Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (2 page)

“Ain't it some kind of thanks,” my grandfather said as he latched up the back of the truck, the mules inside jostling to get their footing, and Orphan's long ear had swiveled back at the sound of his voice. The best of them brought three or four cents a pound as dog meat; some of them would merely be heaved six deep into a trench that would be filled in with dirt by men on tractors. The hollow report of hooves on the truck bed echoed even after the truck had pulled onto the road and turned out of sight. The exact same sound could be heard all through the county, all across the hills of Tennessee and up through Kentucky, across Missouri and Kansas, and all the way out West, even, you could hear it. The mules' job, it was finished.

 

When the back of the truck is finally shut, my father is high above, hiding in the hayloft. At church the pale-haired girl had pulled him into the center aisle just before the service and told him her news, the news of me. All through the sermon his mind had flipped like a fish, and he had stared hard at the back of Eula's neck, trying to still that fish. In the hayloft he thinks of this moment as he listens to the shouts of the truck driver and the engine backfiring once before the mules are pulled away, but he doesn't come to the edge, he doesn't look down for one last glimpse of Orphan Lad.

Late that night my father creeps to the Victrola in the living room and carefully opens the top of the cabinet. He slides a record onto the turntable and turns the crank, then sets his eraser and needle between his teeth and presses it to the first groove. A fiddle plays, is joined by a guitar, and then a high lonesome voice starts in about heartbreak. Every time he listens to his records like this, the first notes take him by surprise. When the music starts to fill his head, he can't believe it is coming from the record on the turntable and not from a place within himself. He closes his eyes and imagines Eula Parker is in the room, dancing behind him in a dark red dress. He moves his face across the record, following the groove with the needle, and spit collects in the pockets of his cheeks.
Eula, Eula, Eula.
He lets her name roll around in his head until it is unclear, too, whether this sound is coming from the record on the turntable, or from the deepest hollows of his heart.

 

Three weeks after the last load of mules goes, a tractor overturns on a hill down by the river and nearly kills one of the hands. It is not an unexpected tragedy. My grandfather is the only one with the man, and he pulls him out from underneath the seat and searches through the grass for three scattered fingers while the engine continues to choke and whir. He drives the man to the hospital in Nashville and doesn't return until late that night. His trip home is held up by an accident at the bridge that takes nearly an hour to be cleared away. When he
finally arrives back, his son is waiting on the porch to tell him about the pale-haired girl.

My father has rehearsed what he will say dozens of times to the fence posts and icebox, but when he sees his father's brown, blood-caked forearms and hands, he is startled enough to forget what it was. Weary and white in the face, my grandfather sits down next to him on the top step and touches his shoulder.

“Son,” he says, “you're gonna see a future I can't even stretch my mind around. Not any of it. I can't even begin to imagine.”

If my father had understood what his father was trying to tell him, maybe he would have waited until the morning to say what he now says. Maybe he would never had said anything, packed up a small bag, and left town for good. Abandoned love and any expectation of it. Instead he confesses to my grandfather, all in a rush, the same way he might have admitted that he had broken the new mower, or left the front gate open all night.

My grandfather stares hard at my father's knee and is quiet a long time.

“You done her wrong,” he says. Repeats it. “You got no choice but to take care of it. You done her wrong.”

In those days this was my grandfather's interpretation of the world: A thing was either right or it was wrong. Or so it seemed to my father, and he was getting tired of it
.

“No, sir,” he says, lips tight. “That's not what I intend. I'm in love with someone else.” He takes a breath. “I'm gonna
marry Eula Parker.” Even as he speaks her name he is startled by this statement, like it is a giant carp he has yanked from the depths of the river. It lies on the step before both of them, gasping.

My grandfather looks at him with sadness rimming his eyes and says quietly, “You should've thought of that before.”

“But you see,” my father says, as if explaining to a child, “I love her.”

My grandfather grips his knees with his big hands and sighs. He reaches out for his son's arm, but my father brushes him away, stands up, and walks heavily across the porch. When he goes into the house, he lets the screen door slam behind him, and it bangs twice in the casement before clicking shut.

