ANNIE PROULX

Postcards

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in paperback in 1994 by Fourth Estate and by

Harper Perennial in 2006, reprinted 7 times.

First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1992

Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Source ISBN: 9781841155012

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007385553

Version: 2018-05-23

Praise for Postcards:

‘Annie Proulx has come close to writing “The Great American Novel”’

New York Times

‘Postcards feels like a fifth or sixth novel, not a first. Language that sizzles like meat in a pan … A wonderful writer and an astonishingly accomplished novel’

Chicago Tribune

‘Her first novel fulfils the promise of her short stories … hugely ambitious … The natural description is superb. The dialogue has a raspy bony twang to it. She pushes language to breaking point … a gifted prose stylist who renders her characters on the page to mesmerizing effect’

San Francisco Chronicle

‘The author’s literary ancestors range from Edith Wharton to Nathaniel West. But Proulx sees the grand side too … She sees every part of the national configuration and wraps every character here in a crazy-quilt of literary affection’

Los Angeles Times

‘Postcards triumphantly delivers. You could use the word “great” about Postcards without embarassing yourself’

Boston Globe

‘Rich, boisterous, remarkable … Annie Proulx draws characters who matter’

Washington Times

For Roberta

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Postcards

Preface

I

1 Blood

2 Mink’s Revenge

3 Down the Road

4 What I See

5 A Short, Sharp Shock

6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch

7 When Your Hand Is Cut Off

8 The Bat in the Wet Grass

9 What I See

10 The Lost Baby

11 Tickweed

12 Billy

13 What I See

II

14 Down in the Mary Mugg

15 The Indian’s Book

16 The Bigger They Are the Higher They Burn

17 The Weeping Water Farm Insurance Office

18 What I See

19 The Lonely Hearts Prisoner

20 The Bottle-Shaped Tombstone

21 The Drive

22 The Dermatologist in the Wild Wood

23 Ott’s Lots

24 The Indian’s Book Again

III

25 Garden of Eden

26 Bullet Wulff

27 Crazy Eyes

28 The Kernel of life

29 Dazed and Confused

30 The Troubles of Celestial Bodies

31 Toot Nipple

32 Pala

33 Obregón’s Arm

34 Tumbleweed

35 What I See

36 Shotguns

37 The Indian’s Book

38 Looks Like Rain

39 The Logging Road

IV

40 The Gallbladders of Black Bears

41 The Tropical Garden

42 What I See

43 The Skeleton with Its Dress Pulled Up

44 The Runty Rider Curses Judges

45 The Lone One

46 What I See

47 The Red-Haired Coyote

V

48 The Hat Man

49 What I See

50 The One Only One

51 The Red-Shirt Coyote

52 La Violencia

53 The Fulgurite Shaped Like a Bone

54 What I See

55 The White Spider

56 The Face in the Moss

57 The Jet Trail in the Windshield

58 What I See

Acknowledgments

Also By Annie Proulx

About the Publisher

‘But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’

DASHIELL HAMMETT, The Maltese Falcon

I

1 Blood

EVEN BEFORE HE GOT UP he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.

He couldn’t get any air, but stood on his knocked-out legs gasping and wheezing. It was like he’d taken a bad fall. Dazed. He could feel the blood hammering in his throat. But there was nothing else, only the gasping for breath and an abnormal acuity of vision. Mats of juniper flowed across the field like spilled water; doghair maple crowded the stone wall wavering through the trees.

He’d thought of the wall walking up the slope behind Billy, thought of it in a common way, of working on it sometime, setting back in place the stones that frost and thrusting roots had thrown out. Now he saw it as a scene drawn in powerful ink lines, the rock fissured with crumpled strings of quartz, humps of moss like shoulders shrugging out of the mold, black lignum beneath rotten bark, the aluminum sheen of deadwood.

A stone the size and shape of a car’s backseat jutted out of the wall, and below it was a knob of soil that marked the entrance to an abandoned fox den. Oh Jesus, it wasn’t his fault but they’d say it was. He grasped Billy’s ankles and dragged her to the wall. He rolled her up under the stone, could not look at her face. There was already a waxiness to her body. The texture of her bunched stockings, the shape of her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead in the moment before the flames consume or the sucking water pulls them under. The space beneath the rock was shallow. Her arm fell outward, the hand relaxed, the fingers curled as if she held a hand mirror or a Fourth of July flag.

Instinctively he translated the withering shock into work, his answer to what he did not want to understand, to persistent toothache, hard weather, the sense of loneliness. He rebuilt the wall over her, fitting the stones, copying the careless, tumbled fall of rock. A secretive reflex worked in him. When she was locked away in the wall he threw on dead leaves, tree limbs and brush, raked the drag marks and scuffed ground with a branch.

Down the back fields, keeping to the fence line, but sometimes staggering onto open ground. No feeling in his legs. The sun was going down, the October afternoon collapsing into evening. The fence posts on the margins of the fields glinted like burnished pins, the thick light plated his face with a coppery mask.

Grass eddied around his knees, the purple awns burst, scattering a hail of seed. Far below he saw the house varnished with orange light, balanced against the grove of cottonwoods, like a scene etched on a metal plate. The sag of the roof curved into shadows as delicate as a bloom of mold, thickening the trees.

In the orchard he knelt and wiped his hands over and over in the coarse grass. The trees were half wild with watersprouts and deadwood. The mournful smell of rotted fruit came into his nose. ‘If I get away,’ he said, dragging breath into his constricted throat, and briefly seeing, not what had happened up beside the wall, but his grandfather spraying the tree with Bordeaux mixture, the long wand hissing in the leaves, the poisoned codling moths bursting up like flames, the women and children, himself, on the ladder picking apples, the strap of the bag cutting into his shoulder, the empty oak-splint baskets under the trees and the men loading the full baskets into a wagon, the frigid packing room, old Roseboy with his sloping, bare neck and his dirty hat, pointed like a cone, nothing but a trimmed-up old syrup filter, tapping on the barrel heads, serious, saying over and over, ‘Take it easy now, one rotten apple spoils the whole goddamn barrel.’

Evening haze rose off the hardwood slopes and blurred a sky discolored like a stained silk skirt. He saw and heard everything with brutal clarity; yet the thing that had happened up beside the wall was confused. Coyotes singling along the edge of the duck marsh called in fluming howls. Wet hand ticking the skeletal bean poles, he walked through the withered garden. Moths like pinches of pale dust battered in his wake.

At the corner of the house he stopped and urinated on the blackened stalks of Jewell’s Canterbury bells. The seed husks rattled and a faint steam rose in the trembling shadow of his legs. His clothes had no warmth. The grey work pants, knees stained with soil, were stippled with grass heads and bramble tips, his jacket spattered with shreds of bark. His neck stung from her raking scratches. A gleaming image of her fingernails swerved into his mind and he clamped it off. The cedar waxwings rustled stiff leaves with a sound of unfolding tissue paper. He could hear Mink’s voice in the kitchen, lumps of sound like newly plowed soil, and the flat muffle of Jewell, his mother, answering. Nothing seemed changed. Billy was somehow up there under the wall, but nothing seemed changed except the uncanny sharpness of his vision and the tightness that gripped somewhere under his breastbone.

A length of binder twine hung with bean plants sagged between the two porch pillars, and he could see each hemp fiber, the shadows in the folds of each desiccated leaf, the swell of the seed inside the husks. A broken pumpkin, crusted on its underside with earth, parted like a mouth in a knowing crack. His foot crushed a leaf as he opened the screen door.

Wire egg baskets were stacked in the corner of the entry. Water had drained from a basket half full of pale eggs and pooled under Mink’s barn boots. The reeking barn clothes, Dub’s jacket, his own denim coat with the pocket gaping open like a wound, dangled from nails. He scraped his shoes on the wad of burlap sacks and went in.

‘About time. You, Loyal, you and Dub can’t get to the table on time we’re not waitin’. Been sayin’ this since you was four years old.’ Jewell pushed the bowl of onions toward him. Her hazel eyes were lost behind the glinting spectacles. The ridge of muscle that supported her lower lip was as stiff as wood.

The white plates made a circle around the kitchen table, the shape echoed in the curve of grease around Mink’s mouth. There was stubble on his face, his finely cut lips were loosened by missing teeth. The dull silver lay on the yolk-colored oilcloth. Mink clenched the carving knife, sawed at the ham. The ham smelled like blood. Cold air crawled along the floor, the ferret scurried in the wall. On a hill miles away an attic window caught the last ray of light, burned for a few minutes, dimmed.

‘Pass the plates.’ Mink’s voice, gone thin since his tractor accident a few years ago, seemed caught in some glottal anatomic trap. He tensed his neck, creased across the back with white lines, and cut at the ham. The label on his overall bib read TUF NUT. The red slices fell away from the knife onto the platter, the glaze crackled by heat in crazy hairlines. The knife was thin-bladed, the steel sharpened away. Mink felt its fragility against the ham bone. Such a worn blade could easily break. His pallid gaze, blue as winter milk, slid around the table.

‘Where’s Dub? Goddamn knockabout.’

‘Don’t know,’ Jewell said, hands like clusters of carrots, shaking pepper out of the glass dog, straight in the chair, the flesh of her arms firm and solid. ‘But I’ll tell you something. Anybody that’s late to supper can go without. I cook supper to be eat hot. And nobody bothers to take the trouble to set down when it’s ready. Don’t care who it is, they’re not here they can forget it. Don’t care if it’s Saint Peter. Don’t care if Dub’s gone off again. Thinks he can come and go as he pleases. He don’t care for nobody’s work. I don’t care if it’s Winston Churchill with his big greasy cigar wants to set down to dinner, we’re not waitin’ for nobody. If there’s something left he can have it, but don’t expect nothing to be saved.’

‘I don’t expect it,’ said Mernelle, squinting her eyes. Her braids were doubled in loops bound with rubber bands that pulled painfully when they were worked loose at night, the teeth too big for the face. She had the family hands with crooked fingers and flat nails. She had Mink’s diffident slouch.

‘Nobody is talking to you, miss. You make some money on the milkweed pods and you’ve got to put your two cents in on every subject. How money does change a person. Glad I haven’t got any to spoil me.’

‘I got more good stuff goin’ on than milkweed pods,‘ said Mernelle scornfully. ‘I got three big things this week. I got six dollars for the milkweed pods, I got a letter from Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum in New Guinea because he read my note with the Sunday school cigarettes, and our class is goin’ to see the robber show in Barton. On Friday.’

‘How many milkweed pods you picked for that six dollars?’ Mink pulled off his barn cap and hung it on the chair’s ear. A feak of hair hung down and he continually jerked his head to the left to get it out of his way.

‘Hundreds. Thousands. Thirty bags. And guess what, Da, some of the kids turned in milkweeds that was still green, and they only give ‘em ten cents a bag. I let mine get all nice and dry up in the hayloft first. The only one picked more than me was a old man from Topunder. Seventy-two bags, but he didn’t have to go to school. He could just fool around pickin’ milkweed all day long.’

‘I wondered what in the hell all them milkweed pods was doin’ spread out over the floor up there. First I thought it was some idea Loyal had for cheap cowfeed. Then I thought they was goin’ to be some kind of a decoration.’

‘Da, they don’t make decorations out of milkweed pods.’

‘Hell they don’t. Milkweed pods, pinecones, spook, popcorn, apples, throw some paint on it, that’s it. I seen women and girls make a goddamn hay rake into a decoration with crepe paper and poison ivy.’

The door opened a few inches and Dub’s florid big-cheeked face thrust into the kitchen. In the thicket of his curly hair a bald spot appeared like a clearing in the woods. He pretended to look around guiltily. When his eyes came to Jewell’s he twisted up his mouth in mock fear, sidling into the room with his arm crooked across his face as if to ward off blows. His thighs were heavy and he had the short man’s scissory walk. He knew he was the fool of the family.

‘Don’t hit me, Ma, I’ll never be late again. Couldn’t help it this time. Hey, I got talkin’ with a fella, said his wife was one of the ones that was up on Camel’s Hump where that bomber went down, looking for the survivors of the crash?’

‘For pity’s sake,’ said Jewell.

Dub turned his chair around and straddled it, his good arm across the back, the empty left sleeve, usually tucked in his jacket pocket, hanging slack. A Camel cigarette balanced behind his right ear. For an instant Jewell remembered how shapely his forearms had been, the swelling flexors and the man’s veins like tight fine branchwood. Mink cut a dice of ham into pieces and scraped them onto Dub’s plate.

The kitchen seemed to Loyal to be falling outward like a perspective painting, showing the grain of the ham, the two shades of green of the wallpaper ivy, the ears of drying popcorn joined together in a twist of wire hanging over the stove, the word COMFORT on the oven door, Jewell’s old purse nailed to the wall to hold bills and letters, the pencil stubs in the spice can hanging from a string looped over a nail, Mernelle’s drawing of a flag tacked to the pantry door, the glass doorknob, the brass hook and eye, the sagging string and stained cretonne covering the cavity under the sink, the wet footprints on the linoleum, all flat and detailed, but receding from him like torn leaves in a flooding river. It seemed he had never before noticed his mother’s floral print apron, the solid way she leaned forward, her beaky nose and round ears. They had those ears, he thought, every one of them, forcing his mind away from what was up under the wall, and Mink’s black Irish hair, so fine you couldn’t see the single hairs.

Dub heaped the mashed potato on his plate, poured the yellow gravy over it and worked it in with his fork. He stuck a lump of chewing gum on the edge of the plate.

‘Plane was all over the mountain. One wing clipped a part of the lion, and then it just end-overed, wings broke off here, tail farther down, cockpit belly-bunted half a mile down. Tell you what, they don’t see how that guy lived through it, guy from Florida, just layin’ on the snow, guts and arms and legs from nine dead men all around him, and all he had was a couple cuts and scrapes, nothing even broke. Guy never even see snow before.’

‘What lion?’ asked Mernelle, picturing the beast behind snowy rocks.

‘Ah, the top of the mountain, looks like a lion gettin’ ready to jump, other guys thinks it looks like a part of a camel. The lion party wanted to call it “crouchin’ lion” but the camel lovers got their way. Camel’s Hump. It’s just stone up there, grade A granite. Looks like a pile of rock. Hey, don’t look like a camel or a lion or a porcupine. Don’t they learn you nothin’ in school!’

‘Seems like it’s been a terrible time the last year or so for terrible things. The War. The Chowder Girl subbing that needle in her eye. That was terrible. That poor woman in the bathtub in the hotel.’ Jewell unleashed one of her gusty sighs and stared away into the sad things that happen, that she guiltily savored. Her eyes were half closed, her thick wrists resting on the edge of the table, fork lying across her plate.

‘What about the fool things,’ said Mink, the words tangled in his mouth with potato and ham, the stubbled cheeks flexing as he chewed, ‘what about that fool that brought the can of blasting powder into the kitchen and put a match to it to see if it would burn. A fool thing, and half the town on fire on account of it and him and his brother’s whole family dead or torn up.’

‘What the hell is this?’ said Dub, pulling something from the mashed potato on his plate. ‘What the hell is this?’ holding up a bloodied Band-Aid.

