Hunko Minton rose with the day like it was the last of Creation. The day and what was to come came in fresh as a hen’s egg with a slight breeze from the south and no more precipitation in the air than a hummingbird’s pee. The sun did what the sun usually does on an Indian summer Thursday: took its sweet time to rise by 6:17, yawned and scratched itself until 7:05, and by 8:23 deigned to fling its arms wide and stick out its big yellow tongue and claim the day officially on. At one minute past nine if you were that blue sky and you wanted to hurry up and idle, you had no need for a shave or a bath, and no need to brush your pearly whites clean of stardust, your skin was corn silk and your breath sweet chrysanthe-mum.
Hunko excreted an altogether different aroma. Waking and stretching and scratching and poking out more than a yellow tongue, Hunko arose with a prehistoric agenda. He and the funk of him bypassed the kitchen pump and its cool runnings in favor of a quick head dunk into the last of last week’s rainwater left murky in the barrel out back of his kitchen door. You’d think he’d be whapping the bejitters out of all the mosquitoes flocking above the green-hued pool, but leathered skin like his is a callused shell impervious to sticks and pricks, and if they bit him he’d let them, today was not about flies.
Hunko grabbed his hose; his bladder needed bleeding. He bowlegged it to the privy beside the well, but mistook the left-leaning pump house for the left-leaning outhouse, and disabused himself of enough flood to drown a turkey—disabused it right into the only semi-clean water on his land. He slid a wet finger across his mossy teeth then ran his tongue to follow, and the pee-yew of it was all the reminder he needed that today would be as different a bird as any that had ever flown.
A million years ago today it was the day for grounding pterodactyls, or so Hunko decided, and he woke this morning in full bore meteor to reenact the anniversary. On every tenth of September since the molten lava cooled, True Bliss served tea and saltines to Kennesaw Belvedere in the parlor of her home on the occasion of his birth, and this was the day, and that was the deed, and he, Hunko Minton, was going to be the blast that would finally end that repast.
Looking back, there had been, from Hunko’s perspective, between himself and Kennesaw, a vision of the future in which the two of them viewed the horizon through a conjoined set of eyes—a future as only a cyclops could see it—without worry, without censure and, without question, without others. That this did not come to pass—yet—was something Hunko in his youth did not see coming, nor could he endure the ongoing sight of it in his young manhood, but unlike the fabled Cyclops whose powers were lost in a single blinding blow, Hunko has never lost his focus on the horizon and the dream he knows will one day rise there before his eyes, and that day is this one.
All through the long stretch of his young adult years through his middle years he endured Kennesaw’s inexplicable daily disappearances from not only his life but also from town itself during daylight. As years grew mossy, and Kennesaw was once again inexplicably present in town, as if he’d never been absent for more than an afternoon, though not necessarily present in Hunko’s daily life, what set Hunko atavistic was what he sensed to be the growing bill and coo between Kennesaw and True Bliss. At picnics, at cart-arounds, Kennesaw couldn’t so much as pinch a crease in his overalls without True’s eyes ironing him. One Sunday not so many years ago (in truth, it could have been more than fifty), he witnessed them passing one another in front of the windows at New Eden Grangery and caught True espying Kennesaw’s sidelong glances at his own reflected self in the only piece of plate glass not broken, and seeing that, Hunko hurt like his own face had broken the rest, and the hurt he felt from that, like the broken glass, has never mended. True Bliss and her wandering cataracts had no business doing such wanton admiring, and although there was no proof that Kennesaw was the least bit aware of her awareness, Hunko decided he had to keep an eye on them both.
Morning and its sleepy smell waddled fat and lazy through ten o’clock, then eleven o’clock, and needing a rest after such inert exertion, straddled its ass on noon like a buzzard on a fence rail. By one o’clock the southern breeze was starting to heckle a bit, and by 1:40 it was a full-blown bossy gale. Hunko was undeterred by the air and its growing discontent. In full snit, he was a disruption of molecules as he stampeded through the overgrown clearing where four generations of Drells were felled; his anger falling all over itself on the ridge where all the girls used to tumble in the high grasses that aren’t grasses anymore; and he was coming undone by the time he stomped along the shores of Grunts Pond where the males of every generation first took themselves in hand and learned what they were capable of, and where Hunko’s youth-ignited Kennesaw obsession first issued from the depths of him. Today’s outrage would quell it once and for all and put a life-lasting longing to bed. He was sure of it.
By the time he reached the lumpy west slope of the valley beyond Grunts Pond, Hunko had become a geological disturbance: naming rocks True and kicking them. By two o’clock as the air picked up speed Hunko’s pace did, too, kicking more rocks he named True, even kicking one he named Kennesaw but that was accidental, and the next True rock he kicked he blamed for it. By 2:13 his toes swole numb from so much kicking, by 2:28 as he bushwhacked his way through the tangles that devoured the pass from the old Drell barn to the old Buckett barn, which was between the old old Drell barn and the old old Buckett barn, and by the time he rounded the woodshed that was all that was left of the newest of the oldest Aspetuck barns, his anger was no longer something he could molt off like feathers, he was as drenched with it as he was with perspiration and neither smelled pretty.
Blind fury doesn’t see what it needs to see, while the wind can stare holes anywhere it wants. Hunko squashed sucker pumpkins on his trespass through Carnival Aspetuck’s long-ago garden, right in front of where Carnival would be sitting if Carnival was still among the standing; but standing or sitting it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. If Carnival had been standing there in the mist, he might have wobbled his old ax handle at Hunko in protest; towards his end, that was the best Carnival’s once legendary grip would allow. He’d press a given-up fist to his gone-bad hip and lead with his good as he’d duck under the clothesline where his sister Jubilee’s ample up-busters once hung to dry and he’d try to shoo Hunko from his gourds, but standing, sitting, shaking, even living—none of it would do no good. Hunko was all anger and stomp, well out of the garden and off on a diminishing trail of butternut by the time Carnival might have reached the carnage, had Carnival still been earthbound and erect. Best his ghost could hope for was a gust of wind to catch his sister’s padded encasement and jumble it airborne like a swollen cloud till it found a landing spot abreast his own ectoplasmic face and brought him back to their life.