Sleepy said, “Oh, my—look at them wheels. That kind costs plenty. ”
“Is that one’s hair yellow?”
“Them boys look like they’d be easy—but there’s the man now, going up to the house for his eats.”
“Those hats hid the colors.”
“I won’t show my gun ’til they show theirs.”
The lane in is narrow, with separated wheel ruts coated by white chat and a taller mohawk of grass between. Every passing tire spreads the chat a bit more and deepens the ruts likewise. The farmer steps onto the porch as Sleepy drives near. Through the screen door I can see a woman of wife age, and a grown son in shadow behind the screen. Sleepy and the farmer lock eyes a minute with the engine running, then Sleepy turns the key. He says, “Stand in the yard, there, and look decent unless I call you over.”
“I have been instructed and will comply.”
I take my stand by the tailgate and wait. Chickens range about the yard, flapping and pecking, murmuring to each other, the kind with red leggings and sharp clucks. Sleepy and the farmer meet on the porch, and the wife steps out while the son lingers on the other side of the door to be nearer the shotgun rack, I imagine. That swing chair on hair ropes is just for show, it seems, and couldn’t hold much weight, the hair being loose and rotted, ready to snap. The wife is a pretty lady but doesn’t look too good just now—pale, hands at her sides, like she’s expecting to see her world flipped wrong way up and dropped on its head at any instant now. Her lipstick is perfect even on lips shaking that way. The farmer is trying to speak back, but pretty soon he stops and Sleepy leans close to him and keeps talking. Young corn smell is coming strong across the yard, with the smell of turned dirt, and chickens. That son opens the door and stands in the way of it closing.
He’s the shiny boy my sleep sent to me. Yellow hair is quite clearly boiling bubbles on his head.
Sleepy laughs alone, the only laugher on the porch. I can hear him say in slowed words, plain and loud, like talking to a kid, “Now, Edward, you’ve known me most all my life—you know damn well that wasn’t me you seen.”
You have to believe your dreams keep your best interests in mind and wouldn’t send anybody wrong to you. I went without thinking or making the choice over the grass to the steps, the way my sleep would want, and swung my dots, sliding past the wife and the farmer. The boy looks at me like he doesn’t remember bicycling through fields of waving grain all night so clear as I do.
“I’m here about your yellow hair.”
“I’m listenin’ to what they say.”
“Don’t you have wooden shoes you wear sometimes?”
“I know who you are.”
I start to reach for his hand, to hold it and feel the warm fingers, and splash the other hand up to his head of boiling yellow and pop those hot bubbles with my fingertips, gather the bubbles and pop, pop, pop but you can startle dreams with sudden changes and they lose their shape and drain through the cracks to somewhere you can’t find, so I don’t. “Maybe you only wear them for going out bicycling?”
“You need to get off this porch.”
Sleepy clomps down the steps and into the yard, suddenly stops, goes on high alert, raises his nose, and takes several big sniffs of the air. “Is that your barn burnin’?”
The farmer, the wife, the son, all rush down the steps, into the yard for a view of the barn. They cluster together. The farmer says, “I don’t see any smoke.”
I follow the family down and stand still behind the boy, drinking his shadow, and it has all the things inside I hunt. I don’t make a move to touch him on his arm fat with muscle, the skin browned from field work, or poke a finger through the hole torn in his shirt by the armpit and tickle. Patience is the quality most lacking in people of my group, and impulses must be recognized and arrested and considered before taking action, or else the flicker of a bad idea unchallenged can instantly make you swing a sharp instrument of hurt into the area of someone you had ought to love but can’t for a second. I have learned exactly how patience looks when standing in public view and I strike that look in the farmer’s yard.
Sleepy stares at the barn, tilting his head side to side as if confused by what he sees and wanting different angles, then says, “Oh, maybe you’re right—it ain’t burnin’, is it.” He climbs into the truck, waves a small wave, fires the motor. I make those dots jump apart and back together fast the way I walk swinging to the truck and hop into the seat. Sleepy eases us away on the lane real slow. I don’t even need to look at the boy to know everything in his chest and how I’ll collect him when the right movie shows. After we hit the paved road and go faster, Sleepy starts to whistle, not that well, a song I recognize before long, though, one of the ancient tunes we’ve all felt, but I couldn’t put any name to it.
Returning the River
My brother left no footprints as he fled. There’d been three nights of freeze, and the mud had stiffened until the sloped field lay as hard as any slant road. Morning light met rime on the furrows and laid a shine between rows of cornstalks cut to winter spikes, and my brother, Harky, a mutinous man with a fog patch of gray hair drifting to the small of his back and black-booted feet, crushed the faded stalks aside as he came to them, and only these broken spikes marked his passing. His strides were long but curiosity curled his path, spun it about in small pondering circles as he glanced behind, followed by abrupt, total shifts in forward direction. The mud was unblemished but for the debris of cornstalks, and some of the pale dried shucks were spotted by kerosene drippings. Harky still carried the fuming torch he’d made of a baseball bat and a wadded sheet, the torch he’d used to set the neighbor’s house afire, to make amends, to show his love, and flammable droplets fell beside him partway across the field.
