Other Worlds, Better Lives, A Howard Waldrop Reader Selected Long Fiction 1989-2003

by Howard Waldrop

  Then we went back by the house.

  Mr. Augie was outside, hands in his butt pockets. “If you’re crazy enough to think you can shovel that stuff out, you’re probably crazy enough to think you can hoodoo this place. But I don’t get the heebie-jeebies, no sir, and Eldridge is barking up the wrong tree if he told you that.”

  “See you at seven in the morning, Mr. Augie,” said Houlka.

  It was late afternoon.

  “I.O., I need the name of a man who’ll do something improper for a dollar. He can’t be in trouble with the law, and he has to be a white man.”

  I named the few I knew. Tomorrow was not going to be easy to watch.

  * * *

  Boss Eustis had a man drive us out before the sun came up. We sat bouncing around in the back of the bobtail truck. I was worried. Houlka had a big toe sack with him that had the handle of a shovel sticking out of it. He’d gone to town and come back after I’d gone to sleep last night, worn out from all the foolishness.

  We got out of the truck. What little sun there was was just coming up behind a flat deck of high clouds.

  Mr. Augie’s whole family, except the woman, was waiting for us.

  “One thing I can say you’re punctual. In two minutes, you’ll have twenty-four hours, and they ain’t no lights out here at night, and I don’t advise shoveling horse manure in the dark. You sure you won’t just give up right now? Save your back?”

  “I’m ready,” said Houlka.

  “Well, start—right—NOW.”

  Houlka reached in the bag and took out a two pound claw hammer and five pounds of #16 nails and handed them to me.

  “Wait right here,” he said. He took the sack with the shovel handle sticking out and walked down toward the lot.

  “Moving mighty slow,” said Mr. Augie, “for a man who’s gotta shovel nine hundred cubic yards of shit today.”

  Houlka went around the lot.

  “What the hell?” said Augie.

  “That man’s crazy, Daddy,” said one of the girls.

  “I knowed that yesterday, honey,” said Augie.

  Houlka went over the gulley and into the far stand of trees.

  “Now I seen it all,” said Mr. Augie. Then Houlka was lost to sight for a while.

  “Do you have any idea what he’s doing?”

  “I’m as lost as you are, Mr. Augie. I been lost since about noon yesterday.”

  After a few minutes Houlka came walking at a brisk pace back up the rise, like he had some purpose in mind. Then he leaned down and was doing something we couldn’t see.

  There was a huge explosion from back in the woods that jarred our teeth.

  “Holy Christ!” yelled Augie. A plume of debris rose in the air from the woods—mud, grass, small tree limbs. Then there was a low roar from that direction.

  “That sonofabitch blew the seal on my minnow pond!” yelled Augie. We could see a brown ribbon snaking its way through the woods toward us, knocking down bushes, coming toward the small gully. I looked at Houlka. He was watching the rushing water. Then he turned, leaned down, then stepped back real quick about fifty feet.

  The water got to the gulley and began to fill it.

  There was another, closer explosion—I thought Houlka had blown himself up. There was a huge roaring torrent shooting straight out into the air above the rise.

  The heavy mud-laden water came down the rise, met up with the water that had just reached the gulley (and seemed to me to leap uphill) and came across and slammed into the feed lot, making a hollow clanging sound like a bell as it beat against the metal water trough. The water turned instantly black, seemed to lift up in its tracks, and flowed what looked to me like uphill again to the gulley in a big churning whirlpool. Then it rushed like a big flat black snake into the woods where it had started from.

  The flow from the first pool had stopped and the second was slowing down. There were two streams, the whirling mass, the outflow from the lot. The barn was shaking. The fence on the far side was under water for a minute or two before it re-emerged.

  Mr. Augie had his mouth open. “Why . . . why . . . he blew up my catfish pool. My minnow pond. My catfish!”

