1996
“Sound like a big un. Must be thirteen rattles on that joker. Let’s get us ‘round that ole barrow out there an’ come back on ‘im.”
The two men stepped lightly through the high, sere grass. They turned south and crept on. Kitty Boy led, straight backed and limber despite his age, his experience guiding him like a higher sense akin to powers claimed by charlatans who had come and gone and never lasted beside his illimitable power. Baldwin followed, smaller, less dexterous, and though more learned in books, unaware and unprepared. Kitty Boy bent forward and went light on his feet, feeling in the air the body and intent of his prey as if he had been present at its conception and known it all its low life. The sun was not high and the burnt orange of the later day, failing to clear the tops of the near pines, was not enough to give him the light he would have preferred, but he was already there amidst the long grass and sticky burrs. He heard it again, just ahead, low but growing angry, keen to his heat and smell. He and Baldwin began the final centripetal approach.
The sound came through the grass and the men stopped, arrested by the high determined warning, its sound as old and everlasting as the land on which they stood. Kitty Boy opened his hand against the low wind, perhaps feeling of the atmosphere and the land and his time. Crepuscular light of the closing day was there, harsh but right, and both men waited in the dimming glow for the sound to come again — when it returned it came sudden and divine, with its inherent enmity but also with patience, almost understanding, almost pity.
“You coulda brought one of your’n an’ had us outta here, Kitty Boy.”
“It’s for comin so late we workin so. Hush now.”
It came again into that verisimilitude of stillness, more ambivalent now and not without telling of its own history — alerting them as they stood in thrall to the gravity of all purpose and especially their own. Baldwin lurched backwards, recoiled, and both men cursed his cravenness. Kitty Boy chased the sound. He did not hear it when it next came or when it sounded again once more, taken as he was by its implications; he led on to the purpose for which he had come. Baldwin kept his feet in Kitty Boy’s shadow, stepping close to the man, but mindful enough not to intrude on the hunt, of which he knew he was not part. Yet he wanted to speak to Kitty Boy, to say to him something urgent or consuming that would turn the hunter, make this beloved man turn and look at him with need — then he could be the man who helped rather than a man who followed, rather than a thing tacked on, superfluous. They would call him a follower, and that if they were kind. He was always weary of this quality of himself, of being beneath the enduring perception of manhood, though he could not say for sure who created the quality or the conception, only that it existed outside his flesh and for all his worry and work he could not design a way to take it in himself. What riled in him then was an urge to speak or act, even to sabotage — this last some spontaneous and horrid energy he feared but was not unfamiliar with; he could not quell or master it, could not reason with himself when it overcame him. Kitty Boy eyed him.
“Naw, now. You go’on an’ carry off thatta way. An’ you keep a cat’s step an’ eye. Sho as you step wrong, that joker be on you.”
Baldwin obeyed, like a coon hound to its master’s finger, but without the natural prowess to run its prey into the high, lonely corner. He had been afraid since he first agreed to walk beside the hunter, but now he was becoming more and more possessed not of his nerves but of a manifestation of ego which did not belong to that place or intent. That horrid energy. The sound came again, bolstered by the encroaching night, and almost pleading now for confrontation, for some end. Now it was Baldwin who did not hear or could not register, his mind jettisoning all else to focus on something anachronistic, yet he knew which way to move toward the place he could not detect, thinking only of returning in the guise of a man. It was what the energy wanted. He was weary of his quality, his lack, his existence as negative space in a foreground rife with solid bodies. He had not proven his mettle, nor shown he had any in years, since he played in the ignorant and heroic manner of children — that did not count, could not count, though he longed for such fearlessness to make him free again. And it was not merely fear that plagued him, but the land and the people that were his but which he did not know and could not fathom; laws unwritten, profound, and ageless which he could not remember; ways and assumptions with which he could not hold. He had heard Sister Bucor’s frail fists at his door — the dull and shallow beat of her aged flesh against his storm door — when tornadoes surprised Jeff-Davis County and she fled her trailer for his brick house, but he could not find the motive force to open the door to those cacophonous winds or to face her when she survived. When the wolves invaded town, he sent his nephew to the hunting party and he himself went for groceries in Magee. And his sins were not limited to failures of courage; he’d spent thousands on a bushhog he did not know how to use and then let rust to pieces. When little Hattie Rawl Gholar killed herself to find heaven he asked her mother if the child had been stable.
“Whoa fella. You git back.”
But he did not hear.
“I say stop now. You ‘bout to run up on ‘im. Whoa now.”
Still he did not hear.
“Baldwin. Git back.”
Baldwin reached the muscled mass of the snake as it rested on its stacked coil. With practiced celerity it retracted and showed the scimitars of its kind.
By the time Kitty Boy cut off the head and kicked it, Baldwins leg was already swelling. Baldwin stay kneeling, looking up at him as if he should have known. Kitty Boy huffed. He struggled to find words wise enough for a fool.