 

Late that night, after washing the dishes of a silent dinner, my father sits on the porch sharpening his pocket knife. He taps his bare feet against the hollow stairs and even whistles through his teeth. His father's words have still not completely closed in around him. Though an uneasiness is slowly creeping up, he is still certain that the future is bright chrome and glorious, full of possibility. Behind him, a string of the banjo gently twangs as it goes flat in the cooling air. It is the first night of the year that smells of autumn and my father takes a few deep breaths as he leans against the porch railing and looks out into the yard. This is when he sees something out under the old elm, a long, twisted shape leaning unsteadily against the thick trunk of the tree.

He steps off the porch onto the cool grass of the yard, thinking first he sees a ghost. As he gets closer to the shape, he believes it next to be a fallen limb, or one of the hands, drunk on moonshine—then, nothing but a forgotten ladder, then—with rising heart—Eula come to call for him in her darkest dress. But when he is just a few yards away from the tree, he sees it is his father, his back to the house, arms at his sides. He is speaking quietly, and my father knows by the quality of his voice that he is praying. He has found him like this before, in the hayfield at dusk or by the creek in the morning, eyes closed, mumbling simple private incantations. My father is about to step quietly back to the porch when his father reaches a trembling hand to the tree to steady himself, then lets his shoulders collapse. He blows his nose in his hand and my father hears him swallow back thick, jumbled sobs. When he hears this, when he realizes his father is crying, he turns and rushes blindly back to the house, waves of heat rising from beneath his ribs like startled birds from a tree.

Once behind the closed door of his room, my father makes himself small as possible on the edge of his unmade bed. Staring hard at the baseboard, he tries to slow his tumbling heart. He has never seen his father cry, not even when his mother died. Now, having witnessed it, he feels like he has pulled the rug of manhood out from under the old man's feet. He convinces himself that it must be the lost mules his father was praying for, or for the mangled man who lies unconscious in the hospital bed in Nashville, and that this is what drove
him to tears. It is only much later, picking asparagus in the ghost of a garden, that he will admit who his father had really been crying for: for his son, and for
his
son.

 

These days, my father remembers little from the time before the tractors. The growl of their engines in his mind has long since drowned out the quieter noises: the constant stamping and shifting of mule weight in the barn, the smooth sound of oats being poured into a steel bucket. He remembers the steam that rose from the animals after work. Pooled heaps of soft leather harness waiting to be mended on the breakfast table. At the threshold of the barn door, a velvet-eared dog that was always snapping its teeth at flies. Orphan standing dark and noble in the snow, a sled hooked to his harness. Eula Parker in a dark blue hat laughing and saying his name, hurrying after him and calling out “Wait, wait,” one warm Sunday as he left church for home.

He remembers too his mother's cooking spices lined up in the cupboard where they had been since her death, faded inside their tins, without scent or taste. When he knew he was alone in the house, it gave him some sad comfort to take them out one by one and open them, the contents of each as dusty and gray as the next. He has just one memory of her, just an image: the curve of her spine and the fall of her hair when she had once leaned over to sniff the sheets on his bed, the morning after he'd wet it. This is all he has of her: one moment, just one, tangled in those little threads of shame.

In the same way I only have one memory of my grandfather, one watery picture from when I was very young. When my mother and father would rock me on the porch at night, my grandfather sat with them in a straight-backed chair, playing the banjo. He would tie a little tissue paper doll to his right wrist, and it danced and jumped like a tiny white ghost. I remember sitting on my mother's lap one night, and in the darkness the only things I could see were the tissue doll, the white moon of the banjo face, my mother's pale hair. I remember watching that doll bobbing along with my grandfather's strumming and, from time to time, the white flash of his teeth when he smiled. And I can hear him sing just a piece of one of the old songs:
I know'd it, indeed I know'd it, yes, I know'd it, my bones are gonna rise again.

This is the story that my father tells me as he bends like a wire wicket in the garden, or, I should say, what once was my mother's garden. He parts the tangle of weeds to find the asparagus, then snaps off the tough spears with his knife, straightening slowly from time to time to stretch his stiff and rounded back. The garden is like a straight-edged wilderness in the middle of the closely mowed lawn, a blasted plot of weeds and thorns and thistle. Nothing has grown here since my mother died and no one wanted to tend it. Nothing except the asparagus, which comes up year after year.

