Fifty Acres and a Poodle

by Jeanne Marie Laskas

There is nothing flirtatious in his manner. The look in his eye is more of genuine concern. It’s the same look he has when any of the guys who come by say curse words in front of me. He’ll correct them, he’ll say there is a lady present, and then he’ll look at me and say, “I am very sorry you had to hear that.”

  Sometimes I worry about Billy meeting the babes; some of them have mouths on them far fouler than the mouths of those workers. I don’t want Billy to know this. I don’t want to disillusion him. Sometimes I look at Billy and see him as a mighty bull with the thickest hide that protects him from the briars of the country but, were he to wander into the city, would only look foolish.

  A lot of times, as we walk through the mud, Billy and I talk about life. He tells me more about his life than I tell him about mine. Some friendships are like this. Billy is forty-nine. He grew up in the mountains of West Virginia in a home without running water or electricity. He has lived a lot of lives since becoming the owner of an excavation company. He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, got gunned down twice. The second time he was the lone survivor. He was hurt. He was hurt bad. He crawled past seven of his buddies, all dead. He crawled under a stump in the bank of a stream. “Crawled under there to die,” he told me. He could see the Vietcong as they searched for survivors of the wreckage, he could see their feet in the water. He had a .45 and he had a .357 Magnum and he had a grenade under this arm. He pulled the pin on the grenade, positioned it just so. “So that when they pulled me out, I’d take half of them with me.” But they didn’t see him and walked on by. He was rescued days later by some Australian soldiers.

  When he got home from the war, Billy worked a few years on the river as a crane operator for a barge company, then got sick of having a boss and set out on his own. He bought a two-seater airplane and got a contract to fly dead people back home from the scenes of distant auto accidents. “Well, how else would they get home?” he explained to me. His airplane could accommodate only him and the dead person, who would be strapped in, seated next to him, just like any other passenger, except it would be dead. Once he had to take home a very beautiful dead woman who kept flopping over onto him. It was a long flight. He felt bad for her. “I felt so bad for her, I had to quit that line of work,” he told me.

  As we walk up toward the apple trees, all leafless and gnarly, Billy tells me he’s been tractor shopping. “I found a tractor for you,” he announces. “To replace that death trap you got. You want to go look at it with me next week?”

  Something in his tone. He’s nervous.

  I look at him.

  “I know it’s unconventional,” he says.

  Unconventional?

  “But I asked Patty already, and she said it’s all right if I take you to the tractor store,” he says.

  Patty is Billy’s “woman.” I haven’t met her, but he’s referred to her before. Tom’s mother left Billy when Tom was just a toddler. Patty has been in his life for a few years now.

  “Well, where is the tractor?” I ask him, completely circumventing the subject of him being a man and me being a woman and us being alone and him inviting me on a tractor-store date.

  “Up there in Dry Tavern,” he says.

  “You think it’s a good tractor?” I say.

  “I do. Four-wheel drive. A roll bar. And it has a front loader.”

  “Well, what color is it?” I ask.

  “Um. I think it was blue,” he says.

  “Did they have any red ones?”

  “Um. I think they did.”

  “Let’s go see them,” I say. “What day do you want to go?”

  “I can’t go till the end of the week. Thursday?”

  “I think that’s good for me.”

  “You’ll have to ask Alex if he minds,” he says.

  “I really don’t think he’ll mind,” I say.

  “But you’ll ask him?”

  “All right.”

  We walk over to the new area that Billy and Tom got cleared today. It’s not a very large area, maybe the size of a football field. “We had trouble here,” Billy says. “You see them logs? They used to be over there. We had to pull them out with chains, and the one chain snapped, and Tom, I thought he would cry.”

  “Cry?”

  “He’s not as tough as my other boy, you know. But he’s a good boy.”

  Billy’s other son, his oldest, is also named Billy. He just got out of the Marines. Now he is a professional bull rider in North Carolina.

  As we head back down the hill, I ask Billy about how Patty came into his life.

