Chris Offutt: Kentucky Straight: Stories

“I’m hungry,” Vaughn said.

She smiled, relaxing. “Count on you to think of your belly.”

They ate supper in the narrow kitchen. Above the metal-edged Formica table hung a portrait of Jesus, the only picture in the house. A breeze seeped beneath the window.

“You cold?” she said.

“No.”

“How was school?”

Vaughn shrugged.

“What’d you learn?”

“Teacher said history ain’t a straight line of time.”

“What is it then?”

“Said history lays over itself like corn in a crib and we’re all a cob.” Vaughn shrugged and looked at the greasy plate. He began to lie. “Then he told about his family and asked about ours.”

Martha stiffened, chin creeping up. “Your father was a good man,” she said. “God sent him up to Ohio for work. Be back any season.”

“Is my grandpaw really dead?”

Martha was silent for a long time and Vaughn knew she was turning Bible pages in her mind, searching an answer.

“He’s dead to God,” she said. “That makes him dead to me.”

“But is he really?”

“No,” she whispered.

“Is he old?”

“Eighty some.”

“Where’s he live?”

Martha looked away from the blue eyes of Jesus on the wall. She trailed a spoon across her plate. “Your grandpaw lives where the state puts people …” She stared at the devil’s horns she’d made from gravy and shut her eyes. “It’s a place for people who can’t live by their ownself.”

“How’d he get there?”

She used her spoon to close the curving horns etched into the gravy. She drew a fish and stared at the faded picture of Jesus. Her words rushed, rising and falling in a lilt.

“Lije run off to World War One and was a chaplain. He came home changed, and took to living on the other side of Shawnee Rock. Not no regular house, just out in the hills. He came down sometimes to see Mommy and us kids. Then the next war came and all my brothers got killed, three of the best boys you ever did see.

“Well, me and Sister and Mommy got took in by a neighbor woman to help raise us up. Her husband was a preacher, could make a possum take to gospel. He’d get everybody riled and head for the creek bank. When he was finished, that creek’d be half dry. And let me tell you, he’d hold a body under till they was nigh drowned. He was bear-stout, he was. People were right proud to claim they’d got saved by him.

“One spring, he done Sister that way and she passed out cold. Preacher lifted her out of the water limp as dead. That’s when Lije ran out of the woods screaming like a bobcat. He’d been hid and watching everything. He took hold of Sister’s shoulders and had a tug-of-war until the preacher let go. Lije laid her down and hunkered there beside her. Then he started kissing her mouth and rubbing her bubs. That’s what people always did say, but what it was, he was drawing that creek water right out of her body. He spit it out and breathed into her mouth three times. He had a little bag tied to his waist, and he took and rubbed stuff on her neck and chest. Well, her breathing got regular. Her eyes opened up.

“Preacher lifted his King James and said Lije Boatman wasn’t fit to live with decent folks. Said he was a devil. Said everybody seen how he’d done devil-stuff to his own daughter.

“Lije laughed. He looked at everybody and said, ‘They ain’t no devil. Only bad men.’ He jumped the creek and ran up the hillside. The preacher claimed how Lije denying it just proved how evil he was. Said if they ain’t no devil, they ain’t no God, and if they ain’t no God, then what were all these people lined up at the creek for.

“One by one, everybody walked into the creek. Only me and Sister stayed on the bank. The preacher yelled about getting sin cleaned plumb off him, and how the only way was letting the Lord see you like you was brung into the world. Preacher took his shirt off. He told his wife to undo her dress and she did. They was standing there in the water half naked. He went and took his britches down and everybody started taking their clothes off. It was a race to see who could show the Lord their true self first. The preacher laid in preaching and he went on till the lightning bugs had come and gone.

“Lije never visited no more but stayed in the woods some forty years. Then VISTA heard of him and brought him out of the hills. I heard he fought, but was weakly, sick with something. A man from the state went to the preacher’s daughter and asked did she know who Lije’s kin was. Next day she came out here packing food to give me. Said did I want to take Lije in. But I never. I sent my own daddy off like stock to a pen. I broke a commandment.”

Martha’s voice had faded to a hoarse whisper. She carried her plate to the sink, where she began washing it over and over, reciting the Lord’s Prayer.

Vaughn left the table and slipped to his room and into bed. From outside came a barred owl’s rising call. Moonlight soaked the yard and lit the woods beyond the house. Vaughn stared through the window, and though the sound grew louder, he could not see the owl. He lay listening to the bird, no longer able to hear his mother’s droning voice.

After school the next day he heard the owl again and followed the sound to a tall oak. Lije sat beneath the tree. He blew into his cupped hands, making the eight tones that ended in a low gurgle. An answering call echoed from the dusky woods. Lije showed Vaughn how to duplicate the sound, and the owl answered once, then quit.

“Owl’s just being civil until he knows you better,” Lije said.

“When will he?”

“That’s on you. People don’t like owls because they live in graveyards, but an owl needs a big tree and graveyard trees don’t get cut down. Never be afraid on account of where something lives. That goes for people, too.”

Vaughn decided not to tell him what his mother had said. Lije didn’t act like a devil or look like one. He was more old than anything else, and Vaughn was glad to have a grandpaw, even if he wasn’t quite right in the head. Vaughn knew that happened to old people. His fifth-grade teacher had broken her hip and when she returned to school, she wore different wigs each day and put lipstick on her nose. Vaughn thought that was worse than talking to owls.

On Saturday Vaughn sat in the white glare of a low noon sun and watched the woods. Softwood leaves, crisp with equinox color, floated them treetops near the sun. His pocket held leftover breakfast pork in case Lije was hungry. Vaughn sweated in the heat but stayed on the porch. Lije had said to wait, that a Boatman knew sign and if Vaughn wasn’t anything else, he was a damn-sure Boatman. “Looking won’t find nary a thing,” Lije had said. “Just you set on lookout. It’ll find you.”

His mother’s mumbling voice drifted from the house, talking to Jesus. Vaughn had tried it once when his mother was in the garden. He sat in her chair facing the picture in its plastic filigreed frame. Jesus didn’t answer. Vaughn talked some more but Jesus never said a word and soon Vaughn felt stupid, hearing his voice in the kitchen with no one there. At the bottom of the picture was a company name and the words SCRANTON, PENNSYLVANIA. Vaughn figured that was where Jesus lived, and on a school map he’d seen that Scranton wasn’t too far from Bethlehem. He talked to his teacher, who said there was more than one Bethlehem, there might be five or six, maybe a dozen. Jesus didn’t have a real home, he lived everywhere.

Behind Vaughn the screen door rubbed on hinge straps cut from an old tire. His mother crossed the porch and stroked the back of his head.

“What all I said the other night don’t have much to do with you,” she said. “That’s old and done. You’re a good boy, Vaughn. You’ll make a man one day.”