English Literature

“I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down”

By William Gay

When the taxicab let old man Meecham out in the dusty road by his mailbox, the first thing he noticed was that someone was living in his house. A woman was hanging out wash on a clothesline, a young girl was sunning herself in a rickety lawn chair, and an old dust-colored Plymouth with a flat tire was parked right in Meecham's driveway. All this so disoriented the old man that he almost forgot about paying the cab driver. He thought for a dizzy moment that he had directed the driver to the wrong place, but there was the fading clapboard house and the warm umber roof of the barn, bisected by the slope of ridge, and his name on the mailbox--ABNER MEECHAM--painted in his own halting brushstrokes.
"Looks like you got company," the cab driver said.
Beyond the white corner of the house the woman stood holding a bedsheet up to the line, studying him, transfixed with a clothespin in her mouth.
"How much was it I owed you?" Meecham asked, finally remembering the driver. He fumbled out a wallet chained to his belt, then turned slightly to the side to study its contents.
"Well. Twenty dollars. That seems like a lot, but it's a right smart way from Linden, and I hardly ever make out-of-town runs."
"And worth ever nickel of it," the old man said, selecting a bill and proffering it through the window. "Twenty dollars' distance from Linden is fine with me. If I was a wealthy man I'd have bought more of it."
"Glad to of brought you," the driver said. "You be careful in all this heat."
Meecham just nodded, picking up his suitcase and preparing to investigate these folks making free with his property.
As he passed the lawn chair the girl casually tucked a pale breast into her halter top and said, "Hidy. Do I know you?"
"You will here in a minute." He was a fierce-looking old man, slightly stooped, wearing dungarees and a blue chambray work shirt. The shirt was faded to a pale blue from repeated laundering, the top button fastened against his Adam's apple. His canvas porkpie hat, cocked over one bristling eyebrow, and his washed-out blue eyes were almost the exact hue of his shirt. "Who are you people, and what are you doin here?"
"I'm Pamela Choat and I'm gettin me a tan," the girl said, misunderstanding or pretending to. "Mama's hangin out clothes, and Daddy's around here somewhere."
"I mean, what are you doing here?"
The girl put her sunglasses back on and turned her oiled face to the weight of the sun. "We live here," she said.
"That can't be. I live here. This is my place."
"You better talk to Mama," the girl said. Behind the opaque lenses, perhaps her eyes were closed.
Meecham turned. The woman was crossing the yard toward him. He noticed with a proprietary air that the grass needed cutting.
"Ain't you Mr. Meecham?"
"I certainly am." He leaned on his carved walking stick. A lifelike wooden snake coiled around the staff up to the asp's head forming the curve he clasped. "I don't believe I've made your acquaintance."
"I'm Mrs. Choat. Ludie Choat--Lonzo's wife. You remember Lonzo Choat."
"Lord God," the old man said.
"We rented this place from your boy."
"The hell you say."
"Oh yes. We got a paper and everthing. We thought you was in the old folk's home in Perry County."
"I was. I ain't no more. I need to use my telephone."
"We ain't got no telephone."
"Of course there's a telephone. We always had a telephone."
The woman regarded him with a bland bovine patience, as if she were explaining something to a backward child. "There's one but it don't work. It ain't hooked up or somethin. You need to talk to Lonzo. He'll be up here directly."
"I'm an old man," Meecham said. "I may die here directly. Where is he? I'll go to him."
He found Choat in the hall of the barn, locked in mortal combat with a flat tire. Stripped to the waist, he was wringing wet with sweat, his belly looped slackly over the waistband of his trousers. He had a crowbar jammed between the tire and the rim, trying to pry them apart. Meecham noticed with satisfaction that the tire showed no sign of giving.
When the old man's shadow fell across the chaff and dried manure of the hall, some dark emotion--dislike or hostility or simply annoyance--flickered across Choat's face like summer lightning. He laid the crowbar aside and squatted on the earth. He wiped sweat out of his eyes, leaving a streak of greasy dirt in the wake of his hand. Meecham suddenly saw how like a hog Choat looked--red jowls and close-set little eyes--as if maybe fate had a sense of humor after all.
"You not got a spare?"
"This is the spare. I think I know you. You're lawyer Meecham's daddy. We heard you was in a nursin home. What you doin here?"
"I didn't take to nursin," Meecham said. "Is it true Paul rented you folks this place?"
"He damn sure did. Ninety-day lease with a option to buy."
The old man felt dizzy, almost apoplectic with rage. The idea of Choat eating at his table and sleeping in his bed was bad enough. The thought that he might eventually own the place was not to be borne.
