Collected Stories, page 17
His father came up past him, moved him aside. “One side there,” he said heartily. “One side for the working men.”
He put red hands down into the tub, sorted out the liver and heart. Grinning, he made as if to throw the great, wobbly, purple liver at Bruce, and Bruce felt his stomach go weak.
“What’s the matter?” his father said. “Here I thought you were a tough guy, and you go around looking peaked as a ghost.”
“I am a tough guy!” Bruce said, but looking across at Chet, he saw the superior smile, the hands in the pockets and the shoulders insolent. “I’m not getting sick,” he said, and made his white face turn fixedly toward the tub of entrails. “I’m not sick at all!” he said, and laughed.
His father looked at him queerly. “You’d better go off and sit down a while,” he said finally. “You’re not quite in shape yet.”
“I am too in shape!” the boy screamed. He wanted to run up and plunge his hands into that red tub of guts, just to show them, but he didn’t quite dare. But he stood where he was, and as he stood, the little black dots came back before his eyes, and he stood still and stared through them, fighting them down in hysterical silence. Then his father, still watching him, pulled a flat flap of insides from the tub.
“Show you something,” he said to the boys. “This’s one that’ll surprise you.”
He dipped the flap in a clean bucket of water and washed it thoroughly. Bruce, fighting off the black spots, struggling to keep the slaughterhouse smell of blood and scalded hair from turning his stomach inside out, watched with the others. When it came out of the water clean, the thing looked like a flattened bag with a tube the size of a pencil sticking out one side.
“What is it?” Chet said. “Is it her stomach?”
The father laughed. “You’ve seen that old sow eat, haven’t you? Think she could put all that in this little bag?” He flapped it, shaking the water from the end of the tube, and then put the tube to his lips.
At the sight of his father’s mouth touching the raw insides of the sow Bruce felt the blood drain from him, and the black dots streamed thicker. He shook his head violently, but they stayed. Through their thickening darkness he saw his father blow into the tube, saw the bladder swell and tighten and grow round, big as a soccer ball. The father pinched the tube, found a piece of string and tied around it, and tossed the bladder out on the ground. It bounced lightly, one side patched with adhesive dust.
His lips tight on his nausea, the blackness almost covering his sight, Bruce stared at the wavering bladder on the ground before him, the tube poking out to one side. The insides of the old sow, the red, dirty insides of the old sow he had hated and seen die …
The vomit was in his very throat. He had to heave, but he couldn’t. He wouldn’t, with those boys around, his father there, Chet standing around with his superior hands in his pockets. The whole group of boys was staring, momentarily a little stupid, at the bladder the father had tossed out. Without thinking, in a wild leap to save himself and his nausea, Bruce sprang forward and kicked as hard as he could. It soared, and immediately all of them were after it, yelling, booting it down into the vacant lot.
Bruce broke into the running crowd again, got a chance, kicked the bladder hard and far, chased it, missed, chased again as Preacher-Kid Morrison booted it across the lot. His nausea was gone, his whole mind centered on that ritual act of kicking the sow’s insides around, dirtying them in the dust of the field, taking out on them his own shame and his own fear and hatred and disbelief. And when they finally broke the bladder, far down the coulee toward school, he stood over it panting, triumphant, so full of life that he could have jumped the barn or carried the woodshed on his back.
Butcher Bird
That summer the boy was alone on the farm except for his parents. His brother was working at Orullian’s Grocery in town, and there was no one to run the trap line with or swim with in the dark, weed-smelling reservoir where garter snakes made straight rapid lines in the water and the skaters rowed close to shore. So every excursion was an adventure, even if it was only a trip across the three miles of prairie to Larsen’s to get mail or groceries. He was excited at the visit to Garfield’s as he was excited by everything unusual. The hot midsummer afternoon was still and breathless, the air harder to breathe than usual. He knew there was a change in weather coming because the gingersnaps in their tall cardboard box were soft and bendable when he snitched two to stick in his pocket. He could tell too by his father’s grumpiness accumulated through two weeks of drought, his habit of looking off into the southwest, from which either rain or hot winds might come, that something was brewing. If it was rain everything would be fine, his father would hum under his breath getting breakfast, maybe let him drive the stoneboat or ride the mare down to Larsen’s for mail. If it was hot wind they’d have to walk soft and speak softer, and it wouldn’t be any fun.
