Collected Stories, page 18
“Well, would it do any harm to try?”
“Oh, shut up!” he said. “Just thinking about that guy and his fluff and his trees gives me the pleefer.”
The topless Ford lurched, one wheel at a time, through the deep burnout by their pasture corner, and the boy clambered out with his gun in his hand to slip the loop from the three-strand gate. It was then that he saw the snake, a striped limp ribbon, dangling on the fence, and a moment later the sparrow, neatly butchered and hung by the throat from the barbed wire. He pointed the gun at them. “Lookit!” he said. “Lookit what the butcher bird’s been doing.”
His father’s violent hand waved at him from the seat. “Come on! Get the wire out of the way!”
The boy dragged the gate through the dust, and the Ford went through and up behind the house, perched on the bare edge of the coulee in the midst of its baked yard and framed by the dark fireguard overgrown with Russian thistle. Walking across that yard a few minutes later, the boy felt its hard heat under his sneakers. There was hardly a spear of grass within the fireguard. It was one of his father’s prides that the dooryard should be like cement. “Pour your wash water out long enough,” he said, “and you’ll have a surface so hard it won’t even make mud.” Religiously he threw his water out three times a day, carrying it sometimes a dozen steps to dump it on a dusty or grassy spot.
The mother had objected at first, asking why they had to live in the middle of an alkali flat, and why they couldn’t let grass grow up to the door. But he snorted her down. Everything round the house ought to be bare as a bone. Get a good prairie fire going and it’d jump that guard like nothing, and if they had grass to the door where’d they be? She said why not plow a wider fireguard then, one a fire couldn’t jump, but he said he had other things to do besides plowing fifty-foot fireguards.
They were arguing inside when the boy came up on the step to sit down and aim his empty .22 at a fence post. Apparently his mother had been persistent, and persistence when he was not in a mood for it angered the father worse than anything else. Their talk came vaguely through his concentration, but he shut his ears on it. If that spot on the fence post was a coyote now, and he held the sight steady, right on it, and pulled the trigger, that old coyote would jump about eighty feet in the air and come down dead as a mackerel, and he could tack his hide on the barn the way Mr. Larsen had once, only the dogs had jumped and torn the tail and hind legs off Mr. Larsen’s pelt, and he wouldn’t get more than the three-dollar bounty out of it. But then Mr. Larsen had shot his with a shotgun anyway, and the hide wasn’t worth much even before the dogs tore it. …
“I can’t for the life of me see why not,” his mother said inside. “We could do it now. We’re not doing anything else.”
“I tell you they wouldn’t grow!” said his father with emphasis on every word. “Why should we run our tongues out doing everything that mealy-mouthed fool does?”
“I don’t want anything but the willows. They’re easy.”
He made his special sound of contempt, half snort, half grunt. After a silence she tried again. “They might even have pussies on them in the spring. Mr. Garfield thinks they’d grow, and he used to work in a greenhouse, his wife told me.”
“This isn’t a greenhouse, for Chrissake.”
“Oh, let it go,” she said. “I’ve stood it this long without any green things around. I guess I can stand it some more.”
The boy, aiming now toward the gate where the butcher bird, coming back to his prey, would in just a minute fly right into Deadeye’s unerring bullet, heard his father stand up suddenly.
“Abused, aren’t you?” he said.
The mother’s voice rose. “No, I’m not abused! Only I can’t see why it would be so awful to get some willows. Just because Mr. Garfield gave me the idea, and you didn’t like him …”
“You’re right I didn’t like Mr. Garfield,” the father said. “He gave me a pain right under the crupper.”
“Because,” the mother’s voice said bitterly, “he calls his wife ‘dear’ and puts his arm around her and likes trees. It wouldn’t occur to you to put your arm around your wife, would it?”
The boy aimed and held his breath. His mother ought to keep still, because if she didn’t she’d get him real mad and then they’d both have to tiptoe around the rest of the day. He heard his father’s breath whistle through his teeth, and his voice, mincing, nasty. “Would you like me to kiss you now, dear?”