"Buy? You wasn't ever nothin but a loafer. You never owned so much as a pair of pliers. That's my wreckin bar right there. If you think you can buy a farm of this size with food stamps, you're badly mistaken."
Choat just shook his head and grinned. A drop of sweat formed on his nose, trembled, and fell. "You still as contrary as you was the time I tried to rent that tenant shack off of you. You wouldn't rent it to me, and now I'm livin in the big house. Ain't life funny?"
"I never rented that shack to nobody. That buildin ain't but seventy or eighty feet from the main house, and I never wanted strangers livin so close. Anyway, all that must have been twenty-five years ago."
"Ever how long it was, I needed it and I didn't get it. And life is funny. I got a boy in Memphis, he's a plumbin contractor, does these big commercial jobs. He makes plenty of money. And you can forget about the food stamps. He buys and sells lawyers like they was K-Mart specials, and he aims to buy this place. We're goin to tend it."
"Well, I ain't seen none of this famous money. And the fact of the matter is, this place ain't Paul's to sell. It's my place and will be till I die. It may be Paul's then, but after this, I doubt it. In fact I'm pretty sure Paul's shot at this place just went up in smoke."
"They fixed it up legal."
"If I was you I'd be packin my stuff. Where's that paper?"
Choat got up. "It's up to the house."
"Then let's be for goin up to the house," the old man said.
Meecham sat on the doorstep of the tenant house in the shade and pondered his options. It was almost twelve miles back to Ackerman's Field, the nearest town and the one in which Paul did his lawyering. The old man had no telephone and no car; in actuality he owned a two-year-old Oldsmobile and a four-wheel-drive Toyota pickup, but when Meecham's driving had grown erratic, Paul had taken them into town for storage, and the old man figured by now they were somewhere in Mexico with the serial numbers eradicated. If Meecham had not shown foresight, he would have been broke as well as stranded, but at the first mention of nursing homes, he had withdrawn a thousand dollars of his savings and deposited it in a Linden bank. Folded, it made a thick and reassuring bulge now in his left front pocket.
So he had money but nowhere to spend it. He had a neighbor across the ridge, but he was too weary to walk there. Choat's car had a flat tire, but that hadn't even been factored into the equation. Folks in hell would be eating Eskimo Pies before he let Lonzo Choat haul him anywhere. He opened the suitcase. One change of clothing. A razor and a bar of soap. A toothbrush and a miniature tube of toothpaste. A tin of Vienna sausages and a package of crackers he'd bought in case he got hungry on the cab ride.
Meecham glanced toward the house. The woman was standing in the doorway watching him as if she'd learn his intentions. He looked away and heard the screen door fall to. The day was waning. Beyond the farmhouse, light was fleeing westward and bullbats winged slant-wise through the trees as if they'd harry the dusk. When a whippoorwill called, an emotion somewhere between exaltation and pain rose in him, then twisted sharp as a knife. It was as if all his days had honed down to this lone whippoorwill calling to him out of the twilight.
He sat for a time just taking all this in. Whippoorwills had been in short supply in the nursing home, and it was a blessing not to smell Lysol. Here he could smell the trees still holding the day's heat and the evocative scent of honeysuckle and the cool citrusy odor of pine needles. "Well, I've lived in tenant houses before," he told himself, and he rose and went in.
At least the lights worked. He guessed that Paul was still paying the electric bill, figured that the first one to come due in Choat's name would be the last. The old man had used this place for junk, and Choat seemed to have toted everything he didn't want down from the main house. Boxes of pictures Lucinda had saved were spilled about at random, and Meecham was touched with anger: his very past had been kicked through and discarded.
He set about arranging some kind of quarters. He placed Paul's old cot by the window for what breeze there was, then sat for a time studying snapshots--dead husks of events that were as strange to him as if they'd happened in someone else's life. An envelope of photographs of dead folks. One of Lucinda's father lying in his casket--his shock of black hair, great blade of a nose. Another of Lucinda standing by the old man's grave. Meecham studied her face carefully--it looked ravaged with grief--before he put the photos away.
He fared better in an old brass-bound trunk. Choat had missed a bet here. Meecham found Paul's old handgun, a long-barreled .22 target pistol on a .45 frame. He couldn't find any shells.
Meecham shuffled through a stack of 78 rpm records, reading the labels. Old Bluebird records by the Carter Family. Victor records by Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman: "Evening Sun Yodel," "T for Texas." He could remember these songs from his youth, could remember singing them himself. Jimmie Rodgers, dead of TB and still a young man after all these years, and even turning a dollar off the disease that was to kill him: That graveyard sure is a lonesome place... they lay you on your back and throw dirt in your face.
