Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

Market Day

  “Reminds me of a quid,” he said, and his voice carried above the circle of three women, standing closer to the display, who were looking at summer lettuce. “You know, when the spinach is cooked,” said the man with the voice, “it all comes together, settles. In the bowl? A quid.”

  The pork-pie hat would point him out in the modest crowd that was gathering mid-morning, but he was also given a name by the slim woman at his side. “Frank” it was, mid-fifties.

  “Enough, Frank,” and then to Doyle: “Nice stuff,” as they turned to go. He nodded yes. And lots more where this came from was what he wanted to say, but didn’t.

  More in the boxes at his feet. More in the truck. More not so nice on the compost pile back at the farm, flies all over with the chickens coming to clean up. And more waiting. Passed over, with the dew still on them, glistening in the light of the morning sun. Rows of the stuff. Waiting.

  “O, John, what do you think about peppers?” An older man and woman, now, somewhat frail, at the corner of his display table, and at the other end two kids, their mother looking across the aisle to the tables at numbers 32 and 33, her two kids lifting the tops of the carrots to see what they could see underneath.

  He walked towards them as they looked up: “Yep, more carrots. You boys like vegetables?”

  One boy crooked his leg and swayed slightly, his shoe pointing straight down while his other leg took the weight. “Not really.”

  “But your mother makes you.”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  “How much for the potatoes, $1.50 a pound?” Mom had arrived.

  “And we sell them by the bag, five pounds and ten pounds, blues and russets or mixed.”

  “I see.” She was looking at them over the tops of her sun-glasses, one arm through the woven bag, thinking. Across the aisle, another woman—tawny, a figure in blue-jeans, vaguely familiar—looking.

  “Good for French fries. Hey boys, what do you think about blue fries?”

  They winced before they saw his smile. He looked her way and then back to them before saying, “Well don’t you worry, it’s just the skin that’s blue.”

  “Or red?” she said. She had made up her mind.

  “Yes ma’am. What can we get you?”

  “I’ll take five pounds of the russets,” she said, handing him a five dollar bill, “at a dollar a pound for the bag?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said again, “right on the money.” He handed her a full brimming bag of potatoes from underneath the table. She smiled primly, handed it to one of her sons, the same kid with the splay-foot display, swaying again, and they were off. The crowd, such as it was, swirled around them.

  The drive home was not much. It had been a good late-August market. He had taken some of the leftovers to Second Harvest, the soup kitchen repository in town, and now his truck was pounding over the last of the washboard as he drove up to the place.

  Put the potatoes in the cool room was on his mind, his eyes scanning his farm, when he noticed the south end of a north bound critter poking out from around the edge of the house just about near where the nasturtiums would be.

  Or were.

  Doyle, you damn fool, how could you have forgotten the gate! He pulled up short and piled out. Shoo boss, and she moved, hesitantly, demurely, big Jersey with a kind of frustratingly slow ponderous flower-blotting grace until he came with the stick. That in itself might not have exactly been the best idea, because then she planted herself, right in the bed of yellows and reds and whites, and kind of lurched, those back feet especially pressing down in the soft earth, compressing the juices out of whatever was beneath them.

  He rounded them up, slowly, over about two hours, still puzzling about the gate. Then, after unloading the potatoes and the other stuff, he was ready for the house.

  The little indecencies of farm life, he thought as he climbed the porch steps, the aggravations, when he noticed the door. Looking at it, he thought immediately of the gate which also had been open and felt foolishly kind of relieved. It had not been his fault after all. He had hurried after milking, but the gate had been closed. And now his mind was ahead of him, through the door, wondering about what was there.

  His eyes brought him back. There were little chips of wood on the deck of the porch and a kind of crude indentation where something like a screw-driver had jabbed, twisted, pried. He could see scratch marks on the latch and on the door mechanism where force had been applied until the whole thing popped.

  Kids. His mind ranged the rows of farms along Jim-Town road and came up with only the Preston boys about a mile down. Brown-skinned, smiling from the tractor with a load of small, square hay bales when he last saw them. The Prestons? Perhaps, but unlikely. He stood there a while, strode over to the window, glanced at the thermometer, noted it was still in its place, angled so you could see it from inside through the window glass. He did all this before becoming aware of himself—before realizing that he was stalling. Putting it off, now are you, Doyle?

  He walked in.

  There was nothing amiss on the first floor. The morning dishes still in the sink. One rumpled cushion on the living room couch where he had left it, mantlepiece trophies, ribbons from the county fair intact.

  He climbed the stairs. The creaks were the same: so far the same place. He turned and eyed the guest bedroom at the top of the flight, his eyes scanning the room and the flight of stairs where he had just come.

