Matthew Null - Allegheny Front

Marion touched the girl’s arm, telling tales. Miranda laughed in an easy way. She seemed graceful and confident, not like the sort of women his sons brought around.

Sull asked, “She a nice girl, Reed?”

“Oh yeah. She’s from a good family.”

“We’re happy for you. Real happy. You be careful, though. You don’t want one rides you too hard, you know what I mean?”

Miranda was complimenting Marion on the way she painted the doors and shutters teal in the summer. Then she laughed at the goats, the color of charcoal and chalk, that had wandered over to gaze at her with their fancy hell-colored eyes. “Things are a nuisance,” Marion said. “Don’t get near or they’ll devil you, they’ll chew the hem of your dress.”

The men heaved the bed-frame into the Chevy. Sull’s corner nicked the paint. He saw Reed grimace, but the boy quickly swept it from his face. In the open barn, the doe hung by the neck, dribbling blood into a pan and twisting on the rope. They walked to the kennel so Reed could say hello to his old friends, Sull’s black and tans: Fife and Drum, Ring and Train, and Sharky, the crip. They stood bawling on hind legs, nails hooking on the hexagonal wire-mesh. They licked Reed’s fingers through the wire. Like all hunting packs, they seemed one feint, one animal.

“What in the hell is that?”

“It kept killing chickens. Got five before I took it out of commission.”

“That’s a bald eagle!”

“No shit?” said Sull, a wicked smirk ratcheting his face tighter and tighter. “Thought about getting me a bird book.”

“Eagles are federally protected now. You could get in big trouble.”

“How big?”

“A few thousand dollars. Maybe jail time.”

Sull chased the thought from the air with his fingers. “Ain’t seen no warrant.”

“Somebody could call you in on it.”

“Like who?” Sull’s one neighbor in sight was a VFW man with a watery heart and a shuddering walk. He never left the house in cold months.

“I’m just warning you, deer-slayer.”

“Thanks for the warning. Now you tell your old Dad I told him what he could do with himself, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Ha! I’ll tell it to Mom, too.”

“You tell Letha we love her.”

After they left, Marion said maybe he should pitch that eagle over the hill. Sull said no, not at all, it would warn the other away from the yard.

An hour later, the eagle’s mate appeared as a distant mote in the sky. She haunted the farm, carving the air with her hooked beak, her metronome wings beating time. Greater in span than the one he’d killed, she perched confidently in the walnut or watched him from the barn’s apex, like a weathervane. When Sull stepped into sight, she’d fly from his gun.

Around one o’clock, she took a Rockingham hen with the sound of a handclap. Sull tossed open the door, fumbling a shell into the breech, but only managed to throw a worthless blast when she was well out of shotgun range. His finger caught on the trigger guard. The cut burned as blood ran from his knuckles and into the creases of skin. Hens cowered under the porch, reassuring one another with soft, gurgling clucks.

The door cracked when he punched it.

He spent the next hours shut up in the shop. In the slack of the year, he invented chores: tend the chainsaw, fool with equipment, make it better. Keep animals alive, read the almanac, plan another year. Whet knives for melons and shoats, pump antifreeze, harvest bills and army pension from the junk mail. He tucked his jeans into rubber shitkickers to go check the spring.

Stepping into sunlight, he read the sky for the eagle’s mate but saw nothing. He fed brass cartridges into the.270 and took up a crowbar. The wind gleaned tears from his eyes.

He reached the fading field-road where a meager little run sluiced the pasture, just enough water to wet the tongues of cattle. A pair of Angus lowed as he approached. Sull hollered, “How you doing, girls? Your old Dad’s here to love you.” The water was shallow this time of year, so half a century ago his Uncle Aubrey had hauled a yellowing clawfoot bathtub there in an oxcart. An iron pipe hammered into a hillside spring kept it full, but in cold months, Sull had to chip ice twice a day. It splintered under the crack of metal, and his Angus shouldered forward to taste the wealth that bloomed from the blow. He gave them kindly smacks on their haunches as they dipped. This run used to be a pure trout stream, but a thousand sucking hooves had chopped it to a muddy ditch. Sull imagined wild brook trout, cold and firm in the fast, healthy current, buried in the water like ingots of precious metal. They hold fast to the bank, laurel-green with bellies of coal-fire. Wilder colors than you’d dare imagine on your own. Stock had destroyed the run — to be truthful, the Mercers had — and silky mud rose off the bottom in slow veils where the Angus dropped their hooves. Do rivers have ghosts? Do trout swim the air?

Coming home, Sull saw her perched on the light-pole. The crowbar fell with a muted clatter. The eagle lifted her hooded eyes. The bullet missed, and she floated unharmed, at a leisurely clip, up Fenwick Mountain. Sull muttered a blasphemy under his breath, then asked God to forgive him.

Marion had taken their coughing Buick to Corinth for groceries and to visit their daughter, June, a bank teller who never gave them a speck of trouble. Sull never felt right when Marion was gone. The mildest bite of food would make his stomach ache and brim. When he was in the army, her letters promised the happiest life when he returned, and he let himself believe. They were married by a justice of the peace and moved here that same afternoon. The first week, he knew something was wrong. Before long, Marion was moving back to her mother’s home for two or three months at a time. Sull’s father had said, “Some women just does that. When you fill her belly, she’ll quit,” and though his father managed to be wrong about nearly all else in life, he was right on this. Thank God they had children. Maybe she’d like to go to her mother’s even now, but her mother was twenty years gone.

As Sull kicked off his boots, the phone began to clatter in its cradle. Through twenty minutes of pleasantries, he knew from the edge in Carter McCulloch’s voice what the man wanted to say. His game warden voice. Reed must have told him. They didn’t keep a thing from one another. Finally, Sull asked, “You calling about that stupid bird, right?”

“It’s illegal. Real illegal.”

“Remember when you jump-shot that hoot owl? I about shit. I’ll never forget the look on your face. Said you thought it was a grouse. Biggest grouse I ever seen.”

“That was thirty years ago, bud.”

“So?”

“Throw it in the woods,” Carter said. “Don’t keep a claw. Don’t keep a feather. You can’t have any part of it. Serious this time.”

“What if I tell people it’s roadkilled?”

“Throw it out, Sull. Do it for me, alright?”

“Alright, Mother Hubbard. When you coming out?”

“Not soon, I hate to say. Getting ready for rifle, got a couple new guys on staff.”

“Best see you before Thanksgiving.”

“You will,” Carter said. “I got to sight-in that 7mm Reed got me.”

“Yes, sure. Don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t.”

The next morning, Sull heard a six-cylinder whining up the road. He stepped out to find Carter ambling up the walk in his olive uniform. The state truck gleamed behind him. “Look here, it’s old tin-star in the flesh. I thought the outlaws and vandals was the end of you.”

“How you doing, Sull?”

“Been awhile.”

“Too long.”

“Yes, too long.”

Carter stepped onto the porch and grinned with that funny, pinched leer of his, as if the left corner of his mouth had been darned up with a stitch. Sull cleaned a finger of tobacco off his palate and slung it into the yard. They shook hands with grips of iron, as men can who have come of age together. Sull said, “That Georgia corn-cracker they want to elect has your name.”