Some of Your Blood (3 page)

When George got a little older, ten or eleven, he got good with traps. He never could pay for steel traps but he got so good with snares he did not need them. He could make a deadfall big enough to take a badger and that is saying something because a badger can dig straight down through a blacktop road if he has to unless your deadfall rock is big enough to kill him first crack, but this George was a strong boy. Your deadfall is nothing but a big flat rock tipped up and propped on a stick. Some people tie a long string to the stick and wait and watch all day till something goes under the rock after the bait, but that is for boy scouts. George liked to prop up the rock and then whittle the stick almost through, and tie the string to the notch. The string goes back under the rock around a peg sunk in the ground and then back a ways and you tie your bait to it. A fox or a possum will grab hold and pull, and the stick breaks and down comes the rock. For rabbits a carrot is the best bait because it is strong. For foxes or even a badger sometimes rabbit meat is good, but don’t ever use the kidneys or you will catch yourself some kind of damn cat.

The nicest one of all is the figure-four, and George could make one faster than you can climb a yellow pine tree. All you do is find a nice young hardwood sapling, ash or hickory or even birch if you got to. You pace off the right distance, depends on the tree, and dig a hole. Then you find a branch thick as your thumb with a good V crotch on it. You cut it through right under the V and then you cut away one of the side branches leaving a spur. What you have now is a bushy branch with a hook like. You turn this upside down and bury the branchy part, stomping it good and putting heavy rocks in the hole and maybe a log on top, so just the upside-down hook is showing out of the ground. You cut a little notch in the shank part of the hook and whittle yourself a good strong double-pointed peg to fit into that notch and cross to the tip of the hook. It looks like a figure 4.

Now you pull down your sapling to bend almost double and tie a piece of twine near the top and the other end of the twine to the double-pointed peg, and set the peg in the hook to make the figure 4. Real easy you let the bent tree pull up until the peg sets hard against the hook. Now, tied to this twine just above the figure 4 is another piece of twine, and tied to this is nothing in the world but a old number one guitar string, the kind with a little bitty brass stopper on one end looks like a hollow brass barrel. You have the end of the guitar string passed through this to make a loop. You lay this loop around the bait, and you tie the bait with a short cord to the double-ended peg in the figure 4. You shake fine dirt all around until the loop is buried and the bait-cord is buried, and then you go home. In the morning you got yourself a rabbit or a chuck or maybe even a fox or badger. Because first time he tugs on the bait he pulls out the peg and that snaps upright and that thin wire loop grabs him and hangs him up higher than Haman. Or maybe it’s a damn skunk or maybe nothing but the chawed off foot of a fox, but usually it’s something good.

Oh this George he loved to hunt. But he never liked killing anything. He had no use for people who killed things just to be killing when the animals never did nothing to them. Nobody should kill nothing they don’t need to for some purpose. Like deer. One time George found a doe pressed flat against the ground by a fallen tree after a bad windstorm and he worked all morning clearing it away with just a bitty hand axe and dragging up poles until he could lever it up high enough to let the deer out. The doe like to died of fear but George just laughed and went on working till he got it loose. George never did kill a deer. They are too big anyway. But this George, when he wasn’t hunting, or maybe fishing, he was laying around thinking about it. He sure did like to do it.

All the time this hunting was going on, and school days and all, things were getting worse around the house. The mother got more arthritis and pretty soon she stopped cleaning the house much and couldn’t hardly cook even. This made the father mad and he got worse than ever. Sometimes he was out all night and would go to work drunk in the morning and he was a good worker, strong, but sometimes when the foreman would say something he would argue back and once he hit him but not much. So he kept getting laid off. When he got laid off he would draw his pay and then he would go on a mad drunk until he spent it all. It was not too bad when he stayed away at those times but when he came home it was very bad. George and the mother always tried not to say the one word that would set him off but any word would do it. Then he would beat up the mother, punching her right in the face and the blood came and the mother cried but she never screamed real loud she was so ashamed. He used to beat up George too but when George was big enough to run away he would run away as soon as the trouble started and even before that, as soon as the father came home. He would come back after the father was asleep. Once the father was asleep there was never any more trouble and when he woke up he never seemed to remember anything about it. George never ran to the neighbors because they had no use for any of them or to the cops because the father hated cops and George never thought there was anything wrong with that, who was to tell him different? He just went into the woods and lay up in a tree or hunted if it was moonlight or maybe just hung around outside until it got quiet and then peeked in the window to see if he was asleep and if he was he would come in and get in bed.

And sometimes he would already be in bed and even asleep when the father came in and those were the times he would wake up hearing the mother crying, first, “Don’t, don’t, not now, the boy, the boy,” and the father would growl that the boy was asleep. George would keep his eyes tight closed and lie still like in the woods waiting for the rabbits, and the mother crying “no no” until she would give a little scream and say, “My hands, oh, my hands,” because that is what he would do, squeeze her arthritis until she gave in, because he always said there was nothing really wrong with her, she was faking. So she would stop saying no no but go on crying until he went to sleep. That was one thing about it, he always went right to sleep.

When George was thirteen he was as big as a man. He was as big as his father and maybe stronger although he did not seem to know this. His father was a yellow headed man with a lot of bad teeth and his skin hung down under his eyes with like little bloody hammocks under the eyeballs and his pants fit him best if he let his stomach hang out over his belt so he always wore them real low like that. When George was a little kid he used to try to wear his pants like that but he never had the belly for it. When he got bigger he stopped trying to do anything like the father. Well when he was thirteen something happened that changed everything.

