Fourmile (2 page)

“Grab him, Foster!” I heard Mother yell from behind.

I got to my knees and crawled to Joe and grabbed him by the collar. I pulled him to me and held tight as he bucked and strained.

Dax was backed against the windshield with his heels on the wipers. “What the hell, Linda!” he shouted.

I struggled with Joe until I was finally able to stand and drag him toward the backyard.

“Foster!” I heard Mother yelling behind me. “Put him up and get back out here!”

3

That night Mother asked me to apologize to Dax. I stayed silent and she sent me to my room. I lay there and listened to them arguing.

“What am I supposed to do about that windshield, Linda?” he said. “That’s prob’ly a three-hundred-dollar piece of glass. I got to go to work in that truck!”

“I’ll pay for it, Dax.”

“Yeah? Where you gonna get three hundred dollars?”

“I’ll pay for it,” she said again.

“Gonna cost another couple hundred to take the dents out of the hood.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Whatever it costs.”

“Work it out of his ass,” he said. “What the hell’s wrong with him?”

“Please, Dax,” she said.

Neither one of them spoke for a moment.

“I’m gonna kick the stew out of that ugly dog,” he finally said. “Then I’m gonna kill him.”

“Just sit down, Dax. I’ll get a beer for you.”

“Shoot the damn thing.”

“Let’s go outside,” she said.

“Let’s go to a bar.”

“I don’t want to go to a bar,” she said.

“Fine. I’m goin’ by myself. Get my beer.”

There was a period of silence before I heard the front door shut. Then more silence. Finally I saw the shadows of her feet pass my bedroom and heard her door close and heard her crying.

*   *   *

Sunday morning Mother was quieter than usual. I still wasn’t sorry for throwing the brick, but I felt miserable that I’d upset her. We ate breakfast with barely a word and then she told me we were going to Dax’s house to apologize.

Neither of us had been to his house before. She looked up his address in the phone book and wrote it down and we got into her Honda Accord and set out. It was about a fifteen-minute drive. After several miles of country road we passed through Robertsdale, a small farming community marked by a single caution light. A few miles outside of town we passed a metal fabrication shop with a yard full of new and repaired Dumpsters. Just after that we came to a red clay road with a plywood sign that read
GANEY TAXIDERMY
.

“What’s taxidermy?” I asked.

“Mounting deer heads and things,” she said. “He told me he does it on the side.”

We traveled the dirt road about a mile between walls of pine plantation until we came to the first break in the trees. There was a five-acre cutout surrounded by a hog wire fence. A small white one-level, vinyl-sided house sat near the back of the lot. Another
GANEY TAXIDERMY
sign was nailed to a fence post near the road. I didn’t see his truck and felt relief wash over me.

“I don’t think he’s home,” I said.

She turned in to the driveway. “He said he has a shop behind the house. He might be back there.”

Dread rushed over me again.

The driveway wasn’t paved. Nothing more than dirt tracks up to and around the house. We drove through the side yard and saw his truck before a small, unpainted cinder-block building with a steel door and metal roof.

When I got out I noticed how quiet it was. Other than a few crows calling, the pine plantation seemed to absorb everything. The smell of turpentine and stink bugs was heavy in the air.

“Dax!” she called.

There was no answer.

She stepped toward the door and knocked on it. “Dax!” she called again.

I wondered why she didn’t just open it, but I wasn’t about to encourage her.

Suddenly the door swung in and he was standing there with his goat face, wiping his hands on his jeans. His thighs were smeared with blood. His arms were covered with it up to his elbows. He wore a white V-neck undershirt that was specked with red splotches and flecked with pieces of meat and jelly fat. I saw the shock in Mother’s face.

He studied her for a second, then glanced at me and back at her. “Hey,” he said.

“Hi,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind us coming by.”

He seemed to think about it. Finally he backed up a few steps. “Come on in,” he said.

