Nothing Save the Bones Inside Her

by Clayton Lindemuth

  A sudden snapping wrench of awareness shoots through me, and my left arm flops on the muddy deck and blood spurts from the ragged meat below my shoulder. I look at the pulpy stump and wriggle past the cathead base to my arm. My hand has a half-open curve, relaxed like it might accept a bottle. Blood soaks my ribs, and all I think is how damn warm it is. The deck is slick and sticky with blood. The sky is blue and mosquitoes zero on my face.

  Merle rushes forward. “You dumb son of a bitch!”

  He disengages the cathead, secures the chain. “Stupid fuck!” He waves to Sarge. “Get that shoulder tied off somehow, ‘fore he bleeds to death!”

  I lift my head from the vibrating metal floor. “There goes your fifty feet.”

  Deet worked at the base of a five-inch oak tree with a one-man crosscut saw. Married! Pregnant!—before he’d even had a chance—a further machination of a Fate that dropped him square in dipshit Pennsylvania to assume the Hardgrave mantle of working like a dog and getting nothing in return.

  Saw teeth ripped through pissy smelling timber, spitting white sawdust that fell in a damp, linear snowdrift. He sweated. A squirrel barked at him from a log a few yards away.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Deet said.

  Pregnant! By that prick father of his—that conniving sack of shit bastard drunk. Murderer.

  The tree creaked, leaned. Deet stepped three feet back, threw his leg high and pushed. The thirty-some foot tree crashed through adjacent limbs and whooshed to the ground. He denuded the tree of branches with Angus’s axe, sawed two eleven-foot lengths with the crosscut, lifted the heavy ends to the crook of his arms, pulled them to the edge of the forest.

  He cut ten, and thought of getting the Farmall.

  “The Farmall ain’t pissed,” he said aloud, and with aching shoulders, dragged the logs to the section of barn roof that lay between the house and the chicken coop. He tossed his sweat-soaked shirt aside and with the poles lined side-by-side, adzed long swaths, working each before spinning all a quarter turn and continuing.

  When the bark lay in heaps, rough and gray on the outside, moist and yellow on the inside, he remembered he didn’t have to be here. He still had a bag packed under his bed. He’d had a plan, and it was time to dust it off.

  It was time to head south.

  Emeline wiped her eyes. She’d sat on the sofa with the Bible until the words were just words, then hobbled on the crutch to the closet, removed a belt from a pair of hunting pants, wrapped the leather strap around her plaster cast and buckled it. She cleaned the dishes in a performance that recalled her first evening as a married woman, and started supper—roasted chicken and dumplings, gravy, potatoes, corn. She’d finish early—and maybe she’d go for a stumble outside. Maybe visit the neighbors—or neighbor—the only one close enough was the widow McClellan. She should have gone over to properly introduce herself and see to the new widow’s needs long ago.

  Emeline looked out the window while she held the chicken under running water in the sink, dissolving flakes of ice inside its chest cavity. She saw Deet strip off his shirt. Emeline averted her eyes then allowed them to wander back. The chicken filled with water; the cavity overflowed.

  Sarge cinched the blood flow by fashioning a tourniquet with my belt and a crescent wrench secured by a length of twine. I don’t know where he found the flesh to cinch. I remember seeing the ball of my arm bone.

  Merle hauled me in his truck to Franklin only to find his doctor was away on a house call. Then he took me to Oil City where the company physician stretched a flap of skin over the hole in my shoulder socket and sewed it. I ain’t had a sip of walnut in I can’t remember. The doctor says penicillin and morphine and he’s working two needles and nothing really has too much meaning in my head. But then that company man Dwight Feeley steps in the room and my senses get sharp. He curls his cap brim and looks out the window.

  “I feel bad, but it was your own fault. Edgarson’s Oil and Gas won’t need your labor no longer.”

  “I come to work fixing to lose my arm, that it?”

  “No,” Dwight says, “one of the boys brought your truck here. You got a jug in the cab and it stinks of a stillery.”

  Behind me, a clock clicks with each passing second, as if the man in the white jacket is a man, by God, whose time is important.

  “Everybody has a little snorkel here and there,” I say. “How the hell’s a man to keep his mind on something as miserable dull as drilling holes in the cussed ground?”