They didn’t know the Garfields, who had moved in only the fall before; but people said they had a good big house and a bigger barn and that Mr. Garfield was an Englishman and a little funny talking about scientific farming and making the desert blossom like the rose. The boy’s father hadn’t wanted to go, but his mother thought it was unneighborly not to call at least once in a whole year when people lived only four miles away. She was, the boy knew, as anxious for a change, as eager to get out of that atmosphere of waiting to see what the weather would do—that tense and teeth-gritting expectancy—as he was.
He found more than he looked for at Garfield’s. Mr. Garfield was tall and bald with a big nose, and talked very softly and politely. The boy’s father was determined not to like him right from the start.
When Mr. Garfield said, “Dear, I think we might have a glass of lemonade, don’t you?” the boy saw his parents look at each other, saw the beginning of a contemptuous smile on his father’s face, saw his mother purse her lips and shake her head ever so little. And when Mrs. Garfield, prim and spectacled, with a habit of tucking her head back and to one side while she listened to anyone talk, brought in the lemonade, the boy saw his father taste his and make a little face behind the glass. He hated any summer drink without ice in it, and had spent two whole weeks digging a dugout icehouse just so that he could have ice water and cold beer when the hot weather came.
But Mr. and Mrs. Garfield were nice people. They sat down in their new parlor and showed the boy’s mother the rug and the gramophone. When the boy came up curiously to inspect the little box with the petunia-shaped horn and the little china dog with “His Master’s Voice” on it, and the Garfields found that he had never seen or heard a gramophone, they put on a cylinder like a big spool of tightly wound black thread and lowered a needle on it, and out came a man’s voice singing in Scotch brogue, and his mother smiled and nodded and said, “My land, Harry Lauder! I heard him once a long time ago. Isn’t it wonderful, Sonny?”
It was wonderful all right. He inspected it, reached out his fingers to touch things, wiggled the big horn to see if it was loose or screwed in. His father warned him sharply to keep his hands off, but then Mr. Garfield smiled and said, “Oh, he can’t hurt it. Let’s play something else,” and found a record about the saucy little bird on Nelly’s hat that had them all laughing. They let him wind the machine and play the record over again, all by himself, and he was very careful. It was a fine machine. He wished he had one.
About the time he had finished playing his sixth or seventh record, and George M. Cohan was singing “She’s a grand old rag, she’s a high-flying flag, and forever in peace may she wave,” he glanced at his father and discovered that he was grouchy about something. He wasn’t taking any part in the conversation but was sitting with his chin in his hand staring out of the window. Mr. Garfield was looking at him a little helplessly. His eyes met the boy’s and he motioned him over.
“What do you find to do all summer? Only child, are you?”
“No, sir. My brother’s in Whitemud. He’s twelve. He’s got a job.”
“So you come out on the farm to help,” said Mr. Garfield. He had his hand on the boy’s shoulder and his voice was so kind that the boy lost his shyness and felt no embarrassment at all in being out there in the middle of the parlor with all of them watching.
“I don’t help much,” he said. “I’m too little to do anything but drive the stoneboat, Pa says. When I’m twelve he’s going to get me a gun and then I can go hunting.”
“Hunting?” Mr. Garfield said. “What do you hunt?”
“Oh, gophers and weasels. I got a pet weasel. His name’s Lucifer.”
“Well,” said Mr. Garfield. “You seem to be a pretty manly little chap. What do you feed your weasel?”
“Gophers.” The boy thought it best not to say that the gophers were live ones he threw into the weasel’s cage. He thought probably Mr. Garfield would be a little shocked at that.
