Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (4 page)

I take up my sack and gaff for a turkle. Some quick chubs flash under the bank. In the moss-dapples, I see rings spread where a turkle ducked under. This sucker is mine. The pool smells like rot, and the sun is a hardish brown.

I wade in. He goes for the roots of a log. I shove around, and feel my gaff twitch. This is a smart turkle, but still a sucker. I bet he could pull liver off a hook for the rest of his days, but he is a sucker for the roots that hold him while I work my gaff. I pull him up, and see he is a snapper. He’s got his stubby neck curved around, biting at the gaff. I lay him on the sand, and take out Pop’s knife. I step on the shell, and press hard. That fat neck gets skinny quick, and sticks way out. A little blood oozes from the gaff wound into the grit, but when I slice, a puddle forms.

A voice says, “Get a dragon, Colly?”

I shiver a little, and look up. It’s only the loansman standing on the creekbank in his tan suit. His face is splotched pink, and the sun is turning his glasses black.

“I crave them now and again,” I say. I go on slitting gristle, skinning back the shell.

“Aw, your daddy loved turtle meat,” the guy says.

I listen to scratching cane leaves in the late sun. I dump the tripes into the pool, bag the rest, and head up the ford. I say, “What can I do for you?”

This guy starts up: “I saw you from the road—just came down to see about my offer.”

“I told you yesterday, Mr. Trent. It ain’t mine to sell.” I tone it down. I don’t want hard feelings. “You got to talk to Mom.”

Blood drips from the poke to the dust. It makes dark paste. Trent pockets his hands, looks over the cane. A cloud blocks the sun, and my crop glows greenish in the shade.

“This is about the last real farm left around here,” Trent says.

“Blight’ll get what the dry left,” I say. I shift the sack to my free hand. I see I’m giving in. I’m letting this guy go and push me around.

“How’s your mother getting along?” he says. I see no eyes behind his smoky glasses.

“Pretty good,” I say. “She’s wanting to move to Akron.” I swing the sack a little toward Ohio, and spray some blood on Trent’s pants. “Sorry,” I say.

“It’ll come out,” he says, but I hope not. I grin and watch the turkle’s mouth gape on the sand. “Well, why Akron?” he says. “Family there?”

I nod. “Hers,” I say. “She’ll take you up on the offer.” This hot shadow saps me, and my voice is a whisper. I throw the sack to the floor plate, climb up to grind the starter. I feel better in a way I’ve never known. The hot metal seat burns through my jeans.

“Saw Ginny at the post office,” this guy shouts. “She sure is a pretty.”

I wave, almost smile, as I gear to lumber up the dirt road. I pass Trent’s dusty Lincoln, move away from my bitten cane. It can go now; the stale seed, the drought, the blight—it can go when she signs the papers. I know I will always be to blame, but it can’t just be my fault. “What about you?” I say. “Your side hurt all that morning, but you wouldn’t see no doctor. Nosir, you had to see that your dumb boy got the crop put proper in the ground.” I shut my trap to keep from talking like a fool.

I stop my tractor on the terraced road to the barn and look back across the cane to the creekbed. Yesterday Trent said the bottoms would be filled with dirt. That will put the houses above flood, but it’ll raise the flood line. Under all those houses, my turkles will turn to stone. Our Herefords make rusty patches on the hill. I see Pop’s grave, and wonder if the new high waters will get over it.

I watch the cattle play. A rain must be coming. A rain is always coming when cattle play. Sometimes they play for snow, but mostly it is rain. After Pop whipped the daylights out of me with that black snake, he hung it on a fence. But it didn’t rain. The cattle weren’t playing, and it didn’t rain, but I kept my mouth shut. The snake was bad enough, I didn’t want the belt too.

I look a long time at that hill. My first time with Ginny was in the tree-cap of that hill. I think of how close we could be then, and maybe even now, I don’t know. I’d like to go with Ginny, fluff her hair in any other field. But I can see her in the post office. I bet she was sending postcards to some guy in Florida.