‘Oh my lord,’ said Jewell, ‘throw it out. Take some new potato. I cut my finger peelin’ potatoes, then when I was settin’ the table I see I lost the Band-Aid somewhere. Must of fell in the potatoes when I was mashin’ ’em. Give it here,’ she said, getting up and scraping the potato in the pig’s slop bucket. She moved with a quick step, her lace-up oxfords with the stacked heels showing off her small feet.

‘Thought for a minute there,’ said Dub, ‘that the taters had the rag on.’

‘Dub,’ said Jewell.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Mernelle. ‘I don’t get what a bomber was doin’ near the Camel’s Hump. Is there Germans on the Camel’s Hump?’

Dub roared in his stupid way. Mernelle could see the thing at the back of his throat hanging down, the black parts of his teeth and the empty gums on the left where the train men had knocked his teeth out.

‘Don’t worry about the Germans. Even if they made it across the ocean what the hell would they do up on Camel’s Hump? “Ach, Heinz, I am seeink der Blood farm und der dangerous Mernelle collecting ze milkveed pods.” ’ Dub’s grin hung in his face like an end of wet rope.

The food lay on Loyal’s plate as Mink had sent it along, the ham hanging a little over the edge, the cone of potato rising, a single iceberg from a frozen sea.

Loyal stood up, the yellow kerosene light reaching as high as his breast, his face shadowed. His leaf-stained fingers bunched, braced against the table. ‘Got something to say. Billy and me has had enough of this place. We’re pullin’ out tonight. She’s waitin’ for me right now. We’re pullin’ out and going out west, someplace out there, buy a farm, make a new sun. She got the right idea. She says “I’m not even goin’ to try to see my folks. Suit me good if I never have to see one of them again.” She’s just goin’. I wanted to set it straight with you, give you some idea. I didn’t come back for no goddamn dinner. Didn’t come back to listen to horseshit about Germans and potatoes. I come back to get my money and my car. Ask you to tell her folks she’s gone. She don’t care to see them.’ As he said it he knew that’s what they should have done. It seemed so easy now he couldn’t understand why he’d fought the idea.

There was a silence. A discordance spread around the table as though he had blindly hit piano keys with a length of pipe.

Mink half-stood, the hair hung down over his eyes. ‘What in hell are you sayin’! This your idea of a joke? All I ever hear from you for ten years is how you think this place oughta be run, now you say just like you was talkin’ about changin’ your shirt that you’re pullin’ out? For ten years I been hearin’ about what you wanted to do with this place, how you wanted to switch off the Jerseys over to Holsteins, “get a milkin’ machine after the War as soon’s we get electricity in, specialize in dairy.” Get the pastures and hayfields up, alfalfa, build a silo, grow more corn, concentrate on commercial dairy farmin’. Profit. Put the time into dairyin’, don’t bother with no big garden, or pigs or turkeys, it’s quicker and efficienter to buy your food. I can hear you sayin’ it now. You said it until my ears turned blue. Now this. You expect me to swallow this like sweet cake?

‘Hey, mister, tell you what else you said. You bitched and whined about the juniper movin’ into the fields, talk half an hour about the orchard, suckers, deadwood, the bull spruce is chokin’ out the spring in the pine tree corner you said, west hayfields ain’t been cut in three year, full of cherry trash. That’s what you said. Said you wished the day had forty hours of light so’s you could get somethin’ done.’

Loyal hardly heard him, but saw the rubbery folds from the wings of his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, saw the cords in Mink’s neck, thought of the glistening strings just under the skin, thought of the arteries swelled with ropes of blood the size of his finger, thought of the crackling sound of rib bones when he kicked in a fox’s chest.

‘You can’t leave us run this farm alone,’ said Mink in his buzzing voice, the self-pity getting into his rage. ‘Jesus Christ, your brother’s only got the one arm and my health is down since the damn tractor laid on my chest. I was up to my health I’d beat the shit out of you. You’re not worth a pig’s patootie. You tell me how in the hell Dub and me can hand-milk nineteen cow alone, two of them damn Holsteins of yours, the one holds her milk back, and kicks. Christ I hate that cow’s eyes. You son of a bitch, we just can’t do it.’

‘Goddamnit, the Holsteins are good-natured cows, better than them little Jerseys you got. They give damn near twice as much milk as any Jersey.’ He tumbled into the relief of the old argument.

‘Yes, and look how much they eat. And half the butterfat of the Jerseys. The Jerseys is made for this country. They can make out on thin pasture and keep a farm going. They’re rugged. Tell you another thing. You just try walkin’ off the farm they’ll have your ass in uniform so fast it’ll take your breath away. There’s a War on, in case you forget. Farm work is essential work. Forget out west. Don’t you read no papers? Don’t you hear no radio programs? Them out west farms dried up and blowed away in the Dust Bowl. You’re stayin’.’

Dub popped a wooden match with his thumbnail and lit his cigarette.

‘I got to go,’ said Loyal. ‘I got to. Oregon or Montana – somewhere.’

‘Put the record on again, Charlie,’ said Dub, ‘everybody likes to dance to that one.’ The smoke streamed out of his nose.

Jewell put her hands to her cheeks and drew down on them, stretching her face and exposing the red inner lids of her eyes behind her glasses. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about the Army Dinner, we’re puttin’ on the Army Dinner Saturday night, the big beef stew dinner in the cafeteria style, Army style. I was expectin’ you to take me down to the church on Saturday mornin’. You can stay for that. Billy’s one of the ones that wears the chefs hats and ladles out the food. She has to stay for that.’

‘It’s on Billy’s account we got to go tonight. There’s certain reasons. No good to talk about it. I’m goin’.’ He leaned wildly at them, the black hair curling at the opening of his shirt where the blue-white skin showed.

‘Well Jesus Christ, I see the whole thing. You knocked her up. She wants to clear out so nobody don’t know. There’s a word to describe a fella like you lets himself get backed into a rutty corner where he can’t turn around,’ the voice squeezed along, ‘but I won’t say it in front of your mother and sister.’

‘Hey, you leave, Loyal,’ said Dub, ‘you’re finishin’ off this farm.’

‘Well I knew this was goin’ to be like takin’ a bath in boiled shit, but I didn’t know it was goin’ to be this bad. Can’t you understand nothin’? I’m goin’.’

He ran up to the slant-ceilinged room he shared with Dub, leaving the ham on his plate, leaving his chair turned away from the table, leaving the fly-spotted mirror reflecting Mernelle’s face. He hauled out the old valise, opened it and threw it onto the bed. And stood a long minute with the shirts bunched up in his hands, the valise gaping like a shout. Down there Mink was firing up, bellowing now, something smashing and rattling – door to the pantry. Loyal dropped the shirts into the valise, and afterwards believed that was the moment when everything shifted, when the route of his life veered away from the main line, not when Billy dumped beneath his blind rutting, but as the shirts collapsed in their cotton limpness.

He found Dub’s bottle in a boot in the closet, tightened the cap and tossed it in, working the stiff strap through the valise buckle as he came down the stairs double-stride, hearing Mink hammering now, seeing the son of a bitch nailing the kitchen door shut. So he couldn’t get out.

He was across the room in a few seconds. He kicked out the window and stepped over the raking glass onto the porch, leaving it all, the trapline, the rough little Jerseys, the two Holsteins with their heavy flesh-colored udders. Dub’s oily rags, and the smell of old iron in the back of the barn, the wall up by the woods. That part of things was over. It was over in a rush.

Down on the town road he thought it was a sour joke how things had turned out. Billy, always yapping about moving away, getting out, making a new start, was staying on the farm. He, who’d never thought beyond the farm, never wanted anything but the farm, was on his way. Clenching the steering wheel.

Something was sticking in his backside, and he felt around, grasped Mernelle’s ocarina, the swirled novelty pattern of the Bakelite scarred from kicking around the floor. On the sides were decals of donkeys carrying panniers of cactus. He started to crank down the window to throw it out, but the window slipped off the rail again when it was only a crack open, and he threw the ocarina into the backseat.

It was almost dusk, but at the low place where the meadows swept the trees off to the sides he pulled over to take a last look. But jammed the spurting flashes of what had happened. Had happened and was done.

The place was as fixed as a picture on a postcard, the house and barn like black ships in an ocean of fields, the sky a membrane holding the final light, and there were the blurred kitchen windows, and up behind the buildings the field, the rich twenty-acre field propped open toward the south like a Bible, the crease of the water vein almost exactly in the center of the ten-acre pages. He fished in the valise and got Dub’s bottle, swallowed the cold whiskey. Beautiful pasture, four or five years of his work to bring that field up, none of Mink’s labor, his, draining the boggy place, liming and seeding to clover, plowing under the clover three years running to build up the soil, get the sourness out, then planting alfalfa and keeping it going, look at it, sweet good stuff, nutty, full of nourishment. That’s what made those cows give the butterfat, nothing Mink did, but him. Loyal, the best pasture in the county. That was why he had wanted to go up above the junipers, even though Billy didn’t care about the field and couldn’t tell good fields from bad, not to do what she thought he wanted, but to look at his pasture from above.

‘I heard it all, now,’ she said. ‘Looks like any stupid old field to me.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know if I can make something out of you or not. Loyal.’

The field looked like black-green fur in the dull light.

‘That’s your last look,’ he said, laid Dub’s bottle in the glove compartment and threw the car into first. Out of the corner of his eye he half-marked a white dot up in the field. Too big for a fox, wrong shape for a deer. And no stumps in that field.

But he was fourteen miles away from home and half across the bridge, stepping gingerly on the brake to keep from hitting a burrcovered stray, before he figured it out. The dog. The dog was up in the field right where he’d told him to sit. Still waiting. Jesus Christ.

2 Mink’s Revenge

MINK, PANTING IN unsatisfied rage, limped through the house throwing down Loyal’s things, a model airplane impaled on a nail in the front hall, school photos in warped folders edged with gold – Loyal the only one in his class with wavy hair, handsome – standing in a crowd of frames and button boxes on the piecrust cherry table in the front room. The 4-H ribbons, red, white and blue for calves, pasted on a piece of propped cardboard, the high school diploma with its black pointed letters proving Loyal had completed courses in Agriculture and Agronomy and Manual Training, the Dairy Management book from his single year at the agricultural school, dark blue and heavy, the certificate for pasture improvement, a newspaper clipping with a photo of Mr. Fuller, the County Agent, handing the certificate to Loyal, all these things he threw on the floor.

He crammed Loyal’s barn coat into the kitchen stove, scraped the untouched food on his plate in after it. Smoke swelled out of a hundred stove cracks and eddied along the ceiling before curling into the stream of warm air pouring out through the smashed window. Dub fumbled behind the pantry door for cardboard to tack over the window and Jewell, her face red and her eyes narrowed to slits, juggled the stove damper. A roaring came from the stovepipe as the creosote in the bend of the elbow caught and heated the stinking metal to a dull red.

‘Christ, Ma, you’re workin’ on a chimbley fire, damper the goddamn thing down,’ shouted Dub.

Here came Mink, cool now, but with vicious eyes, coming downstairs with Loyal’s .30–.30, limping through the kitchen, leaving the door open. Dub guessed the old man would throw it in the pond. Later he could drag through the mud with a potato fork and maybe get lucky. Probably take a day of cleaning and oiling to get it back in shape, but it was a good rifle and worth the trouble. Laid across the windowsill of the hayloft he could shoot it, get his deer like anybody else. He pieced and tacked cardboard boxes, all dots and creases, to the window frame, holding the cardboard in place with his left knee while he hammered.

‘I’ll cut some glass, put it in tomorrow if somebody’ll give me a hand puttin’ in the points.’ But he was pale.

Jewell swept up the curving slivers, putty chunks and dust, stoutly bending over, her print dress riding up, exposing the ribbed cotton stockings, the flesh-pink dip from Montgomery Ward.

‘There’s glass in the food, Ma, there’s glass all over the table,’ said Mernelle. ‘There’s big pieces on the porch, too.’

‘You can start by scrapin’ the plates, and don’t put it in the pig pail. Have to take it out and heave it. I don’t know about the hens, if they’d pick up the glass, but I suppose they would. Heave it out back of the garden.’

There was the slamming sound of a shot from the barn, then another, and, after a long interval, a third. The cows were bawling like alligators, flat roars, stamping, rattling their stanchions. They could hear Father Abraham’s bellow above all the others.

‘That is a hell of a thing to do,’ said Dub. ‘That is a hell of a thing to do.’ Jewell shuddered, her fingers across her mouth, watched Dub go out to the entry, jerk his coat off the nail. Back through the kitchen to the woodshed door.

‘Be careful,’ she said, hoping he knew what he should be careful about. Mernelle started to snivel, not over the cows, but because of Mink’s rage that was spurting out of him like jets of water from a kinked hose. He could chop them all with the axe.

‘Get hold of yourself and go up to bed,’ said Jewell gathering the plates from the table. ‘Go on now, I got enough trouble without you blubberin’ around the place.’

She was sitting at the table when Mink came in. She saw how a little burst of greyed hairs had grown on his cheek since morning. He threw the rifle up on top of the cupboard without cleaning it and sat across from her. His hands were steady. The streaked hair stuck out from under his cap, the bill like a menacing horn over his eyes.

‘By god, that’s two of them we don’t have to milk.’ There were fine drops of blood across the front of his overalls.

Mist rose from the brook like a stage curtain. In midmorning the trees still bent wet and silent. Every surface was coated with beaded drops that paled bark, wood, paint, soil. The coming and going of Dub and Mink made dark paths across the porch, through the grass like stiff hairs with seed pearls at the tips. The top of the barn dissolved, the pigs rooted in the manure pile, heaving bubbles on the surface of a black swamp.

Mink was out before daylight. Jewell struggled from sleep to the sound of the tractor dragging the Holsteins down to the swamp where the dogs and foxes and crows would find them. The engine echoed and dotted through the fog.

‘We could of at least took the meat,’ she thought, and Mink’s anger seemed to her so wasteful he would have to burn for it in a hell as crimson as the landscape seen through the red cellophane strip on cigarette packs. Not a new thought.

He had done a hundred things. She could not forget all of them. The knock-down slaps, the whalings he gave the boys, same as he’d had himself. Loyal, maybe three years old, stumbling across the muddy barnyard in his little red boots, bellowing like a lost calf but still hanging onto his empty milk bucket. It was a quart cream can, really. The milk all spilled when he did in fresh manure. Mink had slapped him halfway across the barn. ‘I’ll learn you to watch your goddamn step! Don’t spill the milk!’ Loyal’s broken nose had swelled up to the size of a hen’s egg by the time he got to the porch steps, the cream can hanging, and for two weeks the kid had slunk around dodging Mink, looking like a raccoon with his double black eyes. When she’d run out to the barn in her own fury Mink’d been astonished. ‘Listen here. We got to start him young. We got to. It’s for his own good. I went through it. And guarantee you he won’t spill no more milk.’ Nor had he.

And Dub, too, who’d got to eating under the table with the dog when he was what, five or six, until Mink hauled him up by his hair and held him screaming in the air, ‘Will you eat off’n your plate or not! Will you?’

