Elizabeth Strout - The Best American Short Stories 2013

“I see. And this is your Excalibur?” She tinked the chrome-handled wrench with her fingernail.

“Yeah. It’s a torque wrench.”

She made a low whistle and coughed softly into the back of her hand. “It’s a big job, Augie. Is he paying you upon completion or piecemeal?”

“I’m taking the tails. We’re going to settle up at the end of the week.”

“Grisly work, son. That’s the kind of work you stand a chance of bringing home with you, if you know what I mean.”

“The haymow smells like piss. It’s getting real bad.”

“This is gruesome, even for your father. Jesus.” She looked down blankly at the cards in front of her. “I keep forgetting where I’m at with this.” She gathered up her game, her nails scrabbling to pick the cards up off the Formica. “I can go only so far with solitaire before I get stumped. You ever win?”

“I never play.”

“I suppose it’s a game for old women.”

“You’re not old.”

“If I’m not, then I don’t want to feel what old is like.”

“Are you ever going to come back to the new house?”

“You can tell him no, if you want. About the cats—you don’t have to do it.”

“She’s been staying over.”

“I found all Grandma’s old quilts. They were in a trunk in the back closet. Beautiful things. She made them all; some of them took her months. All of them hand-stitched. I never had the patience. She used to make me sit there with her for hours, learning the stitches. I’ll show them to you if you want.”

“Sure. I should get to work now, though.”

“Next time, then.”

August ate a few more potatoes and stood up.

“I wish you Godspeed,” his mother said, coaxing another cigarillo from the pack with her lips. “May your arrows fly true.”

“I don’t have any arrows.”

“I know. It’s just an old Indian saying.” She blew smoke at him. “I don’t care about the cats,” she said, smiling in such a way that her mouth didn’t move and it was all in her eyes. “I look at you and it’s clear as day to me that he hasn’t won.”

The barn was empty. His dad and Lisa were out rounding up the cows for milking. August put on his gloves and wedged the wrench down under his belt and climbed the wooden ladder up to the haymow.

Half-blind in the murk, wrinkling his nose at the burning ammonia stench of cat piss, he crushed the skull of the first pale form that came sidling up to him. He got two more in quick succession, and then there was nothing but hissing from the rafters, green-gold eyes glowing and shifting among the hulking stacks of baled hay. August tried to give chase. He clambered over the bales, scratching his bare arms and filling his eyes and ears and nose with the dusty chaff of old hay. But the cats were always out of reach, darting and leaping from one stack to the next, climbing the joists to the rafters, where they faded into the gloom. August imagined them up there, a seething furry mass, a foul clan of fanged wingless bats clinging to a cave roof. This was going to be harder than he had thought.

August inspected his kills. A full-sized calico and two grays, thin and in bad shape, patches of bare skin showing through their matted fur. He pitched them down the hay chute and climbed after them. On ground level, he took a deep breath of the comparatively sweet manure-scented air and fished his knife from his pocket. He picked up the first cat by the tail and severed it at the base, dropping the carcass on the cement with a wet thud. He dealt similarly with the other two cats, pitched them all in the conveyor trough, and went looking for a hammer. By the time he returned to the barn, his father and Lisa had the cows driven in and stanchioned in their stalls. The radio was on, loud enough that Paul Harvey’s disembodied voice could be heard above the muttering of the cows and the drone of the compressor. I don’t know about you-all, but I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist .

August nailed his three tails on a long pine board and propped it up in the corner of the barn, where it wouldn’t get knocked over by cows milling in and out. He could hear his father doing something in the milk room. He passed Lisa on his way out of the barn. She was leaning on a shovel and spitting sunflower seeds into the dirt. She had on blue overalls and muck boots, and her frizzy blond hair was tamed into a ponytail that burst through the hole in the rear of her seed co-op cap.

“Hi, August,” she said, scooping seeds out of her lower lip and thwacking them into the dirt at her feet. “You didn’t come up to the house for lunch.”

“Yeah. I ate at the old house with my mom.”

“Oh, okay. I’m going to stick around tonight. I think I’ll make some tacos for you guys for dinner. Sound good?”

August looked at her face, her round, constantly red cheeks. She called it rosacea, a skin condition. It made her seem to exist in a state of perpetual embarrassment. He wondered if she’d been teased about it at school.

She was only seven years older than he was and had graduated from the high school last year. August’s father had hired her in her senior year to help him with the milking. She’d worked before school and after school and on weekends. August’s father had said that she worked harder than any hired man he’d ever had. Now that she was done with school, she put in full days. She could drive a tractor with a harrow, she could muck out the barn, she could give antibiotic shots to the cows, and when the calving season came she could plunge her hands in up to her wrists to help a difficult calf come bawling into the world.

“Crunchy shells or soft shells?” August said, knocking at the toes of his boots with the wrench.

“Soft?”

“I like crunchy.”

“Well, I’ll see what you guys have in the cupboards, but I bought some soft ones already.”

“Flour or corn?”

“Flour, I think.”

“I like corn.” August spat at his feet, but his mouth was dry, so the spit trailed out on his chin and he wiped at it with the back of his sleeve.

“I asked your dad what kind he wanted and he said it didn’t matter.”

“He likes the crunchy shells too. Trust me. Do you make them with beans or without?”

Lisa hesitated for a moment and tugged at the brim of her cap. “Which do you prefer?” she said.

“Well, that depends.”

“I bought some black beans. I usually put some of those in. But I don’t have to.”

“I like beans. But I don’t eat black beans. I think they look like rabbit turds. My dad thinks that too.”

“Okay, I’ll leave those out, then. Sound good?” The red on Lisa’s cheeks had spread. A crimson blush was leaching down her neck all the way to the collar of her barn overalls.

“All right, August, see you at dinner. Your dad’s probably wondering where I got off to. We have to get these cows taken care of.” Lisa headed into the barn, and August wandered out to the back pasture, swinging his wrench at stalks of burdock and thistle, stepping around the thick plots of fresh manure.

He climbed the low hill before the tree line on the property’s boundary and sat next to the pile of rocks that marked Skyler’s grave. There was a slightly bent sassafras stick, with the bark whittled off, jutting up from the rocks. It was all that was left of a cross August had fashioned from two such sticks lashed together with a piece of old shoelace. This was a gesture August had seen performed in all the old Westerns he watched with his father. Whenever a gunslinger went down, his buddies erected a cross just like that. During the course of the past year, the sun had rotted August’s old shoelace so that the crosspiece had fallen off, leaving just the vertical stick pointing up at the sky like a crooked, accusatory finger.