I drive on to the barn, stop under the shed. I wipe sweat from my face with my sleeve, and see how the seams have slipped from my shoulders. If I sit rigid, I can fill them again. The turkle is moving in the sack, and it gives me the creeps to hear his shell clinking against the gaff. I take the poke to the spigot to clean the game. Pop always liked turkle in a mulligan. He talked a lot about mulligan and the jungles just an hour before I found him.

I wonder what it will be like when Ginny comes by. I hope she’s not talking through her beak. Maybe she’ll take me to her house this time. If her momma had been anybody but Pop’s cousin, her old man would let me go to her house. Screw him. But I can talk to Ginny. I wonder if she remembers the plans we made for the farm. And we wanted kids. She always nagged about a peacock. I will get her one.

I smile as I dump the sack into the rusty sink, but the barn smell—the hay, the cattle, the gasoline—it reminds me. Me and Pop built this barn. I look at every nail with the same dull pain.

I clean the meat and lay it out on a piece of cloth torn from an old bed sheet. I fold the corners, walk to the house.

The air is hot, but it sort of churns, and the set screens in the kitchen window rattle. From inside, I can hear Mom and Trent talking on the front porch, and I leave the window up. It is the same come-on he gave me yesterday, and I bet Mom is eating it up. She probably thinks about tea parties with her cousins in Akron. She never listens to what anybody says. She just says all right to anything anybody but me or Pop ever said. She even voted for Hoover before they got married. I throw the turkle meat into a skillet, get a beer. Trent softens her up with me; I prick my ears.

“I would wager on Colly’s agreement,” he says. I can still hear a hill twang in his voice.

“I told him Sam’d put him on at Goodrich,” she says. “They’d teach him a trade.”

“And there are a good many young people in Akron. You know he’d be happier.” I think how his voice sounds like a damn TV.

“Well, he’s awful good to keep me company. Don’t go out none since Ginny took off to that college.”

“There’s a college in Akron,” he says, but I shut the window.

I lean against the sink, rub my hands across my face. The smell of turkle has soaked between my fingers. It’s the same smell as the pools.

Through the door to the living room, I see the rock case Pop built for me. The white labels show up behind the dark gloss of glass. Ginny helped me find over half of those. If I did study in a college, I could come back and take Jim’s place at the gas wells. I like to hold little stones that lived so long ago. But geology doesn’t mean lick to me. I can’t even find a trilobite.

I stir the meat, listen for noise or talk on the porch, but there is none. I look out. A lightning flash peels shadows from the yard and leaves a dark strip under the cave of the barn. I feel a scum on my skin in the still air. I take my supper to the porch.

I look down the valley to where bison used to graze before the first rails were put down. Now those rails are covered with a highway, and cars rush back and forth in the wind. I watch Trent’s car back out, heading east into town. I’m afraid to ask right off if he got what he wanted.

I stick my plate under Mom’s nose, but she waves it off. I sit in Pop’s old rocker, watch the storm come. Dust devils puff around on the berm, and maple sprigs land in the yard with their white bellies up. Across the road, our windbreak bends, rows of cedars furling every which way at once.

“Coming a big one?” I say.

Mom says nothing and fans herself with the funeral-home fan. The wind layers her hair, but she keeps that cardboard picture of Jesus bobbing like crazy. Her face changes. I know what she thinks. She thinks how she isn’t the girl in the picture on the mantel. She isn’t standing with Pop’s garrison cap cocked on her head.

“I wish you’d of come out while he’s here,” she says. She stares across the road to the windbreak.

“I heard him yesterday,” I say.

“It ain’t that at all,” she says, and I watch her brow come down a little. “It’s like when Jim called us askin’ if we wanted some beans an’ I had to tell him to leave ’em in the truck at church. I swan how folks talk when men come ’round a widow.”

I know Jim talks like a dumb old fart, but it isn’t like he’d rape her or anything. I don’t want to argue with her. “Well,” I say, “who owns this place?”

“We still do. Don’t have to sign nothin’ till tomorrow.”

She quits bobbing Jesus to look at me. She starts up: “You’ll like Akron. Law, I bet Marcy’s youngest girl’d love to meet you. She’s a regular rock hound too. ’Sides, your father always said we’d move there when you got big enough to run the farm.”

