Nathan Coulter (7 page)

There were a lot of cars parked at the church, where Mrs. Crandel's funeral was being held; and when we went past the graveyard we saw the fresh dirt mounded beside her grave.

Uncle Burley pointed to the angel on top of the Coulter monument. “Chairman of the welcoming committee,” he said.

“Uncle Burley,” I said, “do you think Mrs. Crandel was good enough to get to Heaven?”

“Beats me. It's hard to tell what happens after they get them planted.”

“Planted?” I said.

“Planted in the skull orchard.”

That was odd to think about. It sounded as if people's bodies were like seeds and could grow up into trees after they were dead, and maybe those trees had skulls on them instead of apples or pears.

I thought how my mother was dead. But I didn't think of her growing up into a tree. Her body had to stay in the ground, but her soul was in Heaven because she'd been good. Grandma said she was happy up there with the angels. I thought it would be a bad thing to be dead anyway. I figured it was probably darker there than it was on Earth. And maybe she missed Brother and me.

I said, “Uncle Burley, there's not any way to find out how many times they've got your name in that book, is there?”

“I reckon not.” Then he pointed his finger down the road. “Well, boy, if there's not the prettiest little walnut tree you ever saw.”

I looked, and it was, sure enough.

When we got down to Kate Helen's house, old Mrs. Branch was sitting on the porch. The shadow of the roof had moved until it ran in a straight line down the middle of her face.

Uncle Burley tipped his hat to her and said, “Good evening, Mrs. Branch.”

She squinted the eye that was in the sun and looked at us. “Howdy,” she said. “Is that you, Burley?”

“Yes mam,” Uncle Burley said. He asked her how her rheumatism was.

“Well, it's summer now and it's better. But before long it'll be winter again and the cold'll cripple me. I just live from one summer to the next one.” She laughed as if she'd told a joke.

Uncle Burley laughed a little too, and said that she looked mighty spry to him. He took the box of snuff out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Thought you might be needing some.”

She said it was good of Uncle Burley to be so thoughtful of an old woman.

“We thought we'd come over to see the baby,” Uncle Burley said.

“Kate Helen's yonder in the bed,” Mrs. Branch told him. “You all go right in.”

Uncle Burley took his hat off when we went through the door and said, “Well, hello there, Kate Helen.”

She smiled and held the baby up so we could look at it.

“Well, I'll be dogged,” Uncle Burley said. “It's a boy, ain't it, Kate Helen?”

She said yes, it was a boy. Uncle Burley wanted to know what his name was, and she said it was Daniel.

“That's a fine name.” Uncle Burley laid his hat on the foot of the bed. Kate Helen let him hold the baby and he sat down with it in a rocking chair.

“Well, I'll declare,” he said. “If that's not a fine-looking baby.”

The baby stuck one of its fists up in the air and started crying. But Uncle Burley rocked it a little and whistled to it, and it settled down and went back to sleep.

Uncle Burley looked at Kate Helen and looked at the baby again and said, “Well, I'll be switched.”

He motioned for me to come and look too. And I did.

“Now ain't that a pretty baby, Nathan?”

It didn't look like much to me. But I could tell that Uncle Burley thought a lot of it, so I said it was the prettiest baby I ever did see.

“Little Daniel,” Uncle Burley said.

I went across the room and sat down in a chair by the window. And then Uncle Burley began telling Kate Helen how we were getting along with our work. He told her how most of the tobacco crop had ripened early, and how we'd already cut all of it that was ripe. He said we were planning to cut the rest of it in about a week. And then he talked about how many young squirrels he'd seen that year, and promised to bring Kate Helen and her mother a couple of fat ones as soon as he got time to do a little hunting. After that he said he looked for an early frost, because the katydids had been singing for about three weeks already. Kate Helen took a little nap while he was talking.

After a while she woke up and said it was time for the baby to eat. I looked out the window while she fed him, and Uncle Burley got busy and rolled a cigarette.

