Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

THERE WERE CATS in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin or misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board, and then after a few days we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”

The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales, scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but, like most farm boys, he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the rules of husbandry that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close; in return, they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange Martian bank. He could earn fifty dollars at least, maybe seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August often went there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature trapped inside a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll, punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the shed there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery: the looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, Mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval-looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed among the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying stages of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a mower blade the size of a broadsword, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it too. Then he uncovered a three-foot-long torque wrench with a slim stainless-steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques—the sidearm golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing ax chop, the short, quick, line-drive baseball checked swing—the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat and then shouldered his weapon, put the gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch, low-slung, like a dog crouching to avoid a kick. August’s mother’s parents had built the house with their own hands and lived in it until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August’s father had finished the year August turned one. The new house was tall, with a sharp-peaked roof. It had white shutters, a full wraparound porch. August’s grandparents had both died shortly before he was born, and the first thing his father had done when the farm became his was sell fifty acres of fallow pasture and build the new house.

“He feels like it’s his own,” August’s mother had said to him once, while smoking at the dining room table of the new house. “His people didn’t have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him.” She coughed. “It’s too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It’s hard to heat too, exposed up on the hill like this; the wind gets in everywhere. My father would never have done it like that. He built the best possible house for himself and my mother. That’s the type of man he was.”

August tapped on the front door a few times with the wrench, then went inside. The old house had been built by folks interested in efficiency, not landscape, and its windows were few and small. The kitchen was dimly lit by a single shaft of light that came through the window above the sink. The room smelled like frying bacon, and the radio was on. Paul Harvey was extolling the virtues of a Firmness Control Sleep System. At my age there are few things I appreciate more than a night of restful sleep. Get this mattress. It was dreamed up by a team of scientists. It’s infinitely adjustable. Your dreams will thank you .

“Augie, my fair son, how does the day find you?”

His mother was at the kitchen table playing solitaire. A pan of sliced potatoes fried with pieces of bacon and onion sat next to her ashtray. She smoked Swisher Sweet cigarillos, and a thin layer of smoke undulated above her head like a flying carpet waiting for a charge to transport.

“I made lunch, and it smelled so good while it was cooking, but then I found myself suddenly not hungry. I don’t know, I may have finally broken through.”

August pulled out a chair and sat across from his mother at the small table. “Broken through to what?” he said.

“Oh, I didn’t tell you? I’ve been devoting myself to a new teaching.” She stubbed out the cigarillo and shook another from the pack sitting on the table, a fine network of lines appearing around her mouth as she pursed her lips to light it. Her nails were long and gray, her fingertips jaundiced with tobacco stain. “Yeah,” she continued, “I’ve become an inediate.”

“A what?”

“An inediate—you know, a breatharian?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Air eaters? Sky swallowers? Ether ingesters?”

“Nope.”

“You can attune your mind and your body, Augie. Perfectly attune them by healthy living and meditation, so that you completely lose the food requirement. I mean, it’s not just that you’re not hungry. That’s not too hard. I’m talking about getting to the point where all you have to do is breathe the air and you’re satisfied. You get full and you never have to eat. And you can survive that way, happy as a clam.” She took a sip of coffee, smoke dribbling from her nose after she swallowed. “That’s what I’ve been working on.”

She pushed the pan of potatoes and bacon toward him, and August ate some even though Lisa had told him she would make him a sandwich when she got up from the barn. The potatoes were greasy and good, the bacon little pieces of semi-charred saltiness, the onions soft, translucent, and sweet. August ate, then wiped his hands on his jeans and put his wrench on the table for his mother to see.

“Dad gave me a job,” he said. “For money.”

“Oh, well, I’m proud to hear it. Did you negotiate a contract? Set a salary-review option pending exemplary performance?”

“No, I’m just killing the cats in the barn.”