But she couldn’t hold it against him because he came off the fire as fast as he heated up. The Blood temper. Loyal had the same flash temper. And mild as milk afterwards.

Mink and Dub were late coming in from the barn. It was nine by the kitchen clock when Dub went for the speckled coffeepot on the back of the stove, relishing the hot chicory taste. He poured some into a chipped cup for Mink. Shifting weights and counterweights of regard shot back and forth between them like abacus beads on wires. Animosity and bridling softened. Mink tried to smother his contempt for Dub’s wandering habits, hopeless taste for nigger music, those sly records by Raw Boy Harry he brought back from distant places. He went for the Kong Chow restaurant in Rutland, too, where he’d eat three dollars’ worth of vegetables in a ratbrown sauce at one sitting and the Comet Roadhouse where he got drunk on Saturday and pawed the women with his grimy hand.

Dub, in his turn, swallowed the remarks under his breath about Mink’s monotonous ideas and narrow corridors of toil, his pathetic belief that cattle auctions were the height of entertainment. Dub could even choke down the way the old man had shot the Holsteins.

Working in the dim lantern light, their calloused hands touched like pieces of wood as Dub dipped for the handle of the full milk pad and passed a new one to Mink, as Dub went ahead, wiping down the flanks and udder of the next cow, soothing Myrna Loy who tossed her head, still nervy. They fell into the companionship of work. The weight of the work without Loyal pressed them close. Dub hustled; Mink milked on and on, fourteen, seventeen cows, his forearms aching, his back cracking, and Dub saw it was a prodigious job. For the first time he felt sorry on Mink’s account that he’d lost his arm.

Now that Loyal was gone some kind of hunger for his father’s affection came up in Dub, an appetite he hadn’t known he had, that had lain quiet and flat under his joking and travels, and that could never be satisfied at this late date. It did not displace the ancient hatred and what he murmured like a charm against fate, ‘won’t never be like he is.’

They worked without speaking, listening to the farm report and egg prices and War news coming from the crackling, chaff-coated radio that ran off the big farm battery, on its shelf beside the milk room door. For a while, in those hours of carrying, of spurting milk, they passed from being father and youngest son, became two equals subordinate to the endless labor. ‘We’ll get it tuned up, all right,’ Mink said, the muscles in his arms swelling, falling, as he milked.

‘Three and a half hours of milkin’. I done the milkin’. Dub lugged the goddamn milk, and it adds up to seven hours a day on milkin’ alone, add in grainin’ and hayin’ ’em, clean out the barn, got to spread some of that manure before the snow comes, tomorrow we got to get the cream down to the road by seven, plus the rest of life’s little chores like diggin’ the potatoes we got to get dug, we ain’t got the wood hauled down yet. The butcherin’s got to be did this week if we stay up all night doin’ it. If I was to make a list of the things that got to be did right now it would take every piece of paper in the house. I don’t know if I could hold a pencil, don’t know if I can get my hands around anything but cow teats. You and Mernelle will have to take care of them chickens and get in what apples you can, dig the potatoes. Mernelle will have to stay out of school for a week or so until we get on top of it. There ain’t no way we can do it unless we give up sleepin’.’ What he said was true. But the set of his furious mouth got Jewell’s back up.

‘You’ll put up with scratch suppers if we got to do outside work. I can’t kill and pluck chickens and lug potatoes and apples and then come in and make a big dinner. Can’t you get one of your brother’s boys there, Ernest or Norman, to help?’ She knew he could not.

‘Be nice if I could slack off on the milkin’ just because I got to haul wood. Goddamn it, I need a good dinner and I expect you to fix it for me.’ Now he was shouting. ‘And no, I can’t get Ott’s boys to help. First place, Norman’s only eleven and got about as much strength as wet hay. Ernie’s already helpin’ Ott and Ott says he puts about as much into it as he would into takin’ poison.’

She’d like to see him take poison, he knew it.

There was the threshing sound of a car coming up the lane. Jewell went to the window.

‘Might of known she’d be along; it’s old Mrs. Nipple and Ronnie.’

‘Be out in the barn,’ said Mink, hitching at his overalls. The argument had brought up his color, and Jewell had a flash of how he’d been when he was young, the milky skin under the shirt, the blue flashing eyes and the fine hair. The vigor of him, the swaggering way he walked and hitched at his overalls to free his private parts from the chafing cloth.

He and Dub went out the door to the woodshed, moving like a matched team. The porch door hissed. Mrs. Nipple’s heavy fingers crooked around the door edge.

‘Don’t just stand there, Mrs. Nipple, come on in and Ronnie too,’ shouted Jewell, putting on water for tea. The old lady had burned her mouth with hot coffee as a baby and never touched it again, let her tea stand until it went tepid. ‘Thought we might be seein’ you pretty soon.’ Mrs. Nipple had an instinct for discovering trouble as keen as the wild goose’s need to take flight in the shortening days. She was sensitive to the faintest janglings of discord from miles away.

‘After what she had been through,’ Jewell once told Mernelle in a dark tone, ‘she probably knows what ain’t right in Cuba.’

‘What’s she been through, then?’ asked Mernelle.

‘Nothin’ I can tell you until you’re a grown woman. You wouldn’t understand it.’

‘I’ll understand it,’ whined Mernelle, ‘so tell me.’

‘Not likely,’ said Jewell.

‘Ronnie’s gone out to the barn to talk to Loyal and them,’ said Mrs. Nipple sidling through the door, taking in the broken window, the potato peelings in the sink, the woodshed door half open, Jewell’s twisted smile. She smelled the rage, the smoke, sensed some departure. In Mink’s chair she felt the warmth of the seat even through her heavy brown skirt. Nobody had to tell her something had happened. She knew Mink had gone out to the barn when he saw her coming.

The old lady had the look of a hen who had laid a thousand eggs, from her frizzled white hair permed at Corinne Claunch’s Home Beauty Parlor, to her bright moist eye, plump breast, thrusting rear end that no corset could ever bend in and the bowed legs set so far out on her pelvis that when she walked it was like a rocking chair rocking. Dub had snickered to Loyal once that the space between her thighs had to be three hands across, that she could sit on the back of a Clydesdale like a slotted clothes-pin on the line.

She sighed, touched a needle of glass on the oilcloth. ‘Seems like there’s trouble everywhere,’ she said, building up a platform for the news Jewell must tell. ‘It’s a nuisance you have to bring your own paper bags to the stores, and just last month Ronnie got a letter from the milk truck, said they are consolidating the route. Can’t come up to the farm no more. If we want to sell them cream we got to lug it down to the roadside. He’s been doing it, but it’s pretty irksome work, takes a good deal of time. I suppose he’ll lose heavy on it. Don’t know how they expect us to manage. Then my niece Ida’s sister-in-law, you remember Ida, she stayed with us when Toot was still alive, helped me in the garden all one summer, picked berries, apples, I don’t know what, helped Toot and Ronnie with the hay. She was the one got stung by yellow jackets had a nest under a pumpkin. Well, now she’s livin’ over in Shoreham, I hear from her that her sister-in-law, Mrs. Charles Renfrew, runs the U-Auta lunchroom in Barton, her husband’s at the War in the Air Force, and she been arrested. I have never ate there and I don’t believe I ever will. She shot this feller, Jim somebody, worked for the electric light over there, with his own shotgun. Seems he come sneakin’ around, peepin’ in the windows to see what she was doin’ and he saw plenty. She got this cook in to help her run the lunchroom, a colored fellow from South America, she didn’t say what his name was, but Mrs. Charles Renfrew was seen by the electric company man kissin’ the cook, and in he comes with the shotgun. See, he was sweet on her himself. She’s a good-lookin’ woman, they say. She gets the shotgun away from him and shoots him. And he died. When they arrested her she admitted it all, but said everything was an accident. Got six children, the youngest one isn’t but four. Them poor little children. It was all in the paper. Terrible, ain’t it.’ She waited for Jewell to begin. Few things could be worse than Mrs. Charles Renfrew’s multiple crimes laid out in public view, and she’d told the story to give Jewell a chance to whittle her own troubles down to size. She leaned forward.

Jewell slid the cup of tea over to her, the string dangling over the edge of the cup. ‘We had a little surprise here last night. Loyal comes in for supper, stands up in the middle of it and says that Billy and him is goin’ out west. They left last night. Kind of took us by surprise, but that’s the way the kids are these days.’

‘Is that right,’ said Mrs. Nipple. ‘Takes my breath away. Ronnie will be upset. Him and Loyal was tight as ticks.’ There was something awry, she thought, told straight out like that, no details of who had said what. She knew there was something deeper. Mink must have been crazy mad. The way Jewell told it now it didn’t seem like the kind of story that would gather with time, but instead would retract, condense, turn into one of those things that nobody talked about, and in a year or so it would all be forgotten. There were plenty of those stories. She knew one or two herself. It was all serious business. She never understood why Ronnie liked Loyal, no standout, even in the crowd of Bloods with their knack for doing the wrong thing, except for his strength and his sinewy hunger for work. But one man couldn’t bring that farm up again, it had too much against it. Look how it had gone down since the grandfather’s time when it was tight-fenced for the convenience of trotting horses and fine merinos, only three cows then for family butter and cheese on the place. She liked Jewell well enough, but the woman was a dirty housekeeper, letting the men in with their barn clothes on, letting the dust and spiders take over, and too proud for milk room work.

‘Well, Billy was smarting to get out, and I can’t say I blame her. But I’m surprised Loyal would go. He’s a country boy from the word go. She’ll find you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy. It won’t be easy to milk all them cows, just Mink and Dub. Dub’s still here or is he off somewhere again?’ Her voice so custard smooth now it would cure a sore throat.

‘Been here pretty steady since his accident. But you know how he is. The two of them can’t do it all. Not run this farm, just the two of them. We’ll have to hire somebody to come in, I imagine.’

‘You won’t find nobody. Ronnie tried all last winter, this spring and summer, and I guess he got to know everybody for twenty mile around that could hold a pitchfork, and I’ll tell you, the best he could find was school kids and hundred-year-old grandpas with wooden legs and canes. Some places they’re takin’ on girls. How about Mernelle? She could milk, maybe. She’s comin’ on what, twelve or thirteen now? She get the curse yet? I used to milk when I was eight. Or you could milk while she takes over the house. Some say it makes the cows restless when a woman’s got the curse milks ’em. I never noticed it myself.’ The old lady sucked at her tea.

‘No ma’am. I don’t work to the barn and my girl don’t work to the barn. Barns is men’s work. If they can’t handle it they can hire. I give two boys to the barn, that’s enough. Mink’s already set me and Mernelle up to take on what seems like half his outside work.’

‘I’ve noticed that with the help so hard to get and the boys off to the War they’s quite a few of the farms for sale. And the way the cream prices moves around. Course it’s good now, with the War, but it could go down again. I notice that the Darter farm is been sold. The three boys is in the service, the other one’s in the shipyards, the girl’s gone into nurse’s training, and Clyde says, “I don’t know why we’re hangin’ around here when we could be makin’ good money instead of killin’ ourself.” They say he went over to Bath, Maine where the other boy is, they learnt him how to weld and he’s got a high-payin’ job now. They say she got one, too, and between what they get from the wages and what they got from sellin’ the farm to a teacher from Pennsylvania who’s just comin’ up for summers, they are fixed up good. Seems funny that Loyal and Billy would go off so sudden like that. He didn’t say nothin’ to Ronnie. Ronnie and him was plannin’ to go goose huntin’ one day this week. That’s the main reason we come by, so’s Ronnie and Loyal could set their time. I says they ought to try and get some of them hen hawks that have been takin’ my hens and now there’s a turkey gone. I don’t know as a hen hawk could lift a turkey, but I suppose they could eat it where they brought it low. But maybe it was a fox took the turkey. I don’t know how Ronnie’ll get along without Loyal, they was that close. You’ll find it quite a chore without Loyal. A worker.’

‘I suppose we’ll figure somethin’ out. But I don’t know what. One thing, I’m not goin’ in any barn and neither is Mernelle.’

3 Down the Road

HE MADE GOOD TIME, heading north for the end of the lake. He had his little roll of money, country money, dollar bills oily and limp from passage through the hands of mechanics, farmhands, loggers. He had enough gas ration stamps to get him somewhere. It wasn’t like anybody was after him. He didn’t think they’d ever be after him. That wall was built good, he thought. If the foxes didn’t dig in under. If nobody went up there. Who in hell would go up there? Nobody would go up there.

The roads had hardened in the autumn cold and there wasn’t much traffic. Good hunting weather. A few cars, a log truck coming out of the dark woods, leaving a double-curve of cleated mud where it turned onto the hardtop. Must of gotten stuck in some soft spot. He had forty-seven dollars, enough to take him some distance. If the car would hold up. It was in pretty good shape, a ’36 Chevy Coach, except for the back of the seat that had broke and had to be braced from behind with a wooden crosspiece. The heater only put out a trickle, less warmth than a bat’s breath, but the defroster did well enough. The battery was old, and the Coach was a bitch to start on a cold morning, about as simple as getting port wine out of a cow’s left hind teat. The tires still had tread. He’d nurse them along. If it broke down bad he could get work. Walk onto any farm and get work. What bothered him was the gas stamps. He only had enough for twenty gallons. That could just get him across New York state. He’d have to get it any way he could.

He didn’t think where he was going, just heading out. It seemed to him there didn’t have to be a direction, just a random traveling away from the farm. It wasn’t the idea that he could go anywhere, but the idea that he had to go somewhere, and it didn’t make any difference where. No spark had ever ignited his mind for the study of spiders or rocks, for the meshing of watch gears, or the shudder of paper pouring out of the black presses, for mapping the high arctic or singing tenor. The farm had had answers for any question, but no questions had ever come up.

West, that was the direction. That was where Billy thought there was something. Not another farm. She wanted a place with madhouses, some kind of War work, good money in the factories if she could find a job that didn’t bust her nails, save some dough for a start, go out Saturday night, hair curled, parted in the middle and pulled back by two red barrettes set with rhinestones. She wanted to sing. She sang pretty good when she got the chance. Go up to the Club 52 packed with guys from the base. Like Anita O’Day, cool, smart, standing there in front of the microphone, holding it with one hand, a red chiffon scarf dripping down from her hand, her voice running through the room like water over rock. Clear, but a little sarcastic.

He was supposed to get a job. The money was good, she said, dollar an hour and better. Guys were pulling down fifty, sixty bucks a week in the aircraft plants. He’d drive west, but keep to the border. Those cities she’d named, South Bend, Detroit, Gary, Chicago, those were the places. What Billy would have wanted, but his mind kept jumping away from whatever had happened. The gas would be a problem.

The road ran along the railroad tracks up near the lake. That was another way; he could ride the rails. He’d never done it, but plenty had. Dub had, even dumb Dub had bummed around, riding the boxcars in the times he went off his nut and drifted out and away. He’d come back a mess, stinking, lugging an old feed sack of trash, his hair stiff with dirt.

