Chris Offutt: Kentucky Straight: Stories

Chris Offutt is the author of Out of the Woods, The Same River Twice , and The Good Brother . All have been translated into several languages. His work is widely anthologized and has received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award. He lives in Iowa City with his wife and sons.

The author wishes to thank Jane O. Burns,

the Copernicus Society of America

for its James A. Michener Grant,

and the Kentucky Arts Council.

Not a one on this hillside finished high school. Around here a man is judged by how he acts, not how smart he’s supposed to be. I don’t hunt, fish, or work. Neighbors say I think too much. They say I’m like my father and Mom worries that maybe they’re right.

When I was a kid we had a coonhound that got into a skunk, then had the gall to sneak under the porch. He whimpered in the dark and wouldn’t come out. Dad shot him. It didn’t stink less but Dad felt better. He told Mom that any dog who didn’t know coon from skunk ought to be killed.

“He’s still back under the porch,” Mom said.

“I know it,” Dad said. “I loved Tater, too. I don’t reckon I could stand to bury him.”

He looked at my brother and me.

“Don’t you even think of putting them boys under that porch,” Mom yelled. “It’s your dog. You get it.”

She held her nose and walked around the house. Dad looked at us again. “You boys smell anything?”

My eyes were watered up but I shook my head no.

“Dead things stink,” said Warren.

“So does a wife sometimes,” Dad said, handing me his rifle. “Here, Junior. Put this up and fetch my rod and reel.”

I ran into the house for his fishing pole. When I got outside, Dad was on his knees shining a flashlight under the porch. Back in the corner lay old Tater, dead as a mallet. “Blind casting,” Dad said. “This might turn out fun.”

He spread his legs and whipped the rod and the line went humming under the porch. He reeled in a piece of rag. Dad threw again and hooked Tater but only pulled out a hunk of fur. On the next cast, his line got hung. He jerked hard on the fishing pole. The line snapped, the rod lashed over his shoulder and hit Warren in the face. Mom came running around the house at Warren’s screams.

“What’d you do now?” she said.

“Line broke,” Dad said. “Eight-pound test. Lost a good split sinker, too.”

“Why don’t you cut a hole in the floor and fish him out like an ice pond!”

“Don’t know where my saw’s at.”

“That’s the worst of it! You’d have gone and done it.”

She towed Warren up the gray board steps into the house. Dad broke the fishing pole across his knee. “Never should have had no kids,” he said, and threw the ruined rod over the hill. A jaybird squalled into the sky. Dad grabbed my shoulders and leaned his face to mine.

“I wanted to be a horse doctor,” he said, “but you know what?”

I shook my head. His fingers dug me deep.

“I quit sixth grade on account of not having nothing to wear. All my kin did. Every last one of us.”

He turned loose of me and I watched his bowed back fade into the trees. Wide leaves of poplar rustled behind him.

A few years later Dad gave his gun away and joined the church. He got Warren a pup that fell off the porch and broke its leg. Dad cried all day. I was scared, but Mom said his crying was a sign that both his oars were back in the water. She told me to be proud. That Sunday, Dad climbed on top of a church pew in the middle of service. I thought he’d felt the Lord’s touch and would start talking in tongues. The preacher stopped his sermon. Dad looked around the room and swore to high heaven he would heal our pup’s busted leg or die trying. Mom made him sit down and hush. I got scared again.

After church Dad carried the pup out the ridge to a hickory where he tried all day to fix its leg. He was still yelling at God when Mom sent us to bed. She found Dad in the morning. He’d taken off his belt and hanged himself. On the ground below him lay the pup, all its legs broken. It was still alive.

Warren and I both quit school. He got a job and saved his money. I took to the woods hunting mushrooms, ginseng, and mayapple root. I’ve been places a rabbit wouldn’t go.

Last fall Warren pushed a trailer up a hollow and moved into it. He said the one thing I was good for was taking care of Mom. Twice a week I walked to the Clay Creek Post Office at the foot of the hill. It and the church was all we had and they sat side by side between the creek and the road. Most people went to both but Mom and I divided it up. I got more mail than her and she took enough gospel for the whole county. I subscribed to a peck of magazines and read everything twice, even letters and household hints. They stopped coming because I never paid.

Some days I went to the post office early to look at crooks the government wants. Sixty photographs were stapled together like a feed store calendar, and the faces were just regular folks. Under each one was a list of what the person did, where his scars were, and if he was black or white. It seemed odd to show a picture of a man and say what color he was. Around here, we’re mostly brown. I wouldn’t mind talking to somebody of another color but they don’t ever come around these parts. Nobody does. This is a place people move away from.

One afternoon I saw a sign in the post office about a GED. Anyone could take the high school test from a VISTA center in town, and that set me to thinking on what Dad said about quitting school. He never read anything but the King James Bible and about a hundred maps. Dad collected maps the way some men kept dogs — big maps and little maps, favorites and no-counts. I’ve seen him study maps over a tree stump till way past dark. He wanted to know where the Land of Nod was at and who all lived there. The preacher told him it was lost in the Flood. Dad didn’t think so.

“Everywhere has to be somewhere,” he always said.

The GED fretted me for two days’ worth of walking in the woods. I almost stepped on a blue racer sunning on a rock. We watched each other for a spell, him shooting a little forked tongue out and me not able to think of nothing but taking that test. Most people run from a snake without ever knowing if it was poison or just alive. The GED was the same way. Failing couldn’t hurt me, and getting it would make everybody on the hill know I wasn’t what they thought. Maybe then they’d think about Dad differently, too.

The next morning I hitchhiked to Rocksalt and stood on the sidewalk. People stared from cars. My hand was on the test place doorknob and sweat poured off me. I opened the door. The air was cool and the walls were white. Behind a metal desk sat a lady painting her fingernails pink. She looked at me, then at her nails.

“The barbershop is next door,” she said.