Kentucky Straight: Stories

by Chris Offutt

  On Saturday Vaughn sat in the white glare of a low noon sun and watched the woods. Softwood leaves, crisp with equinox color, floated them treetops near the sun. His pocket held leftover breakfast pork in case Lije was hungry. Vaughn sweated in the heat but stayed on the porch. Lije had said to wait, that a Boatman knew sign and if Vaughn wasn’t anything else, he was a damn-sure Boatman. “Looking won’t find nary a thing,” Lije had said. “Just you set on lookout. It’ll find you.”

  His mother’s mumbling voice drifted from the house, talking to Jesus. Vaughn had tried it once when his mother was in the garden. He sat in her chair facing the picture in its plastic filigreed frame. Jesus didn’t answer. Vaughn talked some more but Jesus never said a word and soon Vaughn felt stupid, hearing his voice in the kitchen with no one there. At the bottom of the picture was a company name and the words SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA. Vaughn figured that was where Jesus lived, and on a school map he’d seen that Scranton wasn’t too far from Bethlehem. He talked to his teacher, who said there was more than one Bethlehem, there might be five or six, maybe a dozen. Jesus didn’t have a real home, he lived everywhere.

  Behind Vaughn the screen door rubbed on hinge straps cut from an old tire. His mother crossed the porch and stroked the back of his head.

  “What all I said the other night don’t have much to do with you,” she said. “That’s old and done. You’re a good boy, Vaughn. You’ll make a man one day.”

  “I’m hungry,” he said.

  “Then you’re among the living.” She sighed and looked into the woods. “You stay close by the house today.”

  “How come?”

  “Just feel it’s all. There’s a prayer meeting tonight and I want you to go with me. You hear?”

  Vaughn nodded, staring at the ground as his mother went in the house. She didn’t attend church often, had never forced him to join. Maybe tonight Lije would go, too. They’d sit together and everyone would know Lije was his grandfather.

  The sudden absence of sound lifted Vaughn’s head to the empty sky. He peered into dark brush between the trees. A red-tailed hawk lofted from a gum tree and glided through the open limbs of the ridge. Vaughn crossed the yard and entered the woods. Autumn was all around him.

  The dry rustle of leaves drew Vaughn up the steep ridge slope and down the hill. He stopped at a creek twisting through cudweed in the dark hollow. A frog splashed into the creek. Vaughn turned, and another frog leaped from the bank. The shifting tendrils of a willow swayed apart, releasing sun shafts from its shade. Vaughn moved to the light, stepped through the willow’s overhang, and stood below an outcrop of shale. Clear water gushed through a gap in the rock. Above it, Lije was sitting cross-legged in the sun, his face strained and lichen gray. Vaughn climbed the slippery cliff and squatted beside him.

  “You’re good,” Lije said. “Come straight here without no maundering about. Didn’t tucker me too bad, a-towing you.”

  His eyes were filmy and his voice came faint. A vine held his long hair back. Vaughn breathed through his mouth to avoid the smell. Lije grinned.

  “Fox piss,” he said. “Cuts man-stink awful good. Slept in an old den last night. Got you something, too.”

  He opened a belt pouch and withdrew a shiny piece of quartz.

  “Shooting star,” he said. “Seen it fall last night. Points all busted off when it hit. Ever saw one?”

  “Yup.”

  “You take and hold this up tonight and see if it don’t match them others. A fell star ain’t easy to get.”

  Vaughn had learned in school that stars were gas balls a billion miles away. Quartz lay thick in the hills and it glittered in the sandstone creek beds. Vaughn wondered just how crazy his grandfather was.

  “I brought some breakfast,” Vaughn said.

  “Done ate berries and such. Went dryland fishing but the frost beat me out.”

  “You really my grandpaw?”

  “Found me, didn’t you.”

  “Maw said you were in some kind of state place.”

  “I let them keep me till the time came.”

  “She said people think you’re a devil.”

  “You go by that?”

  Vaughn slowly shook his head. He wasn’t certain what he believed but knew that sitting here was right. Lije stood, leaning on Vaughn. He coughed and spat, and continued to cough a thick, wet sludge. He stepped to the cliff edge and jumped. A sapling eased him to the earth. Vaughn slid sideways down the loose rock face and followed the limping man into the woods.