S
omething's out there. Something has shown up in the woods of Highland City. Dave Hardy was the first to see it, the opening weekend of bow season, up in his grandfather's tree stand on the hill behind Walmart. Afterwards he bushwhacked hell-bent down to the parking lot, and, gasping for breath, tried to tell the story to anyone who would listen. The story changed with the telling, and after a while, Dave Hardy himself didn't know what to believe:
See that old pine tree over there? It was close to me as that tree. As close as that blue Honda over there. As close as you to me.

Panther. Painter. Puma. Cougar. Mountain lion. Whatever you want to call it, by the end of October, half a dozen more people claim they have caught a glimpse of it: a pale shiver in the distance, a flash of fur through the trees. In the woods, hunters linger in their tree stands, hoping they might be the
next. In the houses, the big cat creeps nightly, making the rounds of dinner tables and dreams.

Twenty years in a taxidermy shop and Jack Wells has heard his share of tall tales, near misses, the one that got away. But the panther stories are different, told with pitch and fervor, a wild look in the eye. They don't carry much truck with Jack. No one, after all, has any sort of proof—a photo, a positively identifiable set of tracks, or even a really good look at the thing. For all Jack is concerned, it's an overgrown coyote, someone's German shepherd, or a figment of everyone's imagination. A mountain lion in Highland City? Sure, there's woods out there, hills with deep hollers and abandoned tobacco fields; not a whole lot of people, nothing to the south but the PLAXCO plant, nothing to the north but Kentucky—but the chances are just as good you'll run into a woolly mammoth. People, if you ask Jack, have lost all sense.

His ex-wife Jeanne is the worst of them, jabbering on about it like it's some kind of cuddly pussy cat.

“Oh, isn't it something!” she tells Jack, when they bump into one another in the frozen foods aisle of Tony's Shur-Save. “Wouldn't I like to catch me a glimpse of it.”

Jack is on one of the store's motorized scooters, the basket filled with items he has begrudgingly picked from the doctor's new list: brown rice, cottage cheese, egg replacer. He is embarrassed by the scooter, and when he realizes Jeanne isn't going to say anything about it he feels worse, and he shifts around on the seat, boxed in by his shame.

“For Christ's sake, Jeanne. There's nothing out there.”

Jeanne lets go of her cart and puts her hands on her hips, cocks her head at him, and gives him a look. “And how do
you
know?”

“Because I seen everything that come out of these woods the last twenty years. Every buck, doe, weasel, turkey, tick, and flea. There ain't no panther out there. There ain't been a panther for over ninety years.”

“Well,” Jeanne says, pursing her lips, considering this. “There is now.”

 

At the end of the summer, seven weeks ago, Jack lost his left leg below the knee, the latest battleground of his diabetes. He has only just returned to work full-time, and the walk-in freezer is stuffed with back orders: stiff red foxes stacked six deep and more buck head-and-shoulders than Jack cares to shake a stick at. Finished work crowds the shop: dozens of bucks, turkeys, coons, squirrels on cured oak branches, largemouth bass on maple plaques, all waiting to be picked up by customers.

Ronnie, the latest in a long line of apprentices, still around only because he hasn't knocked up a girl or blown his face up cooking meth, sits just outside the walk-in in a ski parka, defrosting a mink skin with a hair dryer and grunting along to the radio. He came in three days a week and did prep work while Jack was recovering, leaving a pile of buck capes so sloppily fleshed out that Jack has to go back over each one of them with a razor blade to get rid of the leftover bits of
fat and vein. Jack is sitting at his workbench, shaking out a cramp in his hand and cursing the day Ronnie was born, when Jeanne comes in, the bell on the door jingling.

“Well, well, well,” Jack says to the full-body doe mount that stands next to him, ears pricked, front hoof raised, frozen in the moment just before flight. “Don't look now.”

For twenty years, since Jack started the taxidermy business, Jeanne has come down to the shop from the house at least twice a day: in the morning to bring the sorted mail and in the evening to do the receipts and sweep. Four days a week, she works down at the elementary school in the principal's office, a job she's had for forty years, since the summer after they got married. Jeanne kept the house in the divorce. Jack moved into a little trailer on what was left of his father's tobacco holdings, where he's been ever since. But his shop remained in their old two-car garage, a hundred yards down the hill from the house. It's a good spot—tucked up against a wooded hill, no neighbors for miles. He would never be able to rent a place like this, and even back then the shop had become something of an institution among the men of Highland City. The thing he didn't anticipate was that the thin path that links the house to the shop would persist, worn down to the hard dirt through the years by his steps, now by Jeanne's. Jeanne does the ordering, the taxes, the books. Ask Jack Wells how his ex-wife is and he'll shrug and roll his eyes and always give the same answer:
Around.

