William Gay - The Long Home

Winer didn’t say anything.

“Life is hard, Winer. You just got to get hard with it. It’s a blackjack game with life dealin and the dealer’s always got the edge. You see? You got to get your own edge. Because by God if you don’t there’ll always be somebody there lyin to you all your life and then handin you a greasy quarter and tellin you to buy some Santy Clause.”

“What’ll you take for this knife? You found it.”

“Hell, take it. You said it belonged to your pa.”

“Well, you’ve had it all these years. Decide what you want for it and hold it out of my pay.”

“Hell, no. If it means somethin to ye, take it on. Seems to me it’s a damn poor substitute for a pa but such as it is you’re welcome to it.”

Old woods here and deep. Here the earth was coppercolored with fallen needles and the air had the cool, astringent smell of cedar. An old wagonroad faded out somewhere in the grove then wound away toward home. The piled tops of dead cedars lay bleached and white and indestructible as bone.

He had not been in these woods since he was a child. Time seemed to have stopped here. He halfwaited for the rattle of trace chains, the ring of the axe, the slow turning of wagon wheels against the earth. This used to be an old houseplace, his father had said. The year the tornado came through the storm just picked it up off the foundation rocks and carried it away, no one knew where.

Here an old rusted stovepipe leached from the earth, there the remnants of a washtub, a few handmade bricks. On a level area of diminished brush the foundation stones themselves, profound, ageless, curious Stonehenge aligned to no known star.

The spring was clotted with leaves. Kneeling there he cleaned them out with his hands, watched the slow swirl of clean water into it, the list of sand and silt. An old one-eyed crayfish pretending invisibility eyed him apprehensively from the clearing water, retreated beneath a stone. A fall wind drove the first leaves from the tree above him, he arose in a drifting storm of them. He drank here, he thought, his eyes scanning the sandbar. Where had the knife been? His father had been fond of the knife, it wasn’t like him to lose it, once he had lost it and searched for it for two entire days before it was found and his father had not been one for repeating mistakes.

Winer dried his hands on the seat of his pants, walked on up the hollow. In its mouth he found wreckage he could not account for. Old rusted five-five gallon drums, purposeless shards of mauled metal. A cornucopia of gallon sorghum buckets. Broken glass jugs. He sat on a stump and stared at the refuse. A story resided here could he but decipher it. A jay scolded and then the woods were still and impenetrable again. He arose. He had never accepted before that his father was dead but he accepted it now.

Winer watched his mother at work, her eyes close to the sewing in her lap. Her lids were veined and near lashless, the skin drawn tight and smooth over her cheekbones. She seemed oblivious to him, to anything save the cloth her needle moved in. Her mouth was pursed slightly in the expression of resigned disapproval with which she viewed the world. She is old, he thought suddenly, though he knew she was not. For a moment something in the calm placidity of the face reminded him of the old men in Long’s store or Hardin’s, the serene face of an old woman looking down on him long ago from the high cab of a cordwood truck and from an Olympus of years, a face quilted and wrinkled by time until its seemed ageless, something found in nature, an old walnut hull found in the woods. Who was she? Aunt, grandmother, surrogate mother? Whoever’s she was, she was never mine.

I am your blood, he thought. Half of me is you and yet I know nothing about you. I fed at your breast and yet I draw more memory and knowledge from a lost pocketknife than all your years have showed me. Than all your reproach has taught me.

And you know. Somewhere behind the placid mask you wear for a face the answer lies. You may not know it but it is there. Somewhere in the vaults of your memory, old stacked and yellowing newsprint. There must have been things said I did not hear, did not understand if I did. Or have you known all these years, I’ve never known your motives or your reasoning. Did you cut his throat while he slept, did a tinker with his pots and pans trouble your dreams even then? Did his forerunner appear to you in a vision long ago, were you just clearing a path for his coming? Or did Pa just walk off down a road, the way you walked off down a road in your head?

“Did Pa ever fool any with whiskey?”

She looked up sharply. “Do what?”

“Did he ever make whiskey? Or sell it?”

“Lord, no. What makes you ask that?”

“I just got to wonderin.”

“Well, I’d like to know what got you to wonderin any such as that. Has that lowdown Hardin been feedin you a mess of lies?”

“No.”

“Your pa never even drank. I never even knowed him to make a drink of whiskey but one time and that was at a dance before we got married. Your pa was funny turned. He kept to hisself and he never had the patience to put up with a bunch of drunks the way you’d have to do to fool with whiskey.”

“You never talked much about him,” he said. “Why is that?”

“He said it all when he pulled that door to behind him,” she told him.

“Did you ever know Pa to make whiskey?”

“Good God, no. Why? Are you thinkin about settin up and runnin Dallas Hardin out of business?”

“No. I just got to wondering.”

“Get you one of these pears,” Oliver said. He had his rocker in the shade of the pear tree and was peeling pears into an old blue enamel washpan. Yellow windfall pears lay all about in the sere grass and yellowjackets crawled all over them in an agony of gluttony. The air was rich and winey with the fragrance of the pears.

“I found an old still back in there where the cedar grove is, over by King’s Branch. I just wondered who put it there.”

“Well, I can’t tell you who it was but I can tell you who it wadnt. Not talkin agin your pa but he was downright intolerant about some things. Now, I don’t mind bootleggin myself, but whiskeymakin was one of the things he was down on, he was a hard worker and whiskeymakin just looked shiftless to him. Though there’s a world of hard work wound up in it as anyone who ever shouldered a hundred-pound sack of sugar through the woods could tell you.”

“Whose would you say it was then?”

“Well, when Dallas Hardin first come to this part of the country and didn’t have the money to buy the law the way he does now he used to make his own stuff stead of haulin in this here bonded like he does. He had a habit of settin up across Hovington’s lines on somebody else in case the revenuers found his rig.”

The old man glanced up and something in Winer’s expression so startled him that it broke his train of thought and he was momentarily confused. For a second he was seeing the father’s eyes in the son’s face, cold, sleepylooking eyes.

“No, now wait a minute,” Oliver said bemusedly as if he were talking to himself. “That ain’t it atall. My mind’s goin in my old age like the rest of me’s done gone. Old man Cater Loveless lived back in there and when that tornado come through it just blowed his house away. Now, he made whiskey, Cater did. That was fore your pa bought the land for the taxes on it.”

“Then it must’ve been Loveless’ still?”

Oliver looked up. The look was gone from the boy’s face. “Likely it was,” he agreed. He went back to peeling pears.

The boy stood up. “Where’s your bucksaw? I thought I’d cut you up that big poplar the creek washed up.”