Before Grunts Pond was Grunts Pond it was Lake Minton and before it was Lake Minton it must have had a native name like Big Small or Waters of Loud Echoes or Pocahontas’s Pool or some other name no white man would have had history enough to come up with. Depending on who tells the tale, Mintons were here almost from the time Blisses and Belvederes were here, or Blisses were here almost from the time Belvederes and Mintons were here, doesn’t really change how the body of water got its name, all three families agree it was in the winter when they all arrived, everything was covered with snow, there was ice but not thick ice, and it was Hezekiah Minton who went out in his snowshoes in search of something to eat so his wife and infant son wouldn’t starve, and because he didn’t know the lay of the land like the natives did, he trundled right out into the flat middle of a wide open snowy space where no trees grew and before you could say gitchigoomie, the flat wide open space opened up just enough to swallow Hezekiah whole. The echo from his final words bounced around the snow bowl and effervesced through the trees and it was a Bliss or a Belvedere if it was anyone who heard his yelp before he went glub glub to the bottom.
It was late spring at the earliest when the snow melted enough to reveal the little ice that remained and the waters underneath the ice, and it was late summer at the earliest when the water’s level dropped to a dipper and there in the cracked mud of the dried-up bed were the bones of Hezekiah Minton and on his feet the snowshoes that didn’t help him one damn bit. The infant son he left behind was named Horatio and he begat a son named Hudson who begat a son named Harmon who begat a son named Hyman who begat a son named Hinkley who begat the son named Herkimer whom we know as Hunko.
Because Hezekiah’s rib cage was only half out of the dried mud and half stuck in it, it was agreed upon by those who found him that his remains should remain where they remained; and because no marker could reasonably be erected, the body of water that had receded to a dipper but which would come back by the time the autumn rains returned, they decided, would be marker enough, and so they called it Lake Minton. Their decision to call it Lake Minton and not Lake Hezekiah was based in part on the assumption that anyone stupid enough to trudge out into the flat middle of a wide open snowy space where no trees grew and not figure there was probably water underneath would probably beget offspring equally as ignorant and why limit a name to one fool when you can honor his entire family?
Lake Minton stayed Lake Minton through Horatio’s time and Hudson’s time and Harmon’s time, but it was around the time of Hyman’s time when the waters started earning an unofficial nickname not actually named by Hyman but inspired by Hyman and other boys in town like Hyman, all of whom would go down to the rocky shores of the big small lake and from random points work up lonely utterances that echoed across the waters and oozed through the trees and were instantly recognized by all who heard them as rutting grunts. Because these grunts ceased to cease and only grew louder and more frequent when Hyman’s son Hinkley and other boys like him took up the habit with ferocious regularity, Lake Minton thus became known unofficially as Lake Grunt, and because they were captivated by the notion of renaming it a name less formal it was decided too that the lake really was no lake in size, it was more of a pond, and should be referred to as such, and in short order, it became not just a pond it became Grunts Pond, and although no maps were changed, it’s been called that ever since.
Hinkley Minton and the other boys like him—Flummox Belvedere and Righteous Whiskerhooven and Rufus Drell and Bull Engersol and Russet Aspetuck and Boyle Lope and Pernicious Upland and Intermediate Hurlbutt and Etingem Saflutis and Butte O’ums and Remedial Bliss—they all passed through that awkward stage from seedlings to saplings at their random points by the rocky shores of Grunts Pond with their rutting grunts growing louder and more frequent the closer to manhood they came. A boy in town who didn’t learn what he was capable of doing all by his lonesome when he was off by his lonesome on the rocky shores of Grunts Pond doing it was about as rare in these parts as a man named Bob. The only difference between Hinkley Minton and the other boys like him who learned what they were capable of when they were off by their lonesome learning it and the boys whom they begat is, was, and forever will be that Hinkley and his friends got to put their learning to use, which was how the boys they begat were begotten. The boys whom they begat, Mawz Engersol and Carnival Aspetuck and Kennesaw Belvedere and Luddy Upland and Elementary Hurlbutt and Brisket Whiskerhooven and Hunko Minton, all went to that same school by the rocky shores of Grunts Pond and learned what they were capable of when off by their lonesomes (the girls all flocked to Tumblers’ Ridge to tickle their ever-mores); only, no one they knew of short of whom they have their suspicions about, has ever put their learning to use beyond perfecting the art of being off by their lonesomes—and if there’s one artist among all who was ever off by his lonesome most often becoming the lonesome-est artist of all, that lonesome-est artist of all is Hunko Minton.