Mr. Garfield straightened up and looked round at the grown folks. “Isn’t it a shame,” he said, “that there are so many predatory animals and pests in this country that we have to spend our time destroying them? I hate killing things.”
“I hate weasels,” the boy said. “I’m just saving this one till he turns into an ermine, and then I’m going to skin him. Once I speared a weasel with the pitchfork in the chicken coop and he dropped right off the tine and ran up my leg and bit me after he was speared clean through.”
He finished breathlessly, and his mother smiled at him, motioning him not to talk so much. But Mr. Garfield was still looking at him kindly. “So you want to make war on the cruel things, the weasels and the hawks,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said. He looked at his mother and it was all right. He hadn’t spoiled anything by telling about the weasels.
“Now that reminds me,” Mr. Garfield said, rising. “Maybe I’ve got something you’d find useful.”
He went into another room and came back with a .22 in his hand. “Could you use this?”
“I … yes, sir!” the boy said. He had almost, in his excitement, said “I hope to whisk in your piskers,” because that was what his father always said when he meant anything real hard.
“If your parents want you to have it,” Mr. Garfield said and raised his eyebrows at the boy’s mother. He didn’t look at the father, but the boy did.
“Can I, Pa?”
“I guess so,” his father said. “Sure.”
“Thank Mr. Garfield nicely,” said his mother.
“Gee,” the boy breathed. “Thanks, Mr. Garfield, ever so much.”
“There’s a promise goes with it,” Mr. Garfield said. “I’d like you to promise never to shoot anything with it but the bloodthirsty animals—the cruel ones like weasels and hawks. Never anything like birds or prairie dogs.”
“How about butcher birds?”
“Butcher birds?” Mr. Garfield said.
“Shrikes,” said the boy’s mother. “We’ve got some over by our place. They kill all sorts of things, snakes and gophers and other birds. They’re worse than the hawks because they just kill for the fun of it.”
“By all means,” said Mr. Garfield. “Shoot all the shrikes you see. A thing that kills for the fun of it …” He shook his head and his voice got solemn, almost like the voice of Mr. McGregor, the Sunday School Superintendent in town, when he was asking the benediction. “There’s something about the way the war drags on, or maybe just this country,” he said, “that makes me hate killing. I just can’t bear to shoot anything any more, even a weasel.”
The boy’s father turned cold eyes away from Mr. Garfield and looked out of the window. One big brown hand, a little dirty from the wheel of the car, rubbed against the day-old bristles on his jaws. Then he stood up and stretched. “Well, we got to be going,” he said.
“Oh, stay a little while,” Mr. Garfield said. “You just came. I wanted to show you my trees.”
The boy’s mother stared at him. “Trees?”
He smiled. “Sounds a bit odd out here, doesn’t it? But I think trees will grow. I’ve made some plantings down below.”
“I’d love to see them,” she said. “Sometimes I’d give almost anything to get into a good deep shady woods. Just to smell it, and feel how cool …”
“There’s a little story connected with these,” Mr. Garfield said. He spoke to the mother alone, warmly. “When we first decided to come out here I said to Martha that if trees wouldn’t grow we shouldn’t stick it. That’s just what I said, ‘If trees won’t grow we shan’t stick it.’ Trees are almost the breath of life to me.”
The boy’s father was shaken by a sudden spell of coughing, and the mother shot a quick look at him and looked back at Mr. Garfield with a light flush on her cheekbones. “I’d love to see them,” she said. “I was raised in Minnesota, and I never will get used to a place as barren as this.”
“When I think of the beeches back home in England,” Mr. Garfield said, and shook his head with a puckering smile round his eyes.
The father lifted himself heavily out of his chair and followed the rest of them out to the coulee edge. Below them willows grew profusely along the almost-dry creek, and farther back from the water there was a grove of perhaps twenty trees about a dozen feet high.
“I’m trying cottonwoods first because they can stand dry weather,” Mr. Garfield said.
