Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her

by Clayton Lindemuth

  On the floor to the right lay the boards he’d sized and cut for the kennel, arranged for assembly. He carried a bucket with number eight wood screws to the stacked kennel parts.

  Deet looked to the loft where the tip of rowboat prow hung over, then to Emeline sitting on the porch. He pictured the pain that flickered behind her eyes and imagined a separate Emeline within her—an entirely distinct girl crated inside an abominable marriage like some ogre’s plaything. A girl who looked to him because she recognized her plight and that he was the only man who could save her.

  How could it be right to leave her with Angus?

  At the workbench, he twisted the crank on a red Millers Falls eggbeater-style drill. Meticulously oiled gears spun. The chuck whirled. He placed it on the bench and lifted instead a Black & Decker quarter inch hand drill. Slipped in a bit and hand-tightened the chuck.

  He held the drill at his hip like a holstered pistol, then whipped it level. “It’s time to account for the things you done,” he said, aiming at the wall.

  Deet depressed the trigger and the drill screeched.

  He lowered it and dragged the extension cord behind him to the boards. As he studied them his mind replayed the silliness of pointing the drill, pretending to be a man.

  He cleared his throat. Pressed together his lips.

  He would stay, and when the need arose, he would defend Emeline.

  Twenty One

  The shop light is on and as I step from the truck I hear the whine of a hand drill. I circle to the basement side entrance, lean against a hog sty and gulp from the bottle of Turkey I’ve nursed since Franklin. Almost out. The whiskey hits my stomach like a tube of dimes and lays inert. I need a chew, or a smoke, or something to take the edge off. It ebbs and flows and now it’s back. I get my mind on something thin and soft and I got to get a hold of it.

  I want to feel a woman bite my chest and scream.

  It’s that I want. Wild Turkey usually does the job, but my need is more severe since I planed the board with Jonah McClellan’s spine.

  In the pen, a brick-red Jersey sow I never named watches me. She’ll farrow in a week; of the ten or so piglets, I figure to keep five to replace the ones I smoked last fall. I’ll sell the rest.

  Isn’t right, having to follow up on Deet. Jake, I understand. It took daily thrashings for me as a boy to learn farm rules. We do most everything by hand, and it’s a labor-intensive proposition, even with the new tractor. But Deet thinks he’s better than farm work, and sometimes don’t give a task his full energy.

  The sow grunts. I grunt back, spit fresh-cut phlegm to her side.

  My boar and three sows require a trough of water and ten pound of corncob and soybean a day. Near the side entrance an iron bathtub sits below a chute that transports shucked corn from the floor above. A table beside the tub supports a device that looks like a sausage-grinder, for ripping kernels from the cob. I assigned operation of the machine to Jacob. Deet’s supposed to come in after and scoop buckets of grain for the livestock each morning and night.

  The tub is almost empty. The trough is low.

  The sow grunts.

  “That’s a powerful question,” I tell her.

  Sometimes doing right is helping people get what they got coming.

  I exit the barn. Moonlight breaks from behind a cloud and I see Margulies’ flatbed trailer. I run my fingers along the bales, feel the edge of the posts, their width. I sniff them. Deet sawed the only two-inch walnut plank into posts, but only a foot high. What in hell possessed him? I tramp upslope to the second story bay and barrel in.

  Deet has framed the kennels, two separate runs of six crates each. He looks up from attaching a floorboard. I stop short. “Ho there! What the hell you doing?”

  Deet finishes drilling a screw. Stands chest out, brow wrinkled. Hand floats beside his knife. His grin is confused. Proud. Maybe.

  “Hogs ain’t fed? The cows? But you got time to cut up a high-dollar board for a fuckin hayride? Wonder why the hogs are skin and bones and the stalls are cruddy with shit.”

  I swing.

  Blood runs from Deet’s lip and he stands a foot back, but jaw jutted a little farther now.

  “Check your eyes, boy! And make a move for that blade, you’ll be pulling it out your heart.”

  “I built your kennel and fixed your cabinet door.” Deet brushes past me. “Guess I’ll feed your fuckin hogs.”