“What make you do a fool thing like that?”
“Just git me to Dame Marie.”
“You think Dame gone fool wit’ you after this? She liable to let you die or turn yo black behind into somethin unholy.”
“Teresa then.”
“If she home.”
He helped Baldwin up and set him aside. The task remained unfinished. Kitty Boy reached down and straightened the still turning snake. Its blood fell along the blades of grass. He flipped it on its back, exposing the white belly to the sky.
“Rain.”
There were moments when Baldwin believed his quality was based on this or that fallacy; in times of uncommon joy he believed in the abstract future of himself, like a proposal of his manhood to arrive in time. A moment of the latter had overtaken him in the grass, just briefly, giving him the fleeting all-bravado of a god, however false. What had seemed to him a shortcut to new power now revealed itself to be one more of his missteps, a bewildered fumbling for a state he could not obtain, and perhaps could not bear if he did. Kitty Boy had gone back there now, to retrieve a pin Baldwin had lost amidst the high brown grass.
Teresa mended him, not without a harangue more emasculating, more violent than the bite. The group that had gathered was small, which was an insult in itself: when Teresa drew on the Lord’s power it brought all of Short’s Chapel together in a gathering that was preternaturally communal, yet this evening only eight people had come for the prayer. He was not even worth their leering, their talk. Teresa herself seemed to offer God a release from his duty in her peroration, a generous clause pardoning a withholding of power regarding the consequence of Baldwin’s inexorable act. She wrapped the towel containing the venom.
“I sure thank you, Teetabug.”
“Hell if I let a fool like you call me dat.”
“Okay then. Thank you, Teresa.”
She muttered and departed. At least they had succeeded in bringing the rain. At least Kitty Boy had succeeded. Baldwin was there with his quality, alone but not frustrated, not this time, only weary of its heft and more conscious of its influence. His delusion had cost him a brief flash of pain. It had cost the community more. He had wasted the power of God.
He knew they had to use it sparingly, measure it out according to need and merit and righteousness and perhaps even some fomenting of the earth. There were things that had intentions that happened in their order. Dame Marie had been one of the eight to come. She stood in the corner closest to him without a sound even from her heels; she was beautiful and proud there, the elaborate heap of her blonde hair still as certain mornings, silent and unfaceable as she peered on him. He always sweat when she was near, was often nearly sick, but this was different, was more. They knew it together but she did not cease until he turned toward her — he was unable to meet her gaze, instead looking pleadingly at her feet. She perceived it with derisive grace and left. Now alone, he felt caged with the fear of his nightly prayers, with what sign, what words, he might receive.
That night he made his dinner; rather he burned two attempts and abandoned a third. The embarrassment was not of concern — it was neither new nor done with — but his mind had gone back again to his lack, his deficiency, and he contemplated why that quality had been meted to him so stingily. How familiar to him were the questions, the futility, the façade in which he’d encased himself to falsify his position among those he had never fooled. He poured the slop of his half-cooked food into the bin and went to his chair beside the living room window. He turned the wand on the blinds to see the night, somewhat assured there was something in the night peering back, some fragment of self he had either lost or yet to find. He sat in the light of a single bulb, wondering if he would ever rise from the craven iteration to join that virile, hard-forged elite, the southern man, the toiling beloved of the great God.
When the knock came it was the only sound in the still, sparse room. He lurched. Looking once more out the window and seeing only his porch and the night beyond it, he rose and called to the stranger with his handle on the knob, hoping only that it wasn’t Dame Marie. The answering voice was Kitty Boy’s. He opened the door, his eyes on the visitor’s feet.
“Kitty Boy. What can I do for you?”
“Go on back over there and sit down.”
In his own home. But he did it.
“Now Baldwin ain’t a thing wrong with bein a learned man. Woulda liked some more schoolin myself, but it’s otha things worth knowin too. Like yo people. They ways. How can a man live all his years in a place and know nothing of it?”
“I know of it.”
“You might see the ways, but they ain’t yours. How can that be? You ain’t have but one job today and you went and wasted power.”
“You know I didn’t mean for that.”
“What were you doin?”
“I was after somethin.”
“Somethin?”
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“Never mind that.”
“That’s worse yet.”
Baldwin looked away and back again. There was something untenable about looking to the eye of another living soul. It gave the impression of too deep a consideration, of his self laid bare in a world that wanted to recast or dissolve him. Nothing in this world judges so clearly or decisively as the trap of another’s eyes.
“I’m not a fool, Kitty Boy. I don’t think it’s any of your business what I am.”
“I done knowed you all yo life. Seen you up from a tiny thing. Can’t help but to glean a thing or two when you know someone that long. And I didn’t come to call you wrong, even if you are, just to try to steer you better.”
“Like a little boat lost on a river.”
“Well… I reckon so.”