The baby finished its supper and went to sleep again. It was late and we got up to leave. Mrs. Branch came hobbling in from the porch and asked us to have supper with them.

Uncle Burley said we'd like to, but we had to get on home and fire up the coke stoves in our tobacco barn. He told her that the tobacco had a lot of sap in it that year, and we had to keep the fires under it so it wouldn't rot in the barn.

He leaned over the bed to look at the baby again. It was smiling in its sleep. “Look at him. He's seeing the angels,” Uncle Burley said. “Well, I'll swear.” He put his hat on and started backing toward the door. “Well now, Kate Helen, don't take no wooden nickels.”

We walked home and went to the tobacco barn to fire up the coke stoves. Uncle Burley shook the ashes out, and then we took a bucket apiece and started carrying fresh coke to the fires. There was enough trash in the coke to make the stoves smoke a little at first, and it made my eyes smart. It was already dark in the barn, and the row of stoves glowed red-hot down the driveway. I could see Uncle Burley's legs passing back and forth in front of them under the smoke. I imagined that Hell looked like that. It was hot enough too when I leaned over the stoves to empty my bucket. My eyes watered when I looked at the blue flames crawling over the coals. It would be a bad place to stay forever, I thought.

When we came out of the barn it was dark, except for a thin red cloud stretched along the edge of the sky. A cool breeze was blowing and it was fine to be outside again. I thought it would be better to sprout into a tree than to stay down there in the fire.

“Uncle Burley,” I said, “it's a bad thing to be dead, ain't it?”

He lit a cigarette and flipped the match out. “Well, this world and one more and then the fireworks.”

For a week before the Fourth of July, Brother and I worked at Big Ellis's place, cleaning out a fence row. The fence was a good half a mile long, running all the way down one side of the farm, and we contracted to clean it out for five dollars apiece so we'd have plenty of spending money for the Fourth. We worked from daylight to dark every day except Sunday, axing out the sassafras and locust and thorn and scything down the briars, with the sun as hot as it could get at that time of year.

Early on the morning of the Fourth, Grandpa hitched his team to the mowing machine and went to help Daddy mow a field of hay. After he'd gone the day began to feel like a Sunday because we weren't going to work and it was so quiet around the house. The sun wasn't up far, but already you could hear the heat ticking down like a flock of sparrows on the back porch roof.

In a little while Uncle Burley came out and asked Brother and me to help him with a little work before we left for the Fourth of July picnic. We followed him to the smokehouse. He went inside and came out with a long-handled dip net.

“What're you going to do?” I asked him.

“It would be bad for a man to pass up a chance to make some money, wouldn't it?”

“I suppose it would,” I said.

He sent me to the corncrib to get an ear of corn, and when I came
back we went down to the pond. Grandma's ducks were swimming single file close to the bank, dabbling their bills into the water. Uncle Burley shelled the corn and scattered it along the bank. When the ducks came to eat he dipped up five of them in the dip net. We tied their bills shut with pieces of fishing line to keep Grandma from hearing them quack and carried them to the barn. We found an old wire chicken coop and loaded it on the wagon and put the ducks in it. Then we got the long galvanized tank that Grandpa kept shelled corn in, and loaded it on the wagon with the coop.

Uncle Burley sat down and looked at the tank. “Well, all we need now is water.” After a minute or so he said, “Well, we can fix that.”

He got up and brought two buckets from the barn and pitched them into the tank. And we loaded two water barrels.

“What're you going to do with all this?” Brother asked.

“Did you ever hear why they call a duck a duck?”

Brother looked at me and laughed, and we gave up asking him questions. We harnessed a team of mules and hitched them to the wagon, and went back to the house to wash and put on clean clothes.

When we were leaving the house Uncle Burley swiped three of Grandma's embroidery hoops and stuck them into the crown of his hat. On the road to town he whistled to himself, letting the mules trot on the downgrades. Once or twice he winked at Brother and me and said, “A duck is a duck.” That always seemed to please him, and he'd grin and start whistling again.

