Something Rich and Strange: Selected Stories (2 page)

“And you’re sure it ain’t a dog?” Sterling Watts asked.

“Yes. There wasn’t a bit of splatter or shell on the straw.”

“Rats will eat a egg,” Erwin offered from behind the counter.

“There’d still be something left, though,” Bascombe Lindsey said.

“They’s but one thing it can be,” Sterling Watts said with finality.

“What’s that,” Jacob asked.

“A big yaller rat snake. They’ll swallow two or three eggs whole and leave not a dribble of egg.”

“I’ve heard such myself,” Bascombe agreed. “Never seen it but heard of it.”

“Well, one got in my henhouse,” Sterling said. “And it took me near a month to figure out how to catch the damn thing.”

“How did you?” Jacob asked.

“Went fishing,” Sterling said.

That evening Jacob hoed in his cornfield till dark. He ate his supper, then went to the woodshed and found a fishhook. He tied three yards of line to it and went to the henhouse. The bantam had one egg under her. Jacob took the egg and made as small a hole as possible with the barb. He slowly worked the whole hook into the egg, then tied the line to a nail head behind the nesting box. Three yards, Watts had said. That way the snake would swallow the whole egg before a tight line set the hook.

“I ain’t about to go out there come morning and deal with no snake,” Edna said when he told her what he’d done. She sat in the ladderback rocking chair, her legs draped by a quilt. He’d made the chair for her to sit in when she’d been pregnant with Joel. The wood was cherry, not the most practical for furniture, but he’d wanted it to be pretty.

“I’ll deal with it,” Jacob said.

For a few moments he watched her sew, the fine blue thread repairing the binding of the Bear’s Claw quilt. Edna had worked since dawn, but she couldn’t stop even now. Jacob sat down at the kitchen table and spread out the newspaper. On the front page Roosevelt said things were getting better, but the rest of the news argued otherwise. Strikers had been shot at a cotton mill. Men whose crime was hiding in boxcars to search for work had been beaten with clubs by lawmen and hired railroad goons.

“What you claimed this morning about me running off Joel and Mary,” Edna said, her needle not pausing as she spoke, “that was a spiteful thing to say. Those kids never went hungry a day in their lives. Their clothes was patched and they had shoes and coats.”

He knew he should let it go, but the image of Hartley’s knife opening the hound’s throat had snared in his mind.

“You could have been easier on them.”

“The world’s a hard place,” Edna replied. “There was need for them to know that.”

“They’d have learned soon enough on their own,” Jacob said.

“They needed to be prepared, and I prepared them. They ain’t in a hobo camp or barefoot like Hartley and his clan. If they can’t be grateful for that, there’s nothing I can do about it now.”

“There’s going to be better times,” Jacob said. “This depression can’t last forever, but the way you treated them will.”

“It’s lasted nine years,” Edna said. “And I see no sign of it letting up. The price we’re getting for corn and cabbage is the same. We’re still living on half of what we did before.”

She turned back to the quilt’s worn binding and no other words were spoken between them. After a while Edna put down her sewing and went to bed. Jacob soon followed. Edna tensed as he settled his body beside hers.

“I don’t want us to argue,” Jacob said, and laid his hand on her shoulder. She flinched from his touch, moved farther away.

“You think I’ve got no feelings,” Edna said, her face turned so she spoke at the wall. “Stingy and mean-hearted. But maybe if I hadn’t been we’d not have anything left.”

Despite his weariness, Jacob had trouble going to sleep. When he finally did, he dreamed of men hanging onto boxcars while other men beat them with sticks. Those beaten wore muddy brogans and overalls, and he knew they weren’t laid-off mill workers or coal miners but farmers like himself.

Jacob woke in the dark. The window was open and before he could fall back asleep he heard something from inside the henhouse. He pulled on his overalls and boots, then went out on the porch and lit a lantern. The sky was thick with stars and a wet moon lightened the ground, but the windowless henhouse was pitch dark. It had crossed his mind that if a yellow rat snake could eat an egg a copperhead or satinback could as well, and he wanted to see where he stepped. He went to the woodshed and got a hoe for the killing.