  “Where’s Jake? Part of your chores is seein’ him do his.”

  Deet disappears down the stairs.

  “I won’t tell you again!”

  I squat beside the kennel frame. Deet’s turned my pencil drawing into architecture. The doors open tailgate-high for ease loading dogs on the truck. All that remains is to install the floors, walls, roof, and put in the wire outhouse section of the floor. The dogs will venture onto the mesh to do their business and their shitpiles will fall to the ground, and Jake can use buckets to get them to the field.

  Deet’s stacked the remaining components close to their home on the frame. Even with his chores, he’ll finish within a day or two. I rest a hand square against the closest corner of joist and leg. Switch to the opposite corner, twelve feet away. Perfect.

  Deet’s mechanical aptitude comes from his Kraut blood.

  I turn to find Rebel regarding me from his makeshift plywood crate.

  “What?”

  Damn dog wags his tail. What’s the point of a fighting dog that meets his master with a lolling tongue? I stand at the crate and the one-eyed bastard searches me. I punch his blind side, connect with his skull. Rebel slams to the floor and trembles.

  I got an edge Wild Turkey won’t touch. I can feel a bout of darkness coming in.

  The finished panel door lies on the workbench, with a flat shine that suggests a half-buffed coat of paste wax. Though the mortise and tenon joint is hid, the surfaces are flush and square without any glue leakage. I press corner to corner, then shake it. The panel don’t rattle or play.

  With a triple-braid of bailer twine and a Phillips screwdriver in my pocket, the cabinet door tucked under my arm, I follow the edge of the field, turn the corner by the wood, and walk under the heavy shadow of overhanging limbs. Can’t see for shit. Stumble and catch myself. In the woods I hold my hand afore my face; the glow of the hemlock splintered moon gives me bearing on the path I walked as a boy.

  I beat the Widow McClellan’s door.

  “Come in before the moths do. Thought you said two week.”

  I rest the cabinet door on the counter. “Speed like that’ll cost you.”

  The red dog lifts her head from the floor and growls.

  “I’m an old woman. Won’t cost much, or you can keep it.”

  I hold the fixed door to the vacant spot. “Looks better than the rest.”

  She sits at the table. “There’s coffee still warm.”

  I find four screws in my pocket, twist them into the existing holes, then open and close the door with an easy motion. I eyeball the bottom alignment against the other doors. “Perfect,” I say.

  “A good man does good works.”

  I open the next cabinet door, tighten each hinge screw, and open the next.

  “My, but you’re thorough.”

  I finish the upper cabinets and start the lower level. “These musta been built fifty years ago, from the joinery.”

  “Woulda been in ‘15, after Mitch and me tied the knot. He had the kitchen remade right after the wedding, since we wasn’t getting a new house. It’s been his since Jonah—”

  “Disappeared altogether.” I close the last cabinet. “All tight. Now, job like this—six hours of shop time—that’s worth six dollars.”

  “Six hours! Six dollars!” She grabs her breast with one hand and balls the other into a fist. “Pull the door down and keep it!” She struggles to her feet.

  “I didn’t do all this work not to be paid.”

  “I got to eat!”

  “Everybody got to eat. You got anything worth
six dollars?”

  “It ain’t what I got, it’s what I’ll give, and I wouldn’t give more than—” she looks around.

  I study the dog roused from the floor by commotion.

  “That mutt,” she says.

  “That’s how you do a Christian neighbor?” I say. “I’ll take the mutt, and we’ll be through.”

  I yank the coil of bailing twine from my trousers. The dog’s growl sounds like it comes from deep in her guts. I reach for her collar and she nips my hand. I drive a fist to her skull. She drops and I loop the hemp through her collar and jerk her upright. Bony ass head.

  I stop and look at the widow as she releases a long sigh. She shakes her face and hobbles to a dark pine hutch, stoops, and withdraws a gallon jug. “I guess you done me right with the door,” she says. “Craftsmanship—the kind that shows a man’s character—is worth more’n a flea-bit dog.”

  My eye follows the black splash in the jug. “Make your own stain, did you?”