The room was cluttered with stuffed animals—deer heads, fox squirrels, a bobcat, two coyotes. It was cold and smelled like blood and urine and animal fat. Against the right wall were three white deep-freeze coolers. Above them were shelves stacked with mold inserts of animal body parts. A window unit droned against the rear wall. Beneath it was a large stainless-steel sink and countertop with the carcass of some animal turned inside out and a skinning knife lying across it. The wet cement floor sloped to a drain in the center.

Dax walked to the table and picked up the knife. He put his back to us and began scraping at the hide. “Workin’ on a boar for a friend of mine,” he said.

Something about the gore of the place and the dead animals was both fascinating and frightening at the same time. I looked at Mother and saw the nervous twitch she got at the side of her mouth.

“Foster has something to tell you,” she said.

She looked at me.

“I’m sorry about the brick,” I said.

He kept scraping.

“He’s going to work it off,” she said.

He still didn’t face us. “I tell you what, boy,” he said, “one of these days you’re gonna appreciate what it takes to earn a livin’ and buy somethin’ like a truck.”

I didn’t respond. He set the knife down and faced us and leaned against the counter. “You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

He studied me for a second, then turned back to the animal hide. Mother reached into her pocket and pulled out an envelope and walked over to him. She started to reach around him and set it on the counter, but changed her mind and tucked it into his back pocket. Then she touched his shoulder with her hand. “Let me know if it’s not enough,” she said.

He kept working. She hesitated for a moment, then pulled her hand away. “I’ll call you later,” she said.

4

Granddaddy was driving down from Montgomery for lunch. I waited for him with Joe under the pecan tree closest to the house. This tree was bigger and older than the rest, offset like it had never been part of the orchard at all. Daddy once said he thought it had been there since before the land was cleared for farming. Sometimes I liked to imagine it long ago in the midst of a thick forest. I remembered the first time I came to Fourmile when I was six and how small I felt standing under it.

It seemed strange that we were moving down near the Alabama coast to have a farm, but Daddy said it was everything he’d been looking for and the price was too good to pass up. He’d worked and saved ten years for it as a UPS driver in Montgomery. His childhood was spent on a cattle farm in Mississippi and he knew the business. Mother had always been supportive of his dream, but it certainly made it easier that she was already familiar with Baldwin County from having spent a few summers there as a child.

It was late fall when we left the Montgomery suburbs and headed south. After two hours we exited the interstate and drove east into the country. The blacktop was faded and worn and gouged by plow points. There was so little traffic that the road stayed sprinkled with leaves that crinkled like paper under the car tires and whorled behind and resettled. Eventually we came to a pecan orchard and just past it was a rusty metal sign that read
FOURMILE
. The dirt drive ran the outside edge of the orchard up to the house. We got out and I stood under the pecan trees and before the expanse of open pastureland. The air was cool and clean and still. The countryside was soft and quiet, punctuated with the lowing of cows and the whistling of killdeer and doves. The smell of hay and damp soil and soybeans flowed into my nose.

Fourmile wasn’t very big compared to other farms in the area. Just the ten-acre orchard and two hundred acres of pasture that backed up to another sixty acres of creek bottom. The house was a one-level brick ranch with three bedrooms. In addition to the barn and the tractor shed there was a cattle chute and a dipping trough. Our closest neighbor was a widow a mile to the north.

I don’t remember much about my father before we came to the farm. He was at work most of the time and when he was home he always seemed tired. He never seemed tired after we came to Fourmile. There was always something to do, something he wanted to show or teach me.

In fall we woke before school and crouched at the edge of the pasture and shot doves as they whistled in through the slanted sunbeams, their wings still heavy with dew. In winter I sat with him just inside the trees of the creek bottom, our breath misting before us, waiting for the eight-point buck he called Walter. And when the heat of an Alabama summer threatened to bake us dry, Mother made picnics and he drove us up the blacktop to Tillman’s bridge, where we soaked in the clear creek water.

As I grew older he taught me about using tools and working on equipment and tending the livestock. I looked forward to waking early and feeding the cows. I lay in bed at night thinking about the projects we’d planned, like the new watering system and the hay feeder. Work and play and attention that makes a boy proud and confident and secure.