“I wouldn’t let you touch me with a ten-foot pole,” his mother said. She sounded just as mad as he did, and it wasn’t often she let herself get that way. The boy squirmed over when he heard the quick hard steps come up behind him and pause. Then his father’s big hand, brown and meaty and felted with fine black hair, reached down over his shoulder and took the .22.
“Let’s see this cannon old Scissor-bill gave you,” he said.
It was a single-shot, bolt-action Savage, a little rusty on the barrel, the bolt sticky with hardened grease when the father removed it. Sighting up through the barrel, he grunted. “Takes care of a gun like he takes care of his farm. Probably used it to cultivate his luv-ly trees.”
He went out into the sleeping porch, and after a minute came back with a rag and a can of machine oil. Hunching the boy over on the step, he sat down and began rubbing the bolt with the oil-soaked rag.
“I just can’t bear to shoot anything any more,” he said, and laughed suddenly. “I just cawn’t stick it, little man.” He leered at the boy, who grinned back uncertainly. Squinting through the barrel again, the father breathed through his nose and clamped his lips together, shaking his head.
The sun lay heavy on the baked yard. Out over the corner of the pasture a soaring hawk caught wind and sun at the same time, so that his light breast feathers flashed as he banked and rose. Just wait, the boy thought. Wait till I get my gun working and I’ll fix you, you henrobber. He thought of the three chicks a hawk had struck earlier in the summer, the three balls of yellow with the barred mature plumage just coming through. Two of them dead when he got there and chased the hawk away, the other gasping with its crop slashed wide open and the wheat spilling from it on the ground. His mother had sewed up the crop, and the chicken had lived, but it always looked droopy, like a plant in drought time, and sometimes it would stand and work its bill as if it were choking.
By golly, he thought, I’ll shoot every hawk and butcher bird in twenty miles. I’ll …
“Rustle around and find me a piece of baling wire,” his father said. “This barrel looks like a henroost.”
Behind the house he found a piece of rusty wire, brought it back and watched his father straighten it, wind a bit of rag round the end, ram it up and down through the barrel, and peer through again. “He’s leaded her so you can hardly see the grooves,” he said. “But maybe she’ll shoot. We’ll fill her with vinegar and cork her up tonight.”
The mother was behind them, leaning against the jamb and watching. She reached down and rumpled the father’s black hair. “The minute you get a gun in your hand you start feeling better,” she said. “It’s just a shame you weren’t born fifty years sooner.”
“A gun’s a good tool,” he said. “It hadn’t ought to be misused. Gun like this is enough to make a guy cry.”
“Well, you’ve got to admit it was nice of Mr. Garfield to give it to Sonny,” she said. It was the wrong thing to say. The boy had a feeling somehow that she knew it was the wrong thing to say, that she said it just to have one tiny triumph over him. He knew it would make him boiling mad again, even before he heard his father’s answer.
“Oh, sure, Mr. Garfield’s a fine man. He can preach a better sermon than any homesteader in Saskatchewan. God Almighty! everything he does is better than what I do. All right. All right, all right! Why the hell don’t you move over there if you like it so well?”
“If you weren’t so blind … !”
He rose with the .22 in his hand and pushed past her into the house. “I’m not so blind,” he said heavily in passing. “You’ve been throwing that bastard up to me for two hours. It don’t take very good eyes to see what that means.”
His mother started to say, “All because I want a few little …” but the boy cut in on her, anxious to help the situation somehow. “Will it shoot now?” he said.
His father said nothing. His mother looked down at him, shrugged, sighed, smiled bleakly with a tight mouth. She moved aside when the father came back with a box of cartridges in his hand. He ignored his wife, speaking to the boy alone in the particular half-jocular tone he always used with him or the dog when he wasn’t mad or exasperated.
“Thought I had these around,” he said. “Now we’ll see what this smoke-pole will do.”
He slipped a cartridge in and locked the bolt, looking round for something to shoot at. Behind him the mother’s feet moved on the floor, and her voice came purposefully. “I can’t see why you have to act this way,” she said. “I’m going over and get some slips myself.”
