The Long Home (9 page)

Winer was silent a time. Past the timbered horizon and west was awash with purple. Whippoorwills began to call one to the other tree to tree. With falling light the woods took on a quality of ambiguity, as if nothing were quite what it seemed.

“Don’t it bother you living by yourself all the time?” he finally asked the old man.

“Well, I don’t reckon. It did awhile, some time ago. Course, a man don’t always get his druthers, he has to make do sometimes. Why?”

“I don’t know. I was just thinking about Motormouth Hodges. Him and his wife split up and his wife took up with somebody else. He acts like he’s about halfcrazy. Tryin to get her back all the time.”

“He ort to let it lay, but it ain’t for me to advise nobody. And Lord knows a man can’t always do what he ort to. Me, I got used to livin by myself. When you come right down to it, a man’s always by hisself anyhow. When push to comes shove all you got’s yourself.”

“Leavin? Leavin where?” He’d come in off the third shift and she had her suitcase already packed. He’d come home an hour early, had the furnace not broken down she’d have been down the road and gone. “It come up might sudden,” he said. “And might hard too for you to set out walkin four miles to town.”

“It’s nothin to me. I’m going and you can’t stop me.”

“The hell I can’t.” She’d been standing by the bed and he’d pushed her back, gently laid his weight against her, his hands cupped her face. He’d kissed her, but the face was dead, she lay quite still without looking at him, staring at the ceiling, he did not exist anymore. He laid a wrist across her throat: he’d been feeding the boilers at Napier then, loading them three times an hour with iron ore, and his arms were thick and corded with muscle. He had never hit her but he was dizzy for a moment with an awareness of his own strength. He could have broken her neck, crushed her throat in his hands, but he could not get what he wanted or make her do anything but that she had already made up her mid to do.

“It’s that son of a bitch on Jack’s Branch, ain’t it.”

“Jack’s Branch or China, it’s all the same to you. I’m leavin.”

It was a week before Rayner came by.

“Rasbury talked to Clyde and knows you ain’t sick. He said to tell you he’d hold your job for twenty-fours hours and then that’s it. He’s hirin somebody else.”

“You tell Rasbury I said hold it or drop it, or just whatever suits him.”

“Oliver, what the fuck’s the matter with you? You look like death warmed over and this place is a Goddamned pigsty. What're you doin?”

“What does it look like I’m doin?”

“It looks like you're tryin to crawl down the neck of a whiskey bottle. And to my way of thinkin makin pretty fair progress.”

“I lived by myself a lot of years,” Oliver said. “Used to work twelve hours and walk home and feed the stock by lanternlight. Cook and eat and hit the bed and in the mornin tryin to farm. Back that night at the furnaces. A man that busy don’t have much time for feelin sorry for hisself.” He looked westward, arose stiffly. The last of the light had drained off, the might crept up like rising waters. “We stayed longern I meant to. We don’t get out of this mess of tops fore good dark we’ll be here in the mornin.”

Nights Motormouth spent time like linty change fished up from the pockets of his jeans. Drinking in the Snowwhite Cafe, Hardin’s. In the Snowwhite a slanteyed whore with a mop of curly black hair give him a halfsmile he carried with him into the cooling night, where his only other comfort was the slow drift of the Chrysler’s wheels in the gravel, his only absolute the moonlit road coming at him like gleaming cable unreeling dizzily from a spool.

Out of town then, where the last of the streetlights were sentries marking civilization’s end, all that dark beyond them a world in flux, unclaimed, provinces without dominion. A world up for grabs, where a man with an eye for the angles might make a stand. Here where the light pooled and gave the slick pavement the gleam of dark glass he went, reflected headlights tracking below like something sinister pacing him just beneath the surface of the earth, car and anticar snaking past the city limits and gone, looking perhaps for the deceptively simple curve where matter and antimatter collided in a brief and fatal explosion, the slow rain of falling glass, the tilting headlights limning panoramic birches white as bone, the grinding wrench of crumpling metal, sweet peace.

For there where nights when Hodges sought death like a brother, courted it like a longlost lover, a bitter and unnamed grief lodged in his breast like a stone. If I can make it at seventy-five, can I make it at eighty? he’d wonder, the mysteries of physics spread before him, a clinical coolness settling over him. Hands steady on the wheel, the fruitjar cocked between his thighs, the spiel of disc jockeys a dislocated and demented commentary on the onslaught of night coming at him faster and faster, a dark frieze of trees and mailboxes and nameless tenant houses. Then at the moment he was sure of his control a feeling of elation almost orgasmic would seize him, he’d slow and raise the fruitjar and drink to the fates pacing him who’d seen fit to spare him once again, some joy perverse and sweetly erotic.