‘Presents. Got you a present, Ma,’ he’d say, pulling out the junk. Once it was about thirty pie pans, the edges gummed with baked-on apple and cherry syrup. Once five little bales of cotton about six inches high, the tags saying ‘A Gift from New Orleans, Cotton Capital of the World.’ Another time the best he could do was half a BURMA SHAVE sign. All it said was BURMA. He tried to tell them it came from the real Burma. And the time he brought back about fifty pounds of red dirt from somewhere down south, he didn’t even know where.

‘It’s all like this, all red dirt down there. Red as blood. Red roads, the wind blows red, bottom of the houses red, gardens, farms red. But the taters and turnips is the same color as ours. I don’t get it. Because there is red taters in this world. But not in the land of the red dirt.’ He dumped the soil in one of Jewell’s flower beds where he could look at it now and then and be reminded of the place it came from.

A light appeared and reappeared in the darkness behind him, gradually growing larger in the rearview. Loyal heard the whistle blow for a crossing, somewhere behind him, he thought, but when he steered around the long corner before the bridge, the train was there, its light sweeping along the rails, the iron shuddering past a few feet from him.

The worst was the time Dub had come back honed down to his bones, the scabs on his face like black islands and his left arm amputated except for a stub like a seal’s flipper. Mink and Jewell, all stiff in their best clothes driving down to get him, first time Mink had ever been out of the state. Dub called it that, ‘my flipper,’ trying to make a joke but sounding loony and sick. ‘Could of been worse,’ he said, tipping a crazy wink at Loyal. He’d only gone off once since then, no farther than Providence, Rhode Island, and hitching on the road, not riding the rods. There was a kind of school in Rhode Island he said, a place to learn tricks of getting things done with half your parts missing. They could fix you up with artificial arms and hands and legs made out of pulleys and aluminum. A new kind of plastic fingers that worked so good you could play the one-man band with them. But when he came back he was the same. Didn’t want to talk about it. Some VA place for servicemen, farmers had to get along the best they could. It was just a question anyway of how far you got before you were crippled up one way or another. A lot of people didn’t make it past the time they were kids. Look at Mink, pitchfork tines through his thigh when he was five years old, two car wrecks, the tractor rollover, the time the brood sow got him down and half tore off his ear, but he was still there, gimping around, strong as a log chain, getting the work done. Tuf Nut. The old son of a bitch.

Miles into New York state he pulled the car into a field behind a row of chokecherry trees. The broken seat back could come in handy, he thought, pulling out the brace and letting it flop down into a kind of narrow bed. But as he twisted near deep his chest seized up again, a blunt stake slammed into a place under his larynx, and with it a choking breathlessness. He sat up, dozing and waking in starts, the rest of the night.

No station came in clearly on the radio, not even the jabber of French and accordions, riding along the edges of the Adirondack conifer forests, spruce and miles of skeletal larch like grey woods static, sometimes a tangle of deer legs and phosphorescent eyes in the road ahead of him, far enough ahead that he had time to tap the brakes while he laid on the horn and watched them go, worrying about the brake lines, the worn drums. He passed houses not much bigger than toolsheds, threads of smoke floating out of the cobblestone chimneys, passed boarded-up log cabins, signposts saying ‘Crow’s Nest,’ ‘Camp Idle-Our’, ‘The Retreat,’ ‘Skeeter Gulch,’ ‘Dun Roamin.’ Bridges, water racing away, the gravel road punched with potholes, all the roads nothing more than notches through the tight-packed trees, roads that took their curves and twists from the St. Lawrence River thirty miles to the north. The strangeness of the country, its emptiness, steadied his breathing. There was nothing here of him, no weight of event or duty or family. Somber land, wet as the inside of a bucket in the rain. The gas gauge needle tipped down and he kept his eye out for a gas pump. The farther away he got the better it seemed he could breathe.

Late in the morning he pulled up to a tourist trap, BIG PINETREE, lying in wait in the trees beyond a long bend. He was half sick with hunger. Four or five old cars and trucks, standing so long their tires had gone flat. A row of sheds covered with signs: ‘Little Indian Moccasins,’ ‘Peanut Bride,’ ‘Balsom Pilows,’ ‘Lether Work,’ ‘Groceries,’ ‘Sovenirs,’ ‘Tire Change Wihle U Wait,’ ‘Lunchroom,’ ‘Botomless Cup of Coffee 5c,’ ‘Rest Room,’ ‘Gifts & Noveltys,’ ‘Auto Repears,’ ‘Worm & Bait,’ ‘Torist Cabin.’ There was a half-closed look to the place but the light was on in the pump’s round head, the glow shining through the red-painted Tydol Flying A gasoline. The parking lot as rough as a cob, full of mud sinks and washboard ripples. There was a garage bay with a hinge-sprung door that left a scraped semicircle in the gravel. Somebody had dumped a load of cordwood near the main building.

He went in. A wood lunch counter with a few stools home upholstered in red oilcloth, three booths varnished the color of orange peel. He could smell cigarette smoke. The radio was going, somewhere. ‘What a dart you placed in my heart the day that we parted.’ Beyond the counter were islands and aides of moccasins, pincushions, colored feather dusters with handles carved in the shape of a spruce tree, canvas water bags to sling over the car fender, felt pennants, wooden plaques burned with jokes and mottos, green bumper stickers stamped This Car Has Been to the Adirondacks, and on the wall the stuffed heads and mounted bodies of bass and pike, eight-pound trout with square tails, bear, moose and deer, a porcupine bigger than any of the bobcats arched on their birch half-logs, a king snake lumpily crawling over the door lintel and everywhere fly-specked photographs of men wearing knee-high hunting boots holding up carcasses and bodies.

‘Help you,’ said an irritable woman’s voice. She sat in one of the booths, comfortable in a space designed for three people, a fat girl with blond hair parted on the side and pinned back with a black grosgrain bow. She wore a man’s grey sweater over a housedress printed with seahorses. In front of her was a chicken salad sandwich cut square across the middle with strips of bacon hanging out the ends, and a pot of coffee beside a souvenir mug, a magazine folded open. He could see letters spelling out “The Telegram Came While I Was Two-Timing Joe.’

‘Like to get cup of coffee, sandwich, you got any more like that,’ pointing with his thumb.

‘I s’pose we can manage it.’ She heaved to her feet and he saw the wrinkled dungaree legs under the dress, the oily work boots.

‘Are you the Big Pinetree?’

‘Close enough. Big enough. Mrs. Big Pinetree. Piney’s in the Pacific and I’m here keepin’ the bears out of the lunchroom and fixin’ cars much as I can without no parts or no tires. Want it toasted?’

‘Guess so.’

She pulled the uncovered bowl of chicken salad out of a big Servel, the door around the handle discolored with garage grease, slapped three pieces of bacon on the grill and laid three slices of white bread to toast. She pressed down on the bacon with a spatula, forcing the oil out. She opened the Servel again, grasped a head of lettuce like a bowling ball, tore off an inch of leaves and dropped them on the cutting board. She turned the bacon, turned the slices of bread, pressed them with the spatula. She got the pot of coffee from the booth and poured it in a white mug marked ‘Souvenir of Big Pinetree in the Adirondacks.’ She slid the spatula under a slice of bread, toasted dark with a narrow rim of black around the crust, slid it onto a plate, plastered it with Silvernip mayonnaise, put half the lettuce on it, whacked a scoop of chicken salad dead center, then picked up the second dice of toast, laid it in place like a mason dropping a brick in line, hit it with the mayonnaise, the rest of the lettuce and the hot bacon. When the last dice of toast was on she looked up at Loyal, holding the knife.

‘Kitty-corner or straight?’

‘Straight.’

She dipped her head in a single nod, laid the knife dead center, horizontal with the edge of the toast, raised the heel of the blade and cut it clean. She pulled a two-inch cream bottle out of the Servel and thumped it all on the counter in front of him.

‘There you go. I don’t trust guys like it cut kitty-comer. City style. Fifty-five.’ He dug out the change, then sat eating, trying not to cram and wolf. She went back to her magazine and he heard her strike a match, heard the rounded exhalation of her breath, smelled the smoke. She was big, but she wasn’t bad.

‘This is a hell of a good sandwich,’ he said. ‘Any chance of another cup of coffee?’

‘Help yourself,’ she said, rattling the pot on the booth table. He brought his mug over and she poured the coffee, steadying his mug with one hand. Her fingers touched his.

God! He hadn’t washed up since—. He started to jerk away but thought of the gas. He drank a mouthful of coffee, trying to force down the nervous tightness. He sat down on the bench across from her and cocked his head a little.

‘Hate to leave good company,’ he said, ‘but I got to be on my way.’

‘Where you headin’?’

‘Out west. Thought I’d get off the farm, get in one of the War work factories, make some money.’

‘Wish I could do that. They’re makin’ real good wages. Women, too, payin’ ’em the same as men on the production lines. Rosie the Riveter. I’m stuck right here until Piney gets back, and I don’t see five cars a day. Sure wish I could just stow away in your backseat.’

‘I can guess what Big Pine would do. I guess my head would be up on that wall next to the stuffed skunk.’ He got a whiff of a cold sourness from her like the gravelly sod under stones.

She laughed and gave him a look, but he dipped out from under it with a wink.

‘Hey, Mrs. Sweetheart Pinetree.’ He made his voice soft. ‘Chance you could sell me a little extra gas? Awful short on coupons.’

‘Well, you stopped the right place, but it’ll cost you double.’ Her voice hardened up, she seemed to turn into a kind of pot metal. He went out with her and leaned against the car while she filled the tank with gas. Out in the light he saw she wasn’t much, just another penned-up woman who didn’t know how to dig her way out, all grease and grits, but ready to give it away to anybody that came by. Her knuckles were skinned, her nails rimmed with black. She was surly now, too, feeling his intention to get going now that he had the gas.

‘That will hold you.’ She shoved the yellow cat that had come twisting around her legs away with her foot, lofting it a few inches into the air. ‘Beat it, cat.’ She meant him, of course.

She didn’t seem to know how good off she was, he thought. That she could be here, comfortable, running this place, eating big sandwiches, all the gas she could want, cheating on the gas, getting black market prices, cheating on Big Pinetree out there in the Pacific, touching his hand, she didn’t know who the hell he was, and God, poor Billy, where was she? The woman didn’t know how close she was coming.

‘How about some kind of bonus for the one that’s sellin’ you the gas.’ She bunched up her mouth.

‘Maybe we just ought to step back inside for that kind of bonus,’ he said, smiling like he was holding nails in his teeth, the oily metal taste of nails ran right to the back of his throat, and he could hardly wait to get the door slammed shut and locked.

His arms wrapped around the postcard rack for support and he fought for clear breath. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but all of a sudden it was like digging a pit on the hottest day to pull a breath into his caved lungs. His pants were wadded around his boot tops. He could see the stained underwear and he wanted to haul them up, but he couldn’t get a breath.

‘That looks cute,’ she said from across the room, watching him retch for air. She walked toward him. ‘I said that looks cute, you dirty chokin’ bastard.’ She threw a sandwich plate in his direction. It hit the postcard rack and fell into his pants. He could see it between his ankles, see the hardened grease and a red tick of bacon, a white dirty plate. How had he got into this. How had he got into this. He didn’t want her, he didn’t want anything from her but the gas.

He dragged for a breath, kicked the plate onto the floor, got his pants up and wheezed in another breath. Something the hell wrong. A heart attack or something. He stumbled against the door. His hands were full of postcards. There was wind outside, and cold air, and if he was going to die he wanted to do it outside, not in here.

‘Go ahead, get out,’ she said. ‘You’re lucky. You’re lucky I don’t get down Piney’s shotgun. If you’re smart you’ll be out of here and travelin’ in about one minute or I’m going to get down Piney’s shotgun.’ She was wading toward him. He twisted the lock and got the door open.

The parking lot was compressed by the black spruce across the road, stacked on itself as a scrap of paper folded smaller and smaller. His car waited pale against the trees, the chromed handle on the driver’s door a silvery rod that, as he grasped it, connected him with the possibilities of distances. Wheezing and hauling for breath, he swung inside the car, it started, smooth as syrup, started and he backed across the gravel, out onto the lonely road past the waves of spruce and fir, the nicked driveways leading to dark, mosquito-stitched camps in the forest.

As he pulled out onto the road something moved near the woodpile. He thought it was a falling block, but it was the yellow cat, the same color as the fresh wood. They’d had a barn cat once, the same butterscotch fur. He remembered how it favored his mother, sat on the porch gazing up at her. She had called it Spotty and fed it cream. It made the mistake of rubbing against Mink’s leg when his temper was up, shoveling manure out of the gutter and he’d broken its back with a swipe of the shovel.

In an hour he could breathe more easily. The front seat was strewn with postcards, seventy or eighty postcards all showing the same thick-bodied bear with a red snout coming out of the black trees. ‘Must be worth about eight dollars,’ he said aloud and took a cold pleasure in the minute gain.

4 What I See

The land levels as he comes down out of the trees and into miles of vineyards, the crooked branches crucified on wires. The Coach jars along a road knotted with tar patches, unraveled along the edges, the crumbling asphalt mixing with the gravel, weeds, rows of creosoted posts with winking reflectors, angled tops. But the land as monotonous as a lawn, and on he goes past the tourist cabins with their tiny porches and metal chairs, the gas pumps and whirligig ducks, the metal signs saying Nehi.

The sky grows. Yellow dirt roads cut away to the north and south. Plaster ducks on withered lawns, snapping flags in the wind coming down the flat rows. A dog races beside the car for a hundred feet.

In the steamy warmth of the Olympia Cafe he eats thick pancakes with Karo. The coffee is heavy with chicory. He leans his elbows on the counter watching the cook. A kid parks his Indian motorcycle and comes in. He pulls up his goggles, exposing white circles of skin.

‘Dogs’ he says to the cook. ‘Dogs gonna dump me yet. I hit one son of a bitch come out and went for my leg.’

‘That right.’ The cook presses the potato with his crusted spatula. ‘It better not a been my Irish setter. Rusty, just up the road here at my place.’

‘Might a been,’ says the kid. ‘No, no, I’m just kidding you. It was a black one about five mile back. Big son of a bitch. Size of a cow, damn near. It wasn’t no Irish setter.’

In Pennsylvania the vineyards are spaced farther apart. The grapevines fade, cornfields swell up. The levelness of the land disturbs him with its easiness. The road is a slab seamed with asphalt ridges that strike the worn tires, jar his hands and shoulders, on and on. Cars turn off the highway onto side roads ahead of him, raise dusty billows. The radio is nothing but static and broken voices crying out a few words. ‘Jimmy Rodgers … pray to God … happy birthday… in the European theater … goodby folks … Pillsbury … organ inter … Duz does … the story of a … oh … hello folks … Jesus said … our listeners write in …’

He passes old trucks humping along on bald treads. He is worried about his own tires. He turns off onto a gravel road but the stones fly up, dust chokes him. Grit in his mouth. When he rubs his fingers against the ball of his thumb he feels hard grit. And turns back onto the concrete.

