William Gass - In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

I ate an apple I’d found. The skin was shriveled but the meat was sweet.

Big Hans was stronger than Simon, I thought. He let me help him with his chores, and we talked, and later he showed me some of the pictures in his magazines. See anything like that around here? he’d say, shaking his head. Only teats like that round here is on a cow. And he would tease, laughing while he spun the pages, giving me only a glimpse. Or he would come up and spank me on the rump. We tore the privy down together. Big Hans hated it. He said it was a dirty job fit only for soldiers. But I helped him a lot, he said. He told me that Jap girls had their slice on sideways and no hair. He promised to show me a picture of one of them and though I badgered him, he never did. We burned the boards in a big pile back of the barn and the flames were a deep orange like the sun going down and the smoke rolled darkly. It’s piss wet, Hans said. We stood by the fire and talked until it sank down and the stars were out and the coals glowed and he told me about the war in whispers and the firing of big guns.

Pa liked the summer. He wished it was summer all year long. He said once whiskey made it summer for him. But Hans liked the spring like me, though I liked summer too. Hans talked and showed me this and that. He measured his pecker once when he had a hard one. We watched how the larks ran across the weeds and winked with their tails taking off. We watched the brown spring water foam by the rocks in the creek, and heard Horse Simon blow and the pump squeak.

Then pa took a dislike to Hans and said I shouldn’t go with Hans so much. And then in the winter Hans took a dislike to pa as he almost had to, and Hans said fierce things to ma about pa’s drinking, and one day pa heard him. Pa was furious and terrible to ma all day. It was a night like this one. The wind was blowing hard and the snow was coming hard and I’d built a fire and was sitting by it, dreaming. Ma came and sat near me, and then pa came, burning inside himself, while Hans stayed in the kitchen. All I heard was the fire, and in the fire I saw ma’s sad quiet face the whole evening without turning, and I heard pa drinking, and nobody not even me said anything the whole long long evening. The next morning Hans went to wake pa and pa threw the pot and Hans got the ax and pa laughed fit to shake the house. It wasn’t long before Hans and I took to hating one another and hunting pa’s bottles alone.

The fire was burning down. There was some blue but mostly it was orange. For all Pedersen’s preparing like pa said he always did, he hadn’t got much wood in the house. It was good to be warm but I didn’t feel so set against the weather as I had been. I thought I’d like winter pretty well from now on. I sat as close as I could and stretched and yawned. Even if his cock was thicker… I was here and he was in the snow. I was satisfied.

He was in the wind now and in the cold now and sleepy now like me. His head was bent down low like the horse’s head must be and he was rocking in the saddle very tired of holding on and only rocking sleepy with his eyes shut and with snow on his heavy lids and on his lashes and snow in his hair and up his sleeves and down inside his collar and his boots. It was good I was glad he was there it wasn’t me was there sticking up bare in the wind on a horse like a stick with the horse most likely stopped by this time with his bowed head bent into the storm, and I wouldn’t like lying all by myself out there in the cold white dark, dying all alone out there, being buried out there while I was still trying to breathe, knowing I’d only come slowly to the surface in the spring and would soon be soft in the new sun and worried by curious dogs.

The horse must have stopped though he made the other one go on. Maybe he’d manage to drive this one too until it dropped, or he fell off, or something broke. He might make the next place. He just might. Carlson’s or Schmidt’s. He had once before though he never had a right or any chance to. Still he had. He was in the thick snow now. More was coming. More was blowing down. He was in it now and he could go on and he could come through it because he had before. Maybe he belonged in the snow. Maybe he lived there, like a fish does in a lake. Spring didn’t have anything like him. I surprised myself when I laughed the house was so empty and the wind so steady it didn’t count for noise.

I saw him coming up beside our crib, the horse going down to its knees in the drift there. I saw him going to the kitchen and coming in unheard because of all the wind. I saw Hans sitting in the kitchen. He was drinking like pa drank — lifting the bottle. Ma was there, her hands like a trap on the table. The Pedersen kid was there too, naked in the flour, towels lapping his middle, whiskey and water steadily dripping. Hans was watching, watching the kid’s dirty toes, watching him like he watched me with his pin-black eyes and his tongue sliding in his mouth. Then he’d see the cap, the mackinaw, the gloves wrapped thick around the gun, and it would be the same as when pa kicked the glass from Big Hans’s hand, only the bottle this time would roll on the floor, squirting. Ma would worry about her kitchen getting tracked and get up and mix biscuits with a shaky spoon and put the coffee on.

They’d disappear like the Pedersens had. He’d put them away somewhere out of sight for at least as long as the winter. But he’d leave the kid, for we’d been exchanged, and we were both in our own new lands. Then why did he stand there so pale I could see through? Shoot. Go on. Hurry up. Shoot.

The horse had circled round in it. He hadn’t known the way. He hadn’t known the horse had circled round. His hands were loose upon the reins and so the horse had circled round. Everything was black and white and everything the same. There wasn’t any road to go. There wasn’t any track. The horse had circled round in it. He hadn’t known the way. There was only snow to the horse’s thighs. There was only cold to the bone and driving snow in his eyes. He hadn’t known. How could he know the horse had circled round in it? How could he really ride and urge the horse with his heels when there wasn’t anyplace to go and everything was black and white and all the same? Of course the horse had circled round, of course he’d come around in it. Horses have a sense. That’s all manure about horses. No it ain’t, pa, no it ain’t. They do. Hans said. They do. Hans knows. He’s right. He was right about the wheat that time. He said the rust was in it and it was. He was right about the rats, they do eat shoes, they eat anything, so the horse has circled round in it. That was a long time ago. Yes, pa, but Hans was right even though that was a long time ago, and how would you know anyway, you was always drinking… not in summer… no, pa… not in spring or fall either… no, pa, but in the winter, and it’s winter now and you’re in bed where you belong — don’t speak to me, be quiet. The bottle made it spring for me just like that fellow’s made it warm for you. Shut up. Shut up. I wanted a cat or a dog awful bad since I was a little kid. You know those pictures of Hans’s, the girls with big brown nipples like bottle ends… Shut up. Shut up. I’m not going to grieve. You’re no man now. Your bottle’s broken in the snow. The sled rode over it, remember? I’m not going to grieve. You were always after killing me, yourself, pa, oh yes you were. I was cold in your house always, pa. Jorge — so was I. No. I was. I was the one wrapped in the snow. Even in the summer I’d shiver sometimes in the shade of a tree. And pa — I didn’t touch you, remember — there’s no point in haunting me. He did. He’s even come round maybe. Oh no jesus please. Round. He wakes. He sees the horse has stopped. He sits and rocks and thinks the horse is going on and then he sees it’s not. He tries his heels but the horse has finally stopped. He gets off and leads him on smack into the barn, and there it is, the barn, the barn he took the horse from. Then in the barn he begins to see better and he makes out something solid in the yard where he knows the house is and there are certain to be little letups in the storm and through one of them he sees a flicker of something almost orange, a flicker of the fire and a sign of me by it all stretched out my head on my arm and near asleep. If they’d given me a dog, I’d have called him Shep.