“In good time. He ain’t gonna get no deader.”
We started back for the car. It took about an hour to make our way out of the woods. Dad stopped by the Chevy, and did a curious thing. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to open the front passenger-side door. He stuck his head inside, and then he picked up a black purse off the front seat, shoved the door shut with his knee.
“Get in the car, Baby Man.”
I opened the back door to our car and snapped open my shotgun. The shell had already been fired, and it popped out and onto the ground. I picked it up and put it in my pocket with the other empties, and placed the four/ten on the backseat. I got in the car, and Dad placed his shotgun on the back seat as well, and dropped the purse onto the front seat.
When he was sitting behind the wheel, I said, “What happened to Mr. Jenner?”
“I’m going to say an accident.”
“We telling the sheriff?”
I had already asked this, but it was on my mind. I had seen a lot of TV shows and movies, and something like this happened, you told the sheriff, the cops, the law.
“Shortly,” he said.
I looked down at the purse. It looked familiar.
After driving out of the woods, when we turned off onto the main road we didn’t go toward our house. We went the other way.
“Where we going, Daddy?”
“Little thing to do,” he said.
I guess we drove for about twenty minutes or so before we came to a house set off the road. It was at the back of about an acre of property. Great trees grew in the front yard, and the grass was dead as most grass was dead that time of year; it had turned brown as toast. The house was big, but it was old too, one of those that had a porch around it and a dog run right through the middle. The paint was peeling off the house in strips that reminded me of the way skin peels off of you when you’ve had a sunburn and it’s a few days after. There was woods behind the house, and I realized the river was close as well. As the crow flew, where we had found Mr. Jenner was a short distance from the back of the Jenner house, much closer than by car.
“You sit right here, alright?” Daddy said.
“Yes, sir.”
He took the purse and got out of the car.
Even though it was winter, it wasn’t cold, just cool. I had my window rolled down, and I rested my elbow on the window frame and thought about the body in the woods, but I didn’t think on it long. I don’t know if it was because I disliked Mr. Jenner, or because my mind didn’t want to keep thinking on that, his head blown off and the rising and lowering of that cloud of flies.
Instead, after a few moments I thought of supper. I was starting to think about fried squirrel. I hoped Mama had pulled some dandelion greens or some such to go with it. First though, when we got home, I had to skin and clean the squirrels. That was my job. To skin them by cutting the fur loose at the back legs near the feet, peeling it back from there, and pulling it over the squirrel’s head, like a night shirt. Then I would cut the head off and gut the squirrel, careful not to drag my knife through the squirrel’s ass first, but instead I would cut down from its stomach to the ass, pull out the guts for the dog. I would hose the squirrel off then, wash out its empty belly, and give it to Mama to cut up and cook.
That was what was on my mind while I sat there, but those thoughts went away when Mrs. Jenner appeared. She opened the door and stood at the screen for a moment, then pushed the screen door open and came out. She closed the screen gently behind her, crossed the porch and came down the steps. This took her a long while to do. She had on a very old dress, so faded it was nearly white, and if the sun had been bright, you could have seen through it. Mrs. Jenner’s skin was almost as pale as her dress, and sunlight might not only have shown through the dress, it occurred to me that it might even show through her, though there was one dark spot on her: her left eye was black and swollen. It was then that Mr. Jenner’s image came back to me, that blown-away head and the hard, dried blood spread out on the ground like paint. Something was churning around in my young head, but I couldn’t quite get hold of what it was.
Daddy handed Mrs. Jenner the purse. I could hear him clearly.
“Found this.”
“Oh,” she said, and took it.
She stood looking at Daddy, as if she wasn’t sure if he was really there or not. I thought she didn’t seem sure she was there. At the front door one of the kids looked out through the screen, and then went back inside.
“Your husband,” I heard Daddy say, “I found him in the woods where we hunt.”
“Oh,” she said.
“He’s dead.”
“Is he?”
It was as if she had been told he had a flat tire and would be home late.
“He was shot with a shotgun.”
“I see,” she said.
“Could be a hunting accident. Tripped on a limb, the gun went off and killed him. It happens.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” She crossed her arms and put her elbows in her palms.
“But only a 30/30 was on the ground. I think since he was shot with a shotgun, he should have had a shotgun there. He’s not far back there behind the house. His car is parked off the road.”
“Yeah, he never liked crossing the rickety old river bridge.”
“It’s not a good bridge for a big man to test,” Daddy said. “But someone smaller, and lighter, it would be a good way to go.”
She nodded. “He made me go hunting with him sometimes.”
It was Daddy’s turn to nod.
“I didn’t really like it, but he made me go.”
Daddy nodded again.
“I think he’s been there a day, and I’m going to report it. But it will take me time to go to town, because I drive pretty slow.”
She studied Daddy’s face.
“I think since he was shot with a shotgun, that’s what should be there. It’s hard to explain that 30/30, but I may have looked at it wrong. It might have been a shotgun lying there. It sure could be. It ought to be, you know, considering what happened. The accident and all. “
“Of course.”
