Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

The jeep was producing a lot of smoke and terrible strangling sounds that filled the bottom, and Mr. Lamb had retreated into the clamor and begun to look a little debilitated. In the mossy light his skin was pale and the blood pounded the artery in his forehead, percolating hotly back into his brain. His frame was bent over the wheel and his suspenders had luffed forward away from his chest as if nothing were inside them to hold on to.

All at once the old man hacked up a pocket of phlegm and spat it and gave him a tricky look as if something were tempting him to speak but he was intent on keeping it a secret until precisely the right moment when he’d spring it and startle everybody.

A woodpecker swooped out on one of the oaks and went walloping down the glimmer of trail, having a difficult time keeping its fat body aloft. Mr. Lamb watched the bird keenly as if he were making a mental note of it, then glanced at him again craftily as though there had been some import to the bird’s flying the way it had that shouldn’t have been missed. He went back to staring at the tracks when he got no response.

“Did you ever hear the story of the slaughterhouse goat?” Mr. Lamb said, as if he were tired of his own moodiness and wanted to supplant it with some sort of scurrility.

“No,” he said, wondering if there was some indignity waiting to be sprung on him in the old man’s upcoming account.

The old man looked at him suspiciously to see if he could detect a trace of insincerity in his attitude toward the story he proposed to unfurl. He smiled back with as much earnestness as he could, and the old man lolled forward and seemed satisfied.

“This is true,” the old man assured him over the gurgling of the jeep. He brought up another freightload of spit and loosed it out the side. “There was this here goat, you see, a handsome big billy with a fat white chinny beard.” The old man motioned toward his own chin. “And they kept this old goat, you see, at the abattoir, to lead the sheeps and cows down the chutes to where they had stationed a big burly nigger with a sledge to hit ’em on the head and knock the shit out of them.” He regarded him again keenly, his old wet eyes glistening in the flicker of sunlight, to see if he was appreciating everything the way it should be appreciated. “Sometimes, you see,” he said, “one old sheep would commence to be suspicious when he started down the chute and take a notion he wasn’t going. Maybe he had an inkling what was waiting for him. So right away the whole damn chute would pig up with a lot of noisy sheep or Hereford cows, and everything would be topsy-turvy, and somebody’d have to wade down in there amongst them to get ’em straightened out and flowing again. But if they had that goat there a-leading them, then everything just went out smooth as shit through a tin funnel, and sheep commenced dropping like ducks at a shooting gallery, and everybody was happy, including the goat, cause just before he got to the spot where the nigger did the braining, a little Houdini gate opened up on the side and the goat trotted off one direction, and the gate closed back real quick, and the sheep just went on another couple steps, and boom! the lights went out all over town. And the goat went back around to the garbage and had him a couple of soup cans before he had to be to work again. And you see, he was a feisty goat,” the old man said. “He’d hike up on his hind legs and eat the phone directory right off the stock manager’s desk, eat up his fountain pens and his Dictaphone wires, paper clips, and everything. And then he’d turn right around and go lead another bunch of sheep down the chute to get poleaxed.”

The character of the woods had gradually begun to shift lower, allowing some speckles of undiverted light to accumulate, The dead trees had begun to disappear and shumard saplings were clustered together, tightening the trail. He smelled the aroma of stagnation from no one place, though out ahead, where he couldn’t see among the mesh of branches.

“So,” the old man said, “it got to where there was some at the abattoir didn’t particularly care for the goat, whose name was Newel, coincidentally.” Mr. Lamb stole a mutinous look at him and quickly returned his eyes to the road. “Some thought that ole Newel was considerably too big for his britches by the way he acted, eating and chewing everything his eye fell on, then turning right around as calm as you please, and leading a whole passel of friendly sheep — who was, in some ways, kin to him in God’s eye — to their eventual doom at the hands of that unerring nigger. So they gave some thought to letting him go on through the chute one day and having that colored gentleman poleax him along with the rest of the disposable livestock, figuring it would teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. Except they couldn’t get around the fact that they sorely needed the old bastard and didn’t want to have to go to the pain of training up another goat to do what this goat already did just fine — if he hadn’t been so disagreeable.” Two tiny wads of spit had begun waging a war for space in the corners of the old man’s mouth, and had begun to interfere some with the way he opened his mouth. “So,” he said, “they decided they’d play a trick on old Newel, thinking that that would cure him of being so uppity. So they went and got him and set him down in the chute in front of a whole big drove of sheep and opened the gate, and there, of course, old Newel went, with them sheep took in following him, like Moses leading the Jews. Except that when they all got to the little Houdini gate that usually opened up so old Newel could weasel out at the last minute, the little gate didn’t open, and the force of them sheep coming down the incline shoved old Newel right into the face of that big sweaty nigger holding the bleeding sledge hammer. And quick as a flash he raised up that hammer and made like he was going to poleax Newel the same as he was any other sheep, and what do you think happened?” The old man’s voice was hoarse from shouting and he peered out with his lips everted and his eyes illuminated while the jeep wallowed on out into the full sunlight.

“I don’t know,” he said, trying not to think about it at all, since he already knew it would have him as the brunt of it.

The old man looked at him intently, suds forming two prominent white anchors in the wedges of his mouth. “He had a heart attack and died,” he shouted, a great sweeping grin overcoming his face and showcasing his teeth, waggling precariously out of his gums like a cracked porch beam. “Haw haw haw haw.” The old man couldn’t restrain himself any longer.

The jeep had suddenly lumbered out of the shumard saplings into the clear, and the old man had to stand straight up on the brake pedal to keep them from driving right on out into the water that opened all at once in either direction for a quarter of a mile, and stretched two hundred yards across into a plain of dead timber where the water simply phased out into the woods and spatterdocks, rather than coming to an end at the edge of an identifiable dirt bank.

Mr. Lamb looked completely bewildered. He was breathing forcefully and staring over the heeled nose of the Willys, his skinny brows clamped together, trying to factor out how it was he had almost run his jeep right into his own water and drowned himself in the process. For some reason, when he had started to drive, Mr. Lamb had removed his spectacles, and his eyes now looked flat and watery, and the little blisters where the pincers had fastened on his nose looked vile and scarlet as if he’d finally had to remove the glasses at the behest of a gigantic pain.

He looked and could see the old man’s mind backtracking systematically toward whatever it was he had been involved in recounting before both of them were almost pitched off in the water for good.