by Callan Wink
Through the kitchen window he could see the murky green cast of the yard light, the hulking form of the barn, and, farther out, the long, low shape of the old house, completely dark. When his father came in to get two more beers, August didn’t turn around to look at him. He stood next to August at the sink and took the tops off the bottles. He nudged August with an elbow and August scrubbed at a pan, ignoring him.
“How’s your mother?”
August shrugged.
“I’m not going to run her down, Augie, but she’s not a woman that will ever give you her true mind. You know what I mean?”
August shrugged.
“She’s been disappointed her whole life, probably came out of the womb that way. You don’t disappoint her, I know that. But everything else does, me included—always have always will. She never learned to hold herself accountable, that’s the way her parents allowed her to grow up. She’s very smart, and she thinks she sees things I don’t see but she’s wrong, I’ll tell you that. I see plenty. You hear me?”
August swirled a cup in the dishwater and didn’t say anything. His father slapped him on the back of the head.
“I said, You hear me?”
“Yeah. I hear you.” August looked straight ahead out the window.
“Okay, then.” He reached into the dishwater, came up with a handful of suds, and smeared them on August’s cheek. “You’re all right,” he said. “When you think it’s time you let me know and we’ll go find you a pup.”
—
In the morning, the smells of toast and coffee and bacon pulled August from his bed before the sun had even hit the east-facing window. He clumped down the stairs into the kitchen and sat at the table rubbing his eyes. Lisa stood at the stove making eggs. Her feet were bare and she had on the gray long underwear she wore under her barn overalls. They were made for men and were tight around her hips, and when she bent over to get the butter out of the refrigerator, August could see the faint lines of her panties curving across her full rear.
“Would you like coffee, August?” August nodded and she put a steaming mug in front of him.
“I figure you like it black, like your dad likes it?”
“Sure,” he said, taking a sip, trying not to grimace. “Black and strong.”
His mother mixed his coffee half and half with hot whole milk, dumping in heaping spoonfuls of sugar. She told him that’s how she learned to make coffee when she lived in New Orleans, in another lifetime, before she married his father. August knew that Lisa would never go to New Orleans in a million lifetimes.
His father came from the bedroom. He had a dab of shaving foam under one earlobe. He put his hand on Lisa’s waist as he got a coffee mug from the cupboard and she turned and wiped the shaving foam from his ear with her sleeve.
“How long before the eggs are done?” August asked, tapping his fingers on the tabletop.
“A few minutes. The bacon is almost ready.”
August sighed, downed his coffee, and took a piece of toast from the plate on the counter. “Well,” he said, “some of us can’t sit around. I have to get to work.”
He got his wrench from the mudroom, and slid on his boots, leaving them unlaced, and walked across the lawn with his boot tongues flapping like dogs breathing in the heat. The cows were milling in the pasture, gathered up close to the gate. They rolled their dumb baleful eyes at him and lowed, their udders straining and heavy with milk.
“Shut up, you idiots,” August said. He picked up a small handful of pebbles and continued to walk, pelting any cow within reach.
The trees that lined the back pasture were big old oaks and maples and a few massive beech trees with low limbs and velvet gray bark. The ground around them was covered with the scattered spiny shells of their nuts. There was an ancient barbed-wire fence strung across the trees. It was rusted and had been mended many times, so old that it had become embedded in the trunks. August walked down the line and ran his fingers over the rough oaks and maples and the soft gray crepe of the beeches with their bark that looked like smooth hairless hide stretched over muscle. He let his fingers linger on the places where the wire cut into the trunks, and then he knelt and sighted all the way down the fence and squinted into the strengthening light and imagined he was looking at a row of gnarled old people, the soft skin of their necks—the throat cords, the veins, and esophagus—garroted by barbed wire, the twisted branches like arms raised, fingers splayed, trembling and clutching for air.
—
Until last year August had helped with the milking every morning before school and every evening after school, and then his mother forbade it and his father had been forced to hire Lisa full-time.
“Do you like helping your father with the milking?” his mother had asked one evening as he helped her clean up the dinner dishes. His father was on the porch listening to a baseball game, and the sound of the play-by-play came through the screen door, garbled and frantic. Someone had made a triple play. The announcer spit hoarsely, a hard line drive, he’s going, he’s going, he’s going.
“I don’t mind it too much,” August said, wiping a plate dry. “Most of the time I like it.”
“Huh, well, that’s a problem,” his mother said. She had a cigarette tucked into the corner of her mouth, and ash drifted into the dishwater as she spoke. “You’ll be in high school soon, you know. And then there’ll be girls. They’re going to find you so handsome. And then there’ll be college, and then there’ll be any life you want after that. This is just a small piece, Augie—and if you hate it then you should know that soon you’ll be making your own way.”
“But I said I don’t hate it, Mom.”
“Jesus. I really hope you don’t mean that. Getting up early, the shitty cows, the dullness?”
“What about it?”
“My god, Augie, look at me and tell me you don’t hate it.” She turned to him and held his chin with her soapy hand, and her cigarette trembled and August tried but couldn’t tell if she was serious and about to cry, or joking and about to laugh.
