Laird Hunt - Kind One

The hat was a kind of droopy thing. It didn’t look an inch like my boots or Linus Lancaster’s sheath or Cleome’s shoes. Zinnia said she didn’t want to wear those old pork flaps and spit when she said it but Linus Lancaster put her in the shed for three days and three nights, and when she came out she walked straight over to Linus Lancaster and took it from him and put it on. There were rats in the shed. There was a chain at the back and that’s where Zinnia was. It was a heavy chain. It had thirty-seven and a half heavy links. Cleome cried when Zinnia was in the shed, until my husband hit her with his riding crop and said he would build another shed next to the one Zinnia was in and fill it to the top with rats and throw her into it and then build another one even bigger and with even more rats and toss her into that one next, and then he would take the keys to her shackles and drop them down the well and then she could cry all she liked.

“Down the well, you hear me?” he said.

Cleome came to me after this fine speech as I stood in my pretty boots and asked me would I tell Linus Lancaster to let her sister out. Horace came with her and said he had been at fault for making her that ugly hat. It had been a mean trick, and he was sorry. We could all of us hear Zinnia in the shed. She sang in that private way as she sat in there. Some of them were the songs Linus Lancaster liked to sing, only when she sang them it was like old earth sprinkling through the air.

“She’s just in there, she’s not far off, wait a spell,” I told them.

Linus Lancaster liked us all to take a turn at the killing. He said if we were all going to eat pig and wear pig finery then we all ought to kill it. Those of us who ate the most ought to kill the most. That was me and it was Linus Lancaster. The years went by and we ate and ate, and so we killed and killed. In the early times we killed with the chisel or the axe when they weren’t looking and later with Linus Lancaster’s rifle. The rifle wasn’t much, and you had to be better at it than I was to do much more than set a pig off its feed. So you had to reload, take aim, and fire again. Linus Lancaster liked to have some sport with it, and more than once would climb up on a tree or a roof with his rifle and take his several shots at them.

The pigs would emit a sound when we were robbing the life out of them, and that sound is the one that is still sitting here in my head. A pig is a sensible beast. It knows what you are doing to it and it knows the why. A pig gets a look. It has seen what has been done to its fellows. It has seen them hanging up to drain in the sun. It has eaten what’s left of its brothers in its slops. A pig will tell you plain that you have come to it on hell’s orders and that hell is where you will return and that you with your pockets full of dried pig and your stomach full of cracklings will be comfortable there.

“I’m asking you, please, Miss Ginny,” said Cleome.

“Please, Miss Ginny,” said Horace.

“She’s practically right out here with us, you can hear her can’t you?” I said.

I met a man in Indianapolis once who told it that when you had a hard thing in your head you had to scratch at it here and scratch at it there then dig your fingers into it and yank. This hard thing in my head is also in my arms and elbows and fingertips and ankles, and how do you get that kind of a thing out? There were vegetables in Alcofibras’s garden at Linus Lancaster’s place in Kentucky that took a kind of nursing to get out of the ground. Carrots that had more than one root. Turnips grown too big to just tug. There wasn’t anything that Alcofibras couldn’t get out of the ground whole. He had a way. It was almost like he was requesting that the foot-long sweet potato come out and take the air and kindly not break as it was doing so. I expect that if he had set down cross-legged and commenced to blow a tune on a flute the whole garden would have come up and danced for him. Maybe I ought to find a way to set down next to myself and blow on a flute. Or maybe it’s just yanking that’s the way to get it done.

I was twenty and Cleome and Zinnia were sixteen and eighteen when Linus Lancaster commenced to paying them visits. He had been trying on me for six years and one night he pushed me out of his bed and onto the floor and told me to go and sleep in my room and one of those next nights he went over and saw Zinnia, and because Cleome and Zinnia shared one room, when he was done visiting Zinnia he sang lying there between them awhile then rolled up over onto Cleome. I know this because the real house Linus Lancaster had on his piece of heaven in Kentucky was about the size of a thimble and had walls no thicker than wax paper, and the room he had those two girls in was no more than a good spit away from my own. I didn’t hear a sound in that room except for Linus Lancaster. I expect that’s what they had been hearing those years he had more or less nightly and morningly been trying in on me. Some fast breathing and snuffling then those grunts he liked.

During all those years of nights and mornings while he liked to go in after me I would pass the time while he was breathing and snuffling and grunting in imagining I was elsewhere someplace. Maybe I was home at my father’s house outside Lawrenceburg and was just sitting somewhere quiet and practicing my lessons or writing my story about the clouds and getting fixed to read it to the school. There was a crabapple tree I had liked to sit under in the heat and think about my lessons when I had completed my chores. Some of the books Linus Lancaster had burned up for me in his stove had been read under that tree. I had practiced my singing there. Hymns and hot glories and such. There was also my bed in the corner of the little room where I had always slept just exactly like a stone. Other times I thought about my first months in Kentucky and the breezes and sitting in the fields with Cleome and Zinnia, and that is exactly the place my mind went when I was lying there alone in my room after Linus Lancaster had kicked me, his lawful wife, out of his nightly concerns and walked down the hall to their room that first time to pay a visit.

The three of us would sit in a field and play at making daisy chains and daisy crowns, and one morning, because Zinnia had made the prettiest crown I ran back to my chest in the house and pulled out a spool of heavy purple thread I’d had from my mother and brought it to Zinnia for a prize. I put it in her hand and had to close her fingers over it because she didn’t believe it was hers to keep. She had big hands even then, and when I closed her fingers over the spool it disappeared and all you could see was a whisker of purple thread spilling out over the crook of her thumb. Linus Lancaster paid his visit, and I lay there alone and so peaceful it hurts my head bones to remember it even now and thought about Zinnia’s big hand, which had grown ever more over the years, and the piece of purple thread, frayed at the end, fretting a little in whatever fine breeze there was. She thanked me until I thought I would fall over with it then asked if I minded whether she shared some of it with Cleome. I told her it was hers, and if it was hers she could do with it what she liked, but that this was a day for prizes all around. I said this and fetched another spool, this one red. Cleome clapped when I gave it to her and they took pieces of their thread and wove them into the daisies and we all three stood up with crowns on our heads and took hands and turned a circle around and around.

It was Cleome and Zinnia had taught me that trick about thinking yourself into someplace else. They taught me that when they were ten and twelve and I was fourteen and they came up on me crying one skylark afternoon in the bloom of my youth there in that place in Kentucky. I told them that Linus Lancaster had started his husband ways and that I was ready to die if he kept up with them. They each one of them put their hand on my arm and didn’t say a word then let their hands drop and looked at me then at each other, and Cleome said Zinnia had told her in the old days at Linus Lancaster’s home in Louisville, when she had spilled a bucket of peas and taken her long turn in the dark and stink of the coal cellar where you couldn’t even stand up and didn’t want to sit down, that she had to put her mind someplace else.