He moved stacks of folded quilts from the Victrola and raised the lid. The machinery creaked when he cranked it, and he doubted it would work, but the needle hissed on the record and out came Rodgers' distinctive guitar lick. Then a voice out of a dead time but still holding the same smoky sardonic lilt: She's long, she's tall, she's six feet from the ground...
The old man didn't hear the girl until she was in the room, a plate in one hand and a glass of iced tea in the other. Jimmie Rodgers was singing, I hate to see that evenin sun go down... cause it makes me think I'm on my last go-around. He rose and lifted the tone arm off the record. "Mama sent this. She said she bet you was hungry, and that hot as it was, you needed somethin cold to drink."
Having anticipated nothing like this from a Choat, he took the plate awkwardly and cleared a spot for it on the coffee table. She set the tea beside it. "Well. You tell her I'm much obliged. What's Lonzo have to say about it?"
"He was down at the barn. What's that you're listenin to?"
"That's Jimmie Rodgers, the Singin Brakeman."
"What is that, hillbilly? Sure is some weird-soundin shit. Where's he out of, Nashville?"
"Out of hell, if he's out of anywhere. He's been dead and gone from here for fifty years."
"Oh. Well, how do you know he's in hell?"
"He's in the ground with the dirt throwed in his face. That sounds a right smart like hell to me."
"Lord, but you'd cheer a body up. You always in this good a mood?"
"Just when I get rooted away from the trough." He was studying the plate. He mistrusted Ludie Choat's cooking and figured her none too clean in her personal habits, but then you didn't know what was in Vienna sausage either. Here was okra that had been rolled in meal and fried. The plate also held garden tomatoes peeled and sliced, and he figured if everything else proved inedible he could at least eat the tomatoes.
"What are you doin, movin in here?"
"Yes I am. I'll have it right homey before I'm through. Curtains on the windows. I may even get me a dog.''
"Daddy won't allow a dog on the place--can't stand to hear them bark."
"Hmmm," the old man mused. "Say he can't?"
"I got to get back to the house. Set the dishes on the porch in the mornin, all right?"
"All right," he said irritably, peering closely at the plate. "But I believe I recognize this as mine anyway."
At first light he was up, as was his custom, and in the dewy coolness he went up the slope behind the tenant house. At its summit he rested, leaning on his stick and peering back the way he'd come. The slope tended away in a stony tapestry, the valley lay in haze and mist rose out of the distant hollows, blue as smoke. On this July morning each sound seemed clear and equidistant: cowbells on the other side of the woods, a truck laboring up a hill on some road invisible to him.
Meecham had moved from Alabama to Tennessee when he was a young man, had farmed for others before finally managing to buy a farm of his own. He had lived most of his life here in Ackerman's Field--fifty years and better of it--but more and more these sights and sounds reminded him of his childhood in Alabama.
Meecham entered the cool, dappled green of the woods, going downhill now, and when shade changed to light, he was in Thurl Chessor's pasture, approaching the barn and house. He went on past deceased tractors and mowers and old mule-drawn planters like museum artifacts.
Chessor was walking back toward the house with a feed bucket in his hand. Meecham had known Thurl for forty years as a farmer with no head for business, no eye for the small detail. He was apt to leave a tractor out in the weather, the intake filling with rainwater and pine needles, then curse the folks in Detroit or wherever when it wouldn't start. On the other hand, Meecham thought ruefully, Thurl was not living in a tenant shack with Lonzo Choat reared back like the lord of the manor.
Chessor put the bucket on a slab shelf and turned and studied Meecham with no surprise. "Well, I see you're back. Run off, did you?"
"Yeah."
"Are they after you?"
"After me? Hellfire, it was an old folks' home, not a chain gang. Why would they be after me?"
"I don't know. I don't know anything about it. Where'd you sleep last night? Did Lonzo let you crawl in with him and Ludie?"
"Never mind where I slept. I need to use your phone. I need to call Paul and get this mess straightened out. I've got to get Choat out of there."
"You'll play hell doin it. Or doin it quick anyway. You get him evicted legal, the law gives him thirty days. He's got a foot in the door now."
Thurl followed him into the front room where the phone was. Meecham dialed and spoke with a young woman who would make no commitment about Paul's whereabouts. The old man was put on hold for some time before she came back on the line: "Mr. Meecham is engaged right at the moment."
"Then unengage him. I aim to clear this mess up and no mistake about it."
"I'm sorry, sir, Mr. Meecham is tied up. His time is very valuable." "If I hadn't sold calves and pigs to send him through law school it wouldn't be worth fifteen cents. You get him on this phone."