Miles of snow fence. A peregrine falcon balances on a forgotten hay bale. The flatness changes, the earth’s color changes, darker, darker. Prayers and long silences out of the dusty radio. In the autumn rain the houses become trailers among the trees. Oaks come at him, flash, burst into thickets, into woods. H&C Café, EATS, Amoco, GAS 3 MI. AHEAD. Fog. A little night fog. The sod in Indiana a deep brown-black. The cattle sink into its blackness. Southering geese spring up from the sloughs and ponds, scissor over him in the hundreds. The water is streaked with the lines of their angular necks, fractioned by dipping heads and beaks.

In the diner hunched over the cup of coffee he wonders how far he is going.

5 A Short, Sharp Shock

THE BEAR, LIKE MANY BEARS, had led a brief and vivid life. Born in the late winter of 1918 in a stump den, he was the oldest of two cubs. In personality he was quarrelsome and insensitive to the subtle implications of new things. He ate the remains of a poisoned eagle and nearly died. In his second autumn, from the height of a cliff, he saw his mother and sister backed against an angle in the rock by lean bear hounds. They went down in squalling that drew nothing but dry rifle fire. He was hunted himself the same year but escaped death and injury until 1922 when a coffin maker’s charge of broken screws swept up from the shop floor smashed his upper left canine teeth, leaving him unbalanced in mind and with chronic abscesses.

The next summer McCurdy’s Lodge, a massive structure of dovetailed spruce logs and carved cedar posts, opened on the eastern side of his range. The bear’s sense of smell was sharpened by hunger. He came to the Lodge’s garbage dump and its exotic peach peelings, buttered crusts and beef fat that melted in his hot throat. He began to lurk impatiently in the late afternoon trees for the cook’s helper with his wheelbarrow of orange peel and moldy potatoes, celery stumps and chicken bones, trickles of sardine oil.

The helper was a lumber-camp cook learning the refinements of carriage trade cuisine. He saw the bear in the dusk and ran shouting up to the Lodge for a ride. Hotelier McCurdy was in the kitchen talking Toumedos forestier with the cook and went to look at the bear for himself. He saw something in the hulking shoulders, the doggy snout, and told the Lodge carpenters to build benches on the slope above the dump. They set the area off with a peeled sapling railing to mark the limits of approach. The bolder guests walked twittering through the birches to see the bear. They touched each other’s shoulders and arms, their hands sprang protectively to their throats. The laughter was choked. The bear never looked up.

Through the summer the guests watched the bear flay the soft, fly-spangled garbage with his claws. The men wore walking suits or flannel bags and argyle pullovers, the women came in wrinkled linen tubes with sailor collars. They lifted their Kodaks, freezing the sheen of his fur, his polished claws. Oscar Untergans, a timber-lot surveyor who sold hundreds of nature shots to postcard printers photographed the bear at the summer dump. Untergans came again and again, walking along the path behind the cook, picking up any fetid rinds or dull eggshells thrown from the jouncing wheelbarrow. Sometimes the bear was waiting. The cook pitched the garbage with a pointed spade. He hit the bear with rotted tomatoes, grapefruit halves like yellow skullcaps.

Two or three summers after Untergans snapped the bear’s image they ran electric line to the Lodge. One evening the bear did not appear at the dump, nor was he seen in the following weeks and years. The Lodge burned on New Year’s Eve of 1934. On a rainy May night in 1938 Oscar Untergans fell in his estranged wife’s bathroom and died from a subdural haematoma. The postcard endured.

6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch

MERNELLE SLOGGED DOWN the steep road, the snow packing into her boots. The dog plunged into her tracks, up and out, like a roller coaster. ‘You’re knockin’ yourself out for nothin’,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s sendin’ you no letters or postcards. No penpals for dumb dogs. I can guess what you’d write. Stuff like “Dear Fido, Send me a cat. Wufwuf, Dog.”’

Later Mink would get out the snow roller that the town had sold him cheap when they went over to the snowplow and hitch it to the tractor. The roller was a slatted rolling pin of a thing that crushed the snow down into a smooth pack. After the roller went up and down the truck still couldn’t make it, even with chains. In November, before the big snows came, Mink parked the truck at the bottom of the road. He hauled the forty-quart cream cans down every morning with the tractor.

‘Leave the truck up here, we run the risk of bein’ trapped for the winter. This way we got at least a chance if the place catches on fire or somebody gets hurt bad. Get down to the road, we got a ride.’ That was Jewell talking through Mink’s mouth. Jewell was the one afraid of accidents and fire, had seen her father’s barns burn down with the horses and cows inside. Had seen her oldest brother die after they pulled him out of the well, the rotten cover hidden by years of overgrown grass. She told the story in a certain way. Cleared her throat. Began with a silence. Her fingers interlaced, wrists balanced on her breasts and as she told her hands rocked a little.

‘He was smashed up terrible. Every bone in him was broken. That well was forty foot down, and he pulled stone on top of hisself as he was falling, just hit a stone and it’d come right out. They had to move eighteen rocks off him, some of them weighed more than fifty pound, before they could get him out. Those stones come up one by one, real careful so they wouldn’t jar no more loose. You could hear Marvin down there, “unnnh, unnnh,” just didn’t stop. Steever Batwine was the one went down in there to get him out. It was awful dangerous. The rest of the well could of caved in any minute. Steever liked Marvin. Marvin had did some work for him that summer, helped with the hayin’, and Steever said he was a good hand. Well, he was a good hand, only twelve but already real strong. The rocks they were pulling up could of come loose from the sling and beaned Steever.’ Dub always laughed when she said ‘beaned.’

‘Marvin’s the one you’re named after,’ she said to Dub, ’Marvin Sevins, so don’t laugh.

‘Then they put down a like little table with the legs pulled off it, put the table in the sling and lowered it down. The table only got halfway down when it stuck and they had to bring it back up and saw the end off before it could fit. Steever was down there expecting more rocks to come any minute. He picked up Marvin and laid him on the table. He screamed terrible when Steever gathered him up to put him on the table, then went back to moaning. Steever said the only thing holding him together was his skin, he was like a armful of kindling inside. When Marvin come out of the well on the little table all black and blue and covered with blood and dirt and his legs twisted like cornstalks my mother fainted. Just swooned right down and laid there in the dirt. The hens come pecking over by her and this one hen I always hated afterwards, just stepped in her hair and looked in her face like it was thinking about pecking her eye. I was only five or so, but I knew that hen was a bad one and I got a little stick and took after it. So they brought Marvin into my mother and father’s room and the hired man, he was just a young fellow from the Mason’s place was the one that started to wash off the blood. He was real gentle about it, but he could hear this crackling like paper when he wiped off Marvin’s forehead, and he seen it wasn’t no use, so he put down the bloody washrag in the basin very soft and he went out. Took Marvin all night to die, but he never opened his eyes. He was unconscious. My mother never went into that room once. Just stayed out in the parlor fainting and crying by turns. I held that against her for years.’ And the mother’s brutal selfishness of grief again thrown up like a billboard for everyone to see and shudder. Grandma Sevins.

Mernelle was sweating inside her woolen snowsuit when she reached the bottom of the hill. The town road was plowed and empty, the snow corrugated with patterns of tire treads and chains. The mailman’s track, an old Ford sedan with the back end sawed off and a plank bed and slatted tides added on, left a distinctive pattern. You could hear it coming a long way off, the loose links clacking and rattling. Mernelle could tell if the mailbox was empty, just the disappointing gnaw of hinges, when the tire tracks ran down the middle of the road without slewing in.

Usually she walked all the way down, anticipating something, maybe a mysterious buff envelope addressed to her father, and when he slit it open with his old caked penknife a green check for a million dollars would slide out onto the table.

There was mail. Loyal’s Farm Journal that kept coming even though he was gone, a cattle auction flyer, a postcard for her mother that the Watkins man was coming the first week in February. At the bottom he’d scrawled ‘whether permiting.’ Another bear postcard for Jewell, written in Loyal’s handwriting, so small it was a nuisance to read it. There was a postcard for her, the third piece of mail of her life. She counted them. The birthday card from Miss Sparks when Loyal was going out with her. The letter from Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum. And this.

She hadn’t told her mother that Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum wrote that she should send him a picture, a snapshot, he wrote, ‘in a cute two piece bathing suit if you got one but one piece is ok. I know your cute by your cute name. Write to me.’ She sent a bathing suit picture of her cousin Thelma rummaged from the tin box in the pantry where letters and photographs curled. Thelma was fourteen in the snapshot, her arms and legs like rakes. She squinted, looked Mongolian. The Atlantic Ocean was flat. It was a tan bathing suit, sewed at home by Aunt Rose. When it was wet it sagged like old skin. In the photograph it was wet and sandy.

This postcard showed a white-columned building behind trees swathed in angry green moss. ‘An Old Southern Mansion.’

Dog was running up and down the plowed road, digging his toenails in and racing for the bend, then turning on a dime, kicking up a spurt of snow in the tight circle and racing back to Mernelle again. His happiness matched up with her getting a postcard. His fur was yellow against the snow. The snowplow had cut the banks far back and leveled them off in two tiers, ready for February and March storms. The blade had pulled up thousands of sticks and leaves like pieces of bat wings. Dog raced off again, around the bend this time.

‘You get back here. I’m goin’ home. Milk truck’ll run over you.’

But she walked toward the bend herself for the pleasure of feeling the firm road underfoot after a mile and a half of wallowing. ‘Juniata Calliota Homa Alabarna’ she sang. Dog was rolling in the novelty of leaves, sweeping them with his gyrating tail. He looked at her.

‘Come on,’ she said, slapping her thigh. ‘Let’s go.’ When he ran willfully away from her in the direction of the village, she turned back without him, the mail in her coat pocket. She was almost to the culvert, the brook frozen inside, when he caught up with her. He had brought her something, but didn’t want to give it up, like a child bringing a birthday present to a party. She wrestled it out of his wet jaws. It was a woman’s shoe with a strap, a pale lilac color, stained and half full of leaves, the silk wet where Dog had mouthed it.

‘Dog. Dog, look!’ Mernelle made to throw the slipper, feinted. Dog’s eyes got the deep hunting gleam. He stiffened, watched her hand with everything he had. She threw the slipper and he marked where it fell, then plunged into the snow for the prize. It took them all the way home and she threw it for the last time, up onto the milk house roof. And went in singing.

‘How come he don’t put no return address on these things,’ asked Jewell, turning the postcard over and frowning at the bear. ‘How does he expect us to answer him? How are we supposed to tell him anything that’s went on?’ Jewell asked Mink. This question could not be asked.

‘Don’t mention the son of a bitch’s name to me. I don’t want to hear from him.’ Mink jerked on his extra socks. His shoulders sloped in the stiff work shirt, the mark of the iron on the smooth sleeves. His hairy hands came out of the cuffs and grasped.

‘You can send it to General Delivery of the place that’s postmarked,’ said Dub.

‘Chicago? Even I know that’s too big a place to send General Delivery.’

‘You gonna gas all day or can we get on with the milkin’?’ said Mink. His arms were in the barn coat, he slotted the buttons through the stretched holes. ‘I want to look over these cows, decide which ones we’re goin’ to sell to get down to where we can manage. If we can manage. Right now there’s not enough money in the damn milk checks to do more than buy shoes and tractor gas.’ The feed cap, greasy bill tilted at the door.

Dub gave his foolish smile and thrust into barn boots. The laces trailed. He followed as close behind Mink as a dog.

In the barn sweet breath of cows, splattering shit, grass dust sifting down from the loft.

‘Them cows has got to pay the taxes and the fire insurance. And your mother don’t know it, but we are a long way behind in the mortgage department.’

‘What’s new,’ said Dub, burying himself in the dark corner, wrenching the pump handle until the water shot out. Began to fill buckets. ‘ “Oh the farmer’s life is a happy life.” ’ He sang the old Grange song with the usual cracked irony. Had anybody ever sung it another way?

7 When Your Hand Is Cut Off

DUB HAD HIS NEWSPAPER CLIPPING, and for three years he’d kept it in a bureau drawer that would hardly open.

Marvin E. Blood of Vermont was injured after he jumped from a moving freight train entering Oakville, Ct. and slipped under a boxcar. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital where his left arm was amputated above the elbow. Oakville Police Chief Percy Sledge said, ‘Men are bound to be injured if they ride the rods. This young man’s strength should have gone to the War effort, but he has become a burden to his family and the community.’

Mink and Jewell had to drive down to the hospital in Connecticut to get him. Mink stared at the empty sleeve of the donated corduroy jacket and said, ‘Twenty-four years old and look at you. Jesus Christ, you look like a hundred miles of bad road. If you’d did your hellin’ around up at home you wouldn’t be in this mess.’

Dub grinned. He’d grin at a funeral, Mink thought. ‘Gonna have somebody sew that onto my pajamas,’ Dub said. But it was no joke. And when Dub saw the package store on the street in Hartford he told Mink to pull over.

It was hard, opening the pint with just one hand. The cap seemed sweated on. He clenched the bottle between his knees, spit on his fingers and twisted until his fingers cramped. ‘Ma?’ he said.

‘I never opened a bottle of that poison for anybody in my life and I won’t start now.’

‘Ma, I need you to do it. If you don’t I’ll probably bite the top of the goddamn bottle off.’

Jewell stared fixedly at the horizon, her hands folded hard into each other. They traveled another mile. Dub’s breathing filled the car.

‘God’s sake!’ shouted Mink, swerving over to the grassy verge. ‘God’s sake, give me the damn thing.’ He bore down on the cap until it gave a crack and spun free. He passed it back to Dub. The smell of the whiskey flowed out, a heavy smell like roasted sod after a brush fire. Jewell cranked her window partway open and for the two hundred miles north Dub said nothing about the air that chilled him until he shook and had to drink more whiskey to see straight.

They’d known he was a fool since he was a baby, but now they had the firsthand proof he was a cripple and a drunk, too.

It was a little easier, Dub thought, since they’d culled four of the cows, but they still didn’t get done with the evening milking until six-thirty or later. Even if he skipped supper he still had to clean up and get the stink of the barn off him. No matter what he did, whether he took a bath, sliding under the grey water, or scrubbed his arms and neck with Fels Naptha until his skin burned, the rich mingle of manure, milk and animal came off him like heat when he danced with Myrt. But on Saturday night after the milking he cleaned up and took off for the Comet Roadhouse. Try and stop him.

It was cold. The truck wouldn’t turn over until he set the hot teakettle on the battery for half an hour. He probably wouldn’t be able to start it again at midnight when the Comet dosed, but he didn’t care now and a kind of impatient joy sent him skidding around the gravelly curves, running the intersection stop sign. He didn’t see any lights coming. He rushed toward the Comet’s warmth.

The parking strip was full by the time he got there. Over the roadhouse’s roof the red neon comet and its hot letters glowed in the icy night. Ronnie Nipple’s truck, with a load of wood in the back to give some traction on the lull, was parked at the far end of the row of cars and trucks. The snow squeaked as Dub cramped the tires and pulled up beside it. He could probably get a jump from Ronnie if he had to. Or Trimmer, if he was here. He looked down the row for Trimmer’s woods truck but didn’t see it. His breath gushed out, building up an edge of time on the windshield where the heater air hadn’t warmed it. He dammed the truck door, but the worn catch didn’t hold and it bounced open again. ‘Fuck it, no time to fool around with that.’ He ran toward the door with its frosted glass and jingling bell, anxious to dive into the roar of sound he heard coming from inside.