Kitty Boy readjusted in his seat, propping up on his elbow and letting his legs stretch out long in front of him. Even that was done in a way that was foreign to the learned man. Baldwin was frustrated as he watched, thinking that even the manner and confidence of relaxation were far from him. He could not command a seat like that.
“You wantin somethin can’t be put in words an that’s the type of wantin make you plumb miserable. A person got to know a thing for what it is, what it might mean to ’em if they had it, but if you can’t speak it, you don’t need it. Make yoself sick wonderin on somethin like that. And you ain’t Old Folk, but yo youth ain’t yours no mo. Time you get a certain age you got to live in the flesh and the spirit God gave you. It’s a wonderful thing to be set in yo ways, so long as you abide ‘em.”
Baldwin turned from him. The day had been too long. And the room seemed a more callous judge than Kitty Boy, whose mask of flesh and feeling, though austere and dolorous as to its occasional will, could manifest compassion and the softer things of his tutelage; the room was only blank, a most horrific canvas to a man with nothing in his spirit but doubt and pity. And he could feel his lack, which burgeoned in those moments of ever-widening shame, because his father named it in him.
1964
“Just you let the weight of that hammer do the work, son. Raise it up over the head of that nail an’ take your time. You better get that thumb back or you’ll crack it good. Your cousin Boyle almost took his plumb off one day. That’s okay. You ain’t quite strong enough, but you’ll get it one day. Well, not like that, son. It’s okay, don’t pout now. I’m not mad, I just want you to learn the right way. A man has to do a lot of things in his life and build is one of them. Give it to me. Let me show you.”
He took the hammer from his son and held it, the muscles of his arm twisting in striation. He took three nails from his shirt pocket and rolled one to the tip of his fingers.
“Watch your old man, son.”
He looked at the board, then down along its length, gauging where the nails belonged. He set the first and with a deft movement of his wrist he sunk its point in the pine. He choked up on the hammer slightly and then buried everything but the head with one powerful stroke. Then he did the next. And the next. Baldwin watched, wondering at the strength and precision, at how his father could do such a feat, could master such a thing. He figured it must be a simple thing after all or at least that the ability to do it was in his blood. He took the hammer back from his father.
“That’s the spirit. Alright, here’s you one. Now just like I showed you.”
Baldwin set the nail and brought the hammer down. The nail popped up from the wood and struck him in the mouth. He felt the urge to cry begin its rise in him and he turned his face so his father wouldn’t see. He knew that he could not fail twice in the same instant, could not unhand himself so easily in so many ways. His father knew it too.
“You just take you a minute, boy. I’m goin down to holla at your uncle.”
His father climbed down from the roof and walked a distance before beckoning his brother over. Baldwin picked up the nail again, embarrassed and bolstered by the absence of his father. The men below whispered, an effort to hide their true intentions as adults often will, but the sky and the land and even the woods beyond were just quiet enough for their voices to carry.
“How is it up there, Jeff?”
“Same as always, I reckon. He just can’t.”
“Well, he’ll learn. One of those late sprouts.”
“I been tellin myself that, but he’s ten. You remember everythin daddy had us doin by that age? We were doin half the chores ourselves. I been tryin to teach him to hammer a nail all summer. I try to teach him about the strength in a man’s back, and huntin, and workin in the yard, and he just don’t keep none of it in his head.”
“World’s jumpin up, Jeff. Children got time to play these days.”
“What’re you talkin about? Burt, you tellin me that boy don’t strike you as odd? He’s mine, but that don’t mean I can’t use my eyes.”
“Well, he’s different for sure. Smart as a whip, though. Tell you one thing we couldn’t do at that age. Homework.”
“I never said he wasn’t smart. I don’t dispute that. But can’t he be a man? Our kind?”
“He’s just a boy, Jeff. Lay off.”
“I just got a feelin ‘bout him is all. Somethin other ‘bout that boy.”
Baldwin set the nail again. His father had brought them home in a paper bag, balled up in his fist as if even their iron points couldn’t hurt him. He’d set them on the chair by the back door and there had been the familiar sound of their dropping on the wood, telling that there was work to be done. Baldwin raised the hammer and brought it down.
1996
“Kitty Boy, tell me. It’s not somethin that can be fixed. I suppose?”
“Time’ll do it all, but so much.”
“And?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t even tell you that.”
“You can. You have to.”
“Even God wouldn’t. How much smaller am I? You caught all around, looks like.”
“For all this long trouble I might as well stop being here.”
It was not premeditated, nor even cathartic. It had simply risen in him from a place he would have done well to have searched before. But when it came out of his mouth he couldn’t find it himself to want it back. It seemed evident, but also tragic, as if part of his entire conception was bound up in that last, miniscule vestige — the hope that he might one day belong to that place which he adored but which had no use for him — and to have lost it or forsaken it, revealing its true false nature, meant that where before he might be tolerated, now he must be rebuked. He looked to Kitty Boy for its antithesis, for the smallest of indicia that possibilities had not been extinguished.
“You might as well.”