There was a dawning of knowledge in the woman's voice. "Are you Mr. Meecham's father, by any chance?"
"Yes, I am."
"Well, I'm sorry, sir, I didn't understand. He's on his way to court but I'll have him paged. He has a beeper. Give me your number, and I'll have him return your call in a moment."
Meecham read her the number and cradled the phone. Paul's got a beeper, he thought to himself. He was unsure what a beeper was but nonetheless vaguely impressed. He tried to call Paul's face to mind, but it was the child Paul had been that came swimming up from memory. Meecham sat staring at the phone and wondering where that child had gone.
He picked up on the first ring.
"Dad?"
"So you got you a beeper," the old man said.
"Dad, what is this about?"
"I want them folks out of the house, and I want them out now."
"Where are you calling from?"
"Thurl Chessor's place. They've broke my phone or somethin. Are you goin to get them out today or not?"
There was a pause. "What are you doing there? You're supposed to be in the nursing home at Linden."
"Supposed to be? I'm supposed to be where I damn well please. What is this mess you've got cooked up?"
There was another pause, longer, and this time Paul's face did come to Meecham's mind: thin but fleshed out with rich food and prosperity, tanned from the golf course, his pudgy fingers massaging his temples as if the old man was giving him a headache.
"This is too complicated for the telephone," Paul finally said. "Call a cab, and go back to the nursing home. I'll come down there"--a pause again, and the old man knew Paul was looking at the date on his wrist-watch--"day after tomorrow at the latest and explain everything about the sale."
"Sale my ass. You can't sell what ain't yourn."
"Well, obviously we need to discuss it, but as regards what I can or can't do, I'm your legal guardian and the trustee of your estate. When you started acting erratic after Mama died, I got worried about you. I figured you were a danger to yourself, and the court--"
"I'll be a danger to a whole hell of a lot more than myself unless you get this paperwork unscrambled. Hellfire, I'll do it myself. I'm not penniless. Do you think you're the only lawyer who ever hit a golf ball?
"Tomorrow or next day, all right?"
The old man slammed the phone so hard Chessor glanced to see if it was broken. Meecham was lightheaded with rage. Black dots swam before his eyes like a swarm of gnats, and he felt dizzy and strange, as if his soul was packing up to flee his body. lt seemed to him that he had scraped and cut corners just to send Paul to learn a trade that was now doing Meecham out of what had taken a lifetime to accumulate.
When he'd calmed himself, he sat on the porch with Chessor, drinking coffee and trying to formulate a plan.
"Well?" Chessor asked.
The old man sipped his coffee and sat staring across Chessor's yard toward the pear tree. The yard was a motley of broken and discarded plunder, and dogs of indeterminate breed lay about it like fey decorations some white-trash landscapist had positioned with a critical eye.
"He give me the runaround."
"Ain't that the way of the world," Chessor said.
"I got to have a way of goin. You still got that old Falcon?"
"Yeah. It runs, but I had to quit drivin it. They took my license when I kept runnin into folks. I can't see like I used to."
"What'll you take for it?"
"I don't know. Two hundred dollars? Would you give that?"
"Let's look at it."
He checked the oil and brake fluid. He checked the coolant level and listened to the engine idle. Thurl was apt to run an automobile without oil and use water for brake fluid and trust the radiator to replenish itself.
"What was that place like?"
"It was all right."
"All right? That's why you're livin in a tenant house, I reckon."
"No, it was all right. They fed you pretty good, nobody mistreated you. It was just... it was just a job to them, I guess. You had the feelin if you died in your sleep they'd just move you out and a live one in, and go about their business."
"You want the car?"
"I guess. Throw in that spotted dog with one ear up and the other one down, and I'll give you ten extra bucks."
"That dog ain't worth ten dollars. I'd just about knock ten off the car to get rid of him. That thing sets in barkin long about dark and don't let up till daylight."
"He may be a fifteen-dollar dog," Meecham said.
After the old man drove to town and laid in supplies--bread and milk, gallon of orange juice, soup and other tinned goods, and a hot plate to warm the soup--he was feeling fairly complacent. He had also bought a box of shells for the pistol. Sitting on the porch after supper, watching the day wane with the rusty green Falcon in his driveway and his dog dozing at his feet, Meecham felt quite the country squire. Only the thought of Paul caused him a certain disquiet, like waiting for the other shoe to drop. His son had probably figured that he'd gone back to the nursing home--but he wouldn't think that forever. Eventually he'd turn up with a sheaf of the legal papers he was so fond of.