And down the line. Past sleeping houses behind whose walls sleepers spun dreams he’d never know, let alone share. A thousand lives woven like threads in a patternless tapestry and if he died here on the highway it would alter the design not one iota. The world was locked doors, keep-out sign, guard dogs. He figured to just ease through unnoticed and be gone.

Maybe down to Hardin’s, he might think, fingering the scant sheaf of bills, the ball of greasy change. Who knew who’d be there? A blond whore from Memphis watching him from beneath mascaraed lashes. “You wasted in this onehorse town, Daddy,” she’d tell him. “Let me take you away.”

Rounding a curve on the Mormon Springs road he came upon them framed in his headlights temporary as startled deer, the old man and Winer stepping from the hedgerow of sumac onto the roadbed and turning frozen in momentary hesitation as if undecided whether to flee or wait and take their chances, will he stop or not? A madman coming at them in a two-thousand-pound carton. Motormouth locked the wheels and slid sideways toward them.

“Lord God,” the old man said. He leapt backward as the car careered past, flailing at it with his stick as if he might head it off like an animal, the stick striking the front fender and rebounding into the night, Oliver scrambled up swearing from out of the sawbriars and gravel, fiercely red and diabolic in the brakelights. The backup lights of the Chrysler came on then and the car fishtailed drunkenly back toward them.

“He’s seen he missed us,” the old man said. “I reckon he means to try his luck again.”

“It’s just Motormouth Hodges.”

“I know who it is,” the old man said irritably. “Why do you think I was scoutin the bushes?”

Motormouth had rolled down a window and was peering myopically into the night. The Chrysler idled throatily. Past the dark horizon the first stars were out, a pale band of them strung eastward. “Yins want a ride?”

Oliver was silent a long minute. “Not hardly,” he finally said.

“What are yins doin out here anyway?”

“Hunting ginseng,” Winer said.

“You must have needed some real bad,” Motormouth sniggered. He lit a cigarette, the flaring match giving his face a yellow, wolfish cast. “I never knowed you had to slip up on it in the dark,” he said.

“We got turned around back on Buttermilk Ridge. Cordwood cutters got the woods so changed it’s easy to get on the wrong road.”

“I been on that wrong road myself,” Motormouth said. “Get in. I ain’t got all night.”

“Well, I have,” Oliver said. “And hopefully two or three more. I wouldn’t slide my bony ass across them seatcovers for a hundred dollars with the ink still wet on it.”

“Get your gimlet ass in here, Winer. I got a thing or three to show ye.”

“Not tonight, Motormouth. We’ve been out since good light hunting sang. We’re trying to get what we can before frost.”

“That’s what I’m doin myself. Tryin to get what I can fore frost. Get in and I’ll run ye home anyway. Don’t you think I’d let ye out, or what?”

Winer grinned. “I’m not even sure we’d get there.” His fingers traced the long scrapes on the Chrysler’s rocker panels, straight furrows like clawmarks as if the car had barely escaped some dread beast. Lines like hesitation marks on the wrists of an aspiring suicide. “Looks like you been cleanin out a ditch-run or two.”

Motormouth put the car in gear, the pitch of the engine rising. “Well, they never did build roads to suit where I wanted to drive,” he said. “If you old folks don’t want to ride, you can walk then. I got things to do. I’ll see you.” He released the brake, left in the small storm of dust and rocks the wheels flung.

The old man watched as the taillights winked from sight. “You take a little bitty crazyhouse and put a wheel on each corner and give it a kick down the road and you’d have somethin about like that,” he said.

Several years back William Tell Oliver had gone out to his hoglot one morning and found a curious phenomenon. He had kept a few sows and a boar then and what he saw so surprised him that he set the bucket of feed he was carrying aside and stood leaning against the fence, ignoring the riotous squealing of the pigs, just staring out at the lot.