The steamy, smoke-hot room sucked him in. The tables were jammed, the bar was a row of bent backs and shoulders. The jukebox glowed with colored bubbles, saxophones flaring, gurgling out of the bubbles. He threw himself toward the fire of wooden matches, the glint of beer bottles, the mean little half-moon smiles of emptying shot glasses. He stood on the bar rail and looked for Myrtle, looked for Trimmer.

‘How the hell do you get it so hot in here,’ he shouted at Howard who was rushing back and forth behind. The bartender turned his long yellow face toward Dub. The sagging smoke-discolored skin seemed fastened in place by a pair of black metallic eyebrows. The mouth opened in a grimace of recognition. A wet tooth winked.

‘Body heat!’

A man at the bar laughed. It was Jack Didion. His arm hugged the older woman next to him, wearing a long baggy dress printed with navy blue chevrons. She worked at Didion’s, milked cows, wore men’s overalls all week. Didion whispered something in the woman’s ear and she threw back her head and roared. ‘Body heat! You said it!’ Her broken fingernails were rimmed with black.

The colored bottles stood in a pyramid. After Howard’s wife died he had taken the round mirror etched with bluebirds and apple blossoms from her dressing table and hung it on the wall behind the bottles so their number was doubled in richness and promise. Howard, too, was doubled as he passed back and forth, the back of his head reflected among the bottles.

The little stage at the end of the bar was dark, but the microphones were set up, there was the drum set. A cardboard sign on the easel – THE SUGAR TAPPERS in glitter-dust letters. Dub, gyring through the dancers, saw Myrtle at a table against the wall, leaning out into the throbbing light so she could watch the door. He came up behind her and put his cold hand on the back of her neck.

‘My god! You could kill a person that way! What took you so long, as if I didn’t know.’ Her brown hair was screwed into a chignon that had slipped its moorings and rode low on her neck. Her mouth was drawn with lipstick into a hard little crimson kiss. She wore her secretary suit with its ruffled blouse. Her small eyes were a clear teal blue fringed with sandy lashes. Her shallow face and flat chest made her look weak and vulnerable, and Dub enjoyed that illusion. He knew she was as tough as oak, a trim, tough little oak.

‘What always takes me so long; milking, washing up, get the truck going, drive down here. We didn’t get through the milking until late. Usually I don’t care, but tonight I was goin’ crazy tryin’ to get out. He was just squeezin’ slow, I guess. What a fuckin’ hopeless mess.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘No, I didn’t tell him. He’ll go through the wall. Want to make sure the rifles are all locked up before I tell him. I thought he got a little mad when Loyal took off, but it’ll really rattle his marbles when I drop the word we’re getting hitched and moving out.’

‘It isn’t going to get any easier the longer you put it off.’

‘There’s a lot more to it than just telling him. I can’t clear out until I know he’s got a way to get out from under that farm. Sell it, is what I think he ought to do. Then I got to come up with some money. Some real money. It’s o.k. for us to talk about moving off, about me taking the piano tuning course and all, but money is what makes it happen and I don’t got any.’

‘It always comes down to money. That’s what we always end up talking about. It never fails.’

‘It’s the big problem. He don’t say much, but I know damn well the mortgage and the taxes is way behind. He ought to sell but he’s so damn stubborn he won’t. I try to mention it he says “I-was-born-on-this-farm,-I’ll-die-on-this-farm,-farmin’s-the-only-thing-I-know.” Hell, if I can learn piano tuning he could learn something different. Run a drill press or something. Want a beer? Fizzy drink? A martini?’ His voice puffed, rich, comic.

‘Oh, I might as well have have a gin and ginger ale.’ She pushed the chignon up and drove another hairpin into the slippery mass.

‘The one I feel sorry for is Mernelle. She runs up there to her room cryin’ because she don’t have any decent clothes. She’s grown out of everything. She had to wear one of Ma’s dresses to school the other day. Come home bawlin’. I feel bad, but there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I know how she feels when the kids pick on you. Rotten little bastards.’

‘Poor kid. Listen, I got some dresses and a skirt and sweater she can have. A nice green cashmere sweater and a brown corduroy skirt.’

‘Honey, she’s six inches taller than you and about twenty pounds skinnier. That’s the problem. She’s shot up wicked the last few months. Bean pole. Wish she could put the brakes on.’

‘We’ll think of something. She can’t wear Jewell’s dresses to school, poor kid. By the way, I’ve got a surprise for you.’

‘Better be good.’

‘I think so.’ The inverted red prints of her lips mapped the rim of the glass. ‘Doctor Willy got a postcard from the Railway Express today. It’s in.’

‘What’s in?’

‘You know. You know what I mean. What you were measured for.’ Her face washed red. She could not say it, not after two years as the doctor’s secretary and appointment manager. Not after seven months of sitting with Dub in the farm truck that leaked mosquitoes, engine fumes, road water, and leg-paralyzing cold, kissing and planning a hundred escapes and futures and every one without a farm in it.

‘Oh yeah, you must mean the fancy arm. The prosthesis. That what you mean?’

‘Yes.’ She pushed the stained glass away from her. She could not stand to hear him breathe that way.

‘Or is it a hook, big shiny, stainless steel hook? I forget. I only know my girlfriend Myrt says I gotta get one, but she can’t say what it is I gotta get.’

‘Marvin. Don’t do this to me,’ she said in a low voice.

‘Don’t do what? Say “hook”? Say “prosthesis”?’ His voice rolled out across the dance door. He saw Trimmer at the bar, saw Trimmer cross his eyes and draw his hand across his throat. All at once he felt better and began to laugh. He pulled the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket and shook out a cigarette. ‘Don’t be embarrassed, honey. I hate to say it, too. “Prosthesis.” Sounds like a nasty poison snake. “He was bit by a prosthesis.” That’s how come I been so long without doing anything about it. Couldn’t say it. Atta girl, big sweet smile for the mutt. I’ll tell you, little girl, a couple months after it happened I hitched down to this place in Rhode Island where you can get fitted for something, the hook, I think, but I couldn’t go in. I was too embarrassed to go in. I could see the girl sitting there at the desk, and I just couldn’t go up to her and say—’

‘Dub. How you doin’!’ Big old Trimmer, beefy and wide, long Johns sticking out of his filthy red-checkered shirt. He stank of gasoline and oil, of horse and BO and roll-yer-owns. He winked at Myrtle with his heavy eyelid and made a sound with his tongue, the same sound he made to his team of skid horses.

‘Trimmer. How goes?’

‘So goddamn good I can’t stand it. Here I am lookin’ for some grief to tone down my joy and exuberance, and I look across the room and there the two of you sit, made to order, glarin’ at each other. That’s it, true love, I think, only a question of time before she throws him out the door on his ear. Dub, I wanna talk to you later, you got a minute.’

A spot at each end of the stage went on, the beams pooling in the center, lighting up the dirty microphone cords, the blue drums. A man with receding hair and the devil’s pointed teeth came out, dressed in a powder-blue jacket. He held a dented saxophone. Two other old men, the gimpy one with his Red Pearl accordion, the fat shuffler with a banjo, both in grimy powder-blue jackets, sidled onto the platform. They looked disgustedly toward the anteroom at the side of the stage. Smoke eddied. In a minute a teenaged boy wearing brown slacks and a yellow rayon shirt loped to the drum set, a cigarette still burning in the corner of his mouth. He rolled the snare for a hello and the saxophonist’s hollow voice came out of the microphone. ‘Good evening, ladies and gents, welcome to the Comet Roadhouse. Gonna have some fun tonight. The Sugar Tappers for your dancing and listening enjoyment. Starting off now with “The Too Late Jump.” ’

‘Back in a couple of minutes, my boy. First Miss Myrt and I got to show the yokels how to do it.’

Didion shouted as they walked onto the dance floor. ‘Watch out, sparks gonna fly now!’ Howard came down to the end of the bar to watch. The drummer began with a barrage of hard, shattering sound, and one by one the men in the powder-blue jackets straggled after him, the saxophone hollow at first, but working up into a set of squeals and shrieks.

Myrtle and Dub stood hunched like herons, facing each other, only Dub’s upheld hand moving, shaking, fluttering like a strip of cloth in a gale. With a Zulu leap he sprang at Myrtle, spun her under his arm until her skirt stood out like a dark cup, and began to snap her to and from him. Her patent leather shoes like ice. The other dancers stood away, giving them the floor. Dub kicked as hard as a horse. The bright sweat flew from his face. A rain of hairpins behind Myrt, the cascade of crimped hair tumbled loose, their feet thudded.

‘Save yer peanut butter jars,’ screamed Trimmer.

‘Deer meat! Deer meat!’ Didion, with the highest accolade he knew.

When Dub came back to the table where Trimmer sat in a cloud of pipe smoke he carried the two-quart glass pitcher of beer. His sides heaved, runnels of sweat glistened in front of his ears, hung in bright drops under his chin. Myrtle leaned back in the chair, panting, her legs opened wide to let the cool air move up in under her skin, her damp blouse unbuttoned as far as was decent. Dub first poured her a glass of the cold beer then drank thirstily from the pitcher. He set it down in the middle of the table and lit a cigarette for Myrtle, then for himself. Trimmer hauled his chair closer in to the table.

‘That was some dancin’. I couldn’t do that in a million years.’ He knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ashtray. ‘Was gonna ask you if you thought you’d be up to runnin’ Loyal’s old trapline, or if you’d want some help. Fur prices are good. Specially fisher cat. Fox. Looks like you could run ’em down, reach over, turn ’em inside out while they’re still movin’. Way you dance.’

‘It’s just a different kind of thing. You lose your arm or something you feel good you can do something like that. Run Loyal’s trapline? You don’t know much about it, do you?’

‘I know he made damn good money at it. I know he got some good fur and he didn’t have to go up to the North Pole for it, neither. Fox. Awful nice fox he had last spring at the fur auction. Thick, fluffy. I mean nice. See him get up there in front of them all and spin around holdin’ up them red furs, the tails’d all whirl out. Seems natural you’d want to keep it up.’

‘No,’ said Dub, drawling it out, ‘Trimmer, you don’t begin to know about old Loyal’s traps and trapline. I couldn’t do what he done with the traps in a million years. I don’t even know where the traps are.’

‘Shit, it couldn’t be too tough to look for ’em, could it? Out in the hayloft, or up in the attic, the shed? I’ll help you, smoke ’em, put out the sets. I’d give you a hand runnin’ the line. You got to have a general idea where he set.’

‘What Loyal done with the trapping was not what you or me might do. He didn’t hang ’em out in the shed and trust to a day in the smoke to get the human scent off like most of the guys around here. First, when he was a kid he learnt from that old critter used to live out in a bark shack in the swamp down below the place the ferns grows so big.’

‘Ostrich fern.’

‘Ostrich fern, yeah. Loyal’d hang around down there every chance he got after chores on Saturday, summer evenings when the milkin’ was finished. Old Iris Penryn, half wild hisself. Loyal learnt all his trap-wise ways from old Iris, and he was sly about it, he was secret. You know how Loyal was – dip around, do things when nobody’s looking. First, he has him a little shack on the brook where he keeps all his trap stuff, but not the traps. Just listen. You’ll see what I mean.

‘Loyal was real clever in layin’ his sets. He was a goddamn genius with guide sticks, knew how to lay a stalk of hay or bend a goldenrod stem so the fox would step over it every time, right into the trap. Snow sets? He’d put ’em near a tuft of grass stickin’ up out of the new ice along the river edge, see, the foxes go there to play on the new ice, or he’d make a trail set in the snow you couldn’t tell anybody been walkin’ there, or he’d lay a mound set near the edge of the woods where the ground’s heaved up the way it does, a real smart crust set when the snow was hard, maybe two dozen more kinds of lays. You got to know your fox and you got to know your terrain. You got to have the trappin’ instinct.’

‘O.k., I can see he was wicked smart about it, but it’s not impossible you or me to do some of them things pretty good and get some fur.’

‘Nope. Tell you why. End of the season Loyal’d pick up his traps, bring them in to his shack. What he done, and I only remember part of it, he’d build up a fire in the yard, boil some water, scrape off and clean up all his traps, then scrub them down in the hot water with a brush he never used for nothin’ else, and wearin’ waxed gloves. Rubber’s no good, even if you could get ’em. Then he takes a wire hook to pick up the traps and throws ’em in a big washboiler, never been used for anything else, dumps in lye and water and boils ’em for an hour. Takes the traps out’n the lye with his hook and throws ’em in the brook. Leaves ’em in the brook overnight.’ Dub held his hand up as Trimmer started to open his mouth. He drank from the pitcher, watching Myrtle twist and pin up her loosened hair.

‘Next morning, here’s old Loyal again, lookin’ around over his shoulder, make sure nobody’s spyin’ on him. ’Course I did every chance I get. When I was little. Goes in the shack, builds a fire in the stove. Gets down this big bucket he never uses for nothin’ else but this, fills it full of brook water upstream from where he’s got the traps. Sets the bucket on the stove and puts in a pound of pure beeswax never been touched by hand, he takes the honeycake himself from out’n Ronnie Nipple’s hives, puts it in the extractor, won’t let Ronnie touch the wax, keeps the wax in a canvas bag been boiled and brook-soaked like the traps. When the wax is melted and foams up in the pail, he gets a trap outa the brook with his hook, brings it in and in she goes, into the bucket of wax and water for a couple of minutes, then out again with the hook and he carries it out to a birch tree at the edge of the woods and hangs it up there. He does the same thing with every damn trap. When them traps is dry and aired out good, he lays them up according to how he’s goin’ to use them next season. For his field traps, which is what most fox traps is, he lines a big hollow log he’s got somewhere with pulled-up grass. Never touches that grass or log with his hands, he’s got another pair of special waxed gloves he keeps in a scent-free canvas roll, then he stuffs them traps up into the log on that grass and that’s where they stay until he sets ’em out next season. He does the same thing with the traps he’s gonna set in the woods, only he boils them in bark – and he’s particular about what kind of bark he uses – and he keeps ’em under some ledge in the woods until the season. Then he’s got all these scents and lures he makes himself, I don’t know any of that. Trimmer, we are skunked right out of the barrel, even if I wanted to run his trapline, because I don’t know where he hid his traps. And I don’t want to go rustlin’ through the woods jammin’ my arms into empty logs lookin’ for my brother’s traps. He could do it, he liked it, he liked the careful part and the study of the set. I’d rather know how to tune pianos, do the job, get paid when you finish.’

‘Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,’ said Trimmer. ‘I still think I could get enough pelts to make some money. You tell me how else you gonna get enough set by to do what you and Myrt want to do?’

Dub swallowed the last of the beer. Myrtle was staring at him in a way he understood very well. She was asking the same question without saying a word. Dub had an answer for both of them.

‘Way I see it, when a man don’t know how to do anything else, he traps.’ He looked at Myrt. ‘You ready to jump on that floor again?’