“Sorry to bring the bad news.”
“No problem,” she said. “Someone had to tell me.”
“Lucky we came across him, so you’d know.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“We’re going to go now, and I’m sorry about your husband.”
“You said you were going to tell the sheriff.”
“I am, but like I said, I drive slow, and I may stop off at the store to buy some milk and bread. Yeah. I’m going to do that first, then I’m going to tell the sheriff. It might take a while.”
“Please do take your time,” she said.
Daddy nodded at her. “I’ll go then.”
Daddy climbed into the car and started the engine, but he didn’t put the car in gear. He just sat there. We sat there for a while.
I said, “Daddy, what are you doing?”
“Sitting on a log.”
“What?”
“Having a talk with myself.”
“Sir?”
“It’s alright, son.”
Dad put the car in reverse and backed around, put it in drive, and drove us out of there. I looked back and saw that Mrs. Jenner had come out the back door and was crossing the backyard. She was wearing men’s pants and had on boots and was carrying something, but we had reached the edge of the woods along the road near her house, and I only got a glimpse of her, and then I couldn’t see her anymore.
When we were on the road, Daddy said, “What kind of gun did you see lying by Mr. Jenner?”
“A rifle,” I said.
“No, son. It was a shotgun. Anyone asks you, it was a shotgun. I thought it was a 30/30 too, but it wasn’t.”
I knew what I had seen, but in that moment, I understood, or at least understood enough.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “A shotgun.”
Mrs. Jenner taught the rest of the semeste
r, and she dressed well all the time and smiled outside of class, and then when the semester ended, she and her children moved off and I never saw or heard of her again.
14.
The Oak and the Pond
When I finished with the story, Chance said, “I love that.
Can you tell me more?”
I saw Brett glance at the clock.
“Nope, not tonight,” I said. “I have to take Uncle Leonard home.”
“He could sleep on the couch,” Chance said. “We could stay up awhile, like a slumber party.”
“Nope,” Leonard said, “it’s been a long day and a hard workout, time for me to go to my place and crash.”
“Dang it,” Chance said.
“Next time we do pizza, sit and tell stories,” I said.
“Promise?” Chance said. She seemed so much like a little girl then, and I guess, when you get older, someone in their twenties, even thirties, seems like a kid to you.
“Promise,” I said.
I drove Leonard home, and on the way he nodded off. When I stopped at his place he came wide awake. “Damn, you could have just drove around with me in the car and let me sleep.”
“That’s how they do babies,” I said. “You are not a baby.”
“I might be someone’s baby.”
“Not mine, though.”
Leonard reached out and tapped me on the shoulder with his fist. “Tomorrow, bro.”
“You bet.”
He got out and I drove off. Thing was, though, I wasn’t that tired. All the talk had made me nostalgic. I drove out to where Leonard used to live, where Trudy died and other bad things happened. There were good memories there too, and I tried to concentrate on those. I drove out here now and again, sometimes with Leonard, and each time I told myself I wouldn’t do it again, but I did. It was like an alcoholic that says he won’t take another drink, then goes to the cabinet immediately after the thought and pulls down the bottle.
But it wasn’t Trudy I was thinking about now, not really, it was the place where Leonard had lived and the woods behind it and the Robin Hood tree.
At one time there was a great oak tree behind the house where Leonard was living then, and the oak was deep in the woods, and it was one of the last of the great oaks. It stood tall and thick and ancient. It had great limbs you could crawl up on and stretch out on and sleep without real fear of rolling off.
We called it the Robin Hood tree, like the great tree where Robin and his merry band of men gathered to talk and feast. I also thought of it as the Tarzan tree, imagined how you could build a treehouse on its massive limbs and have plenty of room to live with a lithe, blonde Jane and do more than call elephants and swing on vines.
Leonard and I would meet at the oak, me having hiked through the woods from my place. My place wasn’t all that far if you came by wooded path, then broke off the path and took a deer trail, and finally a winding trace through a series of tall black jack oaks until you arrived at Fisherman’s Creek. Across the creek the trees thinned in number but not in magnificence. There were sweet gums and hickory trees, and of course pines.
The Robin Hood tree was the granddaddy of them all. The oak rose higher and spread its limbs wider than all the others. Its bark was healthy and dark, and in the spring its leaves were green as Ireland. To stand beneath it when it rained was a miracle, because the limbs were so thick and the leaves so plush that during the spring, and much of the summer, if not the fall when the leaves were brown and yellow and falling, you would hardly get wet. When it stormed the limbs shook like angry soldiers rattling their weapons, but the limbs didn’t break, just old dead leaves and little branches dribbled down. The soil beneath the oak was thick and dark with many years of dropped and composted leaves. There were acorns on the ground, and sometimes when you came to the tree, squirrels were beneath it, rare black squirrels that made this part of the woods their home. They were in the tree too, chattering and fussing as you arrived.
