Heart Songs and Other Stories

by Annie Proulx

  Snipe came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist, pressed his sallow face against her hot back. She smelled of road dust, of goldenrod and crushed sweet blackberries; her humming voice vibrated in his ear. Far away in the woods there was a cadenced shout and the leafy, thrashing fall of a tree. The chain saws faded from hearing. A yellowjacket, intoxicated by the sweet, musky scent, flew clumsily around the kitchen. Snipe gathered up Nell’s flowery dress hem as carefully as if he were picking up glass jackstraws.

  Later, while he was still pressed against her, she said. “They’re coming down from the woods.” They stared together at the field where the men were bumping along through the uncut hay like a vaudeville team mocking drunkards. “Ruby’s hurt,” she said, pushing him away and turning to face the door. He smoothed himself and went over to stand beside the hot stove where the jelly burned.

  They came in, Ruby grinning in a fixed way as though a set of vise grips had bolted his jaw. His left arm was wrapped in Eno’s bloodstained shirt. There were flecks of bloody matter on his face, and he held the injured arm protectively across his chest. The thick, white hair on old Eno’s chest and bulging belly was flattened and mussed like a deer bed in the orchard, the two dark nipples peeping out like plum-colored eyes. They went to the sink, Eno on one side, Ruby swaying in the center, and Nell with her dimpled hands cupping the elbow of the hurt arm.

  Snipe felt his throat bind as Nell unwrapped the shirt and laid bare the injury. Drops of blood fell heavily into the sink, puddling with the jelly. Snipe could smell Eno’s underarms, a sharp skunky odor that mixed with the reek of sex and sugared fruit. “Get them bandages they give us that time,” said old Eno, and Nell went into the pantry. They heard her tear open paper. She and Eno leaned together as they bound the surgical pad to Ruby’s wound with a thick roll of gauze. A small red flower bloomed on the snowy bandage. “Hold that arm up in the air,” said Eno, hoisting Ruby’s elbow.

  Later, Snipe thought that he should have gotten away then, should have slipped out the door, rolled the car silently down the track, and raced for the protection of the cedars. Instead he said, “Shouldn’t he have a tourniquet on that arm?” Eno turned to stare at him, to wonder a few seconds, then the old man’s eyes went to Nell. Her head was bent, her eyes down, and she wrapped and wrapped the gauze.

  “Not if I want to keep my goddamned hand,” said Ruby in a rough, clenched voice, but the point of crisis had shifted from his wound to Snipe’s presence and Nell’s hidden face. A knowledge of what had happened in the kitchen mounted as steadily as rising floodwater. Ruby set his mouth in a sardonic grin, but old Eno’s hands were trembling, and he gasped for breath as though he were the one who had been wounded.

  “Eno!” cried Snipe in a panic, “I love your daughter!” and he knew that he did not. It had always been the truck in the weeds.

  “Fool,” said Ruby between his teeth, “she’s his wife.”

  Snipe could hear the scorched jelly crackling in the kettle. He glanced at the door, and at once Eno came for him, his heavy farmer’s hand crooked into pincers. “I’ll get you.” he cried, his eyes slitted with rage and his teeth bared like a dog’s. “I’ll get you.”

  Snipe ran, stumbling on the bloody shirt, skidding on the stone doorstep, breaking his fingernails on the car door handle, jamming his foot painfully between the accelerator and the brake, and then cursing and shaking as the vehicle crashed down the rocky track. “Goddamn hillbillies,” he said to the rearview mirror.

  He drove fifty miles to the big town in the next county and drank scotch at Bob’s Bar, a plywood-paneled hole with imitation Tiffany lampshades made of plastic. The raw red and blue colors hurt his eyes and gave him a headache. When someone put Willy Nelson on the antique jukebox, he left. He wanted to hear Haydn. Haydn seemed safe and alluring like a freshly made bed with plump white pillows and a silken comforter. He could sink into Haydn.