“All right, Hud, shoe off!” Jeanne claps her hands with cheerful authority. Once a week, for the six weeks he's been
home since the surgery, she has insisted on cutting the toe-nails of Jack's good foot. This was how it started, on the other side: an ingrown toenail, a raging infection, his circulation shot to hell from the diabetes. Jeanne driving white-knuckled to the emergency room.

Jack throws down the buck cape and pushes his stool back with a screech. “Where's the dog?”

He peers into the open doorway behind her. Tiny, Jeanne's ancient and devoted black-and-tan beagle, was banished last week after lifting his leg on a turkey.

“In the house. Don't you worry about him. I told him, I said, ‘Tiny, I'm not letting you out of my sight anymore, you hear me?'” She raises her voice an octave, to the singsong tone she uses with the dog. “No, sir. Not with that mean old hungry panther prowling around here. Uh-uh. Not out of my sight.”

She takes off her windbreaker and lays it carefully between two raccoons, nostrils stuffed with cotton batting, that are drying on the plywood table in the middle of the room. “Now. I want to get this over with just as much as you do, Huddie, so be a good boy and give me something for under my knees. These old bones can't take no more kneeling on concrete floors.”

As she struggles to her knees on his corduroy jacket, he looks down at her. The top of her head is so familiar. The same perm she has always worn, only gray now instead of red-brown: a black-and-white photo of her younger self. He feels a startling rise of anticipation for her warm, wet mouth,
a forty-year-old memory stirred by the sight of her head at his lap: the two of them in the backseat of his car at the drive-in. But then she pulls the little leather kit out of her pocket and unfolds it to reveal an array of cold, sharp metal tools, and he coughs and shifts his weight, embarrassed, as if she can read his mind.

“Let's get this over with,” he barks.

Jeanne furrows her brow in concentration as she sets to work on each tough yellow nail. Jack folds his arms across his chest and puffs out his cheeks, letting out a long breath. His stomach is bothering him. His stomach is always bothering him. It gurgles and spits, clenches and churns. The pills do it to him. The doctor gave him another set of prescriptions after this latest round in the hospital, after he made it through the unbearable days of physical therapy. He frowns and studies his gut, like a basketball under his shirt. He can't see beyond it to his foot, or to the metal rods of his prosthesis that peek out under his left cuff. In six weeks he goes back for the permanent one, the one that is supposed to be so lifelike he will forget it's not his.

“Betty Ann Flowers called last night. Her new miniature schnauzer? Missing. Disappeared clear out of her yard. That dog cost her four hundred dollars, too.” Jeanne draws in her breath. “Can you even imagine? I told Tiny, I said, ‘Not out of my—'”

“Careful,” Jack snaps.

“I
am
being careful, Huddie.” Jeanne sighs. She can't understand why he doesn't see that this is all for his own good. He seems to think she
wants
to do this. She shoots him a
look. His face, between the jowls, is the same as it has always been, like a familiar road widened for shoulders. She wonders if he is really watching his weight. He seems heavier. Her breath catches in her throat, and she looks back down quickly, scolding herself for worrying. In high school, she'd thought he looked like—just a little bit like—Paul Newman. Not the eyes—Jack's were brown and sleepy—but in the chin, mostly. They saw
Hud
down at the drive-in when they were first married, and she teasingly nicknamed him after the movie's cold-hearted, cheating hero. By the time the bad years rolled around, they were both so used to the name that neither one drew the connection to see the irony.

 

CAT FEVER
, reads the headline of the
Highland City Gazette
on the first day of rifle season. There are two pictures below: a stock photograph of a mountain lion, teeth bared, ears pinned back, and a grainy photograph of Dave Hardy with another man Jack doesn't recognize, serious looks set on their faces, crouched next to a wash somewhere up in the woods. An inset shows what they are pointing to: a blurred set of tracks in the mud, which mysteriously disappear, according to the caption, after only a few feet.