There were two holes there, craters almost, ovals roughly five or six feet in diameter and almost two feet deep. After a time the old man climbed the fence and passed among the milling hogs and inspected the holes closely, expecting who knew what. They were a wonder to him. He squatted in the offal of the lot examining them. The manure and rich black earth mounded their rims and the bottoms were smooth. He peered closely at the bottoms, perhaps looking for the remnants of some motel star, thin, bright layers of celestial slag. Hurled here at random or by discernment.

There was nothing. Only the dark earth beneath the layered manure and what he took to be spade marks. “Be damned,” he said to himself. With his walking stick to part the thick weeds about the fence he searched for signs. He had no idea what he expected to find. Old bones replevied from the curious graves, new bodies so destined. All he found was the hot ferment of the weeds and a copperhead moving sleek and burnished in search of deeper shade. He let his mind wander. What would there to be steal? He counted the hogs three time and all three times there were all accounted for. “What else in a piglot,” he asked himself, “save pigs and pigshit? A manure thief?” He looked for tiretracks without expecting to find them, for there was no road through the weeds and his mind could conceive no one so desperate for pigshit they must steal it under cover of darkness and cart it away on their backs.

It was a mystery and he didn’t care for mysteries: an old man who suspected chaos and disorder beyond the curtain of swirling dark, he hungered for order and symmetry in what remained of his life, a balancing of the scales.

He fed and watered the hogs and returned to the house. When his chores were completed he sat for a time in the shade of a pear tree, his eyes closed, feet up on a Coke crate, listening to the drone of bees glutting themselves on the ripe and windfallen fruit. Before the day was over he had returned to the lot to puzzle anew over the holes. He learned no more than the nothing he already knew.

In the morning there were three more holes, somewhat shallower but spaced over a wider area, as if someone had been digging for something at random. “Be damned,” he said again. He stared at the harried earth, suspecting perhaps some magnetic anomaly that sucked meteors and asteroids from the dusty band of space he hurtled through. He stared upward, seeking some cosmic mirror whose reflections marvelously cast chaos into order, righted the perverse and disorder, but he peered only into the blue emptiness, past shapeless wisps of clouds that fled westward ahead of the sun. He stood listening to the morning sounds that mocked him with their familiarity. He could hear the crinkling of hot tin, the pop of barn rafters warping in the heat. The furtive scuttling of a lizard. A thin film of perspiration crept across his shoulders, dampening his chambray shirt.

He counted the pigs again without expecting to find one gone. They were all there and he was halfdisappointed, surprised to find himself willing to sacrifice a pig for an explanation. A pig thief he could have understood, there was reason in it, sense. There was no sense in these holes pitting his hoglot. After a while he got a manure fork and began halfheartedly to shovel the earth back into the holes.

He took a long nap that afternoon and about dark he made himself a quart jar of coffee and carried it with him down to the barn. He had an old Browning over-and-under and he carried that too. In the hayloft he arranged bales of hay into a comfortable chair and settled himself out of sight to see what transpired.

For a long time nothing did. Dark deepened and shadows took the world. He sat immersed in the cries of insects, in the timeless tolling of whippoorwills. There was something of eternity in these sounds, at once bitter and reassuring. He’d heard them as a boy, as a young man, they sounded the same then as now. In this curiously altered stillness he felt he might even hear his wife open the kitchen door and call his name, his son might be on the spring path following him, a small form forever stalemated by time. He drank from the jar of bitter coffee and wiped his mouth on a sleeve, forced his attention to the barnyard below him. It lay in darkness but after an hour or so the moon cradled up out of the eastern trees and the pale illumination crept across the face of the land, tree and fence and stone imbued with significance like images in a dream.

The moon was high over the treeline and he judged it ten o’clock or better before he saw anything stir. When the boy came he came up from the branch-run with silent stealth, easing through the border of gum and persimmon, peering all about, cautious as a grazing deer. Apparently satisfied, he came out of the brush and approached the fence, carrying a burlap bag and a shovel whose handle was longer than he was tall. It was the Hodges boy. Why, he ain’t no morn nine or ten year old, he thought. The boy threw the sack over and leaned the shovel against the fence and clambered over. He took up the shovel and immediately fell to work, selecting a fresh corner of the lot to dig in. Just clock in and go to work, the old man thought in puzzlement. The boy dug for some time and then unpocketed a flashlight, knelt on the scattered manure he’d dug from the hole, raking carefully through it with his hands. Kneeling so in the earth he raised his face to the moon clocking on westward and then arose and commenced shoveling again.