There was a long silence. The angled shade lay sharp as a knife across the baked front yard. The father’s cheek was pressed against the stock of the gun, his arms and hands as steady as stone.
“How’ll you get there?” he said, whispering down the barrel.
“I’ll walk.”
“Five miles and back.”
“Yes, five miles and back. Or fifty miles and back. If there was any earthly reason why you should mind …”
“I don’t mind,” he said, and his voice was soft as silk. “Go ahead.”
Close to his mother’s long skirts in the doorway, the boy felt her stiffen as if she had been slapped. He squirmed anxiously, but his desperation could find only the question he had asked before. His voice squeaked on it: “Will it shoot now?”
“See that sparrow out there?” his father said, still whispering. “Right out by that cactus?”
“Harry!” the mother said. “If you shoot that harmless little bird!”
Fascinated, the boy watched his father’s dark face against the rifle stock, the locked, immovable left arm, the thick finger crooked inside the trigger guard almost too small to hold it. He saw the sparrow, gray, white-breasted, hopping obliviously in search of bugs, fifty feet out on the gray earth. “I just … can’t … bear … to … shoot … anything,” the father said, his face like dark stone, his lips hardly moving. “I just … can’t … stick it!”
“Harry!” his wife screamed.
The boy’s mouth opened, a dark wash of terror shadowed his vision of the baked yard cut by its sharp angle of shade.
“Don’t, Pa!”
The rocklike figure of his father never moved. The thick finger squeezed slowly down on the trigger, there was a thin, sharp report, and the sparrow jerked and collapsed into a shapeless wad on the ground. It was as if, in the instant of the shot, all its clean outlines vanished. Head, feet, the white breast, the perceptible outlines of the folded wings, disappeared all at once, were crumpled together and lost, and the boy sat beside his father on the step with the echo of the shot still in his ears.
He did not look at either of his parents. He looked only at the crumpled sparrow. Step by step, unable to keep away, he went to it, stooped, and picked it up. Blood stained his fingers, and he held the bird by the tail while he wiped the smeared hand on his overalls. He heard the click as the bolt was shot and the empty cartridge ejected, and he saw his mother come swiftly out of the house past his father, who sat still on the step. Her hands were clenched, and she walked with her head down, as if fighting tears.
“Ma!” the boy said dully. “Ma, what’ll I do with it?”
She stopped and turned, and for a moment they faced each other. He saw the dead pallor of her face, the burning eyes, the not-quite-controllable quiver of her lips. But her words, when they came, were flat and level, almost casual.
“Leave it right there,” she said. “After a while your father will want to hang it on the barbed wire.”
The Double Corner
The summer sun was fierce and white on the pavement, the station, the tracks, the stucco walls of buildings, but the pepper tree made a domed and curtained cave of shade where they waited—the twins languidly playing catch with a tennis ball, Tom and Janet on the iron bench. Sitting with her head back, looking up into the green dome, Janet saw the swarming flies up among the branches, hanging like smoke against the ceiling of a room. They made a sleepy sound like humming wires.
“I wish I thought you knew what you’re doing,” Tom said.
She looked at him. He was leaning forward, his hat pushed back, and with his toe he was keeping a frantic ant from going where it wanted to with a crumb. He had worked on cattle ranches as a young man, and she had always said he had cowpuncher’s eyes, squinty and faded, the color of much-washed jeans.
“She’s your mother,” she reminded him.
“I know.”
“If I’m glad to have her, I should think you’d be.”
The boys were throwing the tennis ball up into the branches, bringing down showers of leaves and twigs. “Hey, kids, cut it out,” Tom said. To Janet he said, “We’ve been all through it. Let it ride.”
“But you had some reason,” she persisted.
“Reason?” he said, and picked his calloused palm. “She’d be better off in an institution.”
That made Janet sit up stiffly and try to hold his eyes. “That’s what I can’t understand, why you’d be willing to send your mother to an asylum.” He was squinting, moving his head slowly back and forth, but he would not look up.
