Kentucky Straight: Stories

by Chris Offutt

  The men glanced at each other, avoiding Coe’s impassive face. One by one they settled their patient gaze on Mr. Richards. He was the boss, he would tell them what to do. Richards blew rain from his lips.

  “He did work on a horse farm,” he said. “But I can’t say what all he knows.”

  The men rubbed their mouths and adjusted their hats. Each had a firm opinion but giving an order would mark him as uppity. They stared at Bobby, their sweat mixing with rain.

  Mercer removed the snakeskin belt his father had made. He jingled the buckle. Everyone studied Mercer and the belt he held.

  Slowly, carefully to ensure that the rest agreed, they began nodding to one another. They looked at Coe’s hands and waited. He did nothing until a man spoke, head turned to Mercer.

  “Won’t hurt Bobby no worse to try,” the man said. “Better take hold of Old Bob first.”

  Richards pulled him away. Old Bob released his son easily, too easily, and Mercer realized he had fainted. Richards laid him in the flowing silty mud.

  Coe looped the belt twice on Bobby’s thigh and threaded the buckle very tight. He pinched the exposed artery, tilted sideways, and pulled a knife from his pocket.

  “Somebody open this,” he said.

  The men looked at Mercer. He took the knife, yanked the blade out, and passed it back. Coe cut Bobby’s pants and folded the flaps of cloth aside. He sliced the withered leg from knee to midthigh and gently tugged six inches of artery from the slit. Twice it slipped from his hands like a tiny, wriggling snake. Blood soaked into the earth. Coe squeezed the artery, looped a knot in its end, and lifted his hands away. The blood flow strained against the knot, leaking to the mud. Coe pulled the end tighter and the bleeding stopped. The artery bulged dark against the pale knot. Coe placed his cap over the stump.

  “Get him to the truck,” he said.

  The men moved to Bobby as if he had four corners. Coe cradled his head. They lifted him and began moving slowly down the muddy slope. Mercer watched until they faded into fog rising from the hollow’s warmth. At his feet Coe’s knife lay half-buried in the mud. Mercer cleaned the blade against his pants and slipped it in his pocket.

  Mr. Richards crouched behind Old Bob and shook him awake. Dark rain trickled from his eye socket. Richards raised him to his feet and turned to Mercer.

  “Reckon we ought not leave that leg laying out here,” he said. “Dogs might get it, or something.”

  Air in the boot made it float on the puddle’s surface. Mercer lifted it by the heel, holding the leg away from his body. It didn’t weigh much. He carried it down the hill, wondering what to do with it.

  His brother stood alone in the road. Rain poured from Aaron’s belly like a gutterless roof.

  “Where’d they all go?” Mercer said.

  “Took Bobby to the doctor.”

  “Coe, too?”

  “Who?”

  “Feller driving the pickup.”

  “You mean the nigger?”

  “No,” said Mercer. “That’s not who I mean, you son of a bitch.”

  He held Bobby’s leg like a weapon. Aaron frowned and spat tobacco.

  “Shouldn’t say such about Mommy,” he said. “What’s that you got there?”

  “Bobby’s leg.”

  “Never was no count.”

  Mercer dropped it, splashing mud on his pants. Wind pelted rain against their backs, and dark sky moved over the ridge.

  “Hill ain’t going to hold,” Mercer said.

  “That trailer washes down in the road,” Aaron said, “I’ll just leave it lay and plow a new road around it. I ain’t living nowhere else but Crosscut Ridge.” He sighed and looked at the sky. Water ran from his eyebrows. “Sure did get late early today.”

  Mercer walked to the pickup where Coe sat and smoked. In the cab, Mercer held his wet shirt away from his body. He was suddenly cold. Coe dropped his cigarette out the window. Mercer dug in his pocket.

  “Here’s your knife,” he said.

  Coe took the knife and bounced it in his palm. He glanced at Mercer, then offered the knife.

  “You might need it,” Coe said.

  “I can’t take a man’s knife.”

  “It’s yours.” Coe tossed it in Mercer’s lap. “Ain’t that good a knife anyway.”

  “Reckon he’ll live?” Mercer said.