  “We going fishing?” Vaughn said.

  “No.”

  “Where we headed for?”

  “The where ain’t much count against the how. We’re not just traipsing these hills, boy. We’re walking with the woods.”

  Vaughn remembered his mother’s warning to stay near the house. If he was going back, now was the time. He’d come to the creek often but had never crossed it, and could get home easily from here. The woods didn’t scare Vaughn except at night, when his mother said spirits roved.

  Vaughn followed Lije deeper into the woods. No matter who the man was, he was still a grown-up and Vaughn knew he’d be safe. Lije plucked a long, dusky feather from the brush. “This way,” he said, and moved east. A hundred yards away, he found a second feather. Lije glided through the woods, dipping a shoulder and bending a knee to avoid low limbs, moving like a shadow. Vaughn plodded behind, his face marked by thorn and branch.

  Their route shifted with each new feather as they traveled beyond the logged-out land and into older woods near Shawnee Rock. Giant trees crowded together, casting dark shade. Lije headed east, away from the afternoon sun slicing the woods. The man wasn’t talking and Vaughn had never been this far from home. If he turned back, he’d be lost.

  An hour later, Lije lifted an arm and tipped his fingers. Vaughn moved to him, smelling the buckskin musk and odor of fox. The woods air chilled.

  “Feathers done,” Lije whispered. “Deer now.”

  Where, Vaughn thought.

  Lije aimed his chin at the ridgeline. “Other side yonder.” He squatted. “Sign,” Lije muttered. “Spy it.”

  Vaughn mentally divided the earth into lanes and searched each row carefully. Weeds pushed through rotting leaves. A cicada shell lay beside pale nut shavings left by a squirrel.

  “Don’t look for nothing,” Lije said. “The nose and ears is first cousin to the eyes.”

  Vaughn closed his eyes and imagined a deer weaving along the hollow and up the ridge. It moved slowly, chewing shrub, alert to sound. The buck looked directly at Vaughn with black eyes, very old. It held the stare a long time, then turned away.

  Vaughn opened his eyes. In the forest floor before him lay a narrow path of bent grass and dead leaves turned damp-side up. He stared hard and the trail faded, becoming the bottom of the woods.

  “I saw it,” Vaughn said.

  “Boatman can’t help but to.”

  “It’s gone now.”

  “Because you’re looking again.”

  Lije limped up the slope, bent from the waist, following sign. He coughed steadily. Vaughn closed his eyes and the deer appeared before him. When he opened them, Lije’s buckskinned body moved along the trail. They eased down a steep bank to the soft ground of a rain gully. Lije followed the creek twenty yards before moving upslope to the next fold of land. The setting sun was on their backs.

  In a basin laced with squawroot, Lije stood erect. He turned in a slow circle, eyes closed and arms extended, his fingertips quivering in the silent woods. His mouth hung slack. A deep breath forced his wet cough.

  “He’s pranking with me,” Lije said. “Doubled on us or hid, one.”

  “Could be anywhere.”

  “But he ain’t.” Lije’s whisper was weak. “There’s only one place he’s at and that’s wherever he is.” His fingers squeezed Vaughn. “Where’d he go, Boatman?”

  “Over that ridge.” Vaughn pointed without thought.

  “How do you know?”
/>   “Don’t.”

  “But you know.”

  Vaughn nodded.

  “What else?” Lije said.

  “Something’s behind us.”

  “What?”

  “Can’t rightly say.”

  “You feared?”

  “No.”

  “It’s your shadow’s shadow then.”

  Lije coughed and began limping up the ridge. Vaughn looked into the dark silence of the woods and realized that night was an hour away and his mother would be mad. She’d spend all evening telling the picture of Jesus what an evil boy she had. When he came home, she’d make him kneel on stones.

  Vaughn climbed the hill and stood beside Lije. The fading sunshine flung their shadows over the land. Lije’s outline flowed across the earth, disappearing between two huge and ancient oaks. They were seven feet apart, too close for trees their size. Vaughn’s shadow ended halfway to the oaks.

  “There it is,” Lije said.

