Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

Mr. Lamb had begun yelling, shouting profanities and threats at Landrieu as if he thought that could devil Landrieu into recovering faster. Above him, the burning paper torch was still creviced between the house and the piling. A small feather of flame had blossomed on the wood facing, and several small curls of gray smoke began to cloud through the worm holes, making more wasps fall out.

Landrieu apparently discovered the wasps on his stomach at the very moment of partially reclaiming his senses, and scrambled up and began slapping his chest, grabbing his neck, and punching in his hair as if he had discovered stinging wasps everywhere and couldn’t get in touch with any of them.

“Looka there, son,” Mr. Lamb said, removing his attention from Landrieu and pointing out the little scroll of smoke. “You done set my house afire.”

Landrieu stopped slapping himself and stared upward at the involved portion of the house, as if he knew it was impossible for the house to be burning.

Mr. Lamb, however, was satisfied. He leaned against the fender of the Willys, twiddling with the latch on the hood, taking in the progress of the fire.

Robard suddenly appeared, sprinting down the steps of the house hauling Landrieu’s metal pail, slopping water in fat gouts. He rushed past, eyes intent on the smoke, arrived at the bottom of the piling, drew back the bucket, and threw it in the middle of the flames, engrossing everything in a great sizzling expenditure of green smoke. Water began trickling back immediately and raining drops off the bottom of the house, and Robard stood back and scrutinized the nexus of smoke for any flames that might survive, and for a moment everyone was held in thrall.

All at once all attention was drawn irresistibly upward from the segment of blacked siding to the square window just above it, where Mrs. Lamb stood, frowning. She watched them all a moment, her PBX set clamped to her head like a medieval caliper compass, focusing immense private displeasure squarely on Mr. Lamb, who was utterly stunned. And then she was gone, as unpredictably as she’d appeared, and the window was returned to the dull, murky green color that showed a fragile, watery reflection of the trees.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb observed, a childish smile broadening his face. “We almost burnt up Mrs. Lamb.”

Robard started around the house looking disagreeable. He set the bucket on the bottom step and started to the Gin Den. Landrieu commenced dragging his chair toward his little house, walking in a broken side-thrown limp understood to be the result of the fall. Mr. Lamb stood beside the jeep, observing everything, his little hands nested on the fender, the same witless smile on his lips as though there was something funny happening but he couldn’t tell what it was.

Mr. Lamb turned the little smile around, and he knew the old man was just before bringing up the fishing trip. He took a fast look at the Gin Den, but Robard had disappeared, and the old man had him trapped. He wanted to let the moment slip away. He walked over beside Elinor, seated in the passenger’s seat, gave her a tap on the head, and looked up at the still-smoking facet of outside wallboard.

“Landroo, you know,” Mr. Lamb said thoughtfully, gazing at the ruined hoardings and sighing, “Landroo’s the kind of man’d stand in a storm with a teaspoon to get a drink of water.”

“I don’t much like wasps myself,” he said, keeping his eyes someplace else.

“Hell, no,” the old man argued. “Nobody does in their right brain. But most of us can keep from getting stung without rupturing ourselves.”

Mr. Lamb was counting Landrieu’s misfortune as an incalculable pleasure, fostering a real withered admiration for Landrieu, who in all the years of slandering and threats had been tricky enough to stay put. It was a measure of his intelligence that he was still there to accept the abuse, since it wasn’t so much abuse as an inverted form of sympathy, which Landrieu was savvy enough to recognize. And he himself didn’t feel at all sure that he owned an intelligence half equal to it.

“Look here,” Mr. Lamb said, very businesslike. “Ain’t you and me supposed to go fishin?” His face was very alert, and full of purposes all having to do with the business of fishing.

It caught him off guard. The old man knew very well he didn’t want to go and had tricked him and sprung it on him just at the moment he was thinking he wouldn’t have to.

“I guess so,” he said, turning back to the Willys.

“Then get your big ass in. If you can’t go huntin turkeys, then you might as well catch a fish.”

The old man started working the snake pedal with his toe until the motor concussed and the jeep broke forward abruptly without ever seeming to actually start, but just to be in motion spontaneously.

He flung his arm at Elinor, who climbed out, and he wedged himself in the skimpy little iron seat while the jeep was moving, and got his legs stuffed inside the well.

“What about poles?” he said, looking wretchedly toward the underside of the house, where the poles were strung.

“The what?” the old man bellowed, the motor whanging intensely.

“Poles!”

“Shit on poles,” the old man shouted, careening off toward the outhouse, getting both hands on either side of the wheel and seeming to lose control.

He grabbed onto the frame of the windshield to keep from being jarred loose.

“I like to telephone the fish,” the old man said craftily, and motioned with his thumb to the back of the jeep at a little black metal box with a smooth wood-handled crank and two long half-stripped copper leads fastened to gold thumbscrews at either end.

“What is that?” he said. The road had reached the line of ashes and was quickly diving off the bank over a series of long narrow rain defiles that reached down a short bluff into a bottom. The jeep was pitching violently and the old man’s eyes were intent.

“That there’s my telephone,” the old man yelled, and broke out in a raucous laugh, and the jeep almost went over on its side and he could actually feel the wheels leave the ground. The old man looked at him wide-eyed and laughed again.

The jeep ducked below the rim of the bank, and he looked back disconsolately at the house and saw Robard kneeling out in the dooryard to the Gin Den, changed into his green whipcord pants and his silk shirt with the arrow pockets, nuzzling Elinor’s head and holding her collar to prevent her from running after the jeep. He had a feeling that when he got back from wherever he was going, some inexplicable place where you caught fish by telephone, Robard would be long gone, and it made him feel queer and almost angry. And he had the sudden insignificant urge to signal him somehow, to wave his hand up, but the jeep straggled down beneath the flat marly rim of the bluff, and he was gone, and there was no time even to get his hand off the frame of the glass and into the air.

At the foot of the bluff the road commenced out through a tall shadowy bottom where most of the big trees were dead or in a state of corruption, except for sprigs of green isolated in the barren crowns where the sunlight kept them alive. The roots had elbowed through the oaty ground, and the trunks had a pale brownish veneer banding the bark three feet off the ground, and there were no limbs on the larger trees nearer than thirty feet from the ground.

There was, too, an unanticipated air change in the bottom, a cool insularity and practically a solemnity, he felt, the high interlock of dead branches and higher foliage tangled and interwoven and causing the underneath to be protected and sequestered from the island proper.

The road the old man took was a road only in the sense that several other sets of cleated tires had passed on the ground and worked triangular gauge troughs in the mud, bearing straight off through the woods out farther than he could see at any one place.