I know she has to say it. I just keep my mouth shut. The rain comes, ringing the roof tin. I watch the high wind snap branches from the trees. Pale splinters of light shoot down behind the far hills. We are just brushed by this storm.

Ginny’s sports car hisses east on the road, honking as it passes, but I know she will be back.

“Just like her momma,” Mom says, “racin’ the devil for the beer joints.”

“She never knew her momma,” I say. I set my plate on the floor. I’m glad Ginny thought to honk.

“What if I’s to run off with some foreman from the wells?”

“You wouldn’t do that, Mom.”

“That’s right,” she says, and watches the cars roll by. “Shot her in Chicago. Shot hisself too.”

I look beyond the hills and time. There is red hair clouding the pillow, blood-splattered by the slug. Another body lies rumpled and warm at the bed foot.

“Folks said he done it cause she wouldn’t marry him. Found two weddin’ bands in his pocket. Feisty little I-taliun.”

I see police and reporters in the tiny room. Mumbles spill into the hallway, but nobody really looks at the dead woman’s face.

“Well,” Mom says, “at least they was still wearin’ their clothes.”

The rain slows, and for a long time I sit watching the blue chicory swaying beside the road. I think of all the people I know who left these hills. Only Jim and Pop came back to the land, worked it.

“Lookee at the willow-wisps.” Mom points to the hills.

The rain trickles, and as it seeps in to cool the ground, a fog rises. The fog curls little ghosts into the branches and gullies. The sun tries to sift through this mist, but is only a tarnished brown splotch in the pinkish sky. Wherever the fog is, the light is a burnished orange.

“Can’t recall the name Pop gave it,” I say.

The colors shift, trade tones.

“He had some funny names all right. Called a tomcat a ‘pussy scat.’ ”

I think back. “Cornflakes were ‘pone-rakes,’ and a chicken was a ‘sick-un.’ ”

We laugh.

“Well,” she says, “he’ll always be a part of us.”

The glommy paint on the chair arm packs under my fingernails. I think how she could foul up a free lunch.

Ginny honks again from the main road. I stand up to go in, but I hold the screen, look for something to say.

“I ain’t going to live in Akron,” I say.

“An’ just where you gonna live, Mister?”

“I don’t know.”

She starts up with her fan again.

“Me and Ginny’s going low-riding,” I say.

She won’t look at me. “Get in early. Mr. Trent don’t keep no late hours for no beer drinkers.”

The house is quiet, and I can hear her out there sniffling. But what to hell can I do about it? I hurry to wash the smell of turkle from my hands. I shake all over while the water flows down. I talked back. I’ve never talked back. I’m scared, but I stop shaking. Ginny can’t see me shaking. I just walk out to the road without ever looking back to the porch.

I climb in the car, let Ginny kiss my cheek. She looks different. I’ve never seen these clothes, and she wears too much jewelry.

“You look great,” she says. “Haven’t changed a bit.”

We drive west along the Pike.

“Where we going?”

She says, “Let’s park for old times’ sake. How’s the depot?”

I say, “Sure.” I reach back for a can of Falls City. “You let your hair grow.”

“You like?”

“Um, yeah.”

We drive. I look at the tinged fog, the colors changing hue.

She says, “Sort of an eerie evening, huh?” It all comes from her beak.

“Pop always called it a fool’s fire or something.”

We pull in beside the old depot. It’s mostly boarded up. We drink, watch the colors slip to gray dusk in the sky.

“You ever look in your yearbook?” I gulp down the rest of my City.

She goes crazy laughing. “You know,” she says, “I don’t even know where I put that thing.”

I feel way too mean to say anything. I look across the railroad to a field sown in timothy. There are wells there, pumps to suck the ancient gases. The gas burns blue, and I wonder if the ancient sun was blue. The tracks run on till they’re a dot in the brown haze. They give off clicks from their switches. Some tankers wait on the spur. Their wheels are rusting to the tracks. I wonder what to hell I ever wanted with trilobites.