There have been few days in his last many thousands when Hunko has forgone his solitary excursion to the rocky shore of Grunts Pond to prove to himself yet anew what he already knows he’s capable of all by his lonesome. From late spring to early autumn this daily bit of business enjoys a warm hand in the warm air warming the slick, and the grunts he finishes up with show as much gratitude to the favorable climate as they do to the final outcome. One would think, however, that the extended cold snap from late autumn to early spring might induce such an outdoor enthusiast to either forgo his daily habit or take it inside, but Hunko has never been guided by a head full of sense. As the autumn trees blow their loads of leaves all over the place and the naked branches chuckle in the wind, Hunko can be heard not just grunting by his lonesome but chattering by his lonesome from icy hands and chilly friction, and once the real cold sets when the first snow covers the land in a thick creamy coat of white, the sounds that linger in the frosty air like an extra-cold blast are Hunko by his lonesome chattering his way to his solitary, if shrunken, accomplishment, finished off with a short, shivered grunt.
For a smudge of a man like Hunko Minton to stand with his drawers down around his boots in snow up to his knees, shivering by his lonesome just for the sake of proving to himself what he can do by his lonesome outdoors on a daily basis, weather come-what-may, takes balsam—the smell of balsam. Trees. The assault on his senses, that blast of earthen fresh is what first makes his nerve endings tingle, and by the time his whole system is infused with the aroma, his resolve stiffens to the daily task at hand, and he is compelled to beat his way through whatever elements arise until on the rocky shores of Grunts Pond he accomplishes what he came for. Balsam is the scent of his earliest recall, it was the scent placed in his infant crate to diffuse the scent of him. It’s the scent that envelops most of the town in a year-round vapor of campfires and sleigh bells, and the scent and the sensation it elicits in him are what Hunko most associates with Kennesaw Belvedere.
Kennesaw was already well accomplished at his own lonesome capabilities down by the rocky shores of Grunts Pond when Hunko was still in short pants loaded with balsam. There was balsam in the air wherever Kennesaw strode and strutted, and on the tail wind of it, Hunko rode like a ribbon. Not so many years exist between them that would make friendship an improbability at that time of their lives, and although they weren’t thick as thieves, they stole a few moments together here and there. A boy barely out of nappies can be just as much company to a stripling learning about his own sap as a chicken can be companion to a wolf, and Hunko would cluck after Kennesaw wherever Kennesaw went until Kennesaw’s feathers got ruffled, whereupon Hunko, if he didn’t act fast enough, he’d learn what it was like to get plucked. Kennesaw made it clear to Hunko that the rocky shores of Grunts Pond were no place for a boy in short pants, and until he was of an age where long pants down around his ankles were still longer than short pants pulled up, he was not to step foot anywhere nearby. It was assumed that Hunko heeded these warnings, for he was not to be seen by Kennesaw when Kennesaw was engaged in what he was capable of when off by his lonesome, yet if Kennesaw wasn’t so engaged in what he was capable of he might have noticed the lad crouched behind a rock all those years on the rocky shore watching his every move and sniffing the air of its balsam while attempting to learn for himself if he himself was capable of anything yet.
It was a considerable stretch of time before Hunko was capable of anything when off by his lonesome, and the day he first discovered what he was capable of, the day he was first capable of it, was also the first day Kennesaw was aware that Hunko was following his every daily move. Hunko had been careful to keep his presence unknown and his sounds unheard, his every sniff of balsam was the slightest whiffle of a breeze, his every little hand friction the ripple of a leaf. The sounds for which the pond was named were sounds he had certainly grown familiar with—they could be heard in a chain of polyphonic eruptions around the full circle of rocky shoreline at all hours of day and night, and after many, many, many outings crouched behind his rock, Hunko grew familiar with each distinct utterance and could tell you which boy in town uttered which particular grunt. Skilled as he became at listening, Hunko didn’t care about the euphoniousness of the other individuals’ grunts per se, his only real affection was for the resonant grunts of one person alone, and that person was Kennesaw, and since the first time he hid behind the rock and peeked, Hunko had looked forward to the day when he could imitate the sounds that came out of Kennesaw when Kennesaw’s capabilities reached their peak. To Hunko’s great surprise, the sound that ultimately debuted out of him on the day he was first capable of anything was a sound unlike any he had heard from anywhere around the shoreline; and to his even greater chagrin, as dissimilar to the sounds out of Kennesaw as morning dewdrops are to a flood. Granted, all grunts come from the same place. How they shoot out of one’s soul when one is off realizing one’s capabilities, the distinct individuality of their tone and propulsion from person to person is something the ancient Greeks must have studied and maybe even etched on a pot. What issued from Hunko’s depths was not so much a grunt as it was a cough, a scratchy hack that was more befitting of clearing one’s throat than of realizing one’s full potential.