  Dwight holds up his hand. “I made all the argument on your behalf that’s gonna get made. You can’t be around a rig missing an arm. Don’t make sense to keep jawing about it. Now I’m sorry. I hope things work out.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I got your final pay.” He digs bills from his shirt pocket and offers them.

  “Count em.”

  Dwight clicks off the tens and ones. “One hundred-fifty-two. That’s every hour to the end of today’s shift.” He offers the bills again.

  “Mighty white.” I look out the window.

  Dwight presses the bills in my hand. He leaves.

  I smack my dry lips. The doctor clears his throat.

  “You’ll need to see your physician tomorrow to follow up on the work I’ve done. If you were smart, you’d go to the hospital in Dubois tonight. The wound is trimmed clean and I’ve given you a healthy shot of penicillin to stave infection. When you get around to looking at it, you’ll find a drain under the cover that I stitched over the stub, here, to let fluids exit. Make sure your doctor watches for gangrene.”

  “Right, Doc.”

  “The men tell me you have a good amount of whiskey alcohol in your truck. Mixed with your coffee, even. You should avoid drinking on your way home, and if that starts bleeding,” he points to the gauze-wrapped stub of my left arm, “you’d better get pressure on it quick. You lost enough blood to kill a smaller man.”

  I close my eyes. Breathe.

  “Mister Hardgrave? Are you about ready?”

  I flop off the edge of the table; steady myself for the first time missing the weight of my arm and a fifth of my blood. Meet the doctor’s eyes. “Go to hell, Doc.”

  Emeline stood with her crutch.

  Outside, the truck door thudded shut. Tonight would be quiet. Angus would be happy—or at least mollified—by the sight of domestic toil. Leaning on the crutch, she forked a chicken leg, added a dumpling and mashed potatoes and waited with the plate in her hands.

  She heard his slow footsteps on the porch planks. The doorknob twisted. She stepped toward the table and forced a fragile smile. The door aperture widened and he emerged.

  His eye was vacant. His face was ashen; his clothes bloody.

  His left arm was gone.

  His dinner plate shattered on the floor.

  “What happened!”

  Angus staggered into the kitchen, leaned against the wall. Looked at the chicken leg, the dumpling squashed like a pale dog pile, the pool of gravy.

  “Look what you done.” Angus lunged, struck her with his nonexistent left hand, lost his balance and caught himself on the table. His eye had a wild gloss and his breath burned with whiskey. “That’s yours on the floor. Now fix me a plate.”

  He crumpled, grinding his wounded shoulder across the edge of the table. He groaned. His skull clunked against the table, then the floor. He was unconscious.

  Angus groaned softly. His knee rested in mashed potatoes and Emeline noticed a long, curved shard of porcelain that drew to a point. His head lolled to the side and she saw the pulse of the artery below the skin. He lay on his side with his good shoulder to the floor and his wounded one on top. The shirt had been folded and pinned and though he’d worn a clean shirt to work it was now crusted with blood and oily grime. From the contour of the cloth she imagined much of his shoulder was gone and while taking it all in, she observed a rapidly swelling circle of darkness, and smelled not just the acrid odor of sweat and alcohol, but the must of blood.

 
Angus bled.

  Emeline looked at the shard of porcelain.

  Angus moaned.

  Emeline closed her eyes, clenched her jaw, focused.

  “Jacob!”

  “What?” He leaned against the entryway frame and regarded his prostrate father with a look of careful indifference.

  “How long have you been standing there?”

  “Just now.”

  “Run upstairs. I need a needle and thread, bandages, mercurochrome. Just bring everything in the medicine closet.”

  “I can’t carry all that.”

  “Then make two trips!”

  Emeline knelt to Angus and unbuttoned his shirt. She tugged it from his pants and he grinned and mumbled. His shirt free, she pulled until the bandaged stump glowed red and bare. Blood dripped to the floor. Emeline shook her head.

  Lord, what do I do? How do I stop something like this?

  The Lord was silent.

  “Jacob! Where are you!”

  She heard him descend the stairs, his feet a rapid patter. He carried an armful of items which he deposited on the table by pushing plates and silver aside with his elbows and opening his arms.