An hour later Dana Swett, Myrtle’s brother-in-law, came in, peering through the smoke until he saw her, then raising his right hand twice, ringers outstretched, showing ten minutes for him to have a beer, for Myrtle to finish up and get ready. She danced with Dub a last time, a slow one, sad, good-by War song, humming until the boy drummer began to pick up the beat, trying to jostle the old musicians into another hot flash, but they were cold, played out, ready to go out back and drink out of their flasks, smoke Luckies and yawn.

‘Don’t stay too late,’ she said. ‘Remember, you got to milk in the morning. And come down Monday afternoon to the office. I’ll put your name down so doctor knows you’re coming.’

‘For you, O Flower of the Meadow, anything your little heart desires.’ He swept a low bow, danced her into the coat hall and pressed her deep into the wool-smelling coats, kissing, tasting the bitter tobacco on her tongue, the musky gin.

When Dub left the Comet the air was burning cold. The hard snow squealed. Even with his glow on he knew the truck was frozen solid. The door groaned on stiff hinges. Frost covered the windshield, the steering wheel. The seat was like a piece of bent sheet metal. He stepped on the clutch, shifted the lever toward neutral. It was like shifting a spoon in a pot of mush. He twisted the key and a short weak groan oozed from the starter.

‘Son of a bitch, she won’t even turn over.’ Ronnie’d gone an hour ago. He’d have to get a jump start from Trimmer. He turned back to the Comet, now hating the thought of the smoke and liquor stink, the collapsing jukebox music, and noticed that the red of the neon sign blurred into the red of the sky. Flutes of red light, the watery red of ripe watermelon, pulsated over his head. He could see the stars through the redness. Long green rods fanned out from the dome of the sky, the high cold air wavering, stuttering with the electric storm. Mink always claimed he could hear the northern lights crackle or make a sound like a distant wind. Dub opened the door.

‘Hey, the northern lights is puttin’ on a show.’

‘Shut the damn door. It’s freezin’,’ Howard yelled. He’d started drinking around eleven. Trimmer was lying across three chairs, spittle glinting at the side of his mouth.

Dub shut the door, looked at the quivering air, the snow in the parking lot stained red, the trees and river shining in the lurid night. If Loyal came walking into the parking lot now, he thought suddenly, he would beat him until the bloody water streamed from his ears and blackened the red snow. A pent rage at being stuck with it all rose in his throat like caustic vomit. What the hell. Might as well walk home, burn off the liquor, cool down. He could do it in two hours.

8 The Bat in the Wet Grass

LOYAL CROSSED the Minnesota state line near Taylor’s Falls, thinking he’d work his way up through the farm country toward the forests. He’d heard there was logging up in the Chippewa National Forest. The money might be poor but he had to get outdoors again. He couldn’t bring himself down to hire onto a farm, but he had to get in the open air. Work his way across, maybe end up in Alaska in the fall, work the fish canneries, anything but the machine shops again, the men pulling down more money than they’d ever made in their lives, their women, too, but not ever getting enough of it after the depression years without work. That little weasel, Taggy Ledbetter from North Carolina, with his deep-kneed walk that made the cluster of keys on his belt bounce against his groin, socking money away. He lagged slyly at the job during the day so he could put in for overtime. He picked up other men in his car and drove them to the plant, collecting a dollar a week and gas ration coupons from each, stole tools and parts, paper clips, pencils, burrs, calipers, drill bits, dipping them into his pockets, inside his green work pants, under his belt, in his humpbacked lunch box. He made his wife and kids save everything that could be turned in for money, patched bicycle tire tubes, tinfoil, paper bags, nails, used oil, scrap metal, torn envelopes, old tires. Sold a little black market gasoline, pork from his backyard pigs. And kept it out of the banks. He bought house lots. Had a little after-hours repair shop in his backyard.

‘Money’s in the lots. Gonna be a lot of servicemen comin’ back, lookin’ to build. Lot of money changin’ hands. I’m gittin’ my share sure as dammit.’

Tired of getting up in the stench of unwashed clothes and working through the day into darkness again in the stink of burned metal and rank oil, the work never slowing, churning around through three shifts like a bingo tumbler spinning the numbered wooden markers until it slows and a lucky number falls at random. On New Year’s Eve he went to a bar. He went with Elton and Foote who worked the next stations on the line. The bar was jammed with drinkers, War workers with money burning holes, women in slippery rayon dresses, their rolled hair limp in invisible hairnets, powder between their breasts and the black-red lipstick that left soft prints of their lips on the beer glasses and the smell of cigarette smoke and dimestore ‘Evening in Paris’ perfume from tiny blue bottles. When someone came in from the street a broadsword of frigid air cut the smoke.

Loyal pressed up to the bar with Elton and Foote, ordered beer. Elton, a lean hillbilly with crooked arms and a weak bladder was spit drunk in half an hour. Foote nursed a whiskey, staring straight ahead. Loyal found himself between Foote and a woman with a red patent leather belt cinching in her black dress. Her hair was a mass of black-purple curls heaped on her head. The neckline of the dress, shaped like the top of a knight’s shield, presented the tops of her powdered breasts. She smoked Camels, one after another, gradually turning away from Loyal toward an unseen man on her left. Her back pressed against Loyal’s arm. Gradually she shifted her hot taut buttocks until they came up against his thigh. He felt his prick hardening, bulging the front of his good trousers. It had been a long time. Slowly he began to maneuver his hand until it cupped her firm behind and she pressed it against his palm, wriggling until his index finger fitted the gully between her buttocks. Heat came off the sleek rayon. He slid his hand up and down and, with the suddenness of a falling beam, the choking spasm gripped him with terrible strength. He could not breathe. He threw himself backward into the wall of drinkers, bucking and tearing at his throat as if the hangman’s rope cinched his neck. He smelted the char of a burning cigarette against cloth, the pressed tin ceiling with its remorseless design heaved, then fed on him.

When he came out of it he was on a table with a ring of faces staring down at him. The thinnest man pressed bony fingers on Loyal’s wrist. The skeleton’s hair, parted in the middle, was scraped back like a metallic cap. His teeth and eyes were rimmed with gold and there were gold rings on his fingers, a wedding ring and a signet ring on the little finger of the right hand. Loyal felt himself shaking and trembling with a thunderous heartbeat.

‘You’re lucky I was here. They’d have stacked you in the corner with the other drunks. Would have put your light out for good.’

Loyal could not speak his jaw was trembling so hard. His arms shook, but he could breathe. He sat up, and the crowd, disappointed he was still alive, turned back to their glasses.

‘It’s Adrenalin that’s making you shake. I gave you a shot of Adrenalin. You’ll calm down in half an hour or so. You’ve had these attacks before, I take it.’

‘Not like this.’

‘Allergic reaction. Probably something you ate or drank. Tell you what. Make up a list of everything you’ve had to eat or drink in the last day and come see me the day after tomorrow.’

But Loyal knew it wasn’t anything he’d swallowed. It was the touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn’t Billy it wouldn’t be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him, restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and soliloquies so easily transmuted to crazy mouthings. Up there beside the wall some kind of black mucky channel that ran from his genitals to his soul had begun to erode.

A soft day, warm enough to grind down the window and get the smell of the country. The black fields stretched for miles, the furrows rising and falling like a calm sea. He thought about pulling into a place and asking if they needed a hand, but didn’t think he could work on another man’s farm, stand there with his hat in his hands asking to be a hired man. He passed a sawmill, tasting the spicy odor of new-sawn wood mixed with the musty smell of old sawdust piles. He smelled his own body on his clothes, even through the laundry soap and a day on the line, not rank, but familiar, the smell of tangled sheets on the bed at home, of his folded blue work shirts.

Corn and wheat farms spraddled out to the horizon, fields cut by white ruler roads edged with farms, everywhere the corners square, the partitioned earth hypnotic, the only relief in converging lines of perspective and distance and the angled flight of birds. Miles of cropland rolled between the rigid farmhouses. Far away he saw a tractor drawing multiple plows in black, contoured furrows as though the driver lay his pattern of curves and bends against the image of a sinuous river held in his mind.

The scale of the farms bothered him. The home place would be a joke to these birds, his twenty-acre field a turnaround space. As he drove he imagined the kind of place he half-planned to find and settle on, not like the home place with its steep rough fields and sour soil, its invading brush and trees, but not like these unrolled landscapes with their revolving skies. He hadn’t known Minnesota was so level. But it was not a quiet landscape. The rise and fall of wind made the land seem to move in slow shudders.

His own place would be a small farm, maybe two hundred and fifty acres, gently swelling earth like the curve of hip and breast, good pasture. He saw his Holsteins grazing, up to their hocks in good grass. The soil would be crumbly and stoneless. There would be a stream with flat rich bottomland on each side for corn and hay crops, and a woodlot, say fifty acres of tall straight hardwood, a sugarbush, low-branched sweet trees on a south slope. On the height of his land he imagined a stand of evergreen, and in the dark spruce a spring welling up from the earth’s pure underground water. Get a tractor, good machinery. He’d make it pay. His hands gripped the steering wheel, he looked in the rearview mirror seeing his steady eyes, the black springing hair. His strength pressured up in him, waiting to be used.

A few miles north of Rice he slowed down when he caught the hitchhiker’s silhouette, flaring bell-bottom pants and jaunty cap. The sun baked the hood. He was feeling good moving out again after the greasy shop, in the mood for company. He pulled up. The echo of the engine’s smooth beating sounded sweet to him. The sailor was a big, sandy-headed man, a potato face and needle eyes, his mood to talk entering the car before he did.

‘You’re a sight for sore eyes,’ said the man. ‘I been standin’ here and shufflin’ along and standin’ some more for about two days. I Jesus Christ swear I got to look like trouble, must put the fear of the old Harry in drivers. Ain’t this a nice spring day? Everybody picks up a serviceman, I get rides from Norfolk to here took me two days, three rides, but not in Minnesota! No sir, not here in my goddamn home state where Suspicious is everybody’s middle name. Goddamn scandahoovians. One guy slowed down, come on the brake so’s the gravel sprayed up a little, but the minute I put my hand on the door handle and he looked over at me he took off like there was a big prize for whoever got to Little Falls first, and he was in the back row.’

‘You headed for Little Falls?’ asked Loyal.

‘General direction, yes. Right on the spot, no. I’m goin’ to pay a surprise visit to my better half, to my little missus up in Leaf River, north of Wadena. About four people live there, and when I’m around I’m one of ’em, milk cows, cut hay, fight with the neighbor. When I’m not around I want to know if anybody is takin’ my place. Where I been I seen too many dear Johns came slippin’ in like the old knife and I got to thinkin’, what about Kirsten, see I know about the scandahoovians ’cause I married one, I think, what about Kirsten and Jugo. Jugo lives the next farm down, we work together, hay, fence, help out, whatever you have to do, I got a broken harrow Jugo lends, he’s got a hay rake the teeth fall out, he takes mine. So she writes to me, tells me Jugo’s wife died around the end of March, nice woman, good-lookin’, good full woman, I could of appreciated that. She was bit by a skunk, says the letter, tryin’ to clean out behind the woodshed, died from rabies. Doctor couldn’t do a thing for her. So I start thinkin’, what’s Jugo do when the axe handle breaks? He comes over and takes mine. What’s Jugo do when he needs some twenty-penny nails? He comes over, sees if I got any. What’s Jugo do when his wife passes on? Maybe he comes over and helps himself to mine since I’m not around. So I got a week’s leave and only three days is left.’ He broke off the flood of words and pointed at a shambling figure on the shoulder of the road. ‘Hey, pick up that guy. He’s o.k., I talked to him yesterday, and won’t nobody pick him up until hell freezes sideways. He’s a Indian, but he’s o.k.’

Loyal thought hitchhikers were coming out of the woodwork on the first warm day. He’d driven a thousand miles without seeing anybody thumbing, and here were two of them within a couple of miles.

‘You know him?’

‘Naw. He walked past me yesterday afternoon, stopped and talked for a while. He just got out of the Army. He’s some kind of different, but he comes from right up the road here. He’ll liven things up. That’s the reason you pick up hitchers, right? Liven things up, tell a few stories, show you where they’re tattooed sometimes.’ He winked at Loyal, the little left eye disappearing behind the fatty eyelid, the sticky lashes.

Loyal slowed as he came up to the man, looked at him in the rearview mirror. He saw black hair combed like Clark Gable’s, a broad face with the skin tight over the cheekbones, a tweed jacket, dirty jeans and a pair of snakeskin boots.

‘Looks more like a lawyer with that coat than a Indian to me,’ he said.

‘Thanks.’ The Indian got into the backseat, nodded two or three times. His cheeks were smooth and he smelled of some spicy after-shave lotion. But there was an animal feeling in the car. The Indian’s black eyes went to the sailor. ‘Heyo again,’ he said.

‘Goes to show that you never know how things is goin’ to turn out, Skies. This here good Samaritan is anonymous so far.’

‘Loyal,’ he said. ‘Loyal Blood.’

‘Third Mate Donnie Weener,’ said the sailor, ‘and he’s Blue Skies, no shit, that’s his name.’

‘Skies for short,’ said the Indian. ‘Don’t sing the song, please.’

The thought occurred to Loyal for the first time that the pair might be in cahoots, close as a pair of nickels in a pocket, tight as two corks in a bottle, as single-purposed as a pencil sharpened at both ends. He didn’t like the Indian sitting behind him in the backseat, didn’t like the way sailor Weener had one arm over the back of the seat, and was half-turned toward him as if he was getting ready to grab the steering wheel. He pulled out onto the highway, steering north, but all the sweetness had gone out of the day from the minute the Indian got in.

The Indian said he was heading for the White Moon Reservation, fifty miles south of Cork Lake.

Weener said he would drive if Loyal wanted, but Loyal said no, he’d drive his own car. He kept the window open against the heat that began to shimmer up from the road.

‘Damn nice farmland,’ said Loyal, looking over the richest soil in the world, a million years of decomposing grass layers, unrolled in earthy floors on each side of the road. The farms by in great squares, each with its phalanx of windbreak trees sheltering the house.

‘These fields is so level,’ said the Indian, ‘you can stand on your running board and see from one end to the other. But you oughta see it if the floods come, if the river goes over the banks. Everything, it’s like a mirage, houses, tractor sheds sticking out of the water, it’s like the ocean, no place for the water to go but spread out. A little wind riffles it you see it move along for a mile.’

‘Must be some kind of mud,’ said Loyal.

‘I known people fell in it and never get up.’

‘That’s right,’ said Weener. ‘Drowned in mud, choked in mud, find you in the fall plowing like some old stick.’ He told jokes. The Indian sat quiet in the backseat, chain-smoking.

Late in the morning they could see thunderheads bunching up behind them in the southeast. Loyal pulled into a Texaco filling station in Little Falls around noon.

‘Fill ’er up?’ The attendant rubbed at the windshield with a dripping rag. His arms were too short to reach the center of the glass. His shirt pulled out of his pants, showing a hairy belly creased with grimy lines.

‘Yeah. And check the oil and water.’

Loyal paid him with a five but before he could pull back onto the highway the sailor told him to wait a minute, opened the door and got out.