  “If he don’t, my name’ll come up. I got to get off this hill.”

  Coe lit another cigarette and started the truck. He turned on the wipers and lights, and after a few seconds, curls of steam rose from the warming hood. The steady hum of rain enclosed the truck.

  THE LEAVING ONE

  The boy crouched at the end of the wooded ridge, smashing walnuts with a brick and using a nail to pry the nutmeat. Quartered green shells lay scattered around him. To knock more nuts from the tree, Vaughn needed a special rock, since the veer of flat ones was hard to control, and small stones would not dislodge the September walnuts clinging tightly to the limbs. If he waited until they fell on their own, squirrels would get the best. Vaughn found a plum-sized rock and sighted into the leaves, arm tensed to throw. He spun instead, staring wildly into the dense tree line that bordered the ridge.

  Something was there. Something was in the woods.

  He was too far from the house for it to be his mother and there were no near neighbors. The path behind him was empty. Vaughn scanned the brush for animal sign, seeing only dark silent woods capped by a narrow strip of sky between the hills. Vaughn shrugged. As his mother would say, a goose walked over his grave was all. He found his target clump of walnuts, missed his throw, and felt something in the woods again, closer now.

  He moved into the shadow of trees and abruptly knew that a deer would be standing beyond the pine thicket ahead. His palms tingled and his fingers began to spread. As he neared the syrupy dark of the low pines, the feeling increased. Dropped needles, soft and brown, hushed his feet. Sap smell filled him. He circled the thicket and peered into a small empty clearing. The deer was gone, and with it, the strange pull of the woods. He stepped into the clearing and a man stood beside an oak as if shed from the tree.

  He was an old man with long hair matted by leaf and twig. A deer-hide shirt draped loose over his body as though he had once been a bigger man. Ragged fringe tied oak leaves to his shirt.

  The man raised his brown palm to show the rock. He tossed it underhand and when Vaughn caught it, the man was gone. Vaughn stared from the rock to the silent woods and felt scared, but he was twelve and knew he could outrun a man that old. He pitched the rock at the tree. The man stepped from behind the oak, holding the stone he’d caught. His face was lined like ironwood.

  “Who are you?” Vaughn said.

  “Depends on who you be.”

  “Vaughn.”

  “Who’s your maw’s people?”

  “Boatman.”

  Dark holes speckled the old man’s brief grin. “You look a Boatman,” he said. “Got them slitty eyes all us got.”

  “Are we kin?”

  “Elijah Boatman,” the man said. “Lije they called me when they did. I’m your grandpaw.”

  “No you ain’t. He’s dead.”

  The man’s narrow shoulders drooped as he limped across the clearing. “Your maw tell you that?”

  Vaughn nodded. The man blew a burst of warm air against Vaughn’s face.

  “Feel that?” the man said.

  “Yup.”

  “Still yet on my hind legs, ain’t I. Do I look dead to you?”

  “Well,” Vaughn said. “You’re kindly old.”

  Lije laughed, a low sound rising to a bellow that ended with a prolonged cough. He used Vaughn’s shoulder to steady himself. His breath was raspy. His body bowed inside the stiff buckskin, and it seemed to Vaughn that only the man’s clothes were holding him up. The woods were very quiet.

  “How come you’re dressed like that?” Vaughn said.

  “It’s the Boatman way,” Lije said. “How come you ain’t?”
/>   Vaughn frowned and looked at the ground. He wore the same clothes as all the other boys on Redbird Ridge, ordered from Sears a size too large. His mother ironed patches at the knees that stiffened his pants like stovepipes. Lije cleared his throat.

  “A-using this rock to fetch out walnuts, are you?”

  “Was.”

  “Rock’s not much count for naught but finding rock,” Lije said. “Don’t never aim a throw.”

  He stepped into the late afternoon sunlight cutting over the western ridge. Vaughn followed until the man suddenly turned to face him, holding a walnut. He closed his eyes and cocked an arm, fringe drifting like a wing. He threw the walnut over his shoulder. It arched high, dropping through the boughs of yellow leaves. Several walnuts fell to earth.

