Читать книгу Twenty Unusual Short Stories - Dr. Donald D. Hook - Страница 7

John Wesley Meadows stepped into the gloom of pine trees behind his back lot and began his trek to sanity down the rutted, serpentine dirt road leading to open hunting fields a mile away. It was nearly 4 p.m. of an early-June day in searing hot, central Georgia. John was dressed neither for the weather nor for a walk in the woods. He wore a dark suit, white shirt, black tie, black shoes, and carried a white handkerchief with which he now and then dabbed at his eyes.

His sole companion was a bird dog, Duke, which had followed him from the house, but now was bounding past, nose close the red clay, scenting whatever else had passed this way. Every once in a while the dog would stop, turn its head in the direction of its master, and wait a moment till it was sure the man was still moving along. Satisfied with its observation, the animal would scamper ahead, fall back, detour through the words to the side, return, lead the way again.

Neither man nor dog seemed to have a goal. The man’s posture gave the impression that some unseen force was pulling him through the green-black forest, for his head was back, chin extended. But as he negotiated the ruts—up and down, in and out, one foot up, the other down—it became as it were not so much an unseen force actuating his forward movement but rather an invisible chain round his neck being pulled, yanked, by Herculean wind-sighs as the sky began its obeisance to an impending storm.

In actuality, the man was being pulled down this hellish road by the all too vivid memory of the last hour in the country church and at the graveside at the burial of his youngest child, John, Jr., a boy aged seven. And it was the mind-weight of the previous two days that caused the cant of the nape of his neck. The dog sensed the external droop of vulnerability about the man, but it had not forgotten that its master had a temper that could come ablaze in a moment. Duke maintained a safe and respectful distance at all times.

For John was a man of contradictions. Forty-two years old, he looked fifty or more. He held a master’s degree in horticulture, but for nearly twenty years he had engaged in hard physical work from sunup till the dead of night. His farm chores had sunburned his face and arms, gnarled his hands, slowed his speech, quickened his long-distance vision, and rendered him helpless at midnight without his reading glasses when he finally read the morning paper. He wrote messages of advice and concern to his two daughters now off at college in North Carolina. When they had lived at home, he made them work in the fields riding the combine, operating the detasseler. When they resisted, he beat them. When his wife complained, he beat her.

The only meals John ever ate with the family were breakfast and Sunday dinner. Both were preceded by profound prayer. Any giggling, squirming, or inattentiveness to the praying was met with an order to leave the table and forego that meal. He took his midday meal when he could—anytime from 1:00 to 3:00. His wife spread it out for him and watched him eat alone at the kitchen table while she busied herself washing dishes or preparing vegetables for the next repast. It was long past dark when he appeared for his supper, which he consumed in his slow, deliberate manner. When he finished, he rose from table, leaving his dishes in disarray on the table as he made his way to his chair in the living room, where he promptly fell to snoozing, unread paper in hand, glasses perched on nose end, for a good hour. One thing could be said about him: he never complained about the food, its variety, its quality, the amount, its cool temperature. Other virtues—as he saw them—included an abhorrence of strong drink, even of the weakest sort, and all forms of tobacco.

Sunday was a special day. John took his only bath of the week and put on his good brown suit. However, the ablutionary ceremony always took so long that the family was invariably thirty minutes late entering the church. John was perennially impervious to his family’s complaints of embarrassment. Besides, as he often said, “The sermon’s the only part of the service worth anything. Why come to church earlier?”

The preacher’s words did indeed have an analeptic effect on him, and for the rest of the day he was easy to live with as long as no one read anything more frivolous than the Bible or dressed down past hair ribbons, starched dresses, and patent leather shoes. Escape from this hebdomadal rigidity came about 4 p.m when John became a farmer again and, donning his work clothes, went out to slop the hogs. A new week had begun.