Our father chased my brother. He chased him down the road from the burning house, into the field, wearing a white bathrobe and loose slippers. With each step he fell farther behind as his old sick feet skittered over uneven furrows and tripped. The nosepiece from his oxygen tube was yet pinched to his face, and a length of tube waved about while the robe flapped open. He fell repeatedly and stalks stabbed his skin broken at the ankles and hips. He stood up from the field six times, or only five, then again tripped over a furrow, collapsed to the frost, and lay there, face to the mud, withered fingers clenching at stalks, robe flung wide.
Smoke and shouts drifted from the neighbor’s house.
Father’s breathing could be heard beyond the fence line, up the road, the hoarse snatching after breath, rattling inhalations. He was raw beneath the robe, his skin ashen and his blood thinned by medications. The broken spots on his ankles and hips quickly turned blue and leaky. He held on to the oxygen tube with one hand, holding it still and inhaling, as if there might be a trapped bubble of pure oxygen his lungs could burst and pull through in shreds. Fogged eyeglasses hung from a cord around his neck, and his glum white private hair and forlorn flopping parts were open to the cold. He lay there weak as a babe, but a babe who’d already snuck a drink this morning, scotch, and chased it with a forbidden cigarette.
Across the mud and downslope he spotted Harky and his fog of hair scuttling from the field at the far end, plunging over the wire fence and into the thicket. Six foot two of man, with a jostling cloud riding his back and a blackened baseball bat in one hand.
Father rose to his knees, gasping, then stood and wobbled his way back to the road, legs too limber for firm strides, blood from his broken spots making lazy trails down his skin. Our father, the joking drunk who was so bitter when sober, shuffled past the edge of the fallow field, toward the big hunkered old house of glowering white that had been the home of our mother’s family for three generations before recent inheritance delivered it down to us Dewlins. Mother waited near the door, pacing between the four-sided pillars on the veranda where she’d played jacks as a girl, hopscotch, her eyes glistening and rounded with anger. Her hair was a carefully selected chestnut hue, girlishly long and casually brushed, and she wore a
winter coat belted over her bed clothes. She watched our father limp to the house and did not reach out to help him until he climbed the steps. They both paused on the veranda and looked across the road, toward the flames dancing on the shiny new log cottage of the only close neighbor, a man named Gordon Mather Adams, a retired schoolteacher of some sort, a man I’d never spoken to, busy beside his eastern wall with a yellow garden hose and a panicked air, the excess water running from the flames down the slope of winter grass toward the river behind his house.
They stared for a few minutes, then she said, “I should’ve called in the fire, but…”
Father opened the door, crossed the threshold, and stepped onto the rug. He was bleeding from blue places, bleeding down his ankles, over that knob of bone, onto the large and intricate heirloom rug mother’s people had always spread just inside the door, drop after drop.
Harky had waited for the holidays to fashion a torch and commit his spectacular act of penance, waited for me to be in the house, on the scene, his witness. Over the fence he’d gone, that fog bouncing about his head, into the forest, and I did not chase hard, did not even hurry, but let him spend his energy fleeing for a while. The trees stood towering gray and numb over us both, shorn of green uplift, the bark bared to the heavy sky and chapping wind. I suspect some stark limbs attempted to point Harky toward escape, others to wag in admonishment, blaming him for palming his pills and drinking whisky again. He hopped onto rocks in the creek to cross the stream, missed only one, and pushed up the slope with his left boot splashed and a sock growing soggy, choosing not to realize how the near future would treat a wet sock on a freezing day. The limb he’d trust most gestured this way, onto the animal path that curled around the hill in a spiral rising to the crest. He knocked aside branches and winter brambles with the baseball bat, and his feet crunched across wastes of leaves and twigs.
Harky is running toward places that aren’t there anymore. That limb aimed him in the direction of the vanished cabin our mother’s family first squatted in after they’d followed game trails west from Kentucky to claim these acres. He knows the general whereabouts of the old hearthstone, but the four walls have fallen and become mulch, and the yard is grown over with woods, blended again with the forest. One tree, many trees, where did the cabin sit? The rocks of the chimney were taken down and carted to the next house the Humphrieses built—high, wide, and white, across the creek on richer ground. In spring warmth the original spot might be found by looking for brighter colors paraded amidst the bland grasses: irises, daffodils, columbine. Great-great-great-grandma with the first name blown from her headstone and lost for good was quick to put down flowers near the house, dollops of cultivation in the yard that meant we live here now, inside this wilderness, and those common perennials are the only remains of a family place abandoned.
In his sick final years Grandpa Humphries sold the pasture, the cornfields, the wooded hillocks and ridges, sold every acre but the two that made a lawn for the house. He’d feared he might live closer to forever than predicted and need those dollars to find rest in his mind. Harky kneels to our old ground and rubs his hands through the sodden leaves, pushing them aside, making one tiny clearing after another, looking for nubs, withered blades of green. His breath puffs signals that don’t last. Dead grasses fly to his clothes and cling. Dirt buries beneath his fingernails. He’s in high spirits for a man who knows that his parole will be revoked in about an hour, maybe two. There’s a pint bottle in his jacket and he stands up for a ruminative chug, but it is empty except for a few drops that are slow reaching his lips. He looks around the ground, studies trees he might know from years before, but doesn’t spot any old acquaintances, and moves on farther behind the hill. He just can’t find Granny-what’s-her-name’s flowers during this cold season.