  The old man opened his eyes. “Leave one,” he said.

  The nuts lay beneath the tree in a diamond shape with a large walnut in the center. Vaughn gathered them quickly, winding them into the bottom of his shirt when his pockets became too tight. He left the biggest and hurried to the man, who leaned on a maple by the game path. Vaughn was aware of the wind’s sliding chill and the old man’s withered body in his deer-hide shirt. He seemed weaker now.

  “Where was it?” Lije said. “The leaving one.”

  “In the middle.”

  The man nodded, grunting a long rumble from deep within his chest. Wind moaned back and the two sounds braided through the woods. Fading sunlight cooled the air.

  “Be dark in a minute,” Vaughn said.

  “Will.”

  “Let’s go to the house.”

  “Your maw’ll not put me up. Don’t say you seen me, either. Swear by the dirt.”

  Vaughn nodded. Lije steaded himself and looked into the woods. “Never could abide no roof.”

  “Ours ain’t the best,” Vaughn said. “Leaks come spring.”

  Lije pointed at Venus faint above the distant ridge. “Only roof-hole I ever did crave.”

  “Evening star ain’t a hole.”

  “Then how’s that light get through?”

  Vaughn tipped his head to the dim night sky. When he looked at Lije, the old man was moving into the woods, his knife sheath flapping deer-tail white. Hillside darkness took him swift as shadow. Vaughn looked at Venus again, remembering from school that it wasn’t a star but a planet like earth, only closer to the sun. He walked slowly home, wondering who the old man was. Vaughn knew everyone who lived on the ridge and in the flanking hollows below the hill. Grandfathers whittled a lot and taught their grandsons how to fish. Lije was just old.

  Vaughn dumped the walnuts on the pine slat porch of his mother’s house. He scraped dirt from his boots on the top step and opened the door. A small dark bird veered past his shoulder and into the house, flying tight loops in the living room.

  “Don’t shut the door!” his mother said. “Open a window up.”

  She hurried to the kitchen, returning with a broom slanted across her body, bristles aimed high. “Where’s it at?”

  “Flew back out.”

  “Oh sweet Lord,” she said. “A bird in the house is worst of all. Did it touch you?”

  “No.”

  “Just a warning then. My opinion it’s on your great-aunt down to Rocksalt. Her lungs don’t work right in fall. I’ll pray for her tonight.”

  She gathered a deep breath, went to the kitchen, and came out with salt mounded in her palm.

  “Take a smidgeon, Vaughn,” she said, “and throw it over your shoulder.”

  Martha pinched a finger’s worth and timed her toss to match his. She threw more salt through the open doorway, then quickly yanked the door shut. Kneeling, she pressed her hands together and trickled a line of salt across the threshold. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil …”

  Wind rattled the stovepipe, startling Martha. She stood and faced her son.

  “I’m hungry,” Vaughn said.

  She smiled, relaxing. “Count on you to think of your belly.”

  They ate supper in the narrow kitchen. Above the metal-edged Formica table hung a portrait of Jesus, the only picture in the house. A breeze seeped beneath the window.

  “You cold?” she said.

  “No.”

  “How was school?”

  Vaughn shrugged.

  “What’d you learn?”

  “Teacher said history ain’t a straight line of time.”

  “What is it then?”

  “Said history lays over itself like corn in a crib and we’re all a cob.” Vaughn shrugged and looked at the greasy plate. He began to lie. “Then he told about his family and asked about ours.”

  Martha stiffened, chin creeping up. “Your father was a good man,” she said. “God sent him up to Ohio for work. Be back any season.”

  “Is my grandpaw really dead?”

  Martha was silent for a long time and Vaughn knew she was turning Bible pages in her mind, searching an answer.

  “He’s dead to God,” she said. “That makes him dead to me.”

  “But is he really?”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Is he old?”

  “Eighty some.”

  “Where’s he live?”

  Martha looked away from the blue eyes of Jesus on the wall. She trailed a spoon across her plate. “Your grandpaw lives where the state puts people …” She stared at the devil’s horns she’d made from gravy and shut her eyes. “It’s a place for people who can’t live by their ownself.”