John worked very hard; there was certainly no doubt about that. Some of his fellow farmers, however, were critical. They said he worked hard as he did because he was so slow and inefficient. Others said he couldn’t keep good help because he mistreated them. John was not interested in replying to these criticisms, but he did often let his wife know he was disappointed she hadn’t borne him a son who could work with him and inherit this fertile land left to him by his father. Although he had graduated from the state university, he did not know the elemental biological fact that it is the father, not the mother, who determines the sex of the child.

From the time of the arrival of John Wesley Meadows, Jr., John, Sr.’s life changed markedly. Not only did his pecan and his peach orchards flourish as never before, a speculative ammonia business he had just started suddenly took off and netted the family an unaccustomed and substantial income. John saw these coincidences as acts of God’s favor. He said to his wife, “God’s been good to us—finally.”

It was clear to everyone from the start that John preferred his son over the rest of the members of his family. He lavished attention, presents, and care on the boy. He took him everywhere with him—to town for supplies, out into the fields and to the lots and barn back of the house to feed the cattle, the pigs, and the horses.

John, Jr. gave early signs of taking to the life of a farmer, showing an especial rapport with the animals. He adored his father, but he often criticized him for his cruelty to dumb creatures. John instructed his son, saying, “They’re not all that dumb; they’re just stubborn. They’re almost as smart as some of the niggers we have working around here.” After a pause he added, “All they need is a lesson or two to straighten them out.”

But the child never understood or approved of his father’s vicious kicks at the dogs, nor of his underfeeding them. (“They hunt better when they’re hungry,” he said.”) John, Jr. also disliked the beatings with stick or whip that his father frequently gave the horses and mules when they didn’t respond instantly to his commands. After he saw his father shoot and kill a cow because it had broken out of the grazing field into the front yard, John, Jr. cried all night. The father maintained stoutly, “She understood where she belonged all right. She was nothing but an ornery beast.”

Shortly after that John expanded his farm business to include the raising of prime cattle for slaughter. One day he brought home a prize bull on expensive loan from a cattleman and tied it securely to the huge oak tree in the front yard until he could shore up the fence around the corral in back. That afternoon there occurred one of those sudden, severe Georgia rainstorms, complete with lightning and thunder. It so frightened the bull that it broke its line and, in an attempt to hide from nature’s fury, wedged itself under the wooden front porch. John heard the commotion from inside the house and rushed outside, poker in hand. Seeing the bull half under the porch, John rushed at the creature and repeatedly struck it with the poker on its backside so that the pointed right-angled tip of the instrument ripped through the animal’s flesh in several places and inflicted great pain. The huge beast involuntarily lifted itself fully on its forelegs and tore away half the porch.

John was red-faced with rage. He beat the animal about the head until the stunned and frightened creature ran off toward the woods to the rear of the property. When John, bareback astride a hastily bridled horse, caught up with it over a mile away, the bull was quietly eating grass in an open field beyond the woods. John would have shot it on the spot if he had had his gun with him. Instead, he had brought along only a heavy rope. He slipped it around the bull’s neck and, on horseback, tolled the animal back to the tree in the front yard. There he tied it with a chain. Now the bull raged. It lowered its head, flared its nostrils, and pawed the ground in front of it. If John had not stepped briskly back, the bull would surely have gored him to death. All night long the bull alternately roared and moaned his discontent. The child Johnny tossed in his bed with compassion for the chained animal.

At home John warned his family about the vicious bull. The next morning he left for a distant orchard early, promising to return by noon to repair the corral. Noon came and went. Shortly before three o’clock the air became heavy. A storm was building up again. Nervously, the bull pawed the ground in front of it and made deep, anxious noises.

Watching from a front window, John, Jr. suddenly left his perch and ran out the front door. He clambered down off the damaged porch. The bull watched him suspiciously with red eyes. The boy moved closer, talking in soothing tones to the animal. It stood quite still and seemed to be listening. John, Jr. approached closer. He confidently reached out his hand to pet the enormous creature’s head. At that moment, the mother, coming out the front door, emitted a scream so loud it shook the heavens. Startled, the bull lowered its head and plunged forward. Its horns caught the boy full in the belly, impaling him horribly and catapulting his body beyond the circumference of the tether.