  “Oh, a couple of years ago I got cancer,” he says matter-of-factly. “I got cancer in my prostate.”

  “Oh,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s life, you know,” he says. “You can’t really do nothing about it. But I’m okay now. And I have Patty to thank.” He tells me about being sick, the operations, the chemo and radiation treatments. He got sicker. He couldn’t work for months, couldn’t leave the house. Patty, who works at a nursing home, nursed Billy. She was a friend, nothing more. But it got so Billy needed more nursing, and more. And maybe Patty needed some nursing, too.

  “She got beat up pretty bad where she was living at,” he says.

  “Beat up?”

  “Like a man will do,” he says. “A bad man.”

  Billy rescued Patty, right there from his sickbed, although he doesn’t quite make it clear how he did this.

  “Put it this way,” he says. “I got over 190 guns in my house. I got an elephant gun.”

  “Oh,” I say, trying to conjure an image of a Dumbo-sized weapon.

  Billy rescued Patty and Patty rescued Billy. And pretty soon Patty was at Billy’s house all the time. “So I told her,” he says. “I told her, I said, ‘You’re here all the time. Why don’t you just stay?’” So that’s what she did.

  “That’s a nice love story,” I say.

  “She’s a good woman,” Billy says. “I would never hurt her. I would never let anybody hurt her.”

  “Sounds like she got herself a good man,” I say.

  Just then Betty comes charging up. She has a skull in her mouth. Some dried-up thing. Apparently, she and Marley went after the pregnant possum, but all they got were some body parts. Maybe an old possum, maybe an old raccoon, maybe an old muskrat; I really don’t know my skulls. Billy tries to get the skull out of Betty’s mouth so he can identify it, but there is no way Betty is giving up that thing.

  I think how I used to pay a dollar twenty-nine at the pet store for one dried pig ear. I think how there used to be baskets of pig hooves and cow bones to choose from by the cash register. I think how disgusting I used to think that was.

  The dried-up jaw still has its teeth. That much I can see.

  I think how gentle we want to believe the natural world is, but how unapologetically savage it is.

  Then there’s Marley. He shows no interest whatsoever in the skull. Instead, he is sitting by the edge of the woods, staring. Doing his transfixed act. Motionless, frozen. Just sitting and staring.

  “Marley, come!” I shout. He doesn’t even flinch. “Marley, you are starting to scare me.”

  ALEX GETS HOME A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN. HE ALWAYS looks so rushed when he comes in the door, as if his drive here were some desperate escape.

  “Ugh,” he says. “I have a horrible headache.”

  I give him a hug. “Okay, you’re supposed to say, ‘Hi honey, I’m home,’ and then I’m supposed to hand you a martini,” I say.

  “I’ll have to work on that,” he says. “So what happened today around here?”

  I tell him about the day’s briar-pushing show, and about the possum education.

  “Uck,” he says.

  “But it was very informative,” I say.

  “I guess the dogs liked it,” he says. “Did they have possum for lunch?”

  “Actually, a possum could kill a dog,” I say, as I chop carrots at the sink.

  “Are we having possum for dinner?” he asks.


  “No, still pork chops,” I say.

  He opens the cabinet and takes out plates, begins setting the table. “But maybe you’re just telling me it’s pork,” he says, elbowing me as he passes. “But you’re trying to slip me possum.”

  “Maybe!” I say, delighted that he’s come up with a new game. A disgusting varmint food game. Tomorrow night I’ll make stew and hint around about a muskrat that I saw.

  I love being a farm wife. Or an almost-farm almost-wife. It feels like the most wonderful game. It feels as silly and nonsensical as when Claire and I used to play “church” in the basement. We made Communion hosts in the Easy Bake Oven, a flour and salt and water concoction we invented, and Claire pretended to be the priest. “Body of Christmas!” she would say, and I would kneel and stick out my tongue. We didn’t think it was right to say “Christ.” We thought that might be pushing it.

