Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She stooped under the bale, got it up again and, the cigarette in her mouth, walked away behind the barn. Ian followed her, his arms against his sides, shedding his camouflage, leaving a trail.

IN THEIR COTTAGE, Ian’s father arranged his sticks on the wide slate fireplace around the circular brazier. He had tiny twigs on the right, against the plaster wall, then larger twigs that were thin, then small branch pieces, then pieces of sapling that he and Ian had dragged down from the hillside forest behind the houses, then round rough pieces of rotten tree that were almost dry and might burn. He had a bucket of coal chunks, and wrinkled pages of The Times . Around some paper, he laid the littlest sticks. Stuart put a piece of sapling on while Ian’s mother sat on the wide old couch and drank whiskey from a teacup. Ian sat next to his mother, his knees a little together, his eyes on his father, but his mouth a bit open, as if he thought of something else.

Ian’s father said, “No, Stuart!”

Ian’s mother said, “Come here, Stu.”

Stuart pushed another piece of wood into the tepee shape and his father said, “ Stu art!”

Ian’s mother said, “Come here Stu.”

Ian’s father said, “Would you mind getting him, Anna? If you want me to make this damned thing.”

She said, “I didn’t ask for the fire, Harry. If it’s too much of a mess with Stuart around, let’s skip it. I don’t care.”

Ian said, “Can I match the fire, Mommy? Can I light the match?”

His mother said, “Ask your father. He handles the hearth and home.”

His father stood up, looked at her, then at Ian, squatted down again in front of the slate shelf and said, “Come on, Ian, before the monster strikes again.” Ian stood beside his father, held the yellow box of Swan Vestas, then opened it and took one, started to scratch it alight, then stood again, his hands at his sides, as his father took the box, closed it, handed him the single match and the box, and said, “Okay, my friend, light us up.”

Ian struck toward himself. His father held his hand and showed him to strike away. Ian tried it three times, and on the fourth the match lit. He dropped the yellow box, stepped backward, then moved himself to the paper and twigs, bent down, singed his fingers, dropped the match into the metal grate, and closed his eyes. His father held the finger inside the circle of his fist, then kissed the finger, picked up the yellow box and handed it back. Ian took out a match, closed the box, struck, struck, struck, lit the match, stooped to the fireplace, singed his finger, dropped the lighted match onto the paper, which caught, and then he stood again to be held by his father’s fist while the paper roared, burnt the small sticks up, and everything went out.

His mother said, “It almost did it.”

Ian said, “I lit all right, didn’t I?”

His father said, “You did fine. I built it wrong.”

His mother said, “I love you.”

Ian turned. He said, “Who?”

IN HIS WHITE jockey shorts and undershirt, his long feet bare, Ian moved in the house while swallows called outside and the morning warmed. He opened the door from the stairs to the main room and watched his father, under heavy gray wool blankets on the couch, rolling slowly in his sleep as if his sleep were sea.

His father’s mouth was open, and Ian moved closer to look inside. Then he went back to the door and upstairs silently, and he stood at Stuart’s cot. The quilt was off, and Stuart’s bottom stuck into the air above his gathered knees, mouth closed, face wholly still. Ian went on his toes to the double bed his mother slept in, her mouth open, her brows bunched into lines. He waited, and then he went on his toes again down the stairs and silently to the little refrigerator for apples and the table loaf and the long sharp knife. He heard his father say, “Ian?”

Ian said, “I’m making breakfast for everyone, Daddy. I’m making enough.”

ON THE TREKKING path through the moors they crisscrossed with sheep tracks, going over one, then another, then descending later to the first, the horses walking around great gray lumps of wrinkled granite and cliffs of slate and later on, delicate hooves under rolling round bodies, slowly dancing over a fast beck that ran in a deep narrow valley for a mile. On the sheep track over the valley, and with the sheep above and below them, shaggy, turd-smeared, expressionless, terrified in place but hungry enough not to move, they rode: Brenda first, her small silver earrings pitching light, then the grandfather, then Ian’s father behind him, then Ian, holding the edge of the saddle and leaning onto the pony’s neck. Behind him were the long stretches of swamp and thick green grass, the little bolls of fell cotton where the water was murkiest on the surface, and the distances back to the cottage where his mother and Stuart were alone.

Ian’s grandfather rode high and straight-backed, his toes pushing in his black pointed boots back against his horse’s motion. Ian’s father bobbed like a toy rider on a toy horse. Ian held on. Brenda rode ahead, then waited near a cluster of junipers, gray-brown and tense on the sky. When the other riders reached her, Brenda let her horse move out ahead again a little quickly, and Ian’s grandfather’s horse went too, more quickly than the others. Ian’s father pulled on the reins and slowed, and Ian and his father went one behind the other, slowly, over the ridge of junipers, until they caught up to the others at the wide clear tarn where Brenda’s white and gray horse was drinking, and where the grandfather looked toward them and then turned his back. As they came up, Brenda said to Ian, “There’s tadpoles in there. You want to have a look before we go — if your father thinks it’s all right. Walk in shallow and mind you don’t slip.”

Ian’s father smiled, and Brenda helped Ian down, and he waded in, slipping on the wet stones and slimy vegetation. Brenda drove the horses back away from the water and tied them away from the yews, which she said they could die from eating. She gave Ian’s father a cigarette and she lit it for him. Ian, in the water to his ankles, teetering, watched.

Brenda said, “Will you all be going home, then, Harry?”

She blew smoke out. Ian heard it over her teeth.

His father said, “Anna’s the one who knows that.”

Ian stood in the cold mountain lake and watched a black bird hanging in the wind, not moving much.

The grandfather said, “I think you’ve got some ground to cover yet, Harry.”

Ian watched. He saw Brenda blow smoke out through her teeth and throw the cigarette into the water. He saw the grandfather watch it float.

IN THE PARKING LOT behind the Church Inn, near the small iron tables, Ian, in his shorts and Wellingtons, squatted at a mound of gravel in front of his grandfather’s Morris Minor estate wagon. With the edges of his hands, Ian channeled and heaped the stones. His father drank from a pint of bitter and his mother drank whiskey. Ian put a stick in the center of the mound, then made a double line of little rocks which led toward the center. He ran a little green steel Land Rover back and forth on his road. His parents stood and talked, and closer to the whitewashed walls of the inn Brenda and the grandfather sat at a table.

Ian’s mother said, “Dad’s going to get in trouble. He really doesn’t know.”

Ian’s father said, “Oh. I thought they were already — you know.”

His mother said, “No, she has a room there, in a sort of a separate wing upstairs. It opens into the hallways of the cottage. She lives there and mostly cooks for herself. Sometimes she eats with him, but that’s all.”

“Are you sure?”

“Poor Daddy. He’s sixty-five, going on twenty-five, and it won’t work for him.”