  He bought a symphony on tape at the discount drugstore, then hit the shopping mall for all of Catherine’s favorites, the champagne, lobster, hearts of endive, a Black Forest cake, and Viennese coffee with cinnamon. It came to more than a hundred dollars and he wrote bad checks with the sure feeling that he and Catherine would make a lucky new start. He was all through with the Twilights. When she got home he would have everything ready, fireplace lit, fresh sheets, chilled champagne glasses. He was suffused with mounting nervousness like a bird before a storm, and went again and again through the long afternoon to the end of the dock to stand and stare across the water, longing for Catherine’s two hundred fragile bones and her shallow flesh. When a dead branch fell from one of the cedars, he dragged it eagerly to the moldering pile behind the garage.

  It was easy. She came back to him willingly, ready to play their old games. They made fun of Omar’s restaurant hands, and Snipe said the country music thing wasn’t working out. There were other things they could do, maybe go out west, New Mexico or Arizona. Snipe knew somebody would pay him good money to collect the wild seed of jimsonweed.

  They lay in the pillows in the corner of the sofa, Snipe’s fingers sliding automatically up and down her arm, the rough calluses rasping on the silk. After a while Haydn’s precise measures were like faded pencil drawings on thin paper. The champagne bottle was empty. Catherine rolled passionately against him, and with the dry feeling that he was saying catechism he rested his mouth against the beat of her heart. He thought how it would be out west with the flat, sepia-tinted earth and the immense sky of a hard, lonely blue. Out there the roads stretched forever to the horizon. Snipe saw himself alone, driving a battered old truck through the shimmering heat, the wind booming through the open windows. The windshield was starred with a bullet hole. He wore scuffed cowboy boots, faded jeans, and a torn black shirt with a cactus embroidered on the back, and the heel of his hand beat out a Tex-Mex rhythm on the cracked steering wheel.

  The Unclouded Day

  IT was a rare thing, a dry, warm spring that swelled into summer so ripe and full that gleaming seed bent the grass low a month before its time; a good year for grouse. When the season opened halfway through September, the heat of summer still held, dust lay like yellow flour on the roads, and a perfume of decay came from the thorned mazes where blackberries fell and rotted on the ground. Grouse were in the briars, along the watercourses, and, drunk on fermenting autumn juices, they flew recklessly, their wings cleaving the shimmering heat of the day.

  Santee did not care to hunt birds in such high-colored weather. Salty sweat stung the whipped-branch welts on his neck and arms, the dog worked badly and the birds spoiled in an hour. In their sour, hot intestines he smelled imminent putrefaction. The feathers stuck to his hands, for Earl never helped gut them. Noah, the dog, lay panting in the shade.

  The heat wave wouldn’t break. Santee longed for the cold weather and unclouded days that lay somewhere ahead, for the sharp chill of spruce shadow, icy rime thickening over osier twigs and a hard autumnal sky cut by the parabolic flights of birds in the same way pond ice was cut by skaters. Ah goddamn, thought Santee, there were better things to do than hunt partridge with a fool in these burning days.

  Earl had come to Santee the year before and begged him to teach him how to hunt birds. He had a good gun, he said, a Tobias Hume. Santee thought it overrated and overpriced, but it was a finer instrument than his own field-grade Jorken with the cracked stock he’d meant to replace for years. (The rough walnut blank lay on the workbench out in the barn, cans of motor oil and paint standing on it; the kids had ruined the checkering files by picking out butternut meats with them.) Santee’s gun, like its owner, was inelegant and long in the tooth, but it worked well.

  Earl had come driving up through the woods to Santee’s place, overlooking the mess in the yard, nodding to Verna, and he had flattered Santee right out of his mind.

  “Santee,” he said, measuring him, seeing how he was inclined, “I’ve talked to people around and they say you’re a pretty good hunter. I want to learn how to hu
nt birds. I want you to teach me. I’ll pay you to teach me everything about them.”

  Santee could see that Earl had money. He wore nice boots, rich corduroy trousers in a golden syrup color, his hands were shaped like doves and his voice rolled out of his throat like sweet batter. He was not more than thirty, Santee thought, looking at the firm cheek slabs and thick yellow hair.

  “I usually hunt birds by myself. Or with my boys.” Santee gave each word its fair measure of weight. “Me’n the dog.” Noah, lying on the porch under the rusty glider, raised his head at the sound of “birds” and watched them.

