Harris and me : a summer remembered (9 page)

Harris had swung the shotgun out over Bob's head, directly between his ears, and let go a round of high-base goose load—what would now be called magnums—with number two shot.

I'm not sure who was the most surprised—Bob or me. I had no idea Harris had loaded the shotgun with a live round and I know the thought had never entered Bob's cranium.

The recoil from the old goose gun was staggering. It drove Harris back, into me, then me back, and both of us off Bob just at the same moment Bob stopped dead—his ears no doubt whistling—then wheeled much faster than I would have thought possible for a creature of his size and tore back to the yard directly over the top of both of us.

We were scuffed some and I couldn't for the life of me figure up from down for a moment or two, but worse, Bob had stepped on the shotgun and broken the rear stock in half.

"Shoot." Harris stood, staring down at the shotgun. "Glennis is gonna kill me."

"Glennis—what about Knute? It's his shotgun."

"He won't say nothing. Just look at me. That's

bad enough but Glennis, she's going to take a hoe handle to me."

I nodded. Glennis was something to be feared. I had seen her hit Harris so hard the snot flew when she just wanted to check her swing and wasn't even seriously mad. I shuddered to think what she could do if she was really upset.

"Well, there's nothing for it . . ."

I nodded again. He'd just have to face the music.

". . . you'll have to take the blame."

"Mel"

He nodded. "It's the only way out of this."

"Glennis will kill me."

"Naww. She don't hit nobody but me and a guy named Harold Peterson. He up and touched her on the chest at a church picnic and she brained him with a hot dish casserole. I think she's sweet on him though because she helped clean the casserole off while he was laying on the ground . . ."

The injustice of it all rankled me. I had done plenty wrong on my own without seeking new blame. "I'm not taking the blame for the shotgun."

"It ain't like we got a choice, is it?"

"I've got a choice."

"It's this way." Harris gave me a speculative look. "If you got a choice, I've got a choice, too."

"What do you mean?"

"If you make a choice not to take the blame, I

might make a choice to tell about them pictures you got in the box under the bed."

"You snake! You've been in my stuff."

He shrugged. "Not so's you'd notice. I just looked at 'em once. Well, maybe more than once. It's kind of fun to look at 'em. Makes my business feel funny and I start thinking about Shirley Everson ..."

He had me. I understood that but I still fought a bit. "I ever catch you in that box again I'll beat the tar out of you." It was a hollow threat and he knew it but he had the decency to give it to me.

"I won't. And don't worry. Glennis ain't going to hit you and even if she does, it won't be like she'd hit me."

The irony was that I lied the best I could, looked them all straight in the face, told them how I found the shotgun and took it out and found a shell in the cabinet (Harris coached me) and loaded it and felt just awful about it and Glennis patted me on the head and turned and hit Harris so hard he almost somersaulted out of the kitchen.

"What was that for?" Harris asked, staggering back into the room.

"For not stopping him," Glennis said. "He could have killed himself with that old gun."

"Well damn . . ."

Smack.

Harris was right about one thing though. Knute never said a word, just looked at me and then went out to glue and wire the stock together. But that look made me wish I'd never lied about anything in my whole life.

another basket on the front that took the smaller piles and threw them up and over the back to make larger stacks.

The stacker was pulled up and over by either Bob or Bill, and Harris said when he was small he used to ride them while they were working, pulling forward and backing up.

I thought it might be fun to do but neither horse wanted me close. I guess they thought I had something to do with Harris jumping on them or shooting off their backs.

But we had work to do anyway. As the hay came up over and down from the stacker we had to use forks to spread it out evenly and then walk around packing it down.

Initially, on the first day, it was fun jumping and bouncing in the fresh summer hay. But that only lasted for part of the time it took to make the initial stack. Then there was another stack, and another, and soon it was work, hard work in dusty hay on a hot afternoon.

By the end of that beginning day of stacking hay I was exhausted and could hardly keep my eyes open to eat the last meal of the day.