  “The deer?”

  “No. Deer’s one led us here. Him and the hawk. That there’s the go-over place.”

  The twin oaks rose like massive legs, their branches twining overhead, blocking sky. Between the trees lay a sunken strip of earth. The arching stems of Solomon’s-seal formed a boundary to the dark space beneath the oaks. Lije walked down the hill into his shadow. Beyond the steep surrounding hillsides were the crests of further hills that melted into the dusk. Crickets began their sunset creaking. Lije was halfway down the hill when Vaughn saw movement to his left.

  A huge deer emerged from the brush with a sixteen-point rack spreading from a tapered head. He had never seen a deer that big. Hunters killed them before they got that old. The buck stood calm and still, watching Vaughn. Its dark eyes were deep as time.

  “Grandpaw,” Vaughn whispered.

  Wind closed leaves around the retreating buck. Vaughn ran down the hill to Lije, who stood before the giant oaks. The noise of the deer circled the trees.

  “I saw it,” Vaughn said. “I saw the deer.”

  “No,” said Lije. “He showed himself.”

  Lije entered the space between the trees. Branches rattled overhead and whippoorwills began their call. Lije sat cross-legged in the center of the trees, smearing gray ash over his face. From inside his shirt, he pulled an oval stone threaded on a thong around his neck. He lifted it over his head and offered it to his grandson. Vaughn stepped between the trees and pressed his hand over the rock.

  “This’ll be yours now,” Lije said. “My pa-paw give me it.”

  “What is it?”

  “He never said.”

  Lije’s body began to rock. He leaned his face close to Vaughn and gripped him by his arms. His eyes glittered fierce.

  “Sing you the be I song,” Lije said. “Sing you what land made me. The oak shadow is be I. Dream tinker is my drum. The eyes in the woods you feel alone. Wind-breath from a cave. Deerprint, birdcall, bobcat keen. The leaf be I. The leaf be I. The leaf be I.”

  Acorns rained to the ground while screeching squirrels raced from limb to limb. Lije’s face was paling fast. A yellow butterfly circled a blur around his head. He slowly tilted backwards into swirling leaves and settled to the earth, pulling Vaughn with him, onto his body. They held the stone together, pressed tight between their palms.

  “Leave me lay here after,” Lije said. “You be the Boatman now.”

  The roots of both oaks interlocked below; their branches welded overhead. The red-tailed hawk rustled to a landing on the oak’s low crotch. The sounds of night swarmed the woods. A bobcat’s high-pitched scream pierced the quickening wind. Leaves whirled the air. From far away came the rumbling bellow of a bear. The wind and animal sound increased until it seemed to Vaughn that all the hills were rushing to the oaks. He shut his eyes and pushed his face against his grandfather’s silent chest.

  Wind moved away and the autumn woods slowly hushed. Vaughn lay a long time before pushing himself up. Lije was still, his sightless eyes staring into the tree limbs overhead. Vaughn’s imprint lay on his body outlined by red oak leaves. The stone was in Vaughn’s hand, and though he thought he should feel scared, he wasn’t. Beside him stood the ancient buck.

  The deer pawed a bare place next to Lije and urinated against the earth. It moved to Lije’s other side and repeated itself, marking its own, and hobbled into the woods on a weak back leg.

  Vaughn strung the oval stone over his neck. He took the feathers and stepped from the cold alley between the oaks. An owl called and another answered until their sound filled the woods. Vaughn chose the biggest feather and shaped its tines, drawing them tight to the tip, and stretched his arm between the oaks. The leaving feather settled to the buckskin husk of Lije. Vaughn began walking toward the red glow of sun behind the western hill.

  Dusk pushed over the ridge and across the land. Vaughn went down the slope and up a dark hollow to the hill where Lije had found the last feather. Vaughn stopped, unable to remember the direction they had come. He faced the oaks beyond the ridge and held the stone between his hands. Behind him something big came up the hill. He thought it was the deer but heard no swish of leaf or crackling twig. Vaughn pressed the stone to his chest. He felt the force move slowly to his back and stop. Overhead, full dark arrived. Silence flowed through the woods.