The mother was looking down with all her longings suddenly plain and naked in her eyes. “It’s wonderful,” she said. “I’d give almost anything to have some on our place.”
“I found the willows close by here,” said Mr. Garfield. “Just at the south end of the hills they call Old-Man-on-His Back, where the stream comes down.”
“Stream?” the boy’s father said. “You mean that trickle?”
“It’s not much of a stream,” Mr. Garfield said apologetically. “But …”
“Are there any more there?” the mother said.
“Oh, yes. You could get some. Cut them diagonally and push them into any damp ground. They’ll grow.”
“They’ll grow about six feet high,” the father said.
“Yes,” said Mr. Garfield. “They’re not, properly speaking, trees. Still …”
“It’s getting pretty smothery,” the father said rather loudly. “We better be getting on.”
This time Mr. Garfield didn’t object, and they went back to the car exchanging promises of visits. The father jerked the crank and climbed into the Ford, where the boy was sighting along his gun. “Put that down,” his father said. “Don’t you know any better than to point a gun around people?”
“It isn’t loaded.”
“They never are,” his father said. “Put it down now.”
The Garfields were standing with their arms round each other’s waists, waiting to wave good-bye. Mr. Garfield reached over and picked something from his wife’s dress.
“What was it, Alfred?” she said, peering.
“Nothing. Just a bit of fluff.”
The boy’s father coughed violently and the car started with a jerk. With his head down almost to the wheel, still coughing, he waved, and the mother and the boy waved as they went down along the badly set cedar posts of the pasture fence. They were almost a quarter of a mile away before the boy, with a last wave of the gun, turned round again and saw that his father was purple with laughter. He rocked the car with his joy, and when his wife said, “Oh, Harry, you big fool,” he pointed helplessly to his shoulder. “Would you mind,” he said. “Would you mind brushing that bit o’ fluff off me showldah?” He roared again, pounding the wheel. “I shawn’t stick it,” he said. “I bloody well shawn’t stick it, you knaow!”
“It isn’t fair to laugh at him,” she said. “He can’t help being English.”
“He can’t help being a sanctimonious old mudhen either, braying about his luv-ly luv-ly trees. They’ll freeze out the first winter.”
“How do you know? Maybe it’s like he says—if they get a start they’ll grow here as well as anywhere.”
“Maybe there’s a gold mine in our back yard too, but I’m not gonna dig to see. I couldn’t stick it.”
“Oh, you’re just being stubborn,” she said. “Just because you didn’t like Mr. Garfield …”
He turned on her in heavy amazement. “Well, my God! Did you?”
“I thought he was very nice,” she said, and sat straighter in the back seat, speaking loudly above the creak of the springs and cough of the motor. “They’re trying to make a home, not just a wheat crop. I liked them.”
“Uh huh.” He was not laughing any more now. Sitting beside him, the boy could see that his face had hardened and the cold look had come into his eye again. “So I should start talking like I had a mouthful of bran and planting trees around the house that’ll look like clothesline poles in two months.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You thought it though.” He looked irritably at the sky, misted with the same delusive film of cloud that had fooled him for three days, and spat at the roadside. “You thought it all the time we were there. ‘Why aren’t you more like Mr. Garfield, he’s such a nice man.’ ” With mincing savagery he swung round and mocked her. “Shall I make it a walnut grove? Or a big maple sugar bush? Or maybe you’d like an orange orchard.”
The boy was looking down at his gun, trying not to hear them quarrel, but he knew what his mother’s face would be like—hurt and a little flushed, her chin trembling into stubbornness. “I don’t suppose you could bear to have a rug on the floor, or a gramophone?” she said.
He smacked the wheel hard. “Of course I could bear it if we could afford it. But I sure as hell would rather do without than be like that old sandhill crane.”
“I don’t suppose you’d like to take me over to the Old-Man-on-His-Back some day to get some willow slips either.”
“What for?”
“To plant down in the coulee, by the dam.”
“That dam dries up every August. Your willows wouldn’t live till snow flies.”