“I don’t hate anything. It’s fine. I like everything fine.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’m disappointed in you,” she said, exhaling smoke forcefully through her nose and turning back to the dishes. “But I suppose it’s my fault, for letting it go on. I’m going to talk to your father. Your barn days are coming to an end. I’ll finish up here. Go out and listen to the game with your dad.”
Out on the porch, his father was on the rocker, his legs stretched out long in front of him. He nodded as August sat on the step.
We’re going into extra innings. Hang on as we pause for station identification—you’re not going to want to miss this. The radio crackled, and an ad for a used-car lot came on. Bats flew from the eaves, and August threw pebbles to make them dive, and then the game came back on and Cecil Fielder won it for the Tigers on a long sacrifice fly to center field. August looked at his father. He was slumped in the chair with his eyes closed and his hands clasped together over his chest.
“Night,” August said, getting up to go inside.
His father yawned and stretched. “Night,” he said.
Later, his parents’ arguing had kept him awake, and the next morning his father hadn’t rousted him for the morning milking—and soon after that Lisa was always around, and not long after that his mother had started spending time at the old house. At first, just a few nights a week, and then one morning she didn’t come back to make breakfast and his father burned the toast and slammed the door on his way to the barn.
—
August tied his boots. He climbed up to the haymow and surprised two cats that had been intently pawing at a dead sparrow on the hay-littered floor. He broke one’s back with a quick chop of the wrench, and stunned the other one with a jab to the head. The cats were indistinct as they writhed, blurred in the gloom. August silenced their yowling, each with a sharp blow from the wrench, and then gave chase t
o a few more slinking forms that eluded him by leaping to join their wailing, spitting clan in the rafters.
August didn’t curse much. His father always said that no one took a man seriously who cursed too much, and it was better to be the type of man who, when he did curse, made everyone else sit up and take notice.
Now, however, in the dark barn with the hay dander swirling around his face, and the cats twitching and seething out of reach above him, he cursed.
“Motherfucker,” he said. “Motherfucking, cocksucking, shitfaced, goddamn fucking cats.”
It was the most curse words he’d ever strung together, and he hoped the cats were sitting up to take notice, trembling at the rain of fire that was about to be visited down upon their mangy heads.
—
At the old house his mother had the blinds drawn. She had cut a ragged hole in a quilt, pulled it over her head, and belted it around her waist, poncho style. Her arms stuck out, bare, and the quilt ends dragged over the floor when she got up to let him in. With the shades drawn, it was dark. She had lit an old kerosene lamp and the flame guttered, sending up tendrils of black smoke. She had been playing solitaire. There was a fried pork chop steaming in a pan on the table.
“You want some lunch?” she said after she had settled herself down in her chair, smoothing the quilt down under her and over her bare legs. “I’m finished. You can have the rest.”
She slid the pork chop over to August. It hadn’t been touched. He took a bite. It was seared crispy on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside, quick fried in butter and finished in the oven. That’s how she always made pork chops. Lisa wouldn’t know how to do this, he thought. His father would get so fed up with dried-out tough pork chops that he might send her away, and his mother might come back to the new house and he’d start helping his dad with the barn chores again.
“Are you still not eating?” He picked up the pork chop to gnaw at the bone where the best tasting meat always lived.
“Augie, that’s a common misconception about us breatharians. I eat. Good lord, I eat all the time. Here, actually, let me have one more bite of that.” She leaned over and wafted her hand around his pork chop, bringing the smell toward herself, and then took a quick, hiccupping little breath and smiled and leaned back in her seat. “Meat from an animal you know always has the best flavor,” she said, lighting one of her little cigars. “That’s something city people probably don’t understand. You remember taking kitchen scraps out to that hog every night after dinner? You fed that animal and now it feeds you. That lends a certain something to the savor—I’m sure there’s a word for it in another language.”
She pulled her quilt tighter around her shoulders. “Did you know that, Augie? That there are all sorts of words for things in other languages that we don’t have in English? It’s like your soul is tongue-tied when that happens, when you have a feeling or experience that you can’t explain because there isn’t a specific word for it. If you knew all the languages in the world, you could express yourself perfectly and all experiences would be understandable to you because you would have a word, a perfect word, to attach to any possible occasion. See what I mean?”
August wiped his greasy hands on his jeans. He was fairly certain his mother was naked under her quilt. He wondered if there was a word for that in another language. A word to classify the feeling you get sitting across from your mother, eating a pork chop, with your mother naked under a quilt.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Just because you have a word to put on something doesn’t mean you understand it any better. Does it?”
“Oh, I think so. Definitely. I don’t think things really exist until we can name them. Without names for every living thing, the world is populated by spooks and monsters.”
“Just because you give something a name doesn’t mean you change what it is. It’s still the same thing.”
“You couldn’t be more wrong, Augie dear. How about death?”
“What about it?”
“What if instead of death everyone called it being born and looked forward to it as the great reward at the end of seventy or so years of slow rot on earth?”