Before we'd gone halfway to the picnic we caught up with a man who was walking in the same direction we were going. Uncle Burley stopped and asked him if he wanted a ride.

“God bless you, brother,” the man said. And he climbed on the wagon.

“Where you going?” Uncle Burley asked him.

“Wherever the Lord's fixing to send me.”

“You a preacher?”

“I am, brother.”

He looked as if he'd been a long time going wherever the Lord was sending him.

“I am one of them it has pleased the Lord to send to the four corners of the world to preach the gospel,” he said.

He began to talk about unbelievers and the sin of the world, and who was going to Hell and who wasn't. The Lord had appointed him to be a witness, he said, to all the people he met. Uncle Burley whistled and spoke to the team, trying not to pay any attention. But I could see that he was getting aggravated. After a while he handed the reins to Brother and rolled a cigarette.

“A cigarette is as much of an abomination in the sight of the Lord as a bottle of whiskey,” the preacher said.

Uncle Burley lit the cigarette and smoked, looking straight down the road.

The preacher said, “If the Lord had wanted you to smoke He'd have give you a smokestack, brother.”

Uncle Burley took the reins again and stopped the team. He looked at the preacher. “If He'd wanted you to ride, you'd have wheels,” he said. “Now you get off.”

The preacher got off and stood in the ditch looking up at us. He raised his hand and said, “ ‘Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you.' Matthew, five-eleven.”

We drove off and left him standing there preaching in the ditch.

“If he's going to Heaven I want him to have to walk every foot of the way,” Uncle Burley said.

A couple of miles from Hargrave, we turned out the side road toward the picnic ground. Just before we got there we went by a pond, and Uncle Burley pulled the wagon off the road. We took the buckets and made a line between the pond and the wagon and filled the barrels with water. Then we drove on into the grounds.

The picnic ground was a fifty-acre field, and when we drove through the gate we could see automobiles parked everywhere, looking hot and shiny with the sun baking down on them. In the center of the field was a grove of tall oaks; people stood under them talking and laughing. Here and there a woman sat by herself in the shade beside a dinner basket. A carnival was set up outside the grove, the tents of the side shows in a double line, facing each other across a kind of street like the houses of a
town. At one end of the carnival was a Ferris wheel, and at the other end was the dance hall where the Odd Fellows held a dance on the night of the Fourth.

Uncle Burley drove around the carnival and pulled in by the dance hall on the far end of the rows of tents. We unloaded the tank and set it on the ground with the long side parallel to the street of the carnival, about twenty-five feet from the tent next to us. That tent was a shooting gallery, and we could hear the rifles cracking and a bell ringing when somebody hit a bull's-eye. When we got the tank leveled to suit Uncle Burley we filled it with water from the barrels. We found five good-sized rocks and tied pieces of fishing line to them, and then used them to anchor the ducks in the tank of water. Uncle Burley scratched a line in the dirt in front of the tank and looped the embroidery hoops over his hand.

Brother and I drove the wagon out of the way and hitched the mules to a tree. When we came back Uncle Burley was walking up and down in front of the tank, twirling the hoops around his finger. Before long a big pimply-faced boy came over from the shooting gallery and looked at the ducks. He was wearing a little hat that he'd won at one of the carnival booths, with a red felt ribbon that said I'M HOT STUFF pinned to the top of it.

Uncle Burley twirled the hoops. “Boy, do you think you can ring one of them ducks?”

“Hell yes,” the boy said. “How much?”

“Three rings for a dime.”

The boy looked at the ducks and then at the hoops in Uncle Burley's hand. “What do I get if I ring one?”

“Five dollars cash money, plus the satisfaction of it.”

The boy handed Uncle Burley a dime and took the hoops. He aimed a long time before he made a throw, and I was afraid he was going to win on the first try. But when the duck saw the hoop coming she stuck her head under the water. He made three tries and every time the duck ducked her head.

“Takes a lot of skill,” Uncle Burley said.