  The kids were yelling and clapping their hands until Mr. Augie looked at them. The water from the second pool over the rise slowed to a trickle, and we could see Houlka shoveling at its levee. Then he walked back into the woods where the minnow pond was. After a few minutes he came back by the second pond and shovelled some more.

  The water had moved out of the barn lot and was moving away and getting back into the woods. I could see black water among the roots of the trees there. Houlka finished shoveling and came down toward us.

  I didn’t know whether Mr. Augie was going to get a gun and kill him or just explode where he stood. Houlka held out his hand. I gave him the hammer and the nails. He walked down to the lot, miring up to his ankles in the muddy ground. He paused to throw a couple of shovelfuls of manure over the fence. Then he came back up the hill and handed the bag to me.

  “You’ll be wanting to go pay Mr. Eustis now,” said Houlka.

  He walked away. Mr. Augie was hissing like an old stove, shaking in his clothes.

  * * *

  Houlka was asleep after a bath. I was at the front of the house.

  Boss Eustis was rolling on the front porch, crying, he was laughing so hard. The Spunt County chorus was falling all over itself.

  “And then . . . and then . . .” tears squirted out of the Boss’s eyes, “then Augie says, but he blew up my minnow pond and my catfish! I says, but that lot’s clean as a whistle, I hear, and it ain’t even a quarter to nine . . . any-thing . . . anything . . . else you want him to do in the other twenty-two hours and fifteen minutes, like . . . like . . . blow up your house, or kill all your horses or anything? Hee-hee-hee.”

  Ed Bender couldn’t get his breath and Mr. Jones fell off his nail keg.

  “’Sides,” said Mr. Eustis, “I hear he only blew the top two feet off each levee and closed them up before he came back, even fixed that . . . damn ol’ rickety fence for you. Hee-hee-hee.”

  “Didja . . . didja take his money, Eldridge?”

  “Hell yes. He lost the bet. You shoulda seed the expression on his face. Then I handed it back to him and gave him another thousand dollars besides, and I said, Augie, you done give me fifteen hundred dollars worth of entertainment this morning, you sure have. Buy yourself some new catfish—besides, you get off your lazy butt and get someone . . . someone to plow that bottom where all that stuff went and soaked in, you’ll get forty bales to the acre off’n it. Hee-hee-hee.”

  “And,” Mr. Eustis caught his breath, “I says, Augie, you just better be mighty careful how you bet from now on out! Hee-hee-hee.”

  I went back into the kitchen. Every time anybody new would pull up out front, he’d start in again, and tell the whole thing, and you could hear people falling off their chairs all afternoon.

  VI

  The next time we got our pay, Houlka went down to the Western Auto store and bought a bow and arrow set. It had a forty pound pull, he said. He bought a bunch of target arrows, and me and him spent some days in the old tumbledown blacksmith shop pounding out hunting arrowheads out of the old bladestock iron in there.

  Then Boss Eustis had us go over to the edge of Lake Yuksino and catch this big damn old bull that had gotten loose and was tearing up the countryside. That thing ran us up one side of the county and halfway across it before Houlka managed to bull-dog and hogtie it.

  That’s also when the rains really started. There was talk the River was higher than it had ever been, and this was only March, so the ice wasn’t even off it in Yankee-land yet. We got fourteen straight days of rain, then it cleared off for a day or so, and Miz Eustis sent us off to go take some medicine
and stuff to a bunch of people who farmed one of the Boss’s places about seven miles northwest of town. Then, she said, you go check on the Old Egypt Cemetery for me again on the way back in, in case we have clear weather and get to work on it.

  So we set off, me carrying the bundle, and Houlka with his big club and bow and arrows.

  * * *

  We moved over so a wagon could pass us. I’d heard it coming up behind us for five minutes or more. A big chestnut mare came by about half asleep, pulling a shay that had been cut down so that only one seat was left.

  I looked up, then looked back real quick. The man driving was the Reverend Mr. East. He had on his preaching suit, out here on this road. On the back rail of the wagon was his two boys, dressed up, too.

