the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 448, Dec. 24, 2003
Merry Christmas
“A considerate person who understands
that his feet are small bulldozers will guide them wisely.”
—Harvey Manning, Backpacking One Step
at a Time
Lila had run through the cornfields for two hours,
sneaking up over and across roads, and lurching through ditches. Row crops were
tough, she knew when she took to them. But she would have the advantage. By
trick of running up on the roots and staying out the center of the troughs, her
tracks would be partially covered. The brown-gray soil all along the flood plain,
even when dry like this, was soft, and men sank deep. Even the dogs would have
a rough time.
If she could keep it up, she thought, she might be
able to wear out the Killian brothers. Their dogs were another matter.
She came to the end of a field, which was akin to
running out of a small, dark room into pure light. She gasped as she threw
herself into the embankment at the side of the dirt road, where she lay with
her hands flat next her head, her cheek to the ground. Dried, sun-blanched
grass brushed her face. A breeze swept down the alley the road made through the
fields. Locusts clicked in flight.
She took in the heat of the sun a moment and waited
to hear the dogs. She tried to go over the events of the morning, how Jesus
Hank had gotten her into this mess with his brothers.
The wind-up alarm clock had rung at seven, but she
had risen with the sun. The tiny house did that to her. Her aunt had only
allowed one wire into the rocky piece of wooded bottomland when the county
electrified. One wire, one bulb in one room. The kitchen had an outlet. That
was it.
And for the days she spent there, she moved from the
city way of late nights in artificial light to the ways of the floodplain—up at
dawn, a fire at sunset, bed when the stars became full and bright.
Jesus Hank had stumble up to the porch around
seven-thirty, she guessed. He was gassed, drunk again on the shine he made in
the kitchen still he blew his shack up with twice a year.
Jesus Hank was different from Tom and Billy. None of the
Killians had ever made a living outside of Yeardley. They each had their own
cabins near the river that they rebuilt after floods and fires year after year.
Tom and Billy ate raccoon and opossum, raised their own dogs from inbred mutts,
and lived, literally, off moonshine, marijuana, and poached deer. They were
mean, ugly men who tortured the animals they killed. Jesus Hank drank homemade
whiskey, ate corn and beans from his own patch, and made salad from poke and
sorrel that he shared from time to time with Lila.
When he wasn’t drinking, Jesus Hank was a nice man, a
gentle soul. But when he was drunk, he changed, became dark, muttered about
talking catfish and ghosts he’d conversed with along the riverbank.
He had banged up against the door, bringing Lila to
the porch. Leaves and grass and dirt clung to the long, frizzed hair surrounded
his gaunt face. He had a pistol in one hand. She noticed his finger was on the
trigger.
“Miz Lila,” he growled. “Miz Lila, I seen um agin.”
“Hank, you gotta sit down.” She pulled a chair up to
him on the creaking boards. But he didn’t sit. He stood, stiff as a scarecrow.
“They sez I gotta do sumthin I ain’t wanna do.” His
eyes were black. Lila’s guts turned to ice water.
“What is it, Hank? Why don’t you sit down and give me
the gun?”
A fly landed on his cheek and crawled up over his
left eye. He didn’t blink.
“Hank,” she said, her voice shaking. “They’re always
telling you things. You know that. They’re always talking. After a while, you
know it’s just talk. They can’t do anything.”
“Miz Lila,” he lifted the pistol at arm’s length and
pointed it at her, the barrel of the pistol not more than six inches from her
breast. As much as she wanted to duck into the cabin, she couldn’t move.
Crickets in the grass beyond the porch seemed so loud they hurt her ears. She
realized how hot the day had become and noticed the sweat that covered Hank’s
face, neck, and tattered and dirty cotton shirt. A drop of sweat tickled as it
dripped down past the front of her ear.
In a single motion, he curled the pistol into his
chest and pulled the trigger. She must have screamed, she thought later,
because her throat was raw. Jesus Hank fell back off the porch into the grass,
and she jumped forward and grabbed the gun from his hand and looked up just as
Hank’s brothers Tom and Billy came out from beneath a stand of cottonwoods at
the other edge of the floodplain.
Tom and Billy Killian found Lila with a pistol in her
hand and their brother Jesus Hank dead in the grass in front of her cabin. Without
a word, Tom wrested the pistol from her and stood over her while Billy walked
around the property to find a shovel. They sat on the porch and took turns
pulling from a hip flask. Using only a few grunts and gestures with the pistol,
they made her dig a grave and drag and roll Jesus Hank in and cover him.
“Now, girlie,” Tom said, “me and Billy’re goin’
huntin’.”
“Yeah,” Billy laughed, a dribble of whisky running
through his wispy beard. “We’re givin’ you a little lead while we go git the dogs.
Then we’re comin’ after ya. When we git ya, we’re gonna have some man fun with
ya and then we’re gonna shoot ya or hang ya or choke ya.”
“Whatever we wanna at the time. Maybe all of um.”
The brothers then walked down the road, laughing and
hooting. Lila leaned against the porch, her soiled and sodden cotton dress
spread over her legs, crying. Before they disappeared under the cottonwoods,
she heard on of them scream, “We’re goin’ on a beaver hunt.”
She guessed she had fallen asleep when she heard the
dogs in the distance, closer this time than ever. The sun had fallen and the
day had cooled. Running the cornfields wasn’t going to get her anywhere. From
the lay of the land, she knew she was at least another hour and a half from
Thorp on the west side of the river. Crossing the river was out of the
question, here at least, where dikes and bars and braids made it difficult to
reach even the main navigation channel.
But it occurred to her that’s what the Killian boys
were counting on, her staying out of the river. She hopped up and brushed off
her dress and ran the ditch at a steady pace for a half-mile until she got past
a soybean and milo field and was back in the corn. Cutting through the corn,
she pulled up slowly on the levee, looking out over the corn to see if she
could see if they boys had gotten to the road yet or if they were in the
cornfield.
She couldn’t see them, but from the sound of the
dogs, they were at the edge of the cornfield coming her way. The sun was low
over the eastern bluffs, the sky turning red. She scooted up over the levee and
through a tangle of grape and bramble at the edge of the cottonwoods there.
Once through the fringe, she ran as fast as she could in cathedral silence, the
floor of the forest clear but for mayapple, phlox, and trout lily.
She reached the cut above the bank and slid down to
the shore, her feet catching in the sand and pulling on the roots. Her boots
sunk into the mud, and she pulled the laces and left them there, plodding
across the last of the sand and mud to the edge of the water.
She looked into the dark river and imagined the
people it had swallowed. Bones clattered, she imagined, in the arched roofs of
beaver lodges. Soldiers’ flesh and the cheeks of steamboat passengers became
the skinless tails of muskrats. All things were consumed and consumed again
until they flowed out into the ocean.
She slid into the water. The water was warm and
flowed around her in tangible swirls and eddies. She’d swim to the bars and
walk upstream if she could, get to the main channel somehow. As she took a
breath and began to crawl, she thought of Jesus Hank and the catfish and the
ghosts, and how flood would bring them together when it washed the land clean
again.
Today’s poem:
By Philip Miller
Everyone wears fatigues,
passes
joints,
makes
them glow
bright,
red.
His hair’s long as a shepherd’s.
He
watches stars,
forgets
to wish:
whiff
of incense.
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