  “Nice dog,” said Earl in his confectionary voice. Santee folded his arms across his chest rather than let them hang by his sides. Hands in the pockets was even worse, he thought, looking at Earl, a wastrel’s posture.

  Earl oiled Santee with his voice. “All I ask, Santee, is that you try it two or three times, and if you don’t want to continue, why then, I’ll pay for your time.” He gave Santee a smile, the leaf-colored eyes under the gleaming lids shifting from Santee to the warped screen door, to the scabby paint on the clapboards, to the run-down yard. Santee looked off to the side as though the muscles in his own eyes were weak.

  “Maybe give it a try. Rather go on a weekday than a weekend. You get away on Monday?”

  Earl could get away any day Santee wanted. He worked at home.

  “What doin’?” asked Santee, letting his arms hang down.

  “Consulting. I analyze stocks and economic trends.” Santee saw that Earl was younger than his own oldest son, Derwin, whose teeth were entirely gone and who worked up at the veneer mill at Potumsic Falls breathing fumes and tending a machine with whirling, curved blades. Santee said he would go out with Earl on Monday. He didn’t know how to say no.

  The first morning was a good one, a solid bright day with a spicy taste to the air. Noah was on his mettle, eager to find birds and showing off a little for the stranger. Santee set Earl some distance away on his right until he could see how he shot.

  Noah worked close. He stiffened two yards away from birds in front, he pointed birds to the left, the right. A single step from Santee or Earl sent partridge bursting out of the cover and into straightaway flight. He pinned them in trees and bushes, scented them feeding on fallen fruit or dusting in powdery bowls of fine earth, marked them as they pattered through wood sorrel. He worked like two dogs, his white sides gliding through the grass, his points so rigid he might have been a glass animal. The grouse tore up the air and the shotguns bellowed. Earl, Santee saw, didn’t know enough to say “Nice dog” when it counted.

  Santee held himself back in order to let his pupil learn, but Earl was a slow, poor shot. The bird would be fifty yards out and darting through safe holes in the air when he finally got the gun around and pulled the trigger. Sometimes a nervous second bird would go up before Earl fired at the first one. He couldn’t seem to catch the rhythm, and had excuses for each miss.

  “Caught the butt end in my shirt pocket flap,” he’d say, laughing a little, and, “My fingers are stiff from carrying the gun,” and “Oh, that one was gone before I could get the bead on him.”

  Santee tried over and over again to show him that you didn’t aim at the bird, that you just threw up the gun and fired in the right place.

  “You have to shoot where they’re goin’, not where they are.” He made Earl watch him on the next one, how the gun notched into place on his shoulder, how his right elbow lifted smoothly as his eyes bent toward the empty air the bird was about to enter. Done! went the shotgun, and the bird fell like a nut.

  “Now you do it.” said Santee.

  But when a grouse blustered out of the wild rose haws, Earl only got the gun to his hip, then twisted his body in an odd backward contortion as he fired. The train of shot cut a hole in the side of a tamarack and the bird melted away through the trees.

  “I’n see you need a lot of practice.” said Santee.

  “What I need is practice.” agreed Earl, “and that is what I am paying for.”

  “Try movin’ the stock up to your shoulder.” said Santee. thinking that his kids had shot better when they were eight years old.

  They worked through the morning, Santee illustrating swift reaction and tidy speed, and Earl sweating and jerking like an old Vitagraph film, trying to line up the shotgun with the bird. Santee shot seven grouse and gave four to Earl who had missed every one. Earl gave Santee a hundred dollars and said he wanted to do it again.

  “I can practice all the rest of this week,” he said, making it sound like a piano lesson.

  The next three Mondays were the same. They went out and worked birds. Earl kept shooting from the hip. With his legs spraddled out he looked like an old-time gangster spraying the rival mob with lead.

  “Listen here,” said Santee, “there are six more weeks left in the season, which means we go out six more times. Now, I am not after more money, but you might want to think about goin’ out a little more often.” Earl was eager and said he’d pay.