  Mr. East nodded, then put his eyes back on the road.

  “Somebody out here must have died,” I said. “Nobody wears clothes like that on a Tuesday. Can’t figure what his sons are doing with him. He’s a preacher, a real hell-fire and brimstone boiled-in-the-word-of-God book thumper,” I said. Houlka didn’t say anything. He knew by now I’d keep on talking anyway.

  “He raised his boys to be just like him. When they turned sixteen and seventeen, they ran off to Atlanta and Memphis, one after another. They showed back up four years later, and it nearly killed the old man. They’d become preachers, too, only one is a Baptist and the other’s a Methodist. He prayed three weeks, then got so sick he almost died, and Dr. Sclape gave him some medicine that kept him in the outhouse for three solid days—the neighbors said you could hear him holler, ‘Oh Lordy, Lordy, take me now, take me now, end this misery!’”

  Houlka smiled a little, hummed, then sort of sang:

  David the King, he wept and wept.

  Saying, Oh my Son, Oh my Son!

  I would have died, had not it been

  for my chamber, chamber!

  “That’s one of Mr. Blind Bill’s songs. Where’d you hear that?”

  “People around Mt. Oatie been singing that for a hundred years,” said Houlka.

  I looked on up the road. There were a couple of wagons and a Model T parked off of the mud on the side of the road to the right, and the preacher’s wagon was turning in at the fence row.

  “They ain’t no house here,” I said. “If somebody’s dead they would have taken them to a house before they called a preacher. Wonder what’s up?”

  We came even with the thicket on the right where the fenceline started, and there were eleven or twelve people there, and the preacher and his two boys was getting out and walking into the field. A man in bib overalls stood there. He had on a big pair of work gloves and a straw hat. He held the handles of a little-bitty one-wheeled single-spade garden cultivator, the kind town wives use to put in tomato patches, and it was hooked up with twelve-strand rope to the biggest ox I’d ever seen in my life.

  “It’s a field-blessing,” said Houlka. “I haven’t seen one since I was your age.”

  “I ain’t ever seen one! What’s it like?”

  “Hush, and you’ll see.”

  We stopped at some respectful distance back, but where we could see and hear. Nobody noticed us. They were attending to what went on out in the field.

  Well, it wasn’t a field, not yet anyway; more of an open place about four, maybe four and a half acres, to where some trees curved around on both sides. There were some old dead weeds about a foot high, and some new grass just coming up, even after all the rain. That was about all you could say for it.

  “This is the place you want me to ask God to make stuff grow on?” asked Reverend Mr. East. He had a big loud voice and the ox’s eyes rolled when he started yelling. It headed for the woods. Mr. East’s two sons grabbed an ear each and held on. It tried to kick out of its rope and pulled the cultivator over. The farmer grabbed the handle and stuck it back into the ground.

  “I can’t believe anybody would be idjit enough to try to grow something on this sorry piece of land,” yelled the preacher. “Did you get your brains out of a feed sack?”

  The farmer scuffed his boot back and forth in the weeds, not looking at the preacher.

  “This!” Mr. East spread his arms all around the extent of the field. “Haven’t nothing but thistles and briers grown on this place since the flood. And you expect me to ask favors for you?”

  The ox jumped again. Mr. East’s sons were talking into its ears, soothing and gentling it down, though we couldn’t hear what they were saying.

  “You must be as dumb as that plow-rig you got,” said the preacher, loosening his tie. “I’m getting mad just thinking about what am I doing here in this wilderness when there’s the sick to visit; I could be evangelicizing down at the jailhouse, but no, I have to get all dressed up, and drag my two boys out away from their good works, and come out to this sorry-ass place and try to get God to bless it?

