William Gay - I Hate To See That Evening Sun Go Down - Collected Stories

Bender was exultant. Salvation was at hand. It did not even strike him as ironic that all his efforts had been impotent but that a fish as ugly and apparently useless as the snail darter had a branch of the federal government working night and day to save its home. He was more than willing to just go along for the ride. The man in the pith helmet said that the snail darter was an endangered species. Endangered himself Bender felt more than a passing empathy with it.

AT MIDMORNING a sheriff’s department car from the town of Ackerman’s Field pulled up Bender’s driveway towing a wake of dust fine as talcum. Bender went out to see. He’d come to dread cop cars, mailmen, ringing telephones.

It was the sheriff himself. Bellwether stood smoothing the wrinkles out of his khaki trousers and adjusting the pistol on his hip.

We’re all peaceable here, Bender said. You won’t need that.

I was just driving out to see what was going on out here, Bellwether said. I ain’t been out in this neighborhood in no telling when.

You can hear what’s going on, Bender said. He realized that he’d lived with noise so long he’d become accustomed to it. It was like the low hum of a swarm of distant bees.

Bellwether stood in an attitude of listening. The dull drone of who knew how many kinds of heavy machinery; to the south they could see the dust they stirred hanging in a shifting cloud.

They do make a hell of a racket, don’t they? Busy as little beavers.

All day long.

I figured you to be gone. Thought I’d see.

Well. I’m not.

I see you ain’t. You hear about old man Liverett coming to terms with them?

Everybody keeps telling me about it.

The sheriff squatted in the earth yard. He tipped out a Camel and put it in his mouth and lit it and took a drag off it. He exhaled and took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at it in mild surprise. He crushed the fire out under a polished shoe and tossed the butt away. I’m trying to quit, he said, but I keep doing that out of habit.

Bender waited. He watched. The high sheriff took up a twig and began to draw meaningless hieroglyphs in the dust. Bender let me talk to you a minute, he said.

All right.

I’ve known your people all my life. You’ve known me all yours. Your mama and daddy was fine people, both of them. Paid their debts and minded their own business. The way you are your ownself. And I know this piece of land goes way back but don’t you think you’ve done about all you can do?

You’re telling it.

You’ve hired lawyers and fired, lawyers and hired more lawyers. You’ve tried to get injunctions and court orders and exemptions and about every kind of legal paper they make. I don’t know how much money you’ve spent and I don’t give a damn. It’s nothing to me. But I know you ain’t a rich man, and for what value you’ve got you might as well have stuck that money up a wild pig’s ass and hollered sooey. They’re going to build that dam. It’s for flood control and the government holds that the common good is more important than what one individual, you for example, has to say about it.

They’re going to shut the goddamned thing down, Bender exploded. That fish. That snail darter. It’s on the endangered species list and the EPA is not going to let it be destroyed.

Bellwether was shaking his head. There is just no way in hell, he said. Not in this lifetime. They’re going to finish it and cut the channel for the river and all this is going to be under a hundred feet of water. Are you by any chance building a boat in your backyard?

Bender didn’t say anything,

Now listen. You’ve got a wife and a kid and a good job teaching English out at the high school. Them boys of mine had you, they thought the world of you. You’ve got it made. Why do you want to piss it all away? Your wife and kid still here?

Yes.

You know they’ve offered you market value for this farm. Take it. There’s plenty of land. Buy some more.

Bender felt awkward and inarticulate the way he did every time this happened. He was continually called upon to explain himself and day by day it had grown harder so that by now there didn’t seem to be any words, the right phrases hadn’t been coined yet. It was easy to say buy more land but hard to explain this was all the land there was. This was all the land he had been born on and that had absorbed the lives of his ancestors. His dead parents’ voices rose and fell in measured cadence just out of hearing and their shades stood almost invisible in dark corners.

Bellwether stood up. Now his face looked curiously remote, and Bender divined that he was distancing himself from him. Bender’s folks were good folks and all that but the law was the law and the federal government was where the buck stopped.

I’d like to talk sense to you, Bellwether said. Sometimes a man in my position is called on to do things he might not want to do, but he’s got to do them anyway.

He climbed back into the cruiser and pulled the door to. I’ll see you, Bender, he said. But I hope for both our sakes it’s someplace else.

BENDER IN HIS OLD FORD truck drove through a countryside almost surreal in the degree of its devastation. As if some great war had been won or lost here. No soul seemed to have survived. He drove past shotgun shack and mansion alike, all empty, houses canted on their foundations by dozers, shells of houses gutted by fire, old tall chimneys standing solitary and regal like sentries left to guard something that wasn’t even there anymore.

The old man was sitting amidst the motley of plunder on his front porch like some gaunt-eyed dust bowl survivor. Ninety-five years old and he lived alone and did his own cooking and mowed the yard himself and until recently he had driven an old pickup truck homemade from a ’47 Studebaker. Liverett had outlived the ’47 Studebaker and all his children and a number of wives and all this outliving had begun to turn him bitter against things in general.

Come up, Bender, the old man said.

Bender sat on the doorstep. He hadn’t seen the old man for a while and age seemed finally to be catching up with him. His face seemed caved as if it were decaying internally and the skin stretched over the cheekbones looked nearly transparent. He went inside to fetch Bender a cup of coffee and now he seemed to move as carefully as if he conveyed something of incalculable value and marvelous fragility.

When Bender had taken a sip of his coffee he figured to work the conversation around to the government. Those home health people still bothering you? he asked. The old man was fiercely independent and for years he had waged a running battle with various agencies determined to take care of him.

I reckon they about give up on me, Liverett said. They send em out once and I run em off and next time it’ll be somebody else. They sent this little snip of a girl out here a week or two ago. Said she was new on the job. Purty little thing, big blue eyes, fine little titties. Said she was supposed to check my blood pressure and give me a bath. A bath? I said. Why I never heard of such a thing. A little snip of a girl givin a grown man a bath and him a stranger at that. Well Missy, I told her, I’ll tell you what. You let me give you one first and we might work up some kind of a deal.

Bender grinned weakly. In his later years the old man’s mind seemed to have turned to sex and in some manner locked there. Bender judged that were he stronger and more agile he might have turned into some kind of sex maniac.

I hear you let them beat you, Bender said. You finally knuckled under.

Is that what you hear? You heard wrong. What I heard was that I asked em a certain price and they finally met it.

You already sold?

Damn right. Wait here a minute. He got up and opened the screen door and went inside. Bender could hear him rummaging around inside the house. When the old man came back out he was carrying a paper bag, a grocery sack with the top folded down. He unfolded it and held it for Bender to peer into. Looky here, he said. Bender looked. Great God, he said. The sack was full of money. Neat stacks of bills as square and crisp as if some kind of machine had bundled them. They paid you in cash?