“Could have been made by anything,” Jack tells Ronnie, peering down his nose at the paper. “Coyote. Bobcat. Some little old
dog
. Listen. We just don't have the wilderness to hold an animal of that size. Scraggly third-growth hard-woods chopped up by logging roads and so full of hunters
on ATVs it's a wonder they don't shoot each others' nuts off. A panther, first of all, is secretive and shy. Second, they can cover some ground. Fifteen, twenty miles a day. There just isn't the room. He'd keep bumping up against highways.”

“It's hogwash,” Jack tells Jeanne later, when she's down in the afternoon to sweep. The pain in his stump has been building all day, like a swarm of ants. He wants to go home and lie down in the dark and not have to see or talk to anyone for days. “Where would it have come from in the first place? Closest it might have wandered in from, closest those things live to us is the wildest bayous of Louisiana. You mean to tell me that a hundred-fifty-pound cat wandered out of some canebrake jungle, walked seven hundred miles without being sighted once, crossed four-lane roads and subdivisions and schoolyards, and took up residence here? In
Highland City
?”

“Well,” Jeanne says quietly, “you don't have to
yell.
And who knows? Maybe it didn't walk. Maybe it climbed up and fell asleep in a boxcar somewhere. Maybe it came on a
train.”

 

Late on a Friday afternoon, Jack stops Ronnie as he's leaving the shop and asks if he's given any thought to his future. “I'm not going to be at this forever, you know,” Jack tells him. “If you put a little more into it, you could be taking over here in a couple of years.” But Ronnie doesn't think much about his future at all, at least not the kind measured in years. Ronnie has been thinking, lately, about quite a few other things: If
he has enough credit to put a down payment on an ATV. If mountain lions are attracted to catnip. If he should ask his girlfriend, Tanya, to move in with him. Tanya is nineteen and a poet. Later that night, he picks her up at work and they drink a pitcher of beer up at Sullivan's. She sits across from him in their booth and scrawls in a big loose-leaf notebook while he watches a wrestling match on the TV above the bar. His sweatshirt and glasses are flecked with blood and bits of fatty tissue. Jack is always trying to get him to change his clothes when he leaves work. “You can't be taking a girl on a date dressed like that!” But Tanya doesn't care, or at least has never said anything.

“You know what I wanna do?” he says, eyes on the screen. “Get me one of them flat-screen TVs. One of them big ones.”

Tanya looks up at him, her pen in her mouth, and doesn't say a word. She is writing a poem about the panther. All her life, one thing has been sure: nothing ever happens in Highland City. Now this. She believes it is some sort of sign.

 

The feet contain a quarter of all the bones in the human body, the doctors told Jack when he was in the hospital. Well, Jack asked, how many bones are in the human body, anyway? Depending on how you count the sternum bones, 206 or 208. So: the bones of one foot, plus one leg from the knee down—count them—he was what, one-eighth gone? He thinks about this often—too often. In bed, trying to sleep, he stuffs a pillow over the place where his left leg should be, the way the
nurses showed him. When that does nothing to calm the pain, he lurches out of bed and finds the heaviest book in the house. When that doesn't work, he flings it across the room, pounds the mattress, and bites the pillow. His leg. Sometimes he has a panicky thought that they gave it to Jeanne, in a jar, like a tonsil. And that she has it up there in the house, with all his things: his old records and taxidermy videos, the suit he wore at their wedding, his .22, and his mother's Bible. All those other things he would have said twenty years ago were essential but had proven after all not to be.

 

Ray Blevins finds a dead fawn under his tree stand, all ripped to hell, half-buried in the leaves like something is planning to return for it. He comes up to the shop for no other reason than to tell this story to Jack. Ray is one that Jack has a hard time finding any respect for. One of the big talkers who needs a dozen technological gadgets to bring down a measly spike buck, who wants to go out there on a Saturday morning with his cell phone and his GPS system, his digital estrus bleat caller and human scent killer and eight-hundred-dollar rifle, and pretend he is Daniel Boone, out on the knife-edge of danger, deep in the uncharted wilderness. But a man couldn't get lost out there if he tried. That's why Jack quit hunting long ago, even before he got sick—because you simply can't get lost anymore—and where's the excitement and danger and pleasure in that? Even if your GPS broke and your cell phone fell in the mud, if you didn't run into another yahoo doing
the same thing ten yards down the hill then you could just follow the sound of the highway, find the gas station, and call your wife.