  The thing was suddenly gone, and Vaughn knew what it was, and why he was not afraid. The hill had come up the hill. The hill would lead him home. He turned and walked into the night, avoiding branches easily. In his hand the stone began to warm.

  HORSEWEED

  William plucked beads of hardened plaster from his trowel and wiped them on the bucket’s edge. The wall joints had to be smooth as snow. This job might lead to another and the Brants wanted everything perfect. The Brants owned the sheetrock, the plaster, and the red rug under the drop cloth. Until the job was finished, they owned William eight hours a day. Only the ability belonged to William; he’d had to rent the tools.

  Mrs. Miriam Brant walked into the room to check his progress, wearing a loose housecoat with nothing underneath. William looked away from her thighs and dipped the trowel. His wife’s legs weren’t as good but they were more familiar. Miriam tapped a red fingernail against the wall.

  “I want your opinion on a room in back,” she said.

  He followed her through a long hall to the bedroom. A three-panel mirror filled a corner, and small rugs lay on the carpet. She bent from the waist, pointing to a web of ripples that puckered the wallpaper like a burn scar. The housecoat fell open to her navel.

  “Work in here,” she said, “is never good enough to suit me.”

  William looked past her face to the store-bought blanket on the bed, feeling bad for her. She was from Bobcat Hollow but had married a lawyer and moved to town. Her husband refused to let her family visit except during election years. William’s fingers brushed the dimpled wall. The room was quiet and big, and he could hear his own breathing. He wondered when her husband got off work.

  “Too much water in the glue,” he said.

  “Always something.”

  “Man ought not to leave a job that way.”

  “Maybe you could do better.”

  William looked at her legs, thinking of his wife at home all day. He lifted his head and spoke quietly.

  “My daddy knew your daddy.”

  Miriam hugged her housecoat together and sat on the bed, shoulders slumped, head down.

  “I couldn’t wait to get out of that holler,” she said. “Now I’m just as stuck here as I was there. You still live on the ridge?”

  “Guess I’m stuck there, too.”

  William returned to the living room, where he skimmed plaster over the seam and feathered the edges. The work was nearly complete; tomorrow he would sand. At an outside faucet he cleaned the tools, watching the steady stream of water sparkle in the sun. Miriam waved from the window. William stared at her a long time before getting into his truck. He hoped he wouldn’t regret his decision to leave. He’d
always liked her when they were kids.

  William slowly drove the blacktop home, glad to be out of Rocksalt. He passed a new video dish perched among felled trees and wondered what his father would have thought of such a thing. Two years ago he’d told his father about a job with a construction crew in town.

  “A man’s lucky to have these hills,” his father had said.

  “I know it,” William said. “But they ain’t exactly ours no more.”

  “Town never was either.”

  William’s father spat dark phlegm against the clay dirt yard. Coal dust filled his pores, blending his face into the night. His voice took on the timbre of a father speaking to a son, not to a man he trusted underground, working an illegal mine.

  “Don’t you do like your grandpaw done.”

  William stared at his boots. Years back, during the first mine strikes, his grandfather had made whiskey to keep his kids in clothes. A government man shotgunned him as he unloaded forty quarts of liquor at Blue Lick River. His body fell into the muddy water and the family buried an empty coffin.

  “I’m not Grandpaw,” William had said. “And you’re not me.”

  Tools rattled in the truck bed as William drove up the hill and out Crosscut Ridge to his house. Three dogs chased through the dust, jumping at the pickup. William squatted, pushing his fingers in the fur behind each dog’s ears. He found several ticks, their bodies stretched tight like kernels of white com. He twisted one free and squeezed it between thumb and finger. The tick burst in a spray of dark blood.

  The heavy scent of venison stew drifted from the house, and William wondered how many meals were left on the doe. His daughters needed more meat. Inside, his wife, Connie, held the baby on her hip. Sarah sat on the floor, banging a spoon against a pot. Ruth rushed to her father.

  “How many’d you get?” she said.

  “Eight,” William said. “Three off Blackie. Two off Hubcap. So how many ticks off Duke?”

  She grunted over stubby fingers. Connie turned and pushed stray hair behind an ear. Afternoon sun washed her skin, softening the shadows below her eyes.

  “How’s town?” she said.