The mother ran from the house to her son. She gathered the battered, bloody child in her arms and ran with him to the old Buick parked next to the house. Laying the boy carefully on the seat next to her, she started the car—no one ever removed the keys. She tore out of the farm and down the highway the two miles to the little hospital in Fort Valley. When she handed over her son to the doctor in the emergency room, she was hysterical. Another doctor administered an injection to her. He went into the examining room. In a few minutes he returned. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but your child is dead.”

The hospital notified the owner of the bull, who raced to the Meadowses’ place. Having gotten the animal in the truck, he drove it to the slaughterhouse for destruction. The sheriff, dispatched to search for John, Sr., found him about to leave his peach orchard. Out of fear for what the shock might do to him, the sheriff transported John to the hospital. “There’s been an accident,” he explained, without giving any details and without disclosing the outcome.

When John learned of the terrible happening, he poured vile curses upon his wife for her carelessness. Normally, he never gave way to profanity and forbade it of everyone in his presence. She, for her part, utterly distraught, inveighed against him for getting a dangerous bull and for his cruelty to the animal.

All this went through the man’s mind, scene for scene, as he and the dog progressed down the tractor road. They were halfway through the piney woods to the other side and the open fields when John, Sr. came to an abrupt halt. He threw his head back and emitted a cry of great volume. His knees buckled. He dropped in a heap on the ground. He sobbed. His ululations stung the forest, but they did not escape beyond. They penetrated the stark, dry Georgia pines; they scraped the rocks; they entered the red clay; they left the soul of the man and touched the dog. Through the shower of his tears the man gazed into the eyes of his dog and heard him whine. For a split second both were touched; for one moment nature was in harmony.

Then the magic broke asunder. The dog bounded away. The man rose slowly from his sorrowful wallowing. Once again he trudged in the direction of the hunting fields.

The sky was getting darker. With the pine baldachin above him it was hard to tell how close the storm was. Most afternoons when the weather was hot a thunderstorm erupted. But sometimes it passed by to come crashing down ten or twenty miles away. What did it matter anyway? he thought. He’d been wet many times before.

At the edge of the forest, before stepping out into the field, he surveyed the sky. It looked worse than he had imagined. Maybe he should turn back. But why? What was left at home now? The events of recent days passed through his mind again. This time they were not strung out; they were rolled into a hard knot, a cannonball lodged in his skull. He had to void it, but he knew he couldn’t.

All at once Duke plunged into the field a hundred feet ahead of him. A rabbit shot up out of the grass directly in front of the dog. In a flash the dog leaped upon the flushed animal and grabbed it by the neck. Twisting, turning, the dog finished off the twitching rabbit and then stood over it for a moment. Then it seized the carcass in its mouth and trotting back to its master, Duke dropped it at John’s feet.

The fuse was lit: John’s blood pressure rose, his face colored, and his head ached. His eyes clouded, his mouth went dry, and his arms and legs tingled. His insides exploded. He picked up a rock and slammed it against the dog’s skull again and again. Duke staggered. Eyes wide, it stared at its master. Then it was dead.

There came a monstrous clap of thunder, but John never heard it. He was on his back, his eyes staring glassily heavenward, questioningly, a burn-rip in his suit from shoulder to ankle. Then the rain came, cascades of purifying water. It fell on the man and his dog. It covered the rabbit. It bathed the man’s house. It penetrated the forest and washed away the cries of anguish and regret. It leaked through the roof of the slaughterhouse. It soaked into Johnny’s fresh grave. It lashed into the face of John’s weeping wife as she shut the front door against the rising wind.

By morning it had reached North Carolina.

(From Psychograms of Sickness and Death: A Partial Autobiography, by Donald D. Hook, Unlimited Publishing, 2002 and Contradictions: Short Stories and Psychograms, by Donald D. Hook, Wildwechsel Books, 2008.)