  “That, Angus Hardgrave, is mother’s milk to a whiskey man, and you’re no stranger to the spirit.”

  “Worship regular.”

  She fetches a lead crystal glass, uncaps the black whiskey. “Mitch, bless his soul, ‘stilled this himself, back in the day. He loved his walnut whiskey.” She pours from the jug.

  “They found a bottle by him, wasn’t that right?”

  “An empty bottle.” She hesitates as the whiskey reaches the halfway mark, then smiles and fills it close to the rim. “Course those damned revenuers axed his still.” She offers the glass. “I know you’ll love it as much as he did. Smell it, first.”

  I take the crystal from her gnarled hand and meet her eyes as I bring the rim to my lips. The smell overtakes me. Rich, like walnuts, dissolved into flammable vapors. I think of the board with Jonah’s bones. Iridescent surface oils reflect my eye. I flash to the photo of Mitch that topped a red oak casket. The fluid touches my lips, pours into my mouth, numbs my tongue. The flavor overwhelms my senses, paralyzes my giddy throat.

  I choke, “Walnut shine?”

  She smacks her thigh. “Them walnuts come from the tree on Devil’s Elbow! Have another!”

  The thirst that’s haunted me since I ran my fingers over the shimmering spine-board vanishes. Walnut whiskey is a square peg going in a square hole. The corners get their fill.

  “Bottom’s up,” the widow says.

  I drink in gulps, note the fire in my throat and stomach, and the heat spreading across my face. I’d take hell if it felt like this.

  I gulp. The dog whines. The widow beams. I watch her. Has she forgotten that forty-seven years ago, her husband wandered across a cornfield and sired a bastard?

  “Take the whole glass!” she says. “Don’t have a belly for it, myself. And I won’t feel right without you take the jug. You don’t know how much I appreciate you.”

  Twenty Two

  The widow closes the door behind me. The yellow bulb blinks off and the porch posts, the trees, the lily-pad path of stones across the lawn—vanish. I feel for the step and tramp across grass. The bitch pit bull tugs toward the forest; I got the jug of walnut whiskey in my left hand and the twine in my right. I raise my leash hand to shelter my eye, though the lowest boughs are twenty feet above. I got a newfound clarity but I suspect my judgment will suffer.

  As a boy I climbed one of these ancient hemlocks. I was ten, and I’d clenched my bare ass three hours, hanging over a limb, stung raw by skeeters, waiting for Larry McClellan to cross below. I dropped pinecones as practice to get my ass situated right. Larry came along and I timed it perfect. I shat on him from thirty feet and never confessed until we rode a plywood Higgins boat to Omaha Beach. Larry said “No,” and shook his head. It was a treed black bear, though he couldn’t explain the corn in the shit. Machine gun bullets cut him to pieces a minute later—Larry shat on from above, one last time.

  I jerk the leash, unscrew the jug, gulp, cough.

  “Here’s to you, Lawrence fuckin McClellan.”

  My voice startles an animal at the juncture of forest and field—a whitetail deer, from the flash of the tail in the moonlight. The bitch heaves and I fall forward holding the uncapped jug high in salute. The bottle splashes but remains upright. My knee hits a root; I slide forward and catch a mouthful of pine needles. Bitch tugs and wheezes against her collar until I regain my feet and yank the line and flip her.

  She whines. I blink. My feet don’t feel like the ones I came on. The pit bull surges and I wrench the twine. “Hiya!”

  I turn the corner at the field. With grass to my right and corn on my left, the sky opens above and the moon lights my path. A few minutes later I arrive at the barn. Deet works inside and meets my eye.

  “Where’d you get that one?” he says.

  “The widow insisted.” I land the jug on the workbench and lead the dog to Rebel’s corner. “How long ‘til that kennel’s done?”

  “Tomorrow, if I can get the chicken wire.”

  I take the bitch by the muzzle and squint into her eyes. “Snap at me and I bust your head.”

  The dog blinks. I reach under her ribs and haunches and toss her into the pen.

  “She’s squat enough,” Deet says. “Red nose, like Rebel.”

  “Maybe seventy pound. Monster of a pit. Any luck, they’ll get together. Fill these pens.” I lean against the wall. Rub my eye.

