Chris Offutt - Kentucky Straight - Stories

A huge deer emerged from the brush with a sixteen-point rack spreading from a tapered head. He had never seen a deer that big. Hunters killed them before they got that old. The buck stood calm and still, watching Vaughn. Its dark eyes were deep as time.

“Grandpaw,” Vaughn whispered.

Wind closed leaves around the retreating buck. Vaughn ran down the hill to Lije, who stood before the giant oaks. The noise of the deer circled the trees.

“I saw it,” Vaughn said. “I saw the deer.”

“No,” said Lije. “He showed himself.”

Lije entered the space between the trees. Branches rattled overhead and whippoorwills began their call. Lije sat cross-legged in the center of the trees, smearing gray ash over his face. From inside his shirt, he pulled an oval stone threaded on a thong around his neck. He lifted it over his head and offered it to his grandson. Vaughn stepped between the trees and pressed his hand over the rock.

“This’ll be yours now,” Lije said. “My pa-paw give me it.”

“What is it?”

“He never said.”

Lije’s body began to rock. He leaned his face close to Vaughn and gripped him by his arms. His eyes glittered fierce.

“Sing you the be I song,” Lije said. “Sing you what land made me. The oak shadow is be I. Dream tinker is my drum. The eyes in the woods you feel alone. Wind-breath from a cave. Deerprint, birdcall, bobcat keen. The leaf be I. The leaf be I. The leaf be I.”

Acorns rained to the ground while screeching squirrels raced from limb to limb. Lije’s face was paling fast. A yellow butterfly circled a blur around his head. He slowly tilted backwards into swirling leaves and settled to the earth, pulling Vaughn with him, onto his body. They held the stone together, pressed tight between their palms.

“Leave me lay here after,” Lije said. “You be the Boatman now.”

The roots of both oaks interlocked below; their branches welded overhead. The red-tailed hawk rustled to a landing on the oak’s low crotch. The sounds of night swarmed the woods. A bobcat’s high-pitched scream pierced the quickening wind. Leaves whirled the air. From far away came the rumbling bellow of a bear. The wind and animal sound increased until it seemed to Vaughn that all the hills were rushing to the oaks. He shut his eyes and pushed his face against his grandfather’s silent chest.

Wind moved away and the autumn woods slowly hushed. Vaughn lay a long time before pushing himself up. Lije was still, his sightless eyes staring into the tree limbs overhead. Vaughn’s imprint lay on his body outlined by red oak leaves. The stone was in Vaughn’s hand, and though he thought he should feel scared, he wasn’t. Beside him stood the ancient buck.

The deer pawed a bare place next to Lije and urinated against the earth. It moved to Lije’s other side and repeated itself, marking its own, and hobbled into the woods on a weak back leg.

Vaughn strung the oval stone over his neck. He took the feathers and stepped from the cold alley between the oaks. An owl called and another answered until their sound filled the woods. Vaughn chose the biggest feather and shaped its tines, drawing them tight to the tip, and stretched his arm between the oaks. The leaving feather settled to the buckskin husk of Lije. Vaughn began walking toward the red glow of sun behind the western hill.

Dusk pushed over the ridge and across the land. Vaughn went down the slope and up a dark hollow to the hill where Lije had found the last feather. Vaughn stopped, unable to remember the direction they had come. He faced the oaks beyond the ridge and held the stone between his hands. Behind him something big came up the hill. He thought it was the deer but heard no swish of leaf or crackling twig. Vaughn pressed the stone to his chest. He felt the force move slowly to his back and stop. Overhead, full dark arrived. Silence flowed through the woods.

The thing was suddenly gone, and Vaughn knew what it was, and why he was not afraid. The hill had come up the hill. The hill would lead him home. He turned and walked into the night, avoiding branches easily. In his hand the stone began to warm.

William plucked beads of hardened plaster from his trowel and wiped them on the bucket’s edge. The wall joints had to be smooth as snow. This job might lead to another and the Brants wanted everything perfect. The Brants owned the sheetrock, the plaster, and the red rug under the drop cloth. Until the job was finished, they owned William eight hours a day. Only the ability belonged to William; he’d had to rent the tools.

Mrs. Miriam Brant walked into the room to check his progress, wearing a loose housecoat with nothing underneath. William looked away from her thighs and dipped the trowel. His wife’s legs weren’t as good but they were more familiar. Miriam tapped a red fingernail against the wall.

“I want your opinion on a room in back,” she said.

He followed her through a long hall to the bedroom. A three-panel mirror filled a corner, and small rugs lay on the carpet. She bent from the waist, pointing to a web of ripples that puckered the wallpaper like a burn scar. The housecoat fell open to her navel.

“Work in here,” she said, “is never good enough to suit me.”

William looked past her face to the store-bought blanket on the bed, feeling bad for her. She was from Bobcat Hollow but had married a lawyer and moved to town. Her husband refused to let her family visit except during election years. William’s fingers brushed the dimpled wall. The room was quiet and big, and he could hear his own breathing. He wondered when her husband got off work.

“Too much water in the glue,” he said.

“Always something.”

“Man ought not to leave a job that way.”

“Maybe you could do better.”

William looked at her legs, thinking of his wife at home all day. He lifted his head and spoke quietly.

“My daddy knew your daddy.”

Miriam hugged her housecoat together and sat on the bed, shoulders slumped, head down.

“I couldn’t wait to get out of that holler,” she said. “Now I’m just as stuck here as I was there. You still live on the ridge?”

“Guess I’m stuck there, too.”

William returned to the living room, where he skimmed plaster over the seam and feathered the edges. The work was nearly complete; tomorrow he would sand. At an outside faucet he cleaned the tools, watching the steady stream of water sparkle in the sun. Miriam waved from the window. William stared at her a long time before getting into his truck. He hoped he wouldn’t regret his decision to leave. He’d always liked her when they were kids.

William slowly drove the blacktop home, glad to be out of Rocksalt. He passed a new video dish perched among felled trees and wondered what his father would have thought of such a thing. Two years ago he’d told his father about a job with a construction crew in town.

“A man’s lucky to have these hills,” his father had said.

“I know it,” William said. “But they ain’t exactly ours no more.”

“Town never was either.”

William’s father spat dark phlegm against the clay dirt yard. Coal dust filled his pores, blending his face into the night. His voice took on the timbre of a father speaking to a son, not to a man he trusted underground, working an illegal mine.

“Don’t you do like your grandpaw done.”

William stared at his boots. Years back, during the first mine strikes, his grandfather had made whiskey to keep his kids in clothes. A government man shotgunned him as he unloaded forty quarts of liquor at Blue Lick River. His body fell into the muddy water and the family buried an empty coffin.