The old man named his new companion Nipper--after the dog on the label of Jimmie Rodgers' records. It was in his mind to train the animal, but he immediately discovered that it needed very little encouragement. If he allowed it to lie on the foot of his cot, it remained quiet. If he set it outside, it began to bark. Meecham rewarded its efforts with bits of tinned mackerel, and noted with delight that when he teased the dog with a section of fish it would erupt into a fierce barking, its little black eyes bulging, ugly as something left on a beach by the tide.
Of course Choat noticed the dog right away, but he ignored it until nightfall, then came in his shambling graceless walk down the slope from the main house. "Where'd you get that thing?"
The old man was sitting on the stoop, cradling the dog as you might a child. Nipper watched Choat warily, with eyes shiny as bits of black glass. "It followed me home," Meecham said. "I guess you could say I found it."
"You better lose it then. I ain't havin no dog on this place."
"It's my place and my dog, and I guess you'll like it or lump it. He don't bark much."
"Yeah. I heard him not barkin much most of the goddamned day. It'll come up with its neck wrung, and you may not fare much better."
"He's a good boy--don't bother nobody. You hush now, Nipper."
The dog began to bark ferociously at Choat, straining against the fragile shelter of the old man's arms.
"You learnt that little son of a bitch to do that," Choat said. "I don't know how you found out a barkin dog drives me up the wall, but by God you did, and it's goin to cost you."
The old man felt a grin trying to break out on his face, but he abruptly swallowed hard and fought it down, for Choat had raised a fist and looked about to attack man or dog or both, his flat porcine face flushed with anger.
"You touch me and I'll have you in jail for assault before good dark," the old man said.
Choat lowered his fist and turned toward the main house. "You need put in the crazy house--and that's where you'll be fore this is over."
"You hush there, Nipper," Meecham told the dog.
The old man was abed early but awoke at eleven o'clock, as he had planned to do, and went with the dog onto the porch. Filigrees of moonlight fell through the leaves, and the main house was dark, locked in sleep. He sat on the stoop and packed the bowl of his pipe with Prince Albert. When he had the pipe going and the fragrant blue smoke rolling, he opened a tin of mackerel.
"Hush, Nipper."
The dog began to bark.
He forked out a mackerel and fed it to the dog. It stopped barking and ate the fish greedily and looked about for more. "I've done fed you," the old man said. "You behave yourself, now."
The dog began a fair frenzy of barking. After a while the porchlight came on at the farmhouse, the door opened, and Choat came onto the porch, wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. "How about shuttin up some of that goddamned racket?" he called.
"I can't get him to hush," the old man yelled. "I don't believe he's used to the place yet."
"He's about as used to it as he's goin to get. You bring him up here and I believe I might be able to quieten him down some."
"He'll be all right. I expect he'll hush by daylight."
"You contrary old bastard! I'm just goin to let you be and outlive you. You'll be in the ground before the snow flies, and I'll still be here layin up in your bed."
Choat went back in and pulled the door closed and cut off the light. When the old man went inside with Nipper, he got out the pistol and loaded it. He found a can of machine oil and oiled the action, and when he spun the cylinder it whirled, clicking with a smooth, lethal dexterity.
Sometime past midnight, the old man awoke to such bedlam that for a moment he thought he must have dozed off in a crazy house somewhere. Looking out the window did little to refute this view. Choat was beating someone with a length of garden hose. Ludie was trying to wrest away the hose, but he fumed and flung her backward. All of them were screaming at the top of their lungs, the hose making an explosive whopping sound each time it struck. "You little slut," Choat was yelling. Then Meecham realized it was Choat's half-naked daughter being beaten.
There was a car parked at the edge of the yard with the driver's door open, and all of a sudden someone streaked full tilt toward it--a young man pulling up his pants and trying to evade the hose, which was now slashing at him. The boy had one hand behind him, trying to grasp the flailing hose, the other hauling at his breeches, and he was screaming every time the hose struck. He leapt into the car, slammed the door, and frantically cranked the engine. The hose was bonging impotently on the roof as the car went spinning sideways in the gravel. Glass shattered when the car glanced off the catalpa tree in the corner of the yard. It righted itself, the headlights came on, and it shot off down the road.
Choat turned his attention back to the girl. She was on her knees with her arms locked about her face and head, and by the moonlight the old man could see her naked back laced with thick red welts.
"Hold it," Meecham yelled. He had the window raised and the pistol barrel resting on the sill. He lifted the enormous pistol and sighted at Choat's midsection.
