up like a billboard for everyone to see and shudder. Grandma Sevins.
Mernelle was sweating inside her woolen snowsuit when she reached the bottom of the hill. The town road was plowed and empty, the snow corrugated with patterns of tire treads and chains. The mailman’s track, an old Ford sedan with the back end sawed off and a plank bed and slatted tides added on, left a distinctive pattern. You could hear it coming a long way off, the loose links clacking and rattling. Mernelle could tell if the mailbox was empty, just the disappointing gnaw of hinges, when the tire tracks ran down the middle of the road without slewing in.
Usually she walked all the way down, anticipating something, maybe a mysterious buff envelope addressed to her father, and when he slit it open with his old caked penknife a green check for a million dollars would slide out onto the table.
There was mail. Loyal’s Farm Journal that kept coming even though he was gone, a cattle auction flyer, a postcard for her mother that the Watkins man was coming the first week in February. At the bottom he’d scrawled ‘whether permiting.’ Another bear postcard for Jewell, written in Loyal’s handwriting, so small it was a nuisance to read it. There was a postcard for her, the third piece of mail of her life. She counted them. The birthday card from Miss Sparks when Loyal was going out with her. The letter from Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum. And this.
She hadn’t told her mother that Sergeant Frederick Hale Bottum wrote that she should send him a picture, a snapshot, he wrote, ‘in a cute two piece bathing suit if you got one but one piece is ok. I know your cute by your cute name. Write to me.’ She sent a bathing suit picture of her cousin Thelma rummaged from the tin box in the pantry where letters and photographs curled. Thelma was fourteen in the snapshot, her arms and legs like rakes. She squinted, looked Mongolian. The Atlantic Ocean was flat. It was a tan bathing suit, sewed at home by Aunt Rose. When it was wet it sagged like old skin. In the photograph it was wet and sandy.
This postcard showed a white-columned building behind trees swathed in angry green moss. ‘An Old Southern Mansion.’
Dog was running up and down the plowed road, digging his toenails in and racing for the bend, then turning on a dime, kicking up a spurt of snow in the tight circle and racing back to Mernelle again. His happiness matched up with her getting a postcard. His fur was yellow against the snow. The snowplow had cut the banks far back and leveled them off in two tiers, ready for February and March storms. The blade had pulled up thousands of sticks and leaves like pieces of bat wings. Dog raced off again, around the bend this time.
‘You get back here. I’m goin’ home. Milk truck’ll run over you.’
But she walked toward the bend herself for the pleasure of feeling the firm road underfoot after a mile and a half of wallowing. ‘Juniata Calliota Homa Alabarna’ she sang. Dog was rolling in the novelty of leaves, sweeping them with his gyrating tail. He looked at her.
‘Come on,’ she said, slapping her thigh. ‘Let’s go.’ When he ran willfully away from her in the direction of the village, she turned back without him, the mail in her coat pocket. She was almost to the culvert, the brook frozen inside, when he caught up with her. He had brought her something, but didn’t want to give it up, like a child bringing a birthday present to a party. She wrestled it out of his wet jaws. It was a woman’s shoe with a strap, a pale lilac color, stained and half full of leaves, the silk wet where Dog had mouthed it.
‘Dog. Dog, look!’ Mernelle made to throw the slipper, feinted. Dog’s eyes got the deep hunting gleam. He stiffened, watched her hand with everything he had. She threw the slipper and he marked where it fell, then plunged into the snow for the prize. It took them all the way home and she threw it for the last time, up onto the milk house roof. And went in singing.
‘How come he don’t put no return address on these things,’ asked Jewell, turning the postcard over and frowning at the bear. ‘How does he expect us to answer him? How are we supposed to tell him anything that’s went on?’ Jewell asked Mink. This question could not be asked.
‘Don’t mention the son of a bitch’s name to me. I don’t want to hear from him.’ Mink jerked on his extra socks. His shoulders sloped in the stiff work shirt, the mark of the iron on the smooth sleeves. His hairy hands came out of the cuffs and grasped.
‘You can send it to General Delivery of the place that’s postmarked,’ said Dub.
‘Chicago? Even I know that’s too big a place to send General Delivery.’
‘You gonna gas all day or can we get on with the milkin’?’ said Mink. His arms were in the barn coat, he slotted the buttons through the stretched holes. ‘I want to look over these cows, decide which ones we’re goin’ to sell to get down to where we can manage. If we can manage. Right now there’s not enough money in the damn milk checks to do more than buy shoes and tractor gas.’ The feed cap, greasy bill tilted at the door.
Dub gave his foolish smile and thrust into barn boots. The laces trailed. He followed as close behind Mink as a dog.
In the barn sweet breath of cows, splattering shit, grass dust sifting down from the loft.
‘Them cows has got to pay the taxes and the fire insurance. And your mother don’t know it, but we are a long way behind in the mortgage department.’
‘What’s new,’ said Dub, burying himself in the dark corner, wrenching the pump handle until the water shot out. Began to fill buckets. ‘ “Oh the farmer’s life is a happy life.” ’ He sang the old Grange song with the usual cracked irony. Had anybody ever sung it another way?
DUB HAD HIS NEWSPAPER CLIPPING, and for three years he’d kept it in a bureau drawer that would hardly open.
Marvin E. Blood of Vermont was injured after he jumped from a moving freight train entering Oakville, Ct. and slipped under a boxcar. He was taken to St. Mary’s Hospital where his left arm was amputated above the elbow. Oakville Police Chief Percy Sledge said, ‘Men are bound to be injured if they ride the rods. This young man’s strength should have gone to the War effort, but he has become a burden to his family and the community.’
Mink and Jewell had to drive down to the hospital in Connecticut to get him. Mink stared at the empty sleeve of the donated corduroy jacket and said, ‘Twenty-four years old and look at you. Jesus Christ, you look like a hundred miles of bad road. If you’d did your hellin’ around up at home you wouldn’t be in this mess.’
Dub grinned. He’d grin at a funeral, Mink thought. ‘Gonna have somebody sew that onto my pajamas,’ Dub said. But it was no joke. And when Dub saw the package store on the street in Hartford he told Mink to pull over.
It was hard, opening the pint with just one hand. The cap seemed sweated on. He clenched the bottle between his knees, spit on his fingers and twisted until his fingers cramped. ‘Ma?’ he said.
‘I never opened a bottle of that poison for anybody in my life and I won’t start now.’
‘Ma, I need you to do it. If you don’t I’ll probably bite the top of the goddamn bottle off.’
Jewell