  Alex and I sit down to our pork chops and sauerkraut and homemade applesauce. Betty curls up under the table, in a tight little circle. Marley is stretched out flat as a rug over by the door, and Bob is snoozing on the windowsill. How wonderful. How complete it all feels. Here is my family, everyone safe and sound, snug in our farmhouse.

  “So,” I say to Alex, “Billy says he’s going to have to stop pushing briars soon because of the mud.”

  “Did you ask him what we’re supposed to do with fifteen acres of mud?” he asks.

  “Actually, I did. He said we should go up to Scenery Hill Hardware and buy, um, he said three hundred pounds of grass seed and a broadcast spreader. He says we have to get the seed on before the warm weather comes.”

  “Three hundred pounds?” Alex says.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “And what’s a broadcast spreader?” Alex says.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Oh, and Billy wants to know if you mind if I go tractor shopping with him next Thursday,” I say.

  “Do I mind?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “I don’t get it,” he says.

  “Well, I barely do,” I say. “And have you noticed all I talk about anymore is Billy?”

  “Maybe you’re not watching enough TV,” he says.

  “Good point.”

  “What kind of tractor?” he asks.

  “There’s a blue one there Billy likes,” I say. “But he says there’s some red ones there, too.”

  “You think we should pick a tractor based on color?”

  “I’ll just let Billy pick it,” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you know Billy had cancer?” I say.

  “He did?”

  “Prostate,” I say. “I think it was a few years ago.”

  “So he survived it,” he says.

  “Yep.”

  “Are you going to be able to come to town with me next Friday?” he asks.

  “Of course.”

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he says.

  “I know.”

  ELEVEN

  NOW, COWS, I AM TOLD, ARE DISGUSTING. BUT THAT isn’t the way anybody puts it. Instead, whenever I mention to anyone around here that we are thinking of putting cows on our fields, they start telling me cow facts, eventually landing on something truly awful.

  “I saved two cows last week,” a neighbor said. He was explaining how cows have a problem when they eat too much. “They blow up and fill with gas and can explode,” he said.

  “Yikes,” I said.

  “So I do what my daddy did,” he said. “You get your knife and you count the ribs, you count down to the seventh and eighth. And right between the seventh and eighth rib, you put your knife in. Poof! It’s like popping a balloon. It beats paying a vet’s bill, that’s for sure.”

  No matter what else happens in our lives, Alex and I agree we will never be able to pop cows.

  On Thursday, tractor-shopping day, Billy pulls up at precisely eight-thirty A.M. in his Ford LTD, an unmarked police cruiser. I’ve never seen him drive this vehicle. Usually he’s in his bright red pickup. The cruiser even has one of those police lights on the dashboard. There are a few guns in the front seat that Billy has to move so I can sit down.

  “I am the constable of Deemston Borough,” Billy announces. I was not aware of that. He tells me that Patty is the assistant constable. “I used to be the police chief of Deemston Borough,” he says, “but I got tired of it. So now they have no police department, because they never really did, except me. So now I’m the constable, but I’m still sort of the police.”

  “I see.”

  I get in the car, and Billy says he talked to Bob, the tractor store man, who has put the blue tractor on hold for us.

  “Great!” I say. “So let’s go give ’er a look!” I like this adventure already. I think of what I used to be doing at this hour, back in my old life. I’d be walking down Eleventh Street, hailing a bus to my office downtown. There was a time when I loved that bus. What an adventure that bus ride felt like! I’d never taken public transportation before. I don’t even think we had public buses in the suburbs where I grew up. I thought that bus was amazing. Someone would pick you up a few blocks from your house and, for a dollar and twenty-five cents, drop you a few blocks from your office. What a concept! I loved that bus.

  But then one day a lady in the back threw up. Everybody rooted in their pockets and purses for tissues. But it was no use. Another time two teenagers got into a fistfight. Thank God no one had a weapon. And often that bus was so crowded, you had no space you could think of as personal. Often I’d have to stand in the aisle, crammed there with all those other riders, sniffing someone else’s smells. One time I let go of the little handle thingy so I could scratch my nose, and just then the bus came to a screeching halt, and me and about twelve others went tumbling like bowling pins.