  “Get me a clean hand towel from the drawer by the sink and soak it in water.”

  Emeline unpacked the wound. The doctor had covered the sutures in gauze and held it in place by wrapping a bandage under his opposite arm. Emeline kneeled on one knee, her other held straight by the cast, and grabbed a serrated knife from the table. She ripped through the bandage. The bloodied gauze stuck to Angus’s shoulder and Emeline wondered if it was pressed to raw meat.

  Jacob stood above her with a dripping cloth.

  Emeline took it and swabbed the blood on Angus’s chest and side, but more oozed from under the bandage and she realized she was just moving blood from one location to another. She would have to pull off the bandage.

  She peeled it from the top of his shoulder. The mesh stuck with blood, not yet dried, but firm like pitch. It sounded like tape. She pulled slowly and Angus’s skin pulled with it, a flap that used to be his shoulder but was now a drum skin stretched over an empty socket. It pulled with the bandage. Emeline swallowed and with her other hand applied downward pressure to the skin flap.

  “God damn,” Angus said.

  Emeline stopped. Looked at him.

  Lord?

  She shook her head in resigned disgust and continued to peel the bandage. It released with a sloppy sound and Emeline unpacked the wet hand towel to find a spot not soaked in blood. She wiped Angus’s shoulder and revealed the damage. Falling against the table, Angus had ripped open a row of sutures that held the skin flap in place, and probably broken whatever clotting inside that had stopped the bleeding. The flow quickened, encroaching to her knee on the floor.

  Lord, I could let him bleed…

  She growled to herself and carried on. “Jacob, did you bring a needle? Thread?”

  “On the table.”

  “Well get it for me.”

  Jacob passed a needle to her, already threaded. Emeline thought for a moment. The sutures were one-at-a-time, each tied off.

  If this was Angus’s moment to die, there was nothing she could do to prevent it.

  The pressure on her leg issued steady pain and Emeline shifted her hips, lowered her chest closer to Angus’s, and relaxed into her work.

  “Jacob, get me more thread. This won’t do. I need a lot.”

  Twenty Nine

  Emeline leaned on her crutch at the bedroom door.

  Angus sawed an exhalation, rolled, and the blanket fell from his shoulder. A tiny spot of blood blotched the bandage she’d applied. Emeline reviewed the contours of his whiskered face, the shock of hair on his tall forehead. He was handsome when he shaved, brutish when he didn’t. She’d marveled at the stamina that powered him through a full day at the derrick and then more hours of farm work. On the day they wed, he looked like a man who could split a tree with an axe or heave a bag of feed from the barn floor to the loft. How he’d sustained his pace through a cloud of hangover had been a fearful mystery.

  Now as he lay in bed with his arm gone, his eye hollow seemed dark. She noticed gray hair in his mane. He grumbled in his sleep as if nowhere could he find peace, and Emeline stood in amazement, realizing that the moment he woke, whatever evil animated him would seize his tired features, beat back the fatigue and sickness, and deploy him to some form of nastiness or outright harm. Awake he would be just as fearful as ever.

  Would the Lord humble him? All men were in a state of insurrection against the Lord because they wanted to be Him, masters of their fates. Even her father had struggled to trust the Lord would provide. He had worked nonstop, sacrificing all his hours and attention to his business, never seeming to let go and trust the Lord to see to the things he didn’t. She loved him in spite of the contradiction between his professed faith and his acted faith.

  One time he explained it to her. “It is easy to believe the Lord is good. But how can I know that the Lord wants for me what I think is good? Maybe the Lord thinks something else is better.”

  It was the conundrum that compelled her father to trust all things to the Lord, and then work like He wasn’t there at all.

  That, exactly, was her problem. She’d stepped out in faith and though she knew for an absolute fact the Lord was with her, she didn’t know what He wanted. She didn’t know how to help, and thus, was helpless.

  Emeline focused again on Angus. Maybe family time would mellow him; maybe an Adirondack chair, the crisp smell of spruce and the view of the lake he’d bragged about during their courtship—listening to the single car that passed by on the road as if the thrum of its tires was the most interesting thing all day—maybe these would turn his path.

  Maybe the Lord took his arm to get his attention.

