William Gay - Little Sister Death

He was right, too. They never heard them again. The house was bored with rats.

The summer drew on, warm and mellow. In the soft, moist nights the bottomland alongside Sinking Creek was beset with fireflies, great phosphorescent droves of them drifting like St. Elmo’s fire through the cool blue dusk.

In the fields the ears of corn lengthened and hardened, the leaves yellowed and withered, then grew brittle. The fields that bordered them turned bright yellow with goldenrod; wild apricots ripened on their dying vines strung on fences, withered globes of dusty gold, and the air was heavy with their musky perfume.

They were briefly happy.

Random as the fireflies, his three eldest daughters were coming and going at all hours of the day and night, as if they had all come into heat simultaneously and word of it sent abroad into the land so that in early September Swaw found himself beleaguered every night by swain from all up and down Sinking Creek, old rustyankled country boys with red necks and hardons and old highbacked rolling junkers held together by spit and baling wire and blind luck, weighting the harvest dusks with the smell of oil burning engines, the stench of rubber from smoking tires. Drunken laughter echoed in the still dark, his daughters with it, raucous and meaningless as calling crows or harpies.

I never seen the goddamn like in my life, he raged to Lorene. Lately he was mostly in a rage. He was sleeping badly.

Lorene just seemed pleased they had entered into an active social life. Let em have their fun, she told him, adding darkly, I never had any. You seen to that.

I aim to put a stop to it, he said.

They just poplar, Lorene said.

Popular was not quite the concept Swaw was struggling with. He would hear them leaving in the old highbacked sedans, gone awhile, back once more. Then after a while horns blowing, wild mindless laughter, gone again. He wished for sons. At least sons would be at somebody else’s house worrying the hell out of them.

At first they sat on the stone doorsteps and plied him with splo whiskey, spoke with transparent craft of the weather, crops, the likelihood of an early winter. Biding their time until they could be gone in a cloud of oily blue smoke and a roar of rusted mufflers, gone to the beer joints at Flatwoods, the show, the woods. They grew emboldened. At last they just drove up and honked their horns. They quit bringing him whiskey, too.

He found a used condom down by the creek. It lay drying in the morning sun, like some arcane form of life beached here by distant seas. He took it up on the end of a stick and threw it in the creek, cursing all the while. They poplar, all right, he said to himself. Pussy was always purty well thought of in these parts.

He commenced running them off. He’d run out into the yard shouting, waving his double-barreled shotgun, maybe fire off a round or two just to hear the shot rattle in the trees. You’d hear Model Ts cranking all the way to Shipps Bend. But they were getting bolder, like wild dogs held at bay by a circle of light. While he was nailing up the front door they were kicking down the back, and there were nights he ran off the same bunch three or four times.

One night a soft mewing noise drew him behind the toolshed. Bowered by honeysuckle, he came upon a naked couple stricken by moonlight, laboring away. The sons of bitches were even bringing their own blankets now. They didn’t hear him until he was upon them. He could smell the raw aroused smell of them, could feel his own member thicken. He raised a booted foot and slammed into the boy’s naked nates. The boy went squalling like a ribkicked dog, hauling at his breeches as he went, whirling where the dark opened up and leering back at Swaw.

Swaw didn’t have his gun, and he couldn’t find a rock.

He couldn’t keep them in the fields either. He’d harness both teams, take one wagon and head for the lower bottoms after getting them started in the upper, but he’d be no more than out of sight when some old boy would saunter out of the brush with a shit-eating grin on his face and they’d be long gone. He was trying to get a crop in, and he’d come in at midday to eat and they’d be lounging around the porch. You had to kick one aside to find a place to sit down.

Piss on it, he said to himself. I wash my hands of em. They can root like hogs or die. He felt sure things were becoming unmanageable. He felt how surely the center was not holding, how adroitly things fell apart. He felt like a man trying to stuff a pumped-up inner tube into a shoebox. He’d stomp one side in and the other would pop up. He’d hold both ends and the middle would leap out like a jack-in-the-box until the shoebox was demolished, the innertube still just as round and fat and uncontained as ever.

Swaw came down the slope with a rolled towsack under his arm. He carried a hoe to part the weeds with. He moved carefully toward the pear tree, studying the ground beneath his feet as he walked. The air was winy with the smell of ripe pears.

When he was sure there were no snakes about he moved with more confidence. He began to pick pears from the lower branches and stuff them into the sack. He worked hurriedly. The pears were warm to his touch and seemed to have stored all the fugitive warmth of summer beneath their yellowbrown skin. The ground beneath the tree was strewn with fermenting pears, and all around him was a steady drone of insects.

Sitting on a mosscovered stone he ate a pear, slicing it off a section at a time with his pocket knife, slapping away onehanded the yellow jackets the juice attracted. He was staring off below the homeplace, where the earth curved gently into a hollow, when for no reason at all he thought: something is going to happen.

The wry air seemed to alter, to thicken. His vision of the world darkened as if the sun reached the glade filtered by an eerie shadow. He could hear a child’s voice singing. A child in a green dress swung from a grapevine, blond hair strung out behind her. It felt to Swaw as if the skin of his body was tightening. He watched the sunburnt hairs on his forearms stand erect, the flesh beneath them crinkle with gooseflesh. There was a popping sound in his eardrum, or a dull far-off roaring like water. His mouth was dry.

Humming to herself, the girl came out of the brush into what had once been the yard. She seemed not to notice Swaw. She had moved so swiftly that his breath caught in his throat. There was no discernible motion of feet or of legs, but rather a smooth movement as if she were gliding. He could see the tree branches and brush behind her. She ascended to the level of the rubblestrewn foundation, as if unaware that there was no longer a floor there.

Swaw felt drained of volition, lethargic, frozen to the stone where he sat. The girl was watching him. He saw that she was not a child, but a young woman, the flaxenhaired girl he’d seen before. She watched Swaw with cold cat’s eyes. Her fingers were slowly unbuttoning the top of her long dress. She slipped it down about her hips, stood bare to the waist, her hands cupping her breasts, which were very white in the sun. Her nipples seemed the texture and color of pale pink rosebuds. Her face was innocent and childlike but her eyes seemed to be taunting him. Her hands caught under her sharp breasts, upthrust them, as if she were mocking him with them. He was on his feet and stumbling toward her before he realized it.

She was gone. He heard soft, derisive laughter behind him. A thrown pear struck the foundation stones at his feet. He stood looking at it. It had split against the rocks, and hornets worked the ripe flesh, buzzing a onenote drone of gluttony.

For two weeks she had been coming to him while he slept. In the dream, if it was a dream, it seemed to be autumn, the time of year after the first frost. The trees were baring and the grass felt sere beneath his feet and the white road lay dusted with moonlight. Once a falling leaf touched his face, a golden sepia cast like an aged photograph.