On the next day, and the next, the work ground me down to the point where I could close my eyes and see haystacks looking like huge loaves of bread in the fields. And even jumping down from a little

platform inside the barn near the roof to pack the hay so we could put more in became work.

Haying took a week and at the end of it I was numb. But there came a day when the endless hay at last ended, not a wisp of grass to put up, and Harris looked at me standing by the barn and said:

"Last one in the river sucks sour pig mud . . ."

And we were gone, racing for the river at a dead lope, Harris shucking his bibs as he moved, gaining the advantage because that's all he wore.

The river ran past the house and barn, and near where it passed the house there was a bend and a small pool where eddies had cut the bank. It was not deep—four feet at the most—but had a sandy bottom and was clear and cold, and we hit the water running. Or Harris did. I had to stop and take my shoes and pants off.

While I was doing so I heard a thumping sound in back of me. I thought immediately of Bill and Bob and worried that they were coming to join the party but I turned to see Knute coming, pulling off his bibs and unbuttoning his shirt.

He was a big man, not fat but wide, and when he got his clothes off he looked as white as paper except for his face, which was burned red.

Harris was already in the water and I was in midair when Knute went over me and almost drained the pool when he landed. Water must have gone

no

twenty feet in the air. He was going so fast he almost skipped across the surface, and as soon as he came up he grabbed Harris by the arm in one hand and me in the other and started slamming and flipping us around like a couple of dead fish.

Then he threw us to the side and walked out of the pool and dressed, putting his clothes on over his wet body, and walked up to the house without saying a word.

Harris came up covered with mud, sputtering, and I looked around the pool trying to understand which way was out of the water.

"Man," Harris laughed, "ain't it fun when Pa plays with us?"

"Plays?"

"Yeah. He hardly ever does it. I just wish he'd do it more. I think it would settle him some."

It felt like most of the bones in my body had turned to cartilage. At no time during the "play" did I ever have any idea of control over my own body and I had never felt strength like I felt in Knute's hand holding my arm, or the ease with which he flipped us around. His grip was like a vise connected to spring steel.

"Settle him?" Knute seemed the least nervous person I had ever seen. He just drank coffee and smoked Bull Durham cigarettes.

"Yeah. It's his nerves, makes him the way he is.

Worry about the farm and all. He used to play with me all the time. Once he threw me clean over the threshing machine. That was a day, I'll tell you."

"I'll bet . . ."

We were lying nude on the bank of the river, the sun cooking us dry. I kept looking up toward the house and covering myself with my hand—we were in plain view—but Harris didn't seem to care.

I lay back and watched the clouds for a moment and wondered how it could be that I was living here now and had been living somewhere else before, and why I didn't seem to remember so much of the other place I had lived, and wondered if I could talk about it with Harris, when he suddenly swore.

"Damn."

"What's the matter?"

"Tick."

"Wood tick?" I opened my eyes and sat up. We'd been seeing ticks all summer. It was now about the first of July and they were almost all gone. Clair once said that the ticks were always gone by the Fourth of July. "So what?"

"Not wood tick. Fever tick."

I scanned the ground around me carefully. "They'll give us a fever?"

"Not us, the cattle. It means we'll have to dip the cows. Man, I hate to dip cattle."

"Dip the cows?" I had no idea—as usual—what he meant. "How do you dip cows?"

But he ignored me and instead slipped into his bibs and headed for the house. "Come on, we got to tell Pa about the tick."

At first it didn't seem that dipping the cattle would be such a difficult thing. There was a large pen in back of the barn with a gate that was usually left open. Feed was put in a trough and it brought the cattle into the pen. The cows came readily enough but there was a bull, a large, flat-sided, black-and-white Holstein that kept pushing at the fence, throwing dirt up over his shoulders and blowing snot.

"He looks mean," I said to Harris. "The bull."

"Naww. He's just nervous. We've kept him apart until now and he knows it's time to be with the cows. He don't like nothing to mess his breeding up. And he don't like to dip. None of 'em do."