‘Tell you what,’ said Weener in a quick gabble, ‘I’m just gonna run over to that café and get some grub. We can save time, get some ham sandwiches and beer and eat it on the road. I’ll get it. My contribution.’ He ran across the street and into a storefront café. Raised letters spelled out THE LONE EAGLE and below an eagle and an airplane were painted on the glass, flying toward a setting sun.

Loyal and the Indian waited for a few minutes at the pump. When a truck drove in behind them for gas Loyal parked on the street where Weener could see them when he came out. They sat in silence. After a while the Indian opened his suitcase and took out a notebook. His fingers flivelled the pages. He scribbled.

‘What the hell is takin’ him so long? He’s been gettin’ them sandwiches half an hour,’ muttered Loyal.

The Indian turned a page. ‘Gone. See him come out the side door right after he went in the front. Ducked up the street.’

‘You mean we’re sittin’ here and he’s took off? Jesus Christ, why didn’t you say something?’

‘Thought you see him, too. Thought you had your reasons to sit here.’

Loyal got out of the car and went across the street. He was inside the café before he thought about the keys in the ignition. He ran back outside, but the car was sitting there with the Indian in the backseat. He went into the café again. A thin man whose lips curved down on one side in an expression of distaste was slicing a cake behind the counter. His thick hair was parted low on the left, the rest of it heaped into a massive pompadour on top of his head. His great glassy eyes were of a blue so pale they seemed colorless. He gripped a serrated knife with a broken blade. There was a pyramid of sandwiches wrapped in cellophane under a glass dome, red stripes of ham, grey tuna.

‘A sailor come in here fifteen, twenty minutes ago?’ said Loyal, swiveling his head to look at the car and the Indian. ’Big, heavyset fella. Named Weener.’

‘A sailor come in, don’t know his goddamn name. Right out d’odder door. People takun a short cut. I put sign on door, NO EXIT, but it don’t do no good. Still do it. Had enough. Like highway in here but nobody buy. Tonight I board a goddam t’ing up.’

Loyal looked out the window. The Indian was sitting in the car. He decided to get rid of him as soon as he could.

‘You give a guy a ride and he takes off. What the hell, give me two of them sandwiches. Give me one of the ham and a tuna.’

‘Ain’t tuna. Chickun salad.’

‘Yeah. Give me one of each of them. Two pieces of cake. You got Dr. Pepper?’ He’d feed the Indian, then get rid of him. No hard feelings that way.

The thin man wiped his hands on his apron and slowly laid the sandwiches in a white bag. He wrapped the slices of cake in waxed paper. He rang it up on an ornate old cash register that must have been in the café since Woodrow Wilson, Loyal thought.

‘Come to one sevendy.’

Loyal reached into his right pants pocket for his money and as be did he knew why sly sailor Weener had disappeared.

‘The son of a bitch took my money. He fucking robbed me.’

The thin man took the wrapped pieces of cake and the sandwiches out of the bag. He shrugged, not looking at Loyal.

The Indian was still in the backseat, his head down, intent. Reading something.

On the sidewalk Loyal plunged his hands into all his pockets feeling again and again for the thick wad of money, most of the six hundred dollars he’d saved over the winter, the grubstake, the new start, his traveling money. It was gone. He got into the car throwing himself back against the seat. The Indian looked up.

‘You know what he done? The sailor? Picked my pocket. He got away with all my money. He must of got it right after I paid for the gas. I worked in a stinking factory all winter for that money.’

After a minute the Indian said, ‘Never to keep more than a five spot in your pocket. Never keep all your money in one place.’

‘Oh, I ain’t that dumb. He didn’t get every penny. I got a hundred in my shoe, but he got all the rest. I could of lived a year on what he got away with.’ He looked up the street in the direction the Indian said Weener had taken. ’Anyway, I know where to find him. He told me he’s headed for his place in a little town up past Wadena, Leaf Falls. That’s where his wife lives.’

‘Leaf River, you mean,’ said the Indian. ‘But he don’t come from around here. Didn’t you hear how he talked? Not from around here. He told me he’s on his way to see his girlfriend in North Dakota. Said he had a letter she’s been real sick, but he thinks she got knocked up so he’s going to find out. He says.’

‘Thief and liar,’ said Loyal. ‘I bet you anything he’s not in the Navy, either. Probably stole that sailor suit. Just a thieving, lying bum on the drift. Probably stole that sailor suit. If I find him he won’t never tell another lie because I’ll rip his tongue out. I’ll take his brain out through his nose.’ He started the car and drove slowly up and down the streets of Little Falls, stopping and running into stores, the Black Hat Bar, the feed store, asking if anyone had seen the sailor. The Indian sat in the backseat, his index finger in the folded notebook. The heat was building up. The sidewalks slowly emptied, people drifting inside to cool shade, to sit on kitchen chairs and the old couches covered with pastel bedspreads.

The streets petered into empty dirt roads. At the end of a short lane they saw a sign LINDBERGH PARK. Loyal pulled in under the trees and shut the engine off. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. His hands and feet were swollen. The sweat trickled down the sides of his face, from the hairline down in front of his ears. The wind stirred and stirred. In the aspen grove the trees swayed, hissing like heavy surf on sea stones. The Indian began to sing.

‘You think this is funny?’ shouted Loyal. ‘You think it’s something to sing about to see a man robbed and trying to get his money back?’

‘I’m singing The Friendly Song. It goes “The sky loves to hear me.” I want to be friendly with the sky. Look over there.’ He pointed to the southeast where the sky was a bruised blue with purple swellings like rotten spots in peaches. Loyal got out of the car. In a minute the Indian, singing under his breath, got out as well. The aspen leaves, green wet silk, tore loose from the trees. The Indian caught a cluster, rubbed the new leaves, as soft as the thinnest glove leather, between his thumb and forefinger.

The wind strengthened in logarithmic increments as they stood watching the sky. The clouds churned, their undersides studded with globes the color of melon flesh. A spatter of rain and branches hurled down, and something twisted in the wet grass with a doomed persistence. It was a bat, injured in some way, gnashing its needle-like teeth. Hail pelted the bat, stung their arms and rattled on the car roof like thrown gravel.

‘See that,’ said the Indian, pointing. A monstrous snout dangled from the cloud. There was a howling roar. The yellow air choked them.

‘Tornado,’ said the Indian. ‘The sky loves to hear me,’ he bawled. The snout swayed like a loose rope and came across the immense landscape toward them.

A setting moon as white as a new time shone in Loyal’s eyes. Enormous toasting forks loomed over him. He heard the cries of geese flying north. He thought he was on the farm, crushed under the stone wall and stretched out his hand to ask Billy to help him.

With the morning light people came. They lifted him in a blanket and laid him on a mattress in the back of a pickup truck. Someone put a paper bag on his chest. On the way to the hospital, the wind of passage beating coldly on his bare feet he began to move his right hand painfully. After a long time he brought it to his head and felt the wet pulpy mass. There was something in his left hand. Hard, smooth, like a blunt cow’s horn. But he could not find the strength to bring it up where he could see it. The trees flared above like flames and the ocarina fell from his hand.

‘A tornado can do freakish things,’ said the doctor. He leaned at Loyal. The close hair stubbled a head that resembled a truncated cone, ears like cupped hands. An ugly son of a bitch, yet the brown eyes behind cow’s lashes were kind. ‘You hear about straws driven six inches into a burr oak and houses shifted two feet without breaking a teacup. In your case it seems to have taken your car and pulled off your shoes and stockings as neat as could be. You’re lucky you weren’t in that car. We’ll probably never be sure exactly what injured you, but in a manner of speaking, you’ve been partially scalped.’

There was no sign of the Indian.

9 What I See

Loyal, going along the roads, the shadows of white poplars like strips of silk in the wind; pale horses in the field drifting like leaves; a woman seen through a window, her apron slipping down over her head the hairnet emerging from the neckhole, the apron faded blue, legs purple mosquito bites no stockings runover shoes; the man in the yard nailing a sign onto a post; RABIT MEAT; a plank across Potato Creek; a swaybacked shed, the door held closed with a heavy chain, white crosses, windmills, silos, pigs, white poplars in the wind, the leaves streaming by as he drove. A fence. More fence. Miles and miles and miles of fence, barbwire fence. Three girls standing at the edge of the woods, their arms encircling masses of red trillium, the torn root bulbs dangling. Sigurd’s Snakepit, OVER 100 LIVE SNAKE’S SEE THE GILA MONSTER 7 FT. ANACONDA COTTON MOUTH COACH WHIP BULL SNAKE’S RAT SNAKE, and old Sigurd in his long, long overalls and his leather coat standing, beckoning, calling, with a bull snake around his neck, his mouth flickering with promises. A Boston fern in the window. A sofa on the porch. A newspaper on the sofa. A man sleeping under a tractor in a black strip of shade. U.S. POST OFFICE. Take Home Kern’s Bread. Black oak, shellbark hickory, shagbark hickory, black walnut, black maple, Kentucky coffee tree, highbush blackberry, Appalachian cherry, chinquapin oak, moss, winter grapes, creeping savin, white pine, a burial mound in the shape of a bird, white cedar, spruce, balsam, tamarack, prairie chickens. Seed clover. A cow lying in a sea of grass like a black Viking boat, a table with a white cloth under an apple tree and at the table a shirtless man with a mahogany face and soft white breasts.

In a diner the painted wooden tables, each place set with a paper napkin, the fork resting on the napkin, to the left a spoon and a knife and an empty water glass. The simple menu is held up by the salt and pepper shakers. Clouds shaped like anteater tongues, like hawk tails, like eraser bloom on a chalkboard, like vomited curds. The ray of the flashlight in the darkness. Wet boulders along a lakeshore.

10 The Lost Baby

MERNELLE HAD ALMOST reached the blueberry swamp, had just come to the first bushes, smelling the sourness of the place, the sun drawing scent from the leathery leaves, from the blue dragonflies and her own mucky footprints, when she heard Jewell’s voice calling, too faint to understand the words which sounded like ‘solo, solo,’ drawn out and mournful.

‘What!’ she shrieked, and listened. Only the faint ‘solo’ floated back, in a long-drawn, hollow tone. It could not be her name. Her name, called from a distance, sounded like ‘burn now, burn now.’ She stepped into the blueberry bushes and picked a few. They were still tinged with purple and sour. She squinted at the sky remembering the dusky brass color it had taken in the eclipse a month ago, though the sun had stayed visible and white. She had been disappointed, had hoped for a black sky with a flaming corona burning a hole in the darkness of midmorning. No such luck. The mournful call came again, and she stripped a handful of berries and leaves, chewed them as she climbed the hill back to the house and only spat them out at the fence.

She could see Jewell in the yard under the pin cherry tree, her white arms go up, hands raised to her mouth, calling, calling. When Mernelle came into her sight line she beckoned her to run.

‘The War is over, President Truman’s been on the radio and a baby is lost. Ronnie Nipple just come by for help. They want us to come help ’em look. It’s his sister Doris’s baby. And wouldn’t you know Mink and Dub is down talking to Claunch about selling off some more of the cows. It makes me mad I can’t drive. There sits the car and we have to walk right past it. Doris is visiting for a week, and this is the first day and look what happens. Seems they was all so tied up with listening to the radio tell about the Japs surrenderin’ and people goin’ hog-crazy wild, they’re dancin’ and screamin’, so that nobody saw the little boy, he’s just a toddler, little Rollo, you remember they brought him over one day last summer before he could walk, nobody saw him go outside. Ronnie, of course, blaming everybody, yelling at his sister, “Why didn’t you keep an eye on him.” They never did get along. So I told him we’d start walkin’ when I got you out of the blueberries and he said if he saw us on his way back from Davis’s he’d pick us up. Davis got a phone.’

‘Hooray, we don’t have to collect fat any more, or tin cans and used clothes to take to church. But they probably won’t need the milkweed pods any more, either.’

‘Guess so. And the gas rationin’ ought to ease off right away, they say.’

‘It didn’t sound like you were calling my name. It sounded like something else.’

‘I hollered “Rollo.” Thought if he’d got this far he could be somewhere in the bushes. But I guess not.’

‘Ma, it’s two miles.’ The strength of it took over the afternoon. Perhaps a baby had to be lost to end the War.

They walked through the August afternoon. The town truck had spread new gravel on the road a few days earlier and the loose stones and pebbles pressed painfully through their thin-soled shoes. Far away they could hear the hoots and blares of sirens, horns, bells, the booms of shotguns fired into the air from the farms along the ridge sounding like planks dropped on lumber piles.

‘One thing they said on the radio was that sewing machines and buckets and scissors will be in the stores pretty quick. Can’t be quick enough for me. I’m sick of using those scissors with the broken blade, twists everything you try to cut.’ Bees mumbled through the goldenrod growing along the fence lines. With a rush of feet and rapid panting the dog caught up with them, trailing his rope.

‘That miserable dog,’ said Jewell, ‘I thought I tied him up good.’ A sense of being too late hung in the dusty goldenrod. The steady grill of crickets burred in the gaping field. Grasses pointed like lances.

‘He can help look for the baby. Like a bloodhound. I’ll hold onto his rope.’ She thought about Rollo lost in the goldenrod, pushing at the stalks with weak baby hands, the air around him laced with bees, or deep in the gloomy woods the little face wet with hopeless tears, imagined the dog nosing along the leaf mold, then straining forward as he did when he picked up rabbit scent, pulling her after him, heroically finding the baby. She would carry him back to his mother through the snowstorm, the dog leaping up at her side to lick the baby’s feet, and she would say ‘Well, you’re lucky. Another hour and he’d be gone. The temperature’s going down to zero,’ and Doris crying gratefully and Mrs. Nipple rummaging in her nest egg money and handing Mernelle ten dollars, saying, ‘My grandson’s worth a million to me.’

‘I can’t believe we are walking on these rocks when there is a perfectly good car sitting in our yard and I can’t drive it. My lord it’s hot. You better learn to drive a car Mernelle soon’s you can so you don’t get stuck on a farm. I wanted to learn years ago but your father said no, still won’t have it, no, doesn’t like the idea of his wife drivin’ around. Besides, then we had that Ford that started with the crank, he said it was enough to break your arm to wind the starter up.’

The lane to the Nipples’ place was smooth and hard with a strip of thin grass up the middle. The maples threw a breathless shade. Old Toot Nipple had tapped the trees each March, but Ronnie didn’t make syrup and said he’d cut them all down for firewood one of these days. In the winter when the ice storms broke big limbs down into the lane he swore he’d do it the next good day. And never did.

‘Ma, say the counting thing, the way your grandfather used to count.’

‘Oh, that old thing. That was his way of counting sheep, the old, old style of counting. He used to count the sheep out. See if I can remember it. Yan. Tyan. Tethera. Methera. Pimp. Sethera. Lethera. Hovera. Dovera. Dick. Yan-a-dick. Tyan-a-dick. Tethera-dick. Methera-dick. Bumfit. Yan-a-bumfit. Tyan-a-bumfit. Tethera-bumfit. Methera-bumfit. Giggot. There! That’s as much as I ever knew. Up to twenty.’

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