it out. The dog. The dog was up in the field right where he’d told him to sit. Still waiting. Jesus Christ.
MINK, PANTING IN unsatisfied rage, limped through the house throwing down Loyal’s things, a model airplane impaled on a nail in the front hall, school photos in warped folders edged with gold – Loyal the only one in his class with wavy hair, handsome – standing in a crowd of frames and button boxes on the piecrust cherry table in the front room. The 4-H ribbons, red, white and blue for calves, pasted on a piece of propped cardboard, the high school diploma with its black pointed letters proving Loyal had completed courses in Agriculture and Agronomy and Manual Training, the Dairy Management book from his single year at the agricultural school, dark blue and heavy, the certificate for pasture improvement, a newspaper clipping with a photo of Mr. Fuller, the County Agent, handing the certificate to Loyal, all these things he threw on the floor.
He crammed Loyal’s barn coat into the kitchen stove, scraped the untouched food on his plate in after it. Smoke swelled out of a hundred stove cracks and eddied along the ceiling before curling into the stream of warm air pouring out through the smashed window. Dub fumbled behind the pantry door for cardboard to tack over the window and Jewell, her face red and her eyes narrowed to slits, juggled the stove damper. A roaring came from the stovepipe as the creosote in the bend of the elbow caught and heated the stinking metal to a dull red.
‘Christ, Ma, you’re workin’ on a chimbley fire, damper the goddamn thing down,’ shouted Dub.
Here came Mink, cool now, but with vicious eyes, coming downstairs with Loyal’s .30–.30, limping through the kitchen, leaving the door open. Dub guessed the old man would throw it in the pond. Later he could drag through the mud with a potato fork and maybe get lucky. Probably take a day of cleaning and oiling to get it back in shape, but it was a good rifle and worth the trouble. Laid across the windowsill of the hayloft he could shoot it, get his deer like anybody else. He pieced and tacked cardboard boxes, all dots and creases, to the window frame, holding the cardboard in place with his left knee while he hammered.
‘I’ll cut some glass, put it in tomorrow if somebody’ll give me a hand puttin’ in the points.’ But he was pale.
Jewell swept up the curving slivers, putty chunks and dust, stoutly bending over, her print dress riding up, exposing the ribbed cotton stockings, the flesh-pink dip from Montgomery Ward.
‘There’s glass in the food, Ma, there’s glass all over the table,’ said Mernelle. ‘There’s big pieces on the porch, too.’
‘You can start by scrapin’ the plates, and don’t put it in the pig pail. Have to take it out and heave it. I don’t know about the hens, if they’d pick up the glass, but I suppose they would. Heave it out back of the garden.’
There was the slamming sound of a shot from the barn, then another, and, after a long interval, a third. The cows were bawling like alligators, flat roars, stamping, rattling their stanchions. They could hear Father Abraham’s bellow above all the others.
‘That is a hell of a thing to do,’ said Dub. ‘That is a hell of a thing to do.’ Jewell shuddered, her fingers across her mouth, watched Dub go out to the entry, jerk his coat off the nail. Back through the kitchen to the woodshed door.
‘Be careful,’ she said, hoping he knew what he should be careful about. Mernelle started to snivel, not over the cows, but because of Mink’s rage that was spurting out of him like jets of water from a kinked hose. He could chop them all with the axe.
‘Get hold of yourself and go up to bed,’ said Jewell gathering the plates from the table. ‘Go on now, I got enough trouble without you blubberin’ around the place.’
She was sitting at the table when Mink came in. She saw how a little burst of greyed hairs had grown on his cheek since morning. He threw the rifle up on top of the cupboard without cleaning it and sat across from her. His hands were steady. The streaked hair stuck out from under his cap, the bill like a menacing horn over his eyes.
‘By god, that’s two of them we don’t have to milk.’ There were fine drops of blood across the front of his overalls.
Mist rose from the brook like a stage curtain. In midmorning the trees still bent wet and silent. Every surface was coated with beaded drops that paled bark, wood, paint, soil. The coming and going of Dub and Mink made dark paths across the porch, through the grass like stiff hairs with seed pearls at the tips. The top of the barn dissolved, the pigs rooted in the manure pile, heaving bubbles on the surface of a black swamp.
Mink was out before daylight. Jewell struggled from sleep to the sound of the tractor dragging the Holsteins down to the swamp where the dogs and foxes and crows would find them. The engine echoed and dotted through the fog.
‘We could of at least took the meat,’ she thought, and Mink’s anger seemed to her so wasteful he would have to burn for it in a hell as crimson as the landscape seen through the red cellophane strip on cigarette packs. Not a new thought.
He had done a hundred things. She could not forget all of them. The knock-down slaps, the whalings he gave the boys, same as he’d had himself. Loyal, maybe three years old, stumbling across the muddy barnyard in his little red boots, bellowing like a lost calf but still hanging onto his empty milk bucket. It was a quart cream can, really. The milk all spilled when he did in fresh manure. Mink had slapped him halfway across the barn. ‘I’ll learn you to watch your goddamn step! Don’t spill the milk!’ Loyal’s broken nose had swelled up to the size of a hen’s egg by the time he got to the porch steps, the cream can hanging, and for two weeks the kid had slunk around dodging Mink, looking like a raccoon with his double black eyes. When she’d run out to the barn in her own fury Mink’d been astonished. ‘Listen here. We got to start him young. We got to. It’s for his own good. I went through it. And guarantee you he won’t spill no more milk.’ Nor had he.
And Dub, too, who’d got to eating under the table with the dog when he was what, five or six, until Mink hauled him up by his hair and held him screaming in the air, ‘Will you eat off’n your plate or not! Will you?’
But she couldn’t hold it against him because he came off the fire as fast as he heated up. The Blood temper. Loyal had the same flash temper. And mild as milk afterwards.
Mink and Dub were late coming in from the barn. It was nine by the kitchen clock when Dub went for the speckled coffeepot on the back of the stove, relishing the hot chicory taste. He poured some into a chipped cup for Mink. Shifting weights and counterweights of regard shot back and forth between them like abacus beads on wires. Animosity and bridling softened. Mink tried to smother his contempt for Dub’s wandering habits, hopeless taste for nigger music, those sly records by Raw Boy Harry he brought back from distant places. He went for the Kong Chow restaurant in Rutland, too, where he’d eat three dollars’ worth of vegetables in a ratbrown sauce at one sitting and the Comet Roadhouse where he got drunk on Saturday and pawed the women with his grimy hand.
Dub, in his turn, swallowed the remarks under his breath about Mink’s monotonous ideas and narrow corridors of toil, his pathetic belief that cattle auctions were the height of entertainment. Dub could even choke down the way the old man had shot the Holsteins.
Working in the dim lantern light, their calloused hands touched like pieces of wood as Dub dipped for the handle of the full milk pad and passed