Jacob crossed the foot log and stepped up to the entrance. He held the lantern out and checked the nesting box. The bantam was in it, but no eggs lay under her. It took him a few moments to find the fishing line, leading toward the back corner like a single strand of a spider’s web. He readied the hoe in his hand and took a step inside. He held the lamp before him and saw Hartley’s daughter huddled in the corner, the line disappearing into her closed mouth.

She did not try to speak as he kneeled before her. Jacob set the hoe and lantern down and took out his pocketknife, cut the line inches above where it disappeared between her lips. For a few moments he did nothing else.

“Let me see,” he said, and though she did not open her mouth she did not resist as his fingers did so. He found the hook’s barb sunk deep in her cheek and was relieved. He’d feared it would be in her tongue or, much worse, deep in her throat.

“We got to get that hook out,” Jacob told her, but still she said nothing. Her eyes did not widen in fear and he wondered if maybe she was in shock. The barb was too deep to wiggle free. He’d have to push it the rest of the way through.

“This is going to hurt, but just for a second,” he said, and let his index finger and thumb grip the hook where it began to curve. He worked deeper into the skin, his thumb and finger slickened by blood and saliva. The child whimpered. Finally the barb broke through. He wiggled the shank out, the line coming last like thread completing a stitch.

“It’s out now,” he told her.

For a few moments Jacob did not get up. He thought about what to do next. He could carry her back to Hartley’s shack and explain what happened, but he remembered the dog. He looked at her cheek and there was no tear, only a tiny hole that bled little more than a briar scratch would. He studied the hook for signs of rust. There didn’t seem to be, so at least he didn’t have to worry about the girl getting lockjaw. But it could still get infected.

“Stay here,” Jacob said and went to the woodshed. He found the bottle of turpentine and returned. He took his handkerchief and soaked it, then opened the child’s mouth and dabbed the wound, did the same outside to the cheek.

“Okay,” Jacob said. He reached out his hands and placed them under her armpits. She was so light it was like lifting a rag doll. The child stood before him now, and for the first time he saw that her right hand held something. He picked up the lantern and saw it was an egg and that it was unbroken. Jacob nodded at the egg.

“You don’t ever take them home, do you,” he said. “You eat them here, right?”

The child nodded.

“Go ahead and eat it then,” Jacob said, “but you can’t come back anymore. If you do, your daddy will know about it. You understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered, the first word she’d spoken.

“Eat it, then.”

The girl raised the egg to her lips. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin as she opened her mouth. The shell crackled as her teeth bit down.

“Go home now,” he said when she’d swallowed the last bit of shell. “And don’t come back. I’m going to put another hook in them eggs and this time there won’t be no line on it. You’ll swallow that hook and it’ll tear your guts up.”

Jacob watched her walk up the skid trail until the dark enveloped her, then sat on the stump that served as a chopping block. He blew out the lantern and waited, though for what he could not say. After a while the moon and stars faded. In the east, darkness lightened to the color of indigo glass. The first outlines of the corn stalks and their leaves were visible now, reaching up from the ground like shabbily dressed arms.

Jacob picked up the lantern and turpentine and went back to the house. Edna was getting dressed as he came into the bedroom. Her back was to him.

“It was a snake,” he said.

Edna paused in her dressing and turned. Her hair was down and her face not yet hardened to face the day’s demands and he glimpsed the younger, softer woman she’d been twenty years ago when they’d married.

“You kill it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I hope you didn’t just throw it out by the henhouse. I don’t want to smell that thing rotting when I’m gathering eggs.”

“I threw it across the road.”

He got in the bed. Edna’s form and warmth lingered on the feather mattress.

“I’ll get up in a few minutes,” he told her.

Jacob closed his eyes but did not sleep. Instead, he imagined towns where hungry men hung on boxcars looking for work that couldn’t be found, shacks where families lived who didn’t even have one swaybacked milk cow. He imagined cities where blood stained the sidewalks beneath buildings tall as ridges. He tried to imagine a place worse than where he was.

C
arson had gone to bed early, so when the cell phone rang he thought it might be his son or daughter calling to check on him, but as he turned to the night table the clock’s green glow read 2:18, too late for a chat, or any kind of good news. He lifted the phone and heard Darnell Coe’s voice. I got trouble with a calf that ain’t of a mind to get born, Darnell told him.