Who was more startled? Hunko: because of what came out of him, vocally and otherwise? Or Kennesaw: because he wasn’t alone and hadn’t yet finished? The way Luddy heard it, Hunko barely had time to fasten his snaps before Kennesaw hoisted the little interloper by his balsam and lobbed him into the pond. Jubilee told Petie Soyle that Carnival said that Kennesaw later told him that he was so fully engaged in his lonesome and so taken by surprise that not only had he reached his full potential much sooner than he would have wanted to but that he reached it with a velocity and span that would have required depiction by the ancient Greeks not on a pot but on a very long frieze. Jubilee told Onesie Lope that Carnival then told her that he wasn’t just talking about a span from his nose to his toes, but a length of yards from where he stood to where Hunko hid and it hit the kid in the eye, and that that was the real surprise to them both.
You could have a stick in your hand or a fishing rod, or an ax or a fire-poker or a pistol, and it won’t ever mean you’ve come to grips with yourself the way having yourself in hand makes you who you are. On that day Hunko discovered about himself a longing that was inbred and immutable and it fixated on Kennesaw and it wouldn’t let go. It had been in him in his infancy, it was the tickle in his ribs and the gist of his ism, and it rimmed him in crimson for the rest of his life.
A curiosity is something you sample and set free. Kennesaw saw this as a passing interest that Hunko would get his fill of and forget, and so he indulged his young friend in shoreside sessions of mutual lonesomeness—not every day, but getting close. He felt heroic, Kennesaw; Hunko seemed so taken by his mien and measure that it swelled his intentions and thrilled the performer in him in a way no isolated outing ever did. Kennesaw rose to the occasion out of his own curiosity about curiosity, and in Hunko’s adulation of him, he found that his capability for reaching his full potential was double what it had ever been before. Kennesaw could go either way about curiosity. If he didn’t like a bean, he tasted it and spat it out. If a beaver waddled his way he might give it a damn, he might not. But this curiosity was an entirely different animal, and he couldn’t deny that he was in its cage.
Hunko never has had the ability to see one thing as two things, to see bars as a fence, to see a cage as a trap. What is is what is, and it is without question, and if there are objections to his understanding of it or his embracing of it, he is dumb to them. If Kennesaw had let him, Hunko would have devoted all hours of every day to the care and feeding of his feelings for his idol, he would have run through town leaving a streak of opalescence declaring the day begun with Kennesaw’s first breath and completed with his eyelid’s last bat. If Kennesaw had let him, which he did not, Hunko would have looped a cordon of his own intestines around his heartsake to keep others from nearing, and he would have done this to show the depths of his heart while dumb to the extremes of the act. Days down by the rocky shore Kennesaw indulged and Hunko adored and together their capabilities reached new heights and high as they went Hunko dreamed they’d go higher still. Kennesaw fully expected the fancy to pass, not only from Hunko but from himself, and when it didn’t he was as startled as the day he discovered Hunko hunkered and hacking, and his surprise turned to fear when thoughts of his father’s disapproval clouded his bluer-than-blue-eyed wonder, and as Flummox reared upon Kennesaw, Kennesaw’s fear turned mean upon Hunko, and instead of laying his arm around the lad he stiffened the length of it between them.
Days down by the rocky shore would continue—not every day, not even close, not anymore—and although Kennesaw kept his hand in for a while longer, clearly his heart was someplace else. Hunko didn’t understand how this one thing could be another thing—if he had done something rash, said something wrong, been more vocal, used less friction, shown more capability, surely the lesson would be learned, Kennesaw would teach him bad from better and there would be a lifetime of days like the days that came before. But all that came after were fewer days and shorter ones, and on more of those Kennesaw would participate less and less, and one day he stopped coming all together, and Hunko was left to reach his own potential all by his lonesome. It’s been that way ever since. Every day, down on the rocky shore of Grunts Pond. The smell of balsam and Hunko in its thrall, and his heart still bursting with Kennesaw. You’d think an obsession like this would have climaxed long ago.