Choat whirled. He looked confused for a moment, as if he couldn't fathom where he was or why someone was pointing a two-foot pistol at him. "You long-nosed old bastard. I might've knowed you'd put into this."
"I'm tired of watchin you beat folks," Meecham said. "You raise that hose one more time, and if what passes for a brain in you is big enough to hit, then I aim to lay a slug in it."
"You ain't got the balls," Choat said.
Meecham lowered the pistol and fired. When the bullet shocked into the ground, a little divot jumped up and showered Choat's bare feet with dirt. Choat dropped the hose and stepped abruptly back.
"I aim to law you too, first thing in the mornin. If they don't have a law about beatin young girls with hose pipes, I aim to see one gets passed."
Choat opened his mouth to speak. Then he closed it. At length he said, "You'll regret this, Meecham. You'll be sorry ever day of your life you shot towards me."
Meecham waved the pistol barrel. "Get this circus out of my yard so's a man can get some sleep."
In the morning the old man and Nipper drove the Falcon into town. At the courthouse he told the story of the daughter and the garden hose to a deputy, and he would not leave until he had assurance that papers would be served. He was back home before noon, seated on a Coke crate in the shade of the catalpa to see what would happen.
Shortly after that a white telephone service truck parked in the yard, and a man with a toolbox got out and went into the house. Meecham was pleased at this, for once he was back in his own house he might have use for a telephone. Then, in midafternoon, a dusty Ford with a police escutcheon on the door pulled up, and a deputy got out with a folded paper in his hand. He went up the steps to where Choat had come onto the porch in his undershirt. The deputy unfolded the warrant and read it to Choat, who then took it and read it for himself, shaking his head. He began protesting that this was all just some misunderstanding. Finally he gave up and went down the steps to the cop car. When he got in, the deputy slammed the door shut and they drove away.
Ludie and the girl followed in the Choat car. The rest of the day it was quiet until just before dark, when the Choat family returned. Choat himself was driving. He got out with a six-pack under his arm, unlocked the trunk, and took out a red five-gallon can with the word KEROSENE stenciled on the side in yellow letters. When he set it on the porch, he turned and gave Meecham a look so malevolent the old man expected the grass around him to burst into flame. Choat went into the house.
That night Meecham had difficulty falling asleep. An old man's sleep was chancy at best, but that night he had begun thinking about Lucinda. He remembered when they were young, when they couldn't keep their hands off each other and the nights were veined with heat. The way he wore Aqua Velva shaving lotion to this day because she had liked the smell of it when they were going together. Then the swift squandering of days and the last time he had seen her alive.
It was on a Saturday, and he was in a hurry to get to a cattle show but she kept dragging around, trying to decide between this dress, that dress.
"Well, you best be for wearing one of them," Meecham had said. "I'm goin out to the truck, and if you're not there in five minutes, I'm gone." He had laid his pocket watch in the seat beside him, and when five minutes were gone he cranked the truck. He saw her hand pull aside the kitchen curtain, her face lean palely to the glass. Then he drove away.
Now, when finally he slept, he dreamed strange, tortured fever dreams a madman might have. He was in the undertaker's office and they were discussing arrangements: backhoe fees, the price of caskets. They were sitting on opposite sides of a limed oak desk, and the undertaker was backlit so starkly his vulpine face was in shadow. The light gleamed off his brilliantined hair. Curving bull's horns grew out of his skull, and his yellow eyes seemed to be watching Meecham out of thick summer bracken.
"Of course, there's an option we haven't considered," the undertaker said. "We could animate her."
"Animate her?"
"Of course. It's a fairly expensive process, but it's done frequently. The motor functions would be somewhat impaired and the speech a little slurred, but it's immeasurably preferable to the grave. As I said, it's done frequently, mostly for decorative purposes."
Meecham was hit by a wave of exalted joy so strong it made him dizzy. "Animate her!" he cried.
"Then it's settled," the hollow voice said out of the bracken.
Meecham dreamed he turned over, his arm falling across the animated Lucinda. Then he woke up.
"Animate her," he was saying aloud. He was crying, tears hot and salty in his throat.
The dog was lying on the edge of the old man's pillow. Its fierce little teeth were bared, its eyes bulbous, its tongue swollen and distended. There was a piece of plow line knotted about its neck, and the covers were tucked neatly under its chin.
"Jesus Christ," Meecham said. He jerked backwards reflexively, forgetting the cot was scooted against the wall, and slammed the back of his head against the window frame. He sat rubbing his head for a moment, then crawled over the foot of the bed and fumbled the pocketknife out of his pants.