  I took to wearing sunglasses on the bus—my first attempt to shield everybody out. Then I started making sure I had my Walkman in my ears playing Bob Marley or something else reggae, a beat that would calm me down. And I remember standing on the bus one day, behind those sunglasses, listening to that music, and thinking how far, far away the bus world had become. I remember noticing that I was no longer living in the world but outside it. In the city I was doing everything and anything I needed to do to keep that world from touching me. I thought: That’s not right. That can’t be right.

  Billy drives the back roads toward the tractor store, heading past Marianna on windy lanes I’ve not yet traveled. We go under low, abandoned train trestles, left over from the glory days of mining. Soon we are in the deepest woods. “It’s like a national park back here!” I say to Billy.

  “It’s the country,” he says. And then he picks up an emptied glass bottle of Lipton’s iced tea, which he spits into.

  “I don’t know how I’ll ever learn these roads,” I say. “All I know so far is Route 40.”

  “The highway?” he says. “Oh, we never take the highway. Too crowded. We use the hard roads, or the tar and chip roads, or the red dog roads.” A lot of people around here refer to roads by their surfaces. Red dog is the name they use for dirt roads, since the dirt used for dirt roads is a reddish-brown byproduct of coal mining. A highway is any road that has a yellow line on it, even Route 40, which really is just a two-lane skinny thing meandering through farms and villages.

  “A highway?” I say. “Crowded? I don’t suppose you’ve ever done rush hour through the Squirrel Hill tunnels in Pittsburgh.”

  “Pittsburgh?” he says. “Why would I go to Pittsburgh?”

  Billy drives me by ponds he has dug, fields he has cleared, barns he has rebuilt, red dog he has hauled and spread. He seems to know every farm, who’s who, and what’s what. He shows me coal mines that have closed, and he tells me what it was like when they were open. He shows me thousand-gallon septic tanks he’s buried, which you can’t actually see. But I trust Billy.

  “You want to see my house?” he asks. And so we stop at a small green house with cross-hatched windows
and a porch decorated with plastic butterflies. The yard is covered on one side with many pieces of enormous excavation equipment and on the other with neat piles of stone, mulch, sand, and other things people might need.

  “Okay, President Lincoln drank out of this well,” he announces, as we get out of the car by a rickety old pump. He draws some water and fills a Dannon yogurt cup with it. “You want to taste?” I sip the water and think I’m supposed to feel connected to President Lincoln, but I’m not sure so I don’t say anything.

  “Okay, this is a log house,” Billy says as we approach the door. “Come on, I’ll show you. Because this was built long before you and me was born. I put siding over it to modernize and whatnot.” There’s a garage attached, which Billy has made into an office. Well, at least one corner of it. The rest of the office space is taken up with a giant hot tub sitting there gurgling. There are pictures of Billy stationed in Vietnam. There are pictures of Billy’s son Billy in his Marine Corps uniform, and other pictures of him as a bull rider. There is a stunningly handsome picture of Tom, all done up in a suit, which seems to shout: “You know what? I am not like the rest of them.” More and more I am beginning to understand Tom’s attachment to Marley.

  Billy shows me a vine that Patty has trained to go all along the kitchen window, and he shows me some of his guns he is proud of, most of all the elephant gun, a black-and-silver hunk of machinery that looks too heavy to carry. “It’s nice just to say you have it,” he says.

  I tell him that, with the exception of a few hunters I have met since moving here, he is the only person I have ever met who even has one gun.

  He looks at me, shakes his head back and forth. “Shooooey!” he says, unable to comprehend what planet I’ve come from. “When I was a kid, everybody took a gun to school,” he says. “Not with the intention of shooting anybody. But just to kill supper on the way home. What else was there to do with your spare time?”

  “Um, well, we watched TV,” I say meekly. “Did you ever see Green Acres?”

  He smiles. “I’m a little older than you,” he says. “But I’ve seen reruns.”

  I feel instantly happy, instantly bonded, instantly in touch with the human condition.