“I wish I could understand you,” Janet said, watching the dark cheek, the long jaw, the leathery sunburned neck, the tipped-back rancher’s hat that showed the graying temple. “Suppose you died, and I got old and needed care. Would you expect the boys to send me off to an asylum, or would you expect they’d have enough love and gratitude to give me a room in their house?”
“You’re not out of your mind,” Tom said.
“I would be, if they treated me the way she’s been treated. Four or five months with Albert, and then he palmed her off on Margaret; and Margaret kept her a little while and sent her to George; and George keeps her two months and wants to ship her to an institution—would have if we hadn’t telephoned.”
Tom removed a leaf from a twig. “It isn’t that she’s not wanted. She just hasn’t got all her buttons any more. She can’t be fitted into a family.”
“Well, I tell you one thing,” Janet said. “In our family she’s going to feel wanted! She’s like a child, Tom. She’s got to feel that she has a place.”
“Okay,” he said. He leaned forward and spit on the ant he had been herding. The boys had given up their ball and were sitting on the edge of the rocked-in well from which the pepper’s trunk rose.
Janet watched her husband a minute. She did not like him when his face went wooden and impenetrable. “Tom,” she said, “will having her around bother you? Will it make you feel bad?”
His faded blue eyes turned on her, almost amused. “Relax,” he said.
The train whistled for the crossing at Santa Clara, and Janet swung around to the boys. “Remember?” she said. “We’re all going to be extra nice to Grandma. We’re not going to laugh, or pester, or tease. We’re going to be as polite and kind as we know how to be. Oliver, can you remember that? Jack, can you?”
The twins stared back at her, identical in T-shirts and jeans, with identical straight brown hair and identical expressions of hypocritical piety. Unsure of what their expressions meant, she waved them out through the curtain of branches, and they stood on the blazing platform in the ovenlike heat until the train rolled in and the Pullmans came abreast of them and the train stopped.
Janet felt above her the cool air-conditioned stares of passengers; she saw porters swing out, down the long train. A redcap pushed a truckload of baggage against the steps of a car. Then, down toward the rear of the train, a man in a blue slack suit stepped down and waited with his hand stretched upward. In a moment he climbed up again and came down leading an old lady by the arm. Janet hurried down the platform.
The man in blue, a fattish man with bare hairy arms, clung to Grandma’s elbow and smiled a sickly smile as Janet came up. He had sweated through the armpits of his shirt. Grandma Waldron leaned away from him, her little brown eyes darting constantly, her lips trembling on a soundless stream of talk. She looked agitated, and her arms were folded hard across the breast of her heavy coat as if she were protecting something precious. She wore black shoes and a black hat, and she looked intolerably hot. In her unsuitable clothes amid the white heat and the pastel stucco of a California town, she tugged at Janet’s sympathy like a lost and unhappy child.
“Hello, Mom,” Tom said, and came forward to kiss her, but she twisted away with her arms still clenched across her breast. She appeared to wrestle with something; her face was strained, and drops of perspiration beaded her upper lip. Then the head of a cat thrust violently up above the lapels of the coat, a panting cat, ears back, pink mouth snarling. Under Grandma’s clutching arms its body struggled, but it could not work free. It yowled, strangling.
Grandma ducked around Tom and the man in blue and came up to Janet. Her soundless talking became audible as a stream of words so unaccented that Janet wondered if she heard them herself, if she knew when she was speaking aloud and when only thinking with her lips. Paying no attention to the cat writhing weakly under the old lady’s coat, she put out her hands and made her voice warm. “Grandma, it’s awfully nice to have you here!”
Grandma’s voice rode over the greetings, and she did not relax her clutch around the cat to touch the welcoming hands. “… never get rid of that man,” she said. “Came up before I even got settled in my seat and stuck like a burr all the way I know what he wanted, he wanted into my bag so he could steal my picture of Tom’s family, said he wanted to see what they looked like if there’d been a policeman there I’d have had him arrested trying to get into my suitcase I’ve had to watch every minute.”