He cut the plow line and massaged the dog's chest. The body was still warm, but it quickly became obvious the dog was not going tO take another breath. Meecham was seized with enormous sorrow. He had killed the dog as surely as if he had knotted the line himself. If he had left the dog alone it would still be fighting over scraps in Thurl Chessor's front yard.
He laid the dog on the floor. Carrying the pistol he went through the house making sure Choat was not hidden there, while hoping all the time that he was. The house was empty.
By the time he had made his morning coffee, he had come to see things in a different light. He realized that Nipper was more than a dog. He was a pawn sacrificed in a game Meecham and Choat had invented, and Choat had simply upped the ante.
There was no taxidermist in Ackerman's Field, but Meecham heard of one in Waynesboro and drove there. The process was more involved than he had known, and he had to stay overnight in a motel. The bill for preparing and mounting the dog was one hundred and seventy-five dollars, but the old man counted it out with a willing hand. He figured that every nickel he spent would be a nickel that Paul would not get his pale, manicured hands on. In face, the old man wished that Paul could have been with him. He would love to tell Paul that he had paid a hundred and seventy-five dollars to stuff a ten-dollar dog for no other reason than to aggravate Lonzo Choat.
The taxidermist was gifted in his art, and this new and improved Nipper was transcendent: the man had given Nipper a dignity he had not possessed in life. His mouth was closed, his little glass eyes thoughtful and intelligent. The expression on his face suggested he was thinking over some offered philosophical remark and was preparing a rebuttal.
Meecharn drove back to Ackerman's Field with Nipper in the passenger seat, positioned so that the little agate eyes faced the window. "Wish I could of got some kind of barker put in you," he said. "Maybe I'll get you a beeper."
Nipper sat motionless, watching the scenery slide by: ripe summer fields already fading slowly into autumn.
When Choat glanced up from the circular he had taken from the mailbox and saw the old man and the dog on the porch, his left foot seemed to forget that it was in the process of taking a step. He stumbled and did a double take, but then his face took on a look of studied disinterest and he went back to reading the circular.
When he glanced up again, Meecham was tossing sticks into the yard and saying "Fetch, boy."
"I wouldn't hold my breath till he brought that stick back," Choat said.
"He's a slow study," the old man agreed. "His papers showed some Choat in his family tree."
"You smart-mouthed old bastard. If I could buy you for what you're worth and sell you for what you think you're worth, I'd retire. I'd never hit another lick at nothin."
"You ain't hit that first lick yet," Meecham pointed out.
Choat was looking closely at the dog. "I bet that little son of a bitch is a light eater," he said.
"He don't eat much and he's a hell of a watchdog," Meecham said. "Lays right across my feet and never shuts his eyes all night. One of these nights the fellow that tied that plow line will come easin through the door, and I'll set him up with the undertaker."
The black Lexus gleaming on the packed earth before the tenant house looked as if there had been some curious breakdown in the proper placement of things. Then the door opened and Paul got out, smoothing down the blond wing of his hair. He took off his sunglasses, folded the earpieces down, and tucked them into the pocket of his sport shirt.
"Hey, Dad."
"I figured you'd be out here the minute you learnt I wasn't in that place. What's been the holdup?"
"I just found out today. Alonzo Choat called me. He tells me you're cutting a pretty wide swath around here."
"Well. I was never one to just let things slide."
"No. You were never that."
"Did you come out here to straighten this mess out?"
"In a way. I came out here to pick you up and drive you back to the nursing home."
"Then you've wasted gas and a good bit of your valuable time drivin out here. It'll be a cold day in hell when you guile me into that place again. I get mad ever time I think about it."
"Dad, it's just till we get this straightened out. The lease has to run its course. When it expires, I'll get out of the sale and you can move back in. If we need a practical nurse to look after you, I'll hire one."
The old man marveled at how different they were, how wide and varied the gulfs between them. It saddened him that he no longer had the energy or inclination to try and discuss them. But it amused him that Paul hadn't improved much in his ability to lie. Being unable to lie convincingly to a jury must be a severe handicap in the lawyer trade.
"I don't need a nurse," he finally said.
"Perhaps not. You need something, though. Shooting a pistol at a man. Having him arrested. Setting dead dogs around the porch like flowerpots. For God's sake, Dad."
"Well, I can't say I didn't do it. But you've got the wrong slant on it. I'm not goin to argue with you, you'd just lie out of it. Don't you think I know you? Do you think I can't see through your skin to every lie you ever told?"
"I'm not leaving here without you. You're a danger to yourself, and you're a danger to other people. Goddamn it! Why do you have to do everything the hard way? You know that if you don't go voluntarily, I'll have to get papers and send people after you. Is that what you want?"