  Deet shakes his head. “What’s in the bottle? You look peaked.”

  “Walnut shine.”

  “Took Emeline to see Doctor Fleming today.” He pauses. “She said you told her not to go.”

  I hoist the jug, swallow. “Women lie.”

  “She’d have lost her leg without I took her in today, and I’m taking her again tomorrow.” He fidgets with a claw hammer at the bench, lays it on its side, but the handle remains in his hand. “Another thing. I was in Doc Fleming’s waiting room and a fellow busted in and claimed the Farmall’s his—said the serial number from his head.”

  I laugh. “I’ll kill him.”

  “You might get some sleep first. You look like shit. I’ll need money for the coop wire.”

  I find my wallet and hand Deet seven singles.

  I finger the jug loop and leave the barn. Pull a corduroy jacket from the truck seat, drape it over by shoulders, and head down slope. The water washes against beach stones. I remember Larry McClellan. Sorry son of a bitch. I drink. Shat on from above. Ain’t we all.

  A frog splashes a gurgled response. I can’t make it all the way out but I believe he was saying life ain’t fair.

  The walnut tree on Devil’s Elbow blots the sky. I veer to the trunk and throw my arm into the crotch, make a fist. I hang, head lolling, bottle stretching my thumb joint until my hand is numb and I recline. The roots prop my elbows like armchair rests. My head against the bark, I tip the jug and swallow, cap it, and stow it between my legs. The water laps. The tree groans. I belch.

  I close my eyes and feel a cold, giant hand rest on my shoulder. I sleep, and see things.

  Jacob watched a shadow on the ceiling. His open bedroom window faced the forest; the lake was to the left, out of sight except for a thin line of water visible beyond the trees at Devil’s Elbow. The breeze smelled of fish. The house was silent. Jacob usually waited for Angus to begin snoring before venturing out, but tonight the absence of snoring was palpable. The old man hadn’t gone to bed. That meant he was outside, somewhere. Maybe in town, maybe by the lake. Maybe slipping his peeper to a hog in the barn. He could be anywhere.

  Jacob’s mattress springs creaked with every roll, every deep breath. He’d experimented to find a quiet exit procedure. Without massing his weight at the center and unduly stretching the springs, he rolled over the edge, caught himself on the floor with one arm and leg, and eased from the mattress. He pulled on clothes that were scattered on the floor and pressed his ear to the window screen.

  A sound came from the lake—faint—a hundred yards away, carried over the dense night air. It was Angus. Jaco
b smiled. He popped the screen free of the bottom slot and wiggled the frame; leaning through, he lowered it to the roof and climbed out. Slid his toe along the wall, found shingles and dropped catlike to the roof of the side addition.

  He jumped to the ground and circled to the lake side of the house. There he waited until Angus sawed an exhalation, then he followed a foot trail down slope through the grass.

  Jacob paused. The sound came from the walnut tree. He looked back to the house, then across the foggy lake. The snores were loud, now, only a dozen yards away; he heard the imprint of his father’s large nose on the snore; the individual chokes and snuffles mired in each grinding gasp.

  Jacob stretched to all fours and willed his knees and elbows forward. His father slept at the walnut tree, but the shadow held no human outline. Jacob stared at the crotch where an old limb jutted out like the family black sheep, where Jacob sometimes laid and watched the lake. Where Angus left him hanging one morning three years ago, overall straps looped over a railroad spike driven into the tree, as punishment for wetting his bed.

  His old man was nowhere; everywhere. The snoring distended like the black mass of limbs above. Angus choked on his noise and grunted. Jacob froze. Angus kicked like a sleeping dog, betraying his shadowy form embraced in the trunk folds. The snores resumed; Jacob crept closer.

  The odors of whiskey and a pile of rotting fish guts Jacob had left nearby a few days earlier mingled in a comfortable pungency. He propped his head on his hand and remembered his mother, Lucy Mae. Her voice was like maple syrup. She ran off last winter. Angus dumped her clothes in the burn barrel the next day. Jacob pleaded to save them because she might come back.