  “Three times a week. I can go Monday, Wednesday and Friday.” They tried it that way. Then they tried Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday for continuity. Earl was paying Santee three hundred dollars a week and he hadn’t shot a single bird.

  “How’s about this?” said Santee, feeling more and more like a cheating old whore every time they went out. “How’s about I come over to your place on the weekend with a box of clay pigeons and you practice shootin’ them up? No charge! Just to sort of get your eye in, and the gun up to your shoulder.”

  “Yes, but I’m not upset about missing the birds, you know,” said Earl, looking in the trees. “I’ve read the books and I know it takes years before you develop that fluid, almost instinctive response to the grouse’s rising thunder. I know, believe me, how difficult a target these speedy fliers really are, and I’m willing to work on it, even if it takes years.”

  Santee had not heard shooting birds was that hard, but he knew Earl was no good; he had the reflexes of a snowman. He said to Verna, “That Earl has got to get it together or I can’t keep takin’ his money. I feel like I’m goin’ to the salt mines every time we go out. I don’t have the heart to hunt any more on my own, out of fear I’ll bust up a bunch of birds he needs for practice. Dammit, all the fun is goin’ out of it.”

  “The money is good,” said Verna, giving the porch floor a shove that set the glider squeaking. Her apron was folded across her lap, her arms folded elbow over elbow with her hands on her shoulders, her ankles crossed against the coolness of the night. She wore the blue acrylic slippers Santee had given her for Mother’s Day.

  “I just wonder how I got into it,” he said, closing his eyes and gliding.

  Santee bought a box of a hundred clay pigeons and drove up to Earl’s house on a Sunday afternoon. It was the kind of day people decided to go for a ride.

  “I wish I hadn’t come,” said Verna, looking through the cloudy windshield at Earl’s home, an enormous Swiss chalet with windows like tan bubbles in the roof and molded polystyrene pillars holding up a portico roof. She wouldn’t get out of the truck, but sat for two hours with the window ground up. Santee knew how she felt, but he had to go. He was hired to teach Earl how to shoot birds.

  There was a big porch and on it was Earl’s wife, as thin as a folded dollar bill, her hand as narrow and cold as a trout. A baby crawled around inside a green plastic-mesh pen playing with a tomato. Earl told them to watch.

  “Watch Daddy shoot the birdy!” he said.

  “Beady!” said the baby.

  “Knock those beadies dead, Earl,” said the wife, drawing her fingernail through a drop of moisture that had fallen from her drink onto the chair arm.

  Santee cocked his arm back again and again and sent the clay discs flying out over a garden of dark shrubs. His ears rang. The baby screamed every time the gun went off, but Earl wouldn’t let the woman take him inside.

  “Watch!” he cried. “Dammit, watch Daddy shoot the beady!” He would
get the gun to his hip and bend his back into the strange posture he had made his trademark. Him and Al Capone, thought Santee, saying, “Put it to your shoulder,” like a broken record. “It won’t backfire.”

  He looked to see if Earl shut his eyes behind the yellow spectacles when he pulled the trigger, but couldn’t tell. After a long time a clay round flew into three black pieces and Earl shrieked, “I got it!” as if it were a wooly mammoth. It was the first object he had hit since Santee had met him.

  “Pretty good,” he lied. “Now you’re doin’ it.”

  Verna called all the kids home for dinner a week later. There was home-cured ham basted with Santee’s hard cider, baked Hubbard squash, mashed potato with Jersey cream spattered over each mound and a platter of roast partridge glazed with chokecherry jelly.

  Before they sat down at the table Verna got everybody out in the yard to clean it up. They all counted one-two-three and heaved the carcass of Santee’s 1952 Chevrolet in with the torn chicken wire, rotted fence posts and dimpled oil cans. Derwin drove the load to the dump after dinner and brought back a new lawn mower Verna had told him to get.

  The next day she waded the brook, feeling for spherical stones of a certain size with her feet. Santee carried them up to the house in a grain bag. When they had dried on the porch she painted them snow white and set them in a line along the driveway. Santee saw the beauty of it—the green shorn grass, the gleaming white stones. It all had something to do with teaching Earl how to hunt, but aside from the money he didn’t know what.