Leonard and I met there many mornings, usually having a breakfast of boiled eggs we had brought in sacks, drinking coffee from our thermoses, carrying fishing gear and small coolers with our lunches in them.
We would sometimes sit there beneath the tree and talk, and finally we would go away from there, carrying our coolers, through the trees, and then along the creek line to where the pond was. It was a big pond, and at one point in time there had been a house near it. Now the house was a pile of gray lumber and rusty nails and a few bricks that showed where the fireplace had been. Beyond that was a clapboard barn that still stood, the great wide doors gone, probably taken for lumber for someone’s project. Trees crowded it, and one sweet gum had grown up and under the roof and was pushing it loose on one side.
The pond had been dug maybe fifty years before and had been filled with fish, and we were fishing their descendants. There was a boat down there, one we had tediously carried there along the creek bank, and we left it for when we wanted to fish. No one bothered it, because no one came there anymore but us. The land was owned by someone up north who had mostly forgotten about it. The pond was always muddy, but the fish were thick. We caught them and generally threw them back, unless they were good-sized enough and fat. Then they went home with us and became our supper.
We fished there with cane poles, not rods and reels. It wasn’t a place for rods and reels. It was a place for fishing in an old and simple way. We put lines on the poles, sinkers, corks, hooks, and bait, usually worms. Out in the boat we would dangle lines and watch the fish jump, the dragonflies dip down on the water, see the shadows of birds flying over, now and again there was the sight of a leaping frog or a wiggling water moccasin. Turtle heads rose like periscopes, then fell beneath the water with a delicate splash and a small ripple.
In the spring it was cool for a long time, and in the summer it grew hot, but with wide-brimmed hats on, we still fished, and we lazed, and sometimes we talked, softly, fearing we might frighten the fish. We talked about all manner of things we believed in, and how we differed from one another. I told Leonard about my women, and he told me about his men. We talked about brotherhood without speaking of it directly. I told bad jokes and Leonard grumbled.
When Leonard moved from the house next to the woods, and I later moved from where I lived, we lost that spot.
Some years later the people up north remembered the land, and they brought in pulp crews and cut the woods down, even the great and ancient oak, which must have fought the saws with its old, hard wood. But the saws won, and it tumbled down and was coated in gasoline and set on fire. They didn’t even bother to make it into lumber. The land where it stood was a black spot for a long time.
They planted rows and rows of soft lumber pines to be cut and replanted every fifteen or twenty years, a crop. People claim there are more trees now than before, but they are wrong. Once you could drive all through East Texas and there were trees as far as you could see, and not just pines either. The trees grew close to the roads and covered them in shadow. You don’t have to go out in the woods and count trees one by one to know that the statements being made about there being more trees than ever before is a bald-faced lie. The pines they planted where the oak grew didn’t shield you from rain or rattle in the wind the way the Robin Hood tree did.
Eventually, they filled in the pond, killing the fish. They dammed up the creek and made another, larger pond farther up, but it lacked charm, and finally scrummed over. Nothing lived in it.
A company that raised chickens for a supermarket chain bought the land, and a series of long, commercial chicken houses took the place of the original pond and the woods that had surrounded it, even the pulp trees, which they also cut down and didn’t replant. Now there is a wide gravel road that leads out of where the trees once grew, on to the highway. It’s odd. Looking down that gravel road, you can see the highway so easy. It seemed farther away in the years before the road was there and the trees were cut.
Leonard wouldn’t even look in the direction of the
old place when we drove by. I look, but I don’t like what I see. The rain still falls and the wind still blows, but the oak and the pond are gone.
Afterword
So I bring you something different.
The Mosaic Novel. I didn’t invent that term. I don’t know who did, but the idea is that it’s a novel that is not in order of the events, nor are all the events designed to roll precisely into the other. It is like a notebook where someone has been randomly recording events of their life and it’s been found by a passerby. Some pages might even be missing, but the stories, in order, or out of order, constitute a portion of a young man’s life.
The early life of one Hap Collins.
Leonard Pine, his close friend, and eventually his brother, appears as well. I know what this is like, to make your own family. I have a good family by blood, thank goodness, but I have some true brothers and sisters out there, like Andrew Vachss for example. Nick Damici. We just know, and there’s no other way to explain it.
When I was growing up it was not unusual for there to be books connected loosely by this sort of tissue, and for the stories to gradually give you an overall view of a character’s life, or a thematic overview of a town, or even something science fictional, like Ray Bradbury’s version of Mars in The Martian Chronicles, or something far more earthbound as in Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories.
Those are merely two examples of many books of that nature. This is a modern example of that. I love the stories here. They are not all heroic or adventurous, but they do fill in a lot of reader gaps. Here you get some background you might not have gotten from the books. Most of it about Hap. Leonard is not in all the stories, and not all the stories are about Hap, even if he narrates. There is even a third person approach to some of the material. It felt right.
Hap and Leonard have become brothers by the time my first novel in the series, Savage Season, occurs, but before that they were two guys feeling out a friendship, finding it good, but it was not quite at the level of what it would eventually be. They would become family.