman getting born. It’s got to be a record.”
Wolf Calf of the Blackfoot first received horse medicine. It was given to him in a dream by a favourite horse which he had always treated respectfully and kindly. This horse appeared to him and said, “Father, I am
grateful for your kindness to me. Now I give you the sacred dance of the horses which will be your secret. I give you the power to heal horses and to heal people. In times of trouble I will always be near you.”
Horse Medicine Men could accomplish miracles. Not only could they cure sick horses and sick people, they could influence the outcome of races, causing horses to leave the course, buck, or refuse to run. Pursued by enemies, they would rub horse medicine on a quirt, point it at the pursuer and drop the quirt in the path of the foe’s horse, causing the animal to falter.
All Horse Medicine Men recognized taboos. Rib bones and shin bones were not to be broken in the lodge of a Horse Medicine Man. No child should ride a wooden stick horse in a lodge in the presence of a Horse Medicine Man. If he did, misfortune and bad luck would befall that child.
Before a vet arrived in the district, if a horse was sick or badly injured, its owner summoned Rupert Kelsey. Usually his father took Joseph along on these visits, although the boy wished he wouldn’t. When Joseph was four a stud bit him on the shoulder. His mother told him that he had screamed bloody blue murder, screamed like a stuck pig. The purple, apple-green bruise lasted for weeks and if he hadn’t been wearing a heavy parka, which had blunted the horse’s teeth, the damage could have been a lot more severe. Years later Joseph would suppose that the sudden crushing pain, the breath hot on his neck and face, the mad glare of the eyes must have been the root of what, in a son of his father’s, was an unnatural, shameful fear of horses. But he couldn’t be sure. He had no memory of the incident. Envying his father’s courage, he did all he could to conceal and dissemble his cowardice.
Once, when Joseph was eleven, a woman telephoned his father with horse trouble. Her husband was away from home working on the rigs and his horse had hurt itself. The woman said she was afraid her husband would blame her for what had happened to the horse, accuse her of carelessness and neglect as he had a habit of doing whenever anything went wrong. This man was infamous for his hot, ungovernable temper. His wife had been seen in the grocery store, eyes blackened, looking like a racoon. Rupert agreed to come at once to see what he could do to help the horse and, by implication, her.
Things As They Are? Page 3