  “Another thing. You probably can’t plow any better than this place can grow things. You and this piece of desert deserve each other! You’ll kill yourself and that there ox, and this place’ll grow weeds and brush and little oak trees, and you’ll make half a bale of cotton off the whole damn thing! Who ever told you you were a farmer? I guess it was easier than getting a real job, huh? Trying to grow things with everything against you is bad enough—the sun, the weather, cyclones, hail—when you’re a mental giant. But somebody like you; well, it’s a wonder this whole country, sea to shining sea, could raise enough food to get Spunt County past peach-picking time if all the farmers out there are like you trying to provide the nation’s breadbasket!

  “And that ox! Not only is he hooked up wrong, but it looks as dumb as you are. Couldn’t be dumber. You didn’t see it buying this piece of trash land, did you? Whoever sold you this place is probably laughing his ass off and getting liquored up with your money right now.

  “Go ahead. Don’t let me stop you. Just go ahead and try to plow a straight furrow with this contraption. It’d be just right—they could let a crazy man out of the Europa Clinic and he could hook a soup ladle up to a cat and plow a straighter line than that—look at that. Straight between here and that dead tree yonder, not all over the place!”

  When the preacher had told him to, the farmer’d dug the plow into the ground and slapped the ox with the tail end of the rope that was doubled over three or four times to the single-yoke and the ox had begun to pull. The ground rolled up and over in front of the plow, like there was a big gopher running just in front of the wheel. The two preacher boys held the ox’s head and every time it would try to pull straight, they sort of guided it the other way. They were still talking into its ears as they handled it from each side.

  The farmer went out from the edge of the field in a short half-circle, twisting the ropes and trying to keep the ox going straight, then got him going fairly well in a long line, then what with one thing and another the ox turned around and was heading back almost at a trot in another long line paralleling the first. The farmer hung on for all he was worth, trying to keep the plow in the ground; his feet only touched the ground every ten feet or so. The two young preachers ran beside the plow animal now, still holding onto its ears, still talking.

  “Look at that idjit!” the preacher turned to the crowd. “I been on some stupid errands in my life in the Name of the Lord, but never anything like this. Stop that thing before it plows under my wagon!” He yelled to the farmer. “Stop it, you agricultural maladroit!”

  The farmer let the ox drag him another few feet by the ropes, then got to his feet and stuck the plow into the ground and wrapped the free ends of the ropes around the cultivator handles. He was panting and covered with mud, grass and sweat. He was twenty-five feet from where he’d started.

  “You consarned idjit. I’m gonna have to come back in a few weeks and say your obsequies. You’ll let that ox plow you and the fence and the road and Spunt County under. Da
mn! Damn! Damn!”

  His two sons joined the preacher.

  “Since I’ve come all the way out here I might as well get this over,” said the Reverend Mr. East. “I guess we better bow our heads.” There wasn’t any sound for a minute but the ox cropping dead grass.

  “Dear Lord, help this moron in his time of need. If anyone ever needed it, it’s him. And his family, for having a fool at the head of it. If he has to kill himself trying to make a go of this piece of wasteland, we ask that you make his death a quick and speedy one. Try not to be too hard on his ox; it was fashioned as one of your creatures and cannot help it if someone was venal enough to sell him to the first idjit with a loose nickel in his pocket, not knowing he’d work it to death on a worthless piece of rocks and stumps like this. We ask all this in your name. Amen.”

  “Amen,” said the crowd. The preacher looked around at the farmer, his ox, the plow, the field with the long single rounded-and-straight continuous cut line in it, and the people in the crowd, and shook his head sadly. Then he and his sons climbed up into the shay.

  The farmer handed him a dollar in quarters.

  “It’ll never grow a single goddam boll,” said Mr. East. Then he turned his mare around and headed back toward town.

  The crowd broke up and went back to its wagon and the car. The farmer, alone in his field next to the harnessed ox, scanned the sky for coming weather.

  We went on down the road and left him to his worries.

  * * *

  We had delivered the medicine and come back to town and gone to Old Egypt Cemetery.

  First thing I noticed was that the recent rains had played hell with everything. Some more of Mr. Keiffer’s tomb had cracked off and was laying in piles around the base. Two or three tombstones were leaning over.