The path is steep and vague in spots, barely there, with a few crashed trees to be crawled across or jumped. Running these woods Harky is feeling redeemed in his bones, raised in his heart, a much better son now than he was before dawn. We’d often hunted this land together when down from the city during holidays, boys afield in joyous pursuit of the small and wild, sharing our single-shot Sears twenty-two, avoiding the tensions in the house for hours at a stretch. I’d pop squirrels from limbs, since they have more taste, but Harky favored rabbits because they were easier to skin. When snow had fallen over the meadows, he’d delight in tracking bunnies at dawn, stealthily following paw prints as they made circles easy to follow, then track the same paw prints around again, and again, never caring that if he just waited where he started the rabbits would circle back within range and offer themselves to his aim: “But tracking is the fun part!” The air on the ridge is cold and smacks of fire, and when I make the turn at the crest, the pinnacle suddenly revealed, Harky is sitting calmly on a large slab rock watching the flames in the valley. That fog of hair drapes past where his ass meets the slab and dangles. The bat stood upright between his legs, black end down.
He said, “Think he’ll be happy now?”
“You didn’t get far.”
“I knew they’d send you—bring any whisky?”
The seal hadn’t been cracked on the bottle I handed to him. He busted the whisky open and swallowed a big peaty breakfast, released a deep groan of appreciation, and dropped the cap into his pocket. I sat on the slab beside him. The mess of smoke below had grown. Deputies were standing in the road, and the volunteer fire department was arriving in pickups, little cars, dusty vans, and the one official fire truck they kept ready at Bing Plimmer’s gas station.
“Is that house fully involved?”
Two men in waders dragged a hose toward the river, hunching away from the jumping heat. The deputies in the street seemed excited and were gathering around our mother, but she’s an old hand at this and stands still, with her arms folded, and listens without argument. Harky’s parole would be violated any minute now.
“I think that’s what they call it.”
“Then it might still burn down flat.”
“The man’ll only build it back again with insurance money. Maybe bigger.”
“But not in time.”
“He might live longer than you think.”
“No. He’ll die seein’ the river where it’s supposed to be again.”
Those distant faces so tiny in the valley turned together and stared roughly in our direction. Harky laughed at them, pointed with his fist, and thumped the ball bat to ground. The fire seemed to be winning. Gordon Mather Adams looked to be weeping. Mother had been angry since the foundation was poured, the first nail driven, and clapped her hands with gusto as the hot ruin spread. A sheriff’s car began to roll down the sloped road alongside the field. I swatted my brother on the knee and stood.
“Let’s get deeper into the woods,” I said. “Make it harder for them.”
“You want to run with me?”
He passed the bottle, and I said, “You’ll be gone a long time this time, Harky.”
“Ahh, I have friends in the slams, baby brother, so don’t worry.” He raised from the slab and shuffled his feet, then sat again and pulled the boot and sock from his wet foot. The skin looked red. He wrung the sock until droplets fell, then pulled it on damp and laced up. He stood, happy with himself and smiling at the smoke in the sky, the voices all excited in the distance. “I could use a new little TV. With better color. And headphones.”
Two walls were coming down. They folded inward and smashed across smoldering furniture and seared appliances, sparks bursting and riding the heat. The flames were renewed by the falling and frolicked. One more wall to fall and father could die upstairs with the river back in his eyes.
I gave Harky the bottle, wiped my lips dry. “Today’s got to be worth a party.”
The sheriff’s car had stopped on the road and the deputy stood in the opened door talking into the radio, calling for help. He was studying the woods, looking for paths he might follow to give chase, but we remembered them all from before we were born and w
alked on laughing, down the spiraled path to low ground and away through a rough patch of scrub, into a small stand of pine trees and the knowing shadow they laid over us, our history, our trespassing boots.
About the Author
DANIEL WOODRELL was born in the Missouri Ozarks, left school and enlisted in the marines the week he turned seventeen, received his bachelor’s degree at age twenty-seven, graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and spent a year on a Michener Fellowship. Winter’s Bone, his eighth novel, was made into a film that won the Sundance Film Festival’s Best Picture Prize in 2010 and was nominated for four Academy Awards. Five of his novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the year. Tomato Red won the PEN West Award for fiction in 1999, and The Death of Sweet Mister received the 2011 Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Center for Fiction. The Outlaw Album is Woodrell’s first collection of stories. He lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.
Also by Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Bone
The Death of Sweet Mister
Tomato Red
Give Us a Kiss: A Country Noir
The Ones You Do
Muscle for the Wing
Woe to Live On (reissued as Ride with the Devil)
Under the Bright Lights
Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
The Echo of Neighborly Bones
Uncle
Twin Forks
Florianne
Black Step
Night Stand
Two Things
The Horse in Our History
Woe to Live On
Dream Spot