With all the cattle in the pen and the gate closed, a chute was rigged up with board panels and a ramp that led up to the top of a long sheet-metal tank over four feet deep. Inside the tank another ramp was laid that led out of the tank. It had wooden crosspieces so the cows could get footing to climb out to yet another ramp that led down to the ground and out into the pasture.

The idea was simple. The cattle were to be pushed out of the pen into the chute, forced to jump into the tank, and then prodded up the ramp to freedom.

"What goes in the tank?" I asked.

"Creosote," Harris said, spitting. "Stuff makes blisters come on your skin so's it looks like you've got a sickness. Try to stay clear of it."

I made a mental promise not to get anywhere near the tank—completely forgetting the concept of fluid displacement and just exactly what happens when a half-ton animal jumps into a tank of liquid.

While we spoke Knute and Louie backed the old truck up to the tank and tipped fifty-five-gallon drums of evil-smelling liquid off the bed so they would run into the tank until it was nearly three-quarters full. Clair and Glennis had come from the house to help but stayed well away from the dip area.

Then Knute stood by the tank and looked at Harris and nodded. "Let 'em go."

Harris opened the gate leading from the pen into the chute and stood back as if expecting the cattle to just run and jump in themselves.

Nothing happened.

"Aww heck." Harris climbed into the pen, motioning for me to follow, and—staying well clear of Vivian's back end—we shooed and pushed on the cows until one of them started into the chute.

As soon as the first cow was close to the tank

itself Louie reached across and grabbed her tail and twisted it over, hard, and the cow made a jump forward that carried her over the center of the dip tank.

She hit with a splash like depth charges going off. Creosote dip flew ten feet in the air and came down on all of us, and I immediately felt a burning sensation where it hit bare skin.

There was no time to worry about the creosote because while we were getting the first cow going Clair and Glennis yelled from the outside of the pen and got the rest moving to follow the first one.

It was fast work for ten or fifteen minutes. Cow after cow jumped in the tank, nudged by Louie's tail-twisting trick, and Knute pulled a mop out of the back of the truck and mopped creosote over the top of each cow as it hit the tank.

Finally there was only one left—the bull. He followed meekly enough, was almost in the position where Louie would grab his tail when he hesitated.

I was standing off to the side in the pen, halfway through the wire to climb out. I happened to be looking at Knute and when the bull stopped, seemed to wait just half a second, Knute dropped the mop and started to move.

I thought I had never seen a person move so fast but the bull was faster. He wheeled around, turning on himself inside the chute, and headed back out with a low bellow that made the ground shake.

And there was Harris.

He had been bringing up the rear, pushing the rest of the cows into the chute, and had actually come a slight way into the chute himself. He might have had time to do something, climb out of the chute, run. But he was looking down to step forward over the fresh cow manure that filled the chute and the bull was so fast, faster than even Knute, that Harris didn't have a chance.

The bull hit him like a train, driving him back into the pen and down. It was all so powerful and sudden that I didn't have time to yell, to do anything but stand with my mouth open.

Knute was over the fence and on the bull in not more than a second. I saw it, saw it all as if it were in slow motion, but I still didn't believe it.

He grabbed for Harris, snatched him somehow from beneath the bull's head, pulled him out and up and threw him over the fence toward Clair and Glennis, where he landed like rags.

Then Knute hit the bull. I'm not sure where, somewhere on the head or nose. He raised his right hand and brought his left up and clasped the two hands together in one fist and brought them down on the bull, brought them down like a mountain falling, hit him with a sound like an ax chopping a watermelon.

And the bull went down—bellowed and goobered

snot and spit and dropped on his front knees—and Knute stood with his left arm hanging at his side, bent funny just above the wrist.

He took two steps past the bull to the fence near Clair and Glennis and threw a leg over the wire.

"Is he all right ?"

"I don't know." Clair was rubbing Harris's chest, her forehead wrinkled with worry. "That damn bull. I told you to get rid of that thing ..."