The father had been working for quite a spell and for a while there was plenty to eat and George helped out as much as he could with the cleaning up and all. Because the father would come home and when he was sober and the house was all cleaned up and dinner cooking he maybe wasn’t like a kind and loving husband in the movies but at least he walked in and washed up and ate and sat in the door whittling and went to bed without yelling at anybody or hitting. And once or twice he would look at something George did like white-washing the wall or fixing the busted porch rail or a step or something and he would look at it and at George and he would say “Wal aw kay!” in that foreign accent of his and George would of done anything for him then. And he could still remember the one time he came in and sniffed in the kitchen and said, “Poy, dat schmells goot!” and the mother just sat there in her wheelchair and cried. She got the wheelchair from the priest who came visiting I guess to see if a wheelchair would make her or George or even the father go to church once in a while, but they never did, the father told them not to and cussed every time he saw the wheelchair for a month but all the same he let her keep it.

And with things that way naturally George and the mother knocked themselves out trying to keep everything nice to make it last as long as they could and make the father glad to come home to a nice place. So this one night was the day he was supposed to stop off at the store on the way home because they were out of food pretty much but for a slab of fatback and some turnip greens. The mother set that aside for some other time and her and George got everything ready for the father to come home with the food, and they talked it around this way and that what they’d fix according to what he brought, so they could have it ready real quick, like if he had a lump of chuck they’d slice off some and quick pound it with the edge of a plate to make pan-fry steaks with onions if he brought onions, or if he brought collards they wouldn’t boil them but sear them quick in hot fat. George always felt very close to his mother but in a funny way disappointed or something like that. Like when she got sorry for herself and used to cry and tell him how she caught the arthritis from him being born and she would pat herself on her skinny chest and say how hard she tried to feed him off her own body but she couldn’t he was too big and she was too sick and how she wished she could. It was like she was always feeding him from herself all his whole life, and what she put out, it cost her, it weakened and sickened her, but still she did it and did it. For him. And at the same time it was like he needed something from her, he took what she fed him, but it was never enough and it was never the right thing that he wanted. It is very hard to explain this. But anyway he always felt her giving and giving out of herself, and he always needed something from her, and hung around her to get it, only what she was giving him all the time was not the thing he wanted. This would get so bad with him sometimes that he would have to go hunting again. That usually made him feel better.

But now this one time when they were waiting for the father to come home and planning all the different things they might be doing to fix something quick and good for him it began to get later and later and they talked a little more to cover it up and then they got quiet and just waited, she was in her wheelchair looking down at her hands, her hands by now were all brown and twisted like cypress. And George he sat in the doorway looking down the cowpath that ran down to the road where the father would have to come. And when it got dark the mother said as bright as she could, “I know! Just shave up that fatback and we’ll fry it up like bacon and have bacon sandwiches and we can boil up a lump of it with the turnip greens and then I think there’s a little beans left too. A whole dinner, and we can have it all ready!” So George got right up out of the doorway, it was beginning to get too dark to see anyway, and he lit the kerosene lamp and shook up the stove and went to the table with the knife and the fatback to shave it up. So that is how he come to have the knife at the time. He did not go for it and he wouldn’t never even thought about it except there it was in his hand.

In walked the father and he was drunk as a hoot-owl and he looked all around the place and said, “Gaw dam dot Polock,” and that was all we needed to know, he had fought with the foreman and got laid off and drew his money and got drunk. And the mother she just couldn’t hold it in, she let out one long wail and threw up her poor crooked hands and said oh, oh again, again, and he run right through the room and punched her one in the nose so hard you could hear it break and the blood squirted out before he could get his hand away. So George clear across the room, he never could remember afterward actually doing it, he threw the knife.

Well it was so quiet in there for so long you wouldn’t believe it. Then the father peeled off his undershirt which was all he was wearing besides pants, it was a hot day, and he looked down at the cut and the blood coming out of it. And the mother was bleeding through her hands and her eyes bulging out over them, looking at the father. And the father pushed George away and got the dishrag and splashed cold water on his chest and wiped it with the dish towel and got his other undershirt from the peg over the bed and a clean rag and put the rag against the cut and pulled the shirt on over it and went out. Nobody had said word one since he said Gaw dam Polock.

Well nothing was ever the same after that. The father still had money when he left and he drank that all up that same night. The next day he got George alone and talked to him, he said he got drunk first because he was so mad about the layoff, and after what happened he got drunk because he was so sorry. It seemed to make a lot of difference to him that George should understand this but George did not understand it and just shrugged his shoulders. And he did not say he was sorry he threw the knife or anything else and the father did not ask him to as a matter of fact he never mentioned the knife or anything else.

But he never again laid a hand on the mother. He spent most of the time just sitting in the open doorway looking down the cowpath. In a day or two all the fatback and turnip greens was gone and the beans and a heel of bread, but still the father sat in the doorway and the mother in her wheelchair with wet cloths to her nose. Nobody wanted to say anything to the father about getting some food in or going to work so the third day George came back from school and he was carrying a big sack of groceries. He walked right past the father and came in and put the bag down. The part of the bag where George had been holding it against his chest was marked in big black grease pencil Morosch which was the name of a white collar guy in the mine office. George quick took everything out of the bag and shoved the bag in the stove to burn up. Then he put everything out of sight, a roasting chicken and two pounds of hamburger and a loaf of stale for stuffing and a loaf of fresh, two quarts of milk, fresh carrots, a whole pound of butter, a jar of strawberry jam, a pound of coffee and some bananas.

The mother probably was too sick to notice, what with her big shut blue black eyes and her nose three times as big. The father came in and looked at the stuff as George put it away out of sight. “Ware ya gat dat?” he wanted to know.

George for once in his life turned and looked the father straight in the eye. “Swiped it, off the Acme store delivery wagon,” and it was the truth. If the father yelled or hit out or said nothing or flew to the moon, just then he did not care.