Flummox Belvedere stepped anywhere he damn well pleased and land knew to bow and water to wave. His arms pumped high and his boots grounded firm and he was locomotive on his way to wherever, and should you come upon him in town or field or wood it was your business to lie down or get out of his way. As stepped the father, such steps were the steps of Kennesaw’s youth and manhood; up until only a decade or so ago his own steps were direct and proud and manifest in their destiny to make the earth tread lightly around him. The change in those steps in his past ten years give shape to his steps this morning of his ninety-ninth, tentative steps, each one needing a breath all its own. It gives him pause that his long limbs can no longer stride the length of town in less time than it takes the day to blink its first—serious pause, since he needs to rest more often than every so.
The mere thought of the walk ahead to True’s and his body so out of oil is enough to make him wish the calendar year had one less day: this. Before there’s the town to no longer stride well across, there’s the woods; and before the woods, the clearing where the Drells were felled; and before the clearing more woods; and before those Saflutises’ fields; and in the shadow of the nearby Tumblers’ Ridge is Grunts Pond, where the boy in him discovered his own manhood and more, then more woods; and one last wood; and on the edge of those the old back road; and before that the unpaved ruts that snake their way to his front fence with its broken gate and the tangle of overgrowth between the fence and the house; before all that there’s the hip-aching business of just stepping out of his front door down and onto the granite mass below it, a mossy slab cold chiseled by hand by his great-grandfather, Congress, and set in place long before there was a house or door to step into. Six inches below the threshold when laid and now more than a foot drop to make that step down, the way things have settled. He’ll grab the doorframe by its jamb and slowly lower one leg to the stone like stepping onto a boat on bobbing waters, then step his other leg down and let go of the doorframe and stand a moment to make sure the craft doesn’t sink. Such a long journey ahead to walk to True’s house for his birthday tea and just the thought of stepping out his front door is exhausting, and he hasn’t even turned the knob.
One arm pumps and then the other. One leg shuffles and then the other. One ache and then another and then another and then another and this is how the aged walk into heaven.
Ache by ache Kennesaw makes his way through the late season milkweeds that make their own forest of his front yard, a chaos his own father would have seen to scything, down the trough of his front path to the broken gate of his front fence that in his dotage is a constant rebuke for his indifference. The sun takes pity on his slow progress and dims behind a surly cloud; it’s a mercy to anyone but a blind man. In its absence, Kennesaw makes out a fuzzy shape beneath the overgrowth and attempts to wrestle upright and free of its binding thistles the sagging half-gate and losing the match mutters the same be damned that he has every other time he’s wrestled it and lost in the last he-doesn’t-know-how-many years. Might as well ask him where the other half-gate went, his brain won’t budge on an answer to that either. Time and again he stubs his toe in the very same spot at the missing gate’s opening and time and again it’s the missing half suffocated under another thatch of weeds he stubs it on, but don’t tell him to step aside, step around, there’s another way through, there’s another way out, this is the way to freedom and he can’t recall any other, be damned!
What he does recall is that together the two gate halves made two halves of a heavenly harp, carved by hand and curved through sweat with slats like strings. Hunko Minton fashioned them with hand tools and found wood from a fallen tree back when making things out of found wood calmed his heart, toted them over, hung them and swung them as a surprise for Kennesaw, and as a surprise for them both, made a matching pair that he hung from the gate to his own home. He did this not long after Flummox Belvedere became nothing but a bad memory in a wooden box in a hole in Nedewen Field.
At the time, Kennesaw was impressed with the artistry and initiative and even said so out loud. Hunko might amount to something after all, he noted to Luddy Upland and Luddy told this to Carnival and Carnival told the rest. Such high praise when it made its way back to Hunko made Hunko puppy happy for more time than the compliment meant. Didn’t last more than sixty years, though, the gates, since they were installed—Hunko must not have cared for Kennesaw all that much, Kennesaw said, or been too fine a carpenter, he added, if shoddy workmanship shows so soon. Good thing, he concluded early on, that Hunko stuck his talents where they wouldn’t show for long: in the business of making boxes for the departed, which was how he put it to Threesie Lope, who couldn’t bite her tongue quick enough when she told it to True in True’s front parlor with the oriel window open and Hunko outside and below it, pressed against the south wall all fallen ears. The broken gate doesn’t budge anymore than the splinter of regret Kennesaw has that he ever spoke such harsh words.
The sun slips out from its hiding and lights a fire under Kennesaw that he’d better make time. As the earth rotates one way, his four limbs sputter the other at the exact same speed, away from the gate and the freedom that brings to mind, and out onto the road, and into a different rut he knows well. With so little between his skin and bones, where there’d be room to store water is anybody’s guess, yet perspiration slicks his brow and mucks under his arms and he can even feel his wattle below getting yeasty. Out of his house and away from his yard and only just beginning, to be this winded already you’d think it was miles and not minutes.
Down the road and down some more and more again; to compare his pace to a snail’s would be slanderous to the snail. But in that shell he might as well be carrying on his back is Flummox Belvedere and his belt, that strip of an unjust god, and the sweaty game of Adam and Abel that he forced Kennesaw to play that Kennesaw couldn’t leave home and run from fast enough. He recalls the first time Flummox was waiting for him in the doorway to the barn, looking both ways to see that no other soul was in presence. Kennesaw couldn’t have been more than a squirt then, still in short pants—that much he’s sure of. Know what happens when I take off this belt? his father would ask him, as he led the boy to a crib behind a stall in the back of the darkening barn; unbuckling, unslinging, unsmiling. The first time it happened Kennesaw didn’t know the meaning, but with frequency he came to. It was not disapproval of his blue-eyed son, Kennesaw discovered, that burned through his father’s body. It was something far more unsettling. Down the road and down some more and more again, as far from his father’s clutches as a smart trout from a barbed hook. The refuge Kennesaw sought at True’s as a boy gives his legs the lift they need to reach her house today.
On his heels as he veers off the back road under the high sun is the man Kennesaw swore he’d always outrun. On the footpath worn to a scrape through the fields once farmed by families he cannot readily bring back to mind, those arms swing high and the boots grind firm and get closer. In the woods he passes the stumps of trees that once were thick enough to hide behind, yet now without their protection he can feel a hot breath on his neck and it distills him like the smell of whiskey on his father’s. The canopy above is cheesecloth for filtering out the sun’s stronger rays, but Kennesaw’s shirt is collared in sweat and his breathing is deep and raspy and his chest is on fire and his sphincter not only stings but itches now and it sends shivers up him. The sun has never been able to warm this kind of chill out of him.