Carson sat up on the mattress, settled his bare feet on the floor. Moments passed before he realized he was waiting for another body to do the same thing, leave the bed and fix him a thermos of coffee. Almost four months and it still happened, not just when he awoke but other times too. He’d read something and lower the newspaper, about to speak to an empty chair, or at the grocery store, reach into a shirt pocket for a neatly printed list that wasn’t there.

He dressed and went out to the truck. All that would be needed lay in the pickup’s lockbox or, just as likely, on Darnell’s gun rack. At the edge of town, he stopped at Dobbins’ Handy-Mart, the only store open. Music harsh as the fluorescent lights came from a counter radio. Carson filled the largest Styrofoam cup with coffee and paid Lloyd Dobbin’s grandson. The road to Flag Pond was twenty miles of switchbacks and curves that ended just short of the Tennessee line. A voice on the radio said no rain until midday, so at least he’d not be contending with a slick road.

Carson had closed his office two years ago, referred his clients to Bobby Starnes, a new doc just out of vet school. Bobby had grown up in Madison County, and that helped a lot, but the older farmers, some Carson had known since childhood, kept calling him. Because they know you won’t expect them to pay up front, or at all, Doris had claimed, which was true in some cases, but for others, like Darnell Coe, it wasn’t. We’ve been hitched to the same wagon this long, we’ll pull it the rest of the way together, Darnell had said, reminding Carson that in the 1950s and half a world away they’d made a vow to do so.

As the town’s last streetlight slid off the rearview mirror, Carson turned the radio off. It was something he often did on late-night calls, making driving the good part, because what usually awaited him in a barn or pasture would not be good, a cow dying of milk fever or a horse with a gangrenous leg—things easily cured if a man hadn’t wagered a vet fee against a roll of barbed wire or a salt lick. There had been times when Carson had told men to their faces they were stupid to wait so long. But even a smart farmer did stupid things when he’d been poor too long. He’d figure after a drought had withered his cornstalks, or maybe a hailstorm had beaten the life out of his tobacco allotment, that he was owed a bit of good luck, so he’d skimp on a calcium shot or pour turpentine on an infected limb. Waiting it out until he’d waited too late, then calling Carson when a rifle was the only remedy.

So driving had to be the good part, and it was. Carson had always been comfortable with solitude. As a boy, he’d loved to roam the woods, loved how quiet the woods could be. If deep enough in them, he wouldn’t even hear the wind. But the best was afternoons in the barn. He’d climb up in the loft and lean back against a hay bale, then watch the sunlight begin to lean through the loft window, brightening the spilled straw. When the light was at its apex, the loft shimmered as though coated with a golden foil. Dust motes speckled the air like midges. The only sound would be underneath, a calf restless in a stall, a horse eating from a feed bag. Carson had always felt an aloneness in those moments, but never in a sad way.

Through the years, the same feeling had come back to him on late nights as he drove out of town. Doris would be back in bed and the children asleep as he left the house. Night would gather around him, the only light his truck’s twin beams probing the road ahead. He would pass darkened farmhouses and barns as he made his way toward the glow of lamp or porch light. On the way back was the better time, though. He’d savor the solitude, knowing that later when he opened the children’s doors, he could watch them a few moments as they slept, then lie down himself as Doris turned or shifted so that some part of their bodies touched.

The road forked and Carson went right, passing a long-abandoned gas station. The cell phone lay on the passenger seat. Sometimes a farmer called and told Carson he might as well turn around, but this far from town the phone didn’t work. The road snaked upward, nothing on the sides now but drop-offs and trees, an occasional white cross and a vase of wilted flowers. Teenage boys for the most part, Carson knew, too young to think it could happen to them. It was that way in war as well, until you watched enough boys your own age being zipped up in body bags.

Carson had been drafted by the army three months after Darnell joined the marines. They had not seen each other until the Seventh Infantry supported the First Marine at Chosin Reservoir, crossing paths in a Red Cross soup line. It was late afternoon and the temperature already below zero. The Chinese, some men claimed a million of them, were pouring in over the Korean border, and no amount of casualties looked to stop them. Let’s make a vow to God and them Chinese too that if they let us get back to North Carolina alive we’ll stay put and grow old together, Darnell had said. He’d held out his hand and Carson had taken it.