Fourmile was a life we built together, something I was molded around, all I knew, the best of him and me and Mother. As if leaving it wasn’t enough to bear, I had to watch it die first.

*   *   *

When Granddaddy pulled up in his big silver Buick sedan, I didn’t see Grandmother with him. But I hadn’t expected to. I knew this was a special trip.

His car came to a stop and he studied me and Joe out the window. “Fine spring day we’ve got here, you two.”

He didn’t know anything about farm life. I couldn’t imagine him out of his leather lace-up shoes and Sunday suit and felt hat. His face was soft and calm and free of worries. I was ashamed of myself for letting him down.

I got up and approached the car. “Hey, Granddaddy.”

“Looks like you grew another two inches on me,” he replied. “Maybe you got some of your grandmother’s side in you.”

I looked at the ground and shrugged my shoulders. Sometimes he just said things like that when we both knew it wasn’t true. It was obvious that I took after Daddy, thin, not overly tall, with hair that went from blond in the summer to brown in winter.

He got out and stretched and looked around. He still had a lot of energy and his eyes were always wide and wet with good nature.

“Your grandmomma said to tell you she’s sorry she couldn’t drive down. She’s a little under the weather.”

“That’s okay. I hope she gets better.”

“Oh, she’ll be okay. Just a spring cold. Your mother inside?”

“Yes, sir.”

He leaned back into his car and grabbed a newspaper off the seat. I saw that it was a copy of the
Montgomery Advertiser
. He tapped it against his leg. “Let’s go check on her.”

“Okay,” I said. I was up for anything that put off the talk I knew he’d driven almost three hours to have with me.

5

Granddaddy said he wanted to take a drive to the coast and see a house he had rented for years when Mother was young.

“The old Morris place,” he reminded her.

“I haven’t been by there in twenty years,” she said.

“We’ll be back after a while.”

We left her at the kitchen table, going through the newspaper, looking for houses she thought we could afford. She’d been doing the same thing for nearly eight months, ever since she’d told me that we were moving.

Granddaddy and I drove through the countryside with the windows down and the spring air cool and smelling of cut grass and pine sap. His car was big and comfortable and I sat back in the seat and wished he would tell me everything I needed to know about growing up. Surely he had the answers. Surely there would come a day when he would just laugh and tell me it was all a joke and give me the secrets.

“Your mother says you might need to make a little extra money.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Thought about what you might do?”

I shrugged.

“Seems to me like there’s a fence needs painting.”

“It’s a pretty big fence.”

“You’re a big kid now.”

I didn’t answer.

“House in the city doesn’t require all this upkeep,” he said.

“Have you met Dax?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “Haven’t met him yet.”

“I don’t like him.”

“That doesn’t give you an excuse to damage his property.”

“No, sir,” I said, sinking lower in my seat.

He reached over into the glove compartment and pulled out a roll of Life Savers candy. He held them out to me and I shook my head.

“No?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” I said.

He shrugged and stuck one in his mouth and worked it slowly in his cheek.

“Why does Mother like him?” I asked.

“Maybe you should ask her.”

“She won’t talk about it to me. She just says he’s nice to her, but he’s not.”

Granddaddy pulled to a slow stop at the intersection. He looked both ways and swung the car left toward the coast.

“Your mother’s entitled to her privacy,” he said. “And she knows how to take care of herself.”

I saw he wasn’t going to choose a side, so I dropped the subject and looked out the window. Even with a strong west wind the briny smell of seawater rarely drifted inland to Fourmile. The only reminder that we were close to beaches was an occasional lone seagull passing nonstop over the pine trees.

Granddaddy pulled off the highway before the beach house he’d been looking for. It was still there, but it wasn’t like he remembered. It was more modern and groomed, with a carport built onto the side.

“I spent ten straight summers here,” he said. “Some of my best memories with your mother and grandmother were made right there.”

I studied his face while he stared at the house. I could almost see the memories flipping through his head.