Maintenance, 1958

Last Saturday my father took down the storms and stacked them on frames in the garage.  This Saturday he put up screens.  Heavy, wooden, full-length screens.  I rinsed them with the hose and watched him on the ladder.

By dinner we were sitting at a kitchen table that was feeling the benefit of the evening breeze.  I was waiting to join kick-the-can in the next yard over.  I could hear who was already there.  Jello yet for the three of us.  Two big men walked onto the porch and up to the screen door.  Suited, fat men.  Not local.  The wooden door rattled when one of them knocked on it.  My father sat just steps from them.  We were on display.

"Yeah?" my father said, still sitting.  Mother did not turn toward the men.

One of them said, "We are organizing furniture workers all over the upstate area."

My father said, "No."  He said, "No.  I know about you.  Go."

"Take some literature," they said.

My father said, "I know about you."

He closed the inner door and went to the room just off the kitchen.  He peeked out toward the porch, his thick fingers touching his lips.
 

Bullfight

In Spain, the only bullfight I saw was on a bank of TVs in a closed appliance store window in Granada. The young matador was strutting his contempt for the bull. The man was to the point of using the sword. The bull seemed stuporous and stalled. Then the bull moved forward and hooked the man in the stomach and tossed him over his head. The matador got up, holding his abdomen and waiving away his helpers. He asked to be handed his sword again. Then the timer shut down all displays for the night.
 

Scrub

Dad's pup took off when we got next to the scrub woods.  The last I saw her, she knocked the snow off a sideways tree as she jumped it.  She was yapping and running where we couldn't see her.  My father was shouting, "Sweetie!  Come!  Come, goddamit!"  He made shrill whistles with his fingers.  He called, "Sweetie!  Biscuit!  Biscuit!"  Sawyer adjusted his hat and seemed to shake his head.

Dad was showing Sawyer a special place he had where three quit farms came together and covered between them a woods that nobody used.  I was along.  Nobody had lived on these farms for years.  Nobody in town knew anymore who owned them.  The farmhouse here had the windows shot out.  The barn had been stripped of its weathered boards.

He said, "Maybe she'll circle back."  He said, "That's all some of them do, run around in circles, chasing the rabbits back at you."

We were at the back edge of the snowy pasture, getting our snowshoes on to go into the woods.  Dad watched the faraway barking.  He whistled some more with his fingers in his mouth.  He called.  Sawyer said, "That dog will do what it wants . . . We don't need the dog."  She was moving straight back away from us.  Dad kept looking into the woods.  Sawyer said, "I don't usually use a dog."

Sawyer had been all over but not to this place Dad was showing him.  His thin legs were bowed, and he had on old green-black plaid woolen pants that puffed out at his thighs and were tight around his calves.  His shotgun was old and heavily-oiled.  Sawyer said, "Maybe she'll be bringing some rabbits back out of the woods to us."  He was grinning.

He was watching the woods in front of us.  I was looking too.  The pines were spread out on the hillocks.  The woods but for the snow would have been easy to walk through.  The snow was bright with sun, and we squinted even when staring into the woods.

Sawyer shot and I jumped, just about dropping my older brother's shotgun.  I saw a rabbit twitching about 20 yards into the woods.  I watched Sawyer go over to it.  He used small bear-paw snowshoes.  He was fast and steady.  He picked the rabbit up by the hind legs and swung the back of its head against a tree-trunk.  Sawyer reached behind his back and put the rabbit inside the pouch that was part of his coat.

Further in, the evergreen bog was uneven under the snow.  Stumps, logs, mounds were among small flat pools of covered ice.  My father was following after his dog by himself.  I went out on a line to one side of him.  Sawyer headed out to the side of me.  We were only close enough to hear each other shout.  Across the bog the big evergreens held piles of snow.  I started walking along the edge of a rise.

I saw a rabbit sitting on top of the snow in the open space between two pines.  I shot, but didn't set my feet and got knocked onto my back.  My head was down the rise.  The back ends of my snowshoes shovelled in.  The gun butt stuck in the snow.  By the time I got myself back to my feet and up the rise again, the rabbit was still where he was, rubbing his face with his paws.  I shot again, blowing into the snow in front of him.  He hopped closer.  Closer!  I shot again and hit snow.  He hopped closer to me again and stopped.  I loaded another shell as fast as I could.  I shot.  The rabbit's front leg was bent back, but he stayed sitting up.  He was not moving away from me one bit.  He was sitting.  I loaded again and smashed him full in the body.

I had bangles of snow all over me.  Snow crammed in my collar and melting down my back.  My impression stretched out in the snow.  The messed-up rabbit beside me.  Gunpowder stink was in the air and up my nose.  The blasts had brought up a humming sound in my head, a hmmm that felt like the start of dizzyness

Dad was cracking his way to me through a break of alders.  Sawyer was coming fast, kicking up the soft snow.

Image: Still Life with Rabbit, William Gould circa 1840