  “How’d he get there?”

  She used her spoon to close the curving horns etched into the gravy. She drew a fish and stared at the faded picture of Jesus. Her words rushed, rising and falling in a lilt.

  “Lije run off to World War One and was a chaplain. He came home changed, and took to living on the other side of Shawnee Rock. Not no regular house, just out in the hills. He came down sometimes to see Mommy and us kids. Then the next war came and all my brothers got killed, three of the best boys you ever did see.

  “Well, me and Sister and Mommy got took in by a neighbor woman to help raise us up. Her husband was a preacher, could make a possum take to gospel. He’d get everybody riled and head for the creek bank. When he was finished, that creek’d be half dry. And let me tell you, he’d hold a body under till they was nigh drowned. He was bear-stout, he was. People were right proud to claim they’d got saved by him.

  “One spring, he done Sister that way and she passed out cold. Preacher lifted her out of the water limp as dead. That’s when Lije ran out of the woods screaming like a bobcat. He’d been hid and watching everything. He took hold of Sister’s shoulders and had a tug-of-war until the preacher let go. Lije laid her down and hunkered there beside her. Then he started kissing her mouth and rubbing her bubs. That’s what people always did say, but what it was, he was drawing that creek water right out of her body. He spit it out and breathed into her mouth three times. He had a little bag tied to his waist, and he took and rubbed stuff on her neck and chest. Well, her breathing got regular. Her eyes opened up.

  “Preacher lifted his King James and said Lije Boatman wasn’t fit to live with decent folks. Said he was a devil. Said everybody seen how he’d done devil-stuff to his own daughter.

  “Lije laughed. He looked at everybody and said, ‘They ain’t no devil. Only bad men.’ He jumped the creek and ran up the hillside. The preacher claimed how Lije denying it just proved how evil he was. Said if they ain’t no devil, they ain’t no God, and if they ain’t no God, then what were all these people lined up at the creek for.

  “One by one, everybody walked into the creek. Only me and Sister stayed on the bank. The preacher yelled about getting sin cleaned plumb off him, and how the only way was letting the Lord see you like you was brung into the world. Preacher took his shirt off. He told his wife to undo her dress and she did. They was standing there in the water half naked. He went and took his britches down and everybody started taking their clothes off. It was a race
to see who could show the Lord their true self first. The preacher laid in preaching and he went on till the lightning bugs had come and gone.

  “Lije never visited no more but stayed in the woods some forty years. Then VISTA heard of him and brought him out of the hills. I heard he fought, but was weakly, sick with something. A man from the state went to the preacher’s daughter and asked did she know who Lije’s kin was. Next day she came out here packing food to give me. Said did I want to take Lije in. But I never. I sent my own daddy off like stock to a pen. I broke a commandment.”

  Martha’s voice had faded to a hoarse whisper. She carried her plate to the sink, where she began washing it over and over, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

  Vaughn left the table and slipped to his room and into bed. From outside came a barred owl’s rising call. Moonlight soaked the yard and lit the woods beyond the house. Vaughn stared through the window, and though the sound grew louder, he could not see the owl. He lay listening to the bird, no longer able to hear his mother’s droning voice.

  After school the next day he heard the owl again and followed the sound to a tall oak. Lije sat beneath the tree. He blew into his cupped hands, making the eight tones that ended in a low gurgle. An answering call echoed from the dusky woods. Lije showed Vaughn how to duplicate the sound, and the owl answered once, then quit.

  “Owl’s just being civil until he knows you better,” Lije said.

  “When will he?”

  “That’s on you. People don’t like owls because they live in graveyards, but an owl needs a big tree and graveyard trees don’t get cut down. Never be afraid on account of where something lives. That goes for people, too.”

  Vaughn decided not to tell him what his mother had said. Lije didn’t act like a devil or look like one. He was more old than anything else, and Vaughn was glad to have a grandpaw, even if he wasn’t quite right in the head. Vaughn knew that happened to old people. His fifth-grade teacher had broken her hip and when she returned to school, she wore different wigs each day and put lipstick on her nose. Vaughn thought that was worse than talking to owls.