Chris Offutt: Kentucky Straight: Stories

“Reckon he’ll live?” Mercer said.

“If he don’t, my name’ll come up. I got to get off this hill.”

Coe lit another cigarette and started the truck. He turned on the wipers and lights, and after a few seconds, curls of steam rose from the warming hood. The steady hum of rain enclosed the truck.

The boy crouched at the end of the wooded ridge, smashing walnuts with a brick and using a nail to pry the nutmeat. Quartered green shells lay scattered around him. To knock more nuts from the tree, Vaughn needed a special rock, since the veer of flat ones was hard to control, and small stones would not dislodge the September walnuts clinging tightly to the limbs. If he waited until they fell on their own, squirrels would get the best. Vaughn found a plum-sized rock and sighted into the leaves, arm tensed to throw. He spun instead, staring wildly into the dense tree line that bordered the ridge.

Something was there. Something was in the woods.

He was too far from the house for it to be his mother and there were no near neighbors. The path behind him was empty. Vaughn scanned the brush for animal sign, seeing only dark silent woods capped by a narrow strip of sky between the hills. Vaughn shrugged. As his mother would say, a goose walked over his grave was all. He found his target clump of walnuts, missed his throw, and felt something in the woods again, closer now.

He moved into the shadow of trees and abruptly knew that a deer would be standing beyond the pine thicket ahead. His palms tingled and his fingers began to spread. As he neared the syrupy dark of the low pines, the feeling increased. Dropped needles, soft and brown, hushed his feet. Sap smell filled him. He circled the thicket and peered into a small empty clearing. The deer was gone, and with it, the strange pull of the woods. He stepped into the clearing and a man stood beside an oak as if shed from the tree.

He was an old man with long hair matted by leaf and twig. A deer-hide shirt draped loose over his body as though he had once been a bigger man. Ragged fringe tied oak leaves to his shirt.

The man raised his brown palm to show the rock. He tossed it underhand and when Vaughn caught it, the man was gone. Vaughn stared from the rock to the silent woods and felt scared, but he was twelve and knew he could outrun a man that old. He pitched the rock at the tree. The man stepped from behind the oak, holding the stone he’d caught. His face was lined like ironwood.

“Who are you?” Vaughn said.

“Depends on who you be.”

“Vaughn.”

“Who’s your maw’s people?”

“Boatman.”

Dark holes speckled the old man’s brief grin. “You look a Boatman,” he said. “Got them slitty eyes all us got.”

“Are we kin?”

“Elijah Boatman,” the man said. “Lije they called me when they did. I’m your grandpaw.”

“No you ain’t. He’s dead.”

The man’s narrow shoulders drooped as he limped across the clearing. “Your maw tell you that?”

Vaughn nodded. The man blew a burst of warm air against Vaughn’s face.

“Feel that?” the man said.

“Yup.”

“Still yet on my hind legs, ain’t I. Do I look dead to you?”

“Well,” Vaughn said. “You’re kindly old.”

Lije laughed, a low sound rising to a bellow that ended with a prolonged cough. He used Vaughn’s shoulder to steady himself. His breath was raspy. His body bowed inside the stiff buckskin, and it seemed to Vaughn that only the man’s clothes were holding him up. The woods were very quiet.

“How come you’re dressed like that?” Vaughn said.

“It’s the Boatman way,” Lije said. “How come you ain’t?”

Vaughn frowned and looked at the ground. He wore the same clothes as all the other boys on Redbird Ridge, ordered from Sears a size too large. His mother ironed patches at the knees that stiffened his pants like stovepipes. Lije cleared his throat.

“A-using this rock to fetch out walnuts, are you?”

“Was.”

“Rock’s not much count for naught but finding rock,” Lije said. “Don’t never aim a throw.”

He stepped into the late afternoon sunlight cutting over the western ridge. Vaughn followed until the man suddenly turned to face him, holding a walnut. He closed his eyes and cocked an arm, fringe drifting like a wing. He threw the walnut over his shoulder. It arched high, dropping through the boughs of yellow leaves. Several walnuts fell to earth.

The old man opened his eyes. “Leave one,” he said.

The nuts lay beneath the tree in a diamond shape with a large walnut in the center. Vaughn gathered them quickly, winding them into the bottom of his shirt when his pockets became too tight. He left the biggest and hurried to the man, who leaned on a maple by the game path. Vaughn was aware of the wind’s sliding chill and the old man’s withered body in his deer-hide shirt. He seemed weaker now.

“Where was it?” Lije said. “The leaving one.”

“In the middle.”

The man nodded, grunting a long rumble from deep within his chest. Wind moaned back and the two sounds braided through the woods. Fading sunlight cooled the air.

“Be dark in a minute,” Vaughn said.

“Will.”

“Let’s go to the house.”

“Your maw’ll not put me up. Don’t say you seen me, either. Swear by the dirt.”

Vaughn nodded. Lije steaded himself and looked into the woods. “Never could abide no roof.”

“Ours ain’t the best,” Vaughn said. “Leaks come spring.”

Lije pointed at Venus faint above the distant ridge. “Only roof-hole I ever did crave.”

“Evening star ain’t a hole.”

“Then how’s that light get through?”

Vaughn tipped his head to the dim night sky. When he looked at Lije, the old man was moving into the woods, his knife sheath flapping deer-tail white. Hillside darkness took him swift as shadow. Vaughn looked at Venus again, remembering from school that it wasn’t a star but a planet like earth, only closer to the sun. He walked slowly home, wondering who the old man was. Vaughn knew everyone who lived on the ridge and in the flanking hollows below the hill. Grandfathers whittled a lot and taught their grandsons how to fish. Lije was just old.

Vaughn dumped the walnuts on the pine slat porch of his mother’s house. He scraped dirt from his boots on the top step and opened the door. A small dark bird veered past his shoulder and into the house, flying tight loops in the living room.

“Don’t shut the door!” his mother said. “Open a window up.”

She hurried to the kitchen, returning with a broom slanted across her body, bristles aimed high. “Where’s it at?”

“Flew back out.”

“Oh sweet Lord,” she said. “A bird in the house is worst of all. Did it touch you?”

“No.”

“Just a warning then. My opinion it’s on your great-aunt down to Rocksalt. Her lungs don’t work right in fall. I’ll pray for her tonight.”

She gathered a deep breath, went to the kitchen, and came out with salt mounded in her palm.

“Take a smidgeon, Vaughn,” she said, “and throw it over your shoulder.”

Martha pinched a finger’s worth and timed her toss to match his. She threw more salt through the open doorway, then quickly yanked the door shut. Kneeling, she pressed her hands together and trickled a line of salt across the threshold. “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil …”

Wind rattled the stovepipe, startling Martha. She stood and faced her son.