  Nothing.

  He walked the hall, pushed the door open to the storage bedroom, where all the horse tack would be in the wintertime. Some of it was still there now, where he had left it.

  Ahead the bathroom. He saw the clawfoot of the tub on the tile floor, the sun filtering through the curtain, everything at peace. So it was his room or the attic room. The stairs to the old attic level were to the right by the bathroom’s open door. He looked at the blue painted wainscoting and the blue of the closed attic door before deciding for his own room, the last place he had known before the premonition of first light had brought him awake.

  Doyle turned. A lot went through his mind as he did that. The cows crowded at the back of the barn, waiting for the door to open. Chickens at the fence, waiting for the gate. He thought of them now, scratching the compost, heads cocked, beaks snapping catching flies.

  He looked in.

  The bed was rumpled some. He was a bed maker and sheet straightener. Even as a bachelor he would make the thing daily. No coins bouncing on the sheets, to be sure, but hospital corners, he could manage that.

  But now it was rumpled some in the middle from where someone had sat. He thought of himself, naturally, putting on his boots. But it was too far back. Someone had sat and then slid into the middle of things, a medium-sized body, he was reckoning.

  The stranger, the person with just a form, had been sitting there, perhaps contemplating what to do?

  As he stood in the middle of the room, Doyle looked right and saw the closet door ajar and clothes on the floor from where they had been jerked off the shelf. He went there and looked deeper and saw stuff from the shelf down on the clothes in the back. A couple of boxes of old items which should have been discarded. Cowboy ties. Cuff links. Pocket knifes. Even an old pocket watch resting on the sleeve of one of the shirts.

  Overlooked. The face of the watch was pointing out and he turned with it to look towards the gun cabinet at the far end of the room, close to where the door would swing.

  The glass on the panel of the gun case looked strange. Spider-webs. One central impression—an elbow, rock or bullet—and then spider webs floating out from the center in all directions.

  Gossamer on glass. One pane’s been broke clear through, he thought. And then he did not want to look anymore: higher, further. It was as if the glass were an opaque barrier which his eyes could rest upon but his mind not solve. It was the guns, he thought,
it had to be the guns.

  Now it was that Doyle Ritchie discovered that he was carrying an instant mental inventory of the things he needed to see. The octagon barrel of the old .22 caliber was first. It hadn’t been fired in years. His uncle’s gun. Next the 30-06 from his father.

  Dad standing on the ridgetop cradling the gun as young Doyle climbed up to take a look-see, ten years old, the brown form of the deer just beyond his father’s boots. This rifle was followed by a shotgun, little used. Then his pump action .22: Remington Model 62. Then another shotgun, single-shot 20 gauge. And finally his deer gun, the 30-30 Winchester Model 94, well oiled, waiting like those cucumbers, zuchinnis and lettuce in early morning sun: Everything glistening and waiting.

  He looked, swung the door open, and looked again.

  Down below, shells were missing. Most of them. And the bullets: Various calibers and loads were all cleaned off down low. Up above he knew before he looked.

  The Ought Six was gone. And where his hand would reach to find the tool to bring down a pigeon or a woodchuck or a disfigured old tom, dull yellow eyes staring out from the woodpile, where his fingers would curl and his arm muscles tighten slightly in lifting it free, now there was just the worn felt indentation where the stock should rest: where the barrel would lie against the concave, cupped place that would hold it.

  Model 62.

  It was, in fact, a small price to pay. Two guns. He could feel the .22 and see it there as his eyes looked the whole place over, even the ceiling. He paused and looked under the bed and then, lighter with what he had seen and understood, he walked down the back stairs past the .22 cartridges on the window sill that had been missed.

  It was like they came up and looked through a bit of stuff in the closet, perhaps for shells. One or two? They had then grabbed a whole bunch of shells and cartridges, all kinds, just kind of scooped them up. Two or three?

  What were they thinking? Did they know guns? He could see a hand now, younger than his for sure. Much younger. As young as the hands of the splay-footed boy at the market: that young? Perhaps a brown hand, tanned and strong with farm work but young still? It was just an outline of a hand that he could frame in the mind. Curling fingers, tightening of the arm. That and a form on the bed. He could see the form sitting there, facing the glass, wondering what to do, the idea building until it became what there was to do.

  The Form

  He thought of this while throwing down some third crop grassy hay for the heifers he had penned in the dry lot to the north of the barn. He curled his fingers around the pitchfork and lifted the bales deliberately up high in the air before throwing them down. Hard. Sometimes hard enough to break the baling twine. Lifting, breathing, throwing, sweating.

  He did this thing first, before calling the sheriff.