  Though taking his eye hadn’t done the trick.

  “Angus?” she said.

  He choked on a snore and opened his eye to a slit.

  “Do you want to come downstairs for breakfast or should I have Deet bring it to you?”

  “Hunh?”

  “It’s ten. Maybe you’d be happier if you took breakfast outside in the air.”

  “Happier?”

  “Do you want to come for sausage and eggs, or have Deet bring them up?”

  “Deet, huh?”

  “He’s at the barn, but I’ll call him. I can’t carry a tray up the steps on a crutch.”

  Angus rubbed his eye, wiped his nose. Rolled to the edge of the bed, slid his legs over the side, and drug himself into a seated posture. His organ peeked at her from his boxers. She turned away and when she glanced back, he grinned.

  “How ‘bout you suck some sausage for breakfast?”

  “Don’t be vulgar.”

  “Come over here.” He tamped the bed. “Let’s see how it’s gonna work with one arm.”

  “Your breakfast is getting overdone.” She crutched down the hall and labored down the stairs sideways. Behind her, the bedsprings groaned and Angus’s feet struck the floor. She arrived in the kitchen as he clomped down the stairs. She stood at the stove and scooped eggs and sausage patties from the skillet; he wrapped his arm around her and pressed her pubic triangle.

  “You notice something?” she said.

  “Yeah. I got a pig needs some mud.”

  “Your pig got some mud.”

  “Hunh?”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  He released her, sat on the table. Emeline watched his crinkled brow, and his eye, which seemed unseeing. “Can’t a doctor get rid of it?”

  Thirty

  The special insight came while Jacob leaned against the base of the walnut tree, embraced by clefts of root.

  Deet worked on the barn roof and Emeline cooked. Jacob couldn’t steal whiskey while she peg-legged here and there in the kitchen, but the jug in the cabinet was the only open container. The dozen in the barn were sealed. He rested his head against the bark; draped his bare forearm across the trunk.
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br />   His throat was parched. Pap’s whiskey tasted like a burning snowball, maybe with flecks of walnut. A sip would be real nice.

  In all the times he’d played or loitered at the walnut on Devil’s Elbow, Jacob had never seen the presence. He’d had a dawning awareness that his thoughts were different when he was there—just like he’d noticed his thoughts seemed more crisp and pleasurable after drinking walnut whiskey. But as he sat now, he was illuminated. The presence loitered nearby. Jacob closed his eyes, felt him, almost saw his face, a tan block with hard edges struggling for definition, as if form was of secondary relevance where he came from. With whiskey, things would be clearer.

  Jacob shivered. Both the tree and Angus had lost a limb.

  “Whiskey.”

  Jacob remembered his mother, cooing as she cradled him. As if driven by the presence, a sharp gust fluttered walnut leaves, issuing a sound like sizzling meat. He wriggled his bare toes, felt the muscles in his neck go taut, and his skin prickle like a needle was about to skewer him. He craned his neck, expecting to see the huge man behind him.

  “Walnut Whiskey.”

  The skin on his face tightened as if he’d stepped into a frosty morning. From nowhere—(four quarts make a gallon)—he remembered. In the basement, a cupboard contained canned tomatoes, apples, pears, corn, venison. Empty Ball jars collected dust on the bottom shelf. A nearby bin held heaps of brass lids and threaded rings. There were four, he was sure.

  “Plans for you boy. Plans.”

  Jacob approached the porch and nodded at Angus, who sat on an Adirondack chair with a cup of coffee balanced on his leg, stabilized by his hand. The other arm was gone, the shirtsleeve pinned to the shoulder. Angus had said nothing about his lost limb, nor had Emeline.

  But Deet had grumbled while feeding the hogs that he’d be happy once the rest of Angus was torn off by the cathead spool.

  Deet and Angus used to be products of the same mold. Deet was cooler, Angus rougher, but they both worked for the same things, griped about the same country problems. Both tore into him if he forgot to shuck corn. They laughed with the same voice the first time he gutted a chicken, accidentally sliced an intestine, and puked at the smell of runny chicken brownies on his hands. But since Emeline came, they were sharp around one another. Remaining within Angus’s good graces, especially now, was important. Deet’s failure was Jacob’s opportunity.