The old man was suddenly seized with weariness, a weight of despair bearing down so that it took an enormous effort to reply, just to breathe. He sat packing the bowl of his pipe and staring at the red kerosene can on Choat's porch.
"Goodbye, Paul," he said at last. "Take care of yourself."
"I'll tell you what he did do one time," Thurl Chessor said. "He was in Long's grocer store, and when they wasn't nobody watchin him, he poked a mouse down into a Cocola bottle and let on he drunk off of it. Oh, he cut a shine. Spittin and gaggin. He thronged such a fit with Long, the bottlin company give him a world of cold drinks just to shut him up--cases and cases. They drunk on them all summer, like to foundered theirselves on Cocolas."
"But do you reckon he'd burn a man out?"
"I wouldn't think so. I never heard tell of him doin anybody any real harm. He'll steal anything ain't tied down or on fire, but he's too lazy to put out much effort."
"Well. He said he was goin to. He said that tenant house would go up like a stack of kindlin and me with it. I may have leaned a little hard on him, shootin at him and all. I believe he'll try it. He strangled that dog."
"You ought to get the law then. Tell the high sheriff."
"Choat would just deny it. He's tryin to make Paul think I'm crazy. All I want you to do is just speak out if anything does happen. Will you do that?"
"Yeah. I'll do that much."
"I wouldn't want him to get clean away with it."
"No. You can have another one of them dogs if you want it."
"No, I believe I'll pass," the old man said. "I'm a little hard on dogs. Besides, I've still got the other one."
"Maybe," Chessor said. "Maybe it would be the best thing all around if you just went back. You said it wasn't so bad."
"I lied," Meecham grinned. "It's a factory where they make dead folks, and I ain't workin there no more."
Chessor was silent a time, as if considering his own bleak future as well as Meecham's. "We all got to work somewhere," he said at last.
Meecham drove back home and sat on the porch, smoking his pipe and waiting for full dark so that he could steal the kerosene can. At last the day began to fail, dark rising out of the earth like vapors. Against the sky the main house looked black and depthless as a stage prop. Beyond the Rorschach trees, the heavens were burnished with metallic rose as if all the light was pooling and draining off the rim of the world like quicksilver.
The old man worked very fast. He figured if he faltered he'd quit, give it up, let Paul be a daddy to him. He upended a box of photographs and threw on old newspapers and lit it all with a kitchen match, and when the photographs began to burn with thin blue flames, he picked up the can to splash kerosene around the room--except when he poured some, the fire leapt toward him like something he'd summoned by dark invocation. Even as he hurled the can away, it exploded. Only someone like Choat, he thought, would store high octane gasoline in a can clearly labeled kerosene. He could feel his hair burning, as the room filled up with liquid fire. Vinelike flames were climbing the walls, and from the foot of the burning bed Nipper watched him calmly out of the smoke, his expressionless glass eyes orange with refracted fire.
Meecham covered his face with his hands and fell to the floor. Far off he could hear someone screaming, "Help me, help me." Then he realized it was himself.
He was lying on his back staring upward into the stars. His body seemed to be absorbing the heat from the wheeling constellations as he rocked on a sea of molten lava. He could hear a voice and an ambulance siren, and after a time he recognized the voice as Lonzo Choat's.
"The old man always grumbled about how close these houses are, but if they wasn't, I never would have heard him takin on. Beats the hell out of me what he thought he was doin. He's been actin funny. I believe his mainspring may have busted. I reckon he thought it was winter, and he was just buildin a fire."
"That's a hell of a brave thing you did, Choat," another voice said. "Let's roll with him, Ray."
Then the stars were shuttled from sight, and he was sliding down the sleek wall of the night. He could feel the ambulance beneath him taking stockgaps and curves, then there was a sharp pain in his wrist, and a voice was saying, "Lay back, old-timer, this'll cool you off."
He was in a cold glacial world of wind-formed ice, ice the exact blue of frozen Aqua Velva, a world so arctic and alien that life was not even rumored. He struggled up to see.
"Help me hold him, Ray, he's trying to get up."
"Why I believe we've crossed over into Alabama," Meecham told himself in wonder, and in truth the ice-locked world was evolving into a landscape sculpted by memory. The ambulance swayed on past curving lazy creeks he had fished and waded as a boy, winding roads dusted white as mica in the moonlight.
He pressed his face to the glass as a child might and watched the irrevocable slide of scenery—tree and field and sleeping farmhouse. He studied each object as it hove into view and went slipstreaming off the dark glass to see if it might have something to tell him, some intimation of his destination.
for Cormac McCarthy

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