“That doesn’t make any sense. Why would anyone look forward to death?”
“Maybe you’re too young for this conversation,” she said, coughing into the back of her hand. “That’s an interesting thought. I bet in some language there is a word for the state you exist in now—the state of being incapable of formulating concepts of, or discussing abstractly, death in all its various forms, due to a lack of experience. You need to have someone you love die, and then you get it. All the understanding of the world comes rushing in on you like a vacuum seal was broken somewhere. I’m not saying you’ll ever understand why the world works the way it does, but you’ll surely come to the conclusion that it does work, and that, as a result, it will absolutely someday come to a grinding halt, as nothing can work forever. See what I mean?”
“No.”
“Huh. Well, in time you will. I’m sure.”
She picked up her solitaire game and shuffled the cards, splitting the deck, riffling the ends together with a brisk splat, and then condensing the deck back together by making the cards bow and bridge and shush into one. August sat listening, enjoying the sound of her shuffling, thinking, knowing she was wrong. He had loved someone who had died.
“How’s the job coming?”
“Not great.”
“Motivational issues?”
“No. They’re just fast. I’ve been thinking about a change of tactics.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I don’t know if it will work. Can I borrow some bowls?”
—
Lisa stayed for dinner again. August sensed that his life was now split in two distinct pieces. There was the part when Skyler was alive, when his father and mother and he had all lived in the new house, and now, this new part, where things were foggy and indistinct. August twirled Lisa’s spaghetti around on his fork and realized, for the very first time, that the whole of his life up until this very point existed in the past, which meant it didn’t exist at all, not really. It might as well have been buried right there in the pasture next to Skyler.
—
It was dark and cool in the barn and he switched on the radio for company. August hadn’t been able to sleep, and he’d risen early—before Lisa, even—and he hadn’t had breakfast and his stomach rumbled as he climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow. In the darkness he could see the faint pinpricks of stars through the knotholes and chinks of the barn planks, and then his groping fingers found the pull chain and the haymow was flooded with fluorescent light.
The floor was carpeted with twisted feline forms, tabbies, calicos, some night black, some pure white, intermingled and lumpy and irrevocably dead. They lay like pieces of dirty laundry where they’d fallen from their perches after the tainted milk had taken its hold on their guts. August coughed and spit, slightly awed, thinking about last night, and the way the antifreeze had turned the bluish white milk a sickly rotten green. He nudged a few of the still forms with his boot and looked to the rafters and found them empty except for one, where he spotted a calico, its dead claws stuck in the joist so it dangled there, like a shabby, moth-eaten piñata.
He pulled his shirt cuffs into his gloves against the fleas jumping everywhere, and began pitching the cats down the hay chute. As he worked the voice of Paul Harvey found its way up from the radio on the ground floor.
There’s going to be unrest. There’s always going to be unrest but things always get better. Tomorrow will always be better. Just think about it, is there any time in history in which you’d rather live than now? I’ll leave you with that thought. I’m Paul Harvey, and now you know the rest of the story.
August climbed down the ladder and stepped shin deep into a pile of cats. He got out his jackknife and stropped it a few times against the side of his boot and set to work separating the cats from their tails. He pushed the cats into the
conveyor trough as he worked and when he was done he flipped the wall switch to set the belt moving. August watched the cats ride the conveyor until all of them went out of sight under the back wall of the barn. Outside, they were falling from the track to the cart on the back of the manure spreader. He didn’t go out to look but he imagined them piling up, covering the dirty straw and cow slop, a stack of forms as lifeless and soft as old fruit, furred with mold. Tomorrow or the next day his father would hook the cart up to the tractor and drive it to the back pasture to spread its strange load across the cow-pocked grass.
—
It took him a long time to nail the tails to the board and as he pounded the last one they were already stiffening. The sky was just starting to take on the milky light of predawn when August carried the board up to the new house. In the mudroom he stopped and listened. There was no sound of his father and Lisa in the kitchen but he knew they’d be up soon. He leaned his board against the coatrack, directly over his father’s barn boots, and regarded his work as it was, totem and trophy, altogether alien against a backdrop of lilac-patterned wallpaper.
August tried to whistle as he walked across the lawn and down the hill to the old house. He’d never gotten the hang of whistling. The best he could muster was a spit-laced warble. On the porch he wiped at his lips with the back of his sleeve and looked in the window. His mother was at the kitchen table. She held a card in her hand, raised, as if she were deciding her next move but August could see that the cards in front of her were scattered across the table in disarray, a jumbled mess, as if they’d been thrown there.
EXOTICS
On the last day of class before summer vacation, his students—all fifteen of them, ranging in age from eight to sixteen—filed out the door saying their goodbyes. Before leaving, one of his sixth graders, Molly Hanchet, stopped at his desk. She had red hair and freckles and, in five years, would likely be Park County’s Fourth of July rodeo queen. After that, she would go on to premed at Stanford. She had her thumbs hooked in the straps of her backpack and she said